Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Should mention...

Assignment finished. Semester over. Relief sets in. Waiting for marks.

New program commissioned at work. Production just starting to ramp up. Exciting things on the horizon. Once we get the bugs out.

Time for planning. "Return to Bug City" running through my head. All sorts of incredible ideas. Plot twists. Narrative flow. Thematic elements. Characters. Shadowrun never felt so good.

Reading "Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering" by Robin Laws. Nothing new. Nice to have it written down on paper though. An enjoyable read. Then back to Eco.

Annoyed about ideas. Why is all my stuff so derivative? Great ideas. Based on someone else's work. Screw Newton and "standing on the shoulders of giants." Frustrating for someone for whom writing was once so enjoyable and simple. In school I won awards. I won awards I didn't even know about until this year. What did I do wrong?

Random thought - If the best idea the MSM has of "participatory media" is "Funnist Home Videos", why are we bothering? Sick of phone polls and call ins and "hitting the guestbook." No one's doing it right. In this country at least.

Had.

Enough.

Staccato.

Sentences.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Annoyed about ideas. Why is all my stuff so derivative? Great ideas. Based on someone else's work.

Ironically, I get that too. I haven't got one original idea in my head. I feel a lot of the time that I'm just regurgitating the thoughts of others.

Oddly enough though, I find a lot of excellent inspiration from re-working stuff that I like. I can't think up an original idea for a RPGing adventure, say, but it's a unique and refreshing experience to pull out an old module and play it with today's attitudes and rules.

Besides, isn't our man Whedon doing that with his art? Sci-Fis are Westerns, there's nothing original in that. He's just made it blatant.

Don't let unoriginality get you down. Anyway, playing to audience expectation is one of the solid rules they teach us about in improv. Try it. Then bend it. ;)