Saturday, August 28, 2010

News: One Life Remaining S2: Episode 8 delay






One Life Remaining S2: Episode 8

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Video: Arby 'n' the Chief S04E05: "Giveth and Taketh"


Get it while it's hot.  Enjoy.


P.S. By the way, a few people have been e-mailing me about the actual scripts for the episodes I write.  Here's the production script for Giveth and Taketh:

Arby 'n' the Chief S04E05: "Giveth and Taketh" Script (PDF)

You'll need Adobe Reader to check it out.

Also you may notice the dialogue in the video and the script don't match exactly all the time.  The production script gets typed, and then either during recording (voices or video) or even editing, I'll throw in extra stuff or alter lines that don't work on the fly.  Also you'll notice Chief's dialogue isn't completely fucked in the script.  I distort it later during the voice recording/editing phase so I don't get that distracting spellchecker shit.  Enjoy!


Friday, August 20, 2010

News: Reflections


I'm pretty drunk at the moment and trying my best to type coherently.  Had a bit of the ol' Jack.

For a while now I've had an irregular sleeping pattern and I'm trying to get back into the swing of things.  I figured a bit of alcohol would help me pass out but it's made me actually go back and revisit all the old Arby 'n' the Chief episodes that I've made over the past few years, so that I might gain some valuable insight on what made them so special and how to handle the episodes for the remainder of the newest fourth season so people can get that feeling they had when they watched those old episodes for the first time.

I actually really laughed at most of them.  I probably sound like a total prick saying that I laughed at my own shit, but really, they did.  But I'm mainly referring to the episodes from the first season.  In the episodes from the second season I introduced some story arc bullshit because I was trying to branch out as a writer but it just didn't work, really.  The third season is a mix of hit-or-miss episodes.  I like "Wedding".

I so wanna be that one filmmaker that can go "Don't worry guys, other writers veer off their path of success, but I get it, man.  I got it covered.  I know how to stay retro, I know how to make people keep laughing".  But that just wasn't the case for me, as I'm sure it has been for many others.  You lose your "spunk" eventually at some point, you forget what made you popular.  I wanna be the guy that never forgets it, but I'm starting to wonder if there's even such a person that exists.  Fame is poisonous.  Not that I consider myself "famous" or anything, in the true sense of the word, I'm just going by views.

I wanna post this before my drunkenness wears off because when I'm sober again, I'm gonna feel so self-conscious that I won't wanna post this message, and I don't want that to happen.  I want people to know the human being behind the retarded videos.  Oh man, I don't even know where I'm going with this.

This post is probably so retarded beyond what I can comprehend right now, and I'm gonna read it over the next morning and think about how fucking retarded it is, but whatever.

I'm drunk, but the reason you aren't finding many (if any) typos (lol "many" and "any" rhymes) is because my brain can still pick out those red zig-zaggy lines in Blogger's text-entry thingy that represent possible spelling errors and I go back and fix them compulsively because I'm slightly OCD.

Oh man, I can barely see straight.  I just wanna collapse into bed, but I gotta finish this first.  I WANNA finish this first.

Thanks a lot guys, really.  I know I've been a dick in the past, but I've learned from it.  Really, thanks for taking an interest in all the stupid shit I've made, it really means a lot.  I mean Jesus, portraying drama in head-bobbing Halo 3 characters, what the fuck, man.  But I thank you all who stick with it.

The next morning I'm gonna read this post and realize I should never have posted it and feel totally embarrassed, but I SHOULD post it.  Alcohol is a truth serum, not some personality-distortioner.  It's a personality revealer.

If you wanna be a writer, just do it man.  Fuck, look at me.  Look at Deus Ex Machina.  The dialogue, especially in the early episodes, is utter shit.  But you learn from it.  The more you write, the more you learn, the better you become.  Don't be afraid to write shit, guys.  Write shit.  Write lots of shit.  You'll learn from it and write better shit until you eventually write something decent.  I'm not quite there yet, but I'm getting there.  I'm closer to there than I ever was, anyways.  Did this paragraph just make sense?  I dunno, I hope so.

I don't think I got to the point of this blog post yet, I hope I yet, but if I didn't, sorry, 'cause I gotta pass out now, seriously.  There's some shit I gotta wake up for in the morning, so yeah.  Thanks a lot guys for keeping up with my stuff and everything, really.

By the way, the upcoming episode of Arby 'n' the Chief is video game related, in response to the comments on the fourth episode about how it wasn't related to video games.  Yes, I actually read all the comments.  Seriously, ALL of them.  I don't respond to them, but I read them.  Same goes for e-mails.

Do what makes you happy, guys.  Do what makes you happy.  This is a shit ugly world and we all gotta find a way to make ourselves happy.  Writing is a fucking horrible job but it's also wonderful at the same time and it makes me happy.  Write if it makes you happy, and if it doesn't, find whatever DOES make you happy.

I gotta collapse into bed now.  I'm very drunk.

I'm not glamorizing drinking, by the way.  Don't drink, it's overrated.  I don't even drink that much, this night was just a one-off, really, because I couldn't get to sleep, but I never slept and ended up writing this instead and probably doesn't make any fucking sense.  I dunno, I can't really keep track of all the stuff I've written so far, all I can hold in my brain is like, the last two words I've written at this point.  "This point".  That's all I remember.  All the other stuff?  Gone.  I hope you can make sense of it.

Goodnight, guys.


News: The rest of One Life Remaining


Before I go over what to expect from the rest of the season, here's episode seven:

One Life Remaining S2: Episode 7

I realize that some of the recent episodes haven't turned out the greatest, but I've learned a lot for next time.  Second acts are hard to write and keep interesting.  But things are gonna pick up pretty soon.

The upcoming eighth episode is basically the last episode leading to an imminent shit storm, and episode nine IS the shit storm. It's pretty much one long action sequence.

Then the third act begins, which is pretty explosive and disturbing -- episode twelve is balls-to-the-wall action, and episode thirteen, being the finale, is utter chaos, contrasting pretty significantly with the season's tame beginning.

Thanks much for staying interested!
- Jon

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

???: Rambling

I typed and saved a very small portion of my nightly absurd internal mental ramblings.  Maybe you'll find some amusement or gain some weird insight in this.


Maybe I'm delusional.  Then surely everybody else must be delusional to some degree.  Jesus.  The world is being run by people as fucked as I am.  They're also surrounding me.  Oh shit.  I probably won't be alive in a few years.  Either we go through 2012's frequency/vibrational shift, or the planet explodes, or implodes, or gets eaten by giant raptors, or someone here's gonna shoot a nuclear bomb.  And if I don't die, I'll probably be poisoned or irradiated, or possibly in a distant area from the blast but then more bombs will go off and I'll be trampled under the stampede of panicking people.  Left to die.  Imagine what it would be like starving to death.  Holy crap, that would suck for real.  That happens to people every day.  People no worse than I am.  I got lucky.  I landed on my feet and hit the ground running out of sure chaos.  Maybe the entire universe is inside the glass eye of a winged super-raptor with cool spikes and a double-bladed scythe, barking orders at a bunch of pissed-off werewolves with brilliant diamond body armor and cloaking devices in a world-wide battle over some fucking hovering trans-dimentional hyper cube that's comically over-mechanized.  ...People are gonna think I'm "trying to be too cool" or something by typing something too imaginative like that.  Who cares what they think.  That's always the message in movies -- who gives a fuck about what anyone else thinks?  No matter how good you try to bee, some guy somewhere is gonna hate you.  Even if it's just that your face reminds him of some other guy at the dildo store that short-changed him earlier.  You probably caught that "bee" typo by now.  You read over it, looked back, examined the context, and then BURST into laughter, muttering to yourself how dumb I was for doing that.  Did I type "bee," to a certain extent, purposefully, because my mind associated it with the correct word "be," or because my mind purposefully meant to type it correctly but I just had my finger on the E key a tad too long while I was scratching an itch on my balls?  What the hell am I talking about?  I'm thirsty.  I can't believe it's almost twenty bucks cheaper to buy another entire Brita filtration jug with a filter in it than a replacement filter on it's own.  That is so fucking stupid.  It's like buying another Lexmark when your ink cartridge runs out.  The world is filled with stupid fucking shit like this.  How can we take any of this seriously?  And I'm the worst out of all of us.  I'm aware of this, and I don't do a God damn thing about it because I'm scared.  Scared of everything.  No matter how cool a face I try to put on at crosswalks.


- Jon

Saturday, August 7, 2010