Saturday 31st May 2003
Rules for submitting an Idiot for Idiot of the Month Contest:
Ah, the internet. Where, by the time you're done uploading something, it's already old news. Except in this case, where the Idiot of the Month Contest got uploaded a few days too soon.
Logically, the voting for May's Idiot of the Month should have been locked out until tomorrow. It's not quite fair to start voting on idiotic quotes before the month's morons are done coming up with retarded things to say. Still: that's technically what happened here. So the Idiot of the Month for May is a sort of prototype. June's contest will be a bit more scientific. Or something.
I'm not sure whether the contest will ultimately end up being between the top four quotes [or how the top four will be determined] or between all the entries. At this point, Hunter has pretty well taken the thing over; I'm not sure exactly what she's planning to do with it.
Otherwise, the rules as they stand right now are coloured 00C0C0 [some sort of teal, if you're not colourblind] to the right. Read them and follow them; and hit iotm.grem.tv to vote on May's moron.
Loosely on the subject, I'm playing with ideas for this AudioBook version of NotS.
What I've worked out so far is that the book itself is too long to fit into eighty minutes if read out loud. Also, certain parts of the book are getting outdated now. The predictions that the electoral college will fail, and that terrorists will destroy the World Trade Centre, and so on, sound a bit dumb in the future tense now. I suppose the book still works, since it's clearly written in 1999; recording it in 2003, it's a bit outdated. Time for a new one, maybe.
Which leads to new questions. News of the Stoopid, above all else, is supposed to be funny. Written down, it seems to work because the minimal literacy required to read it is found in those organisms which can conclude that something is funny without a laughtrack. A vocal version negates the need to read, and, by extension, the intelligence to understand the concept in the first place.
In short: the primary reason to release a vocal version of NotS is the exact reason that a vocal version might not actually work. Or, more accurately: it'll work; it just won't work much better than the written version.
Maybe I can just drop in a list of system requirements for the disc. Minimum System Requirements: IQ 90, working ears, English v1.0 or greater, CD player or 100% compatible. Recommended System Requirements: IQ 120.
That might work.
Obviously, I have no intention of adding a laughtrack to this thing. Although I haven't ruled out reading it in front of an audience, and recording their reactions. I might try it both ways and see which works better.
As for the content in general, I've still got to work that part out. We know there's not a lot of point, anymore, to mentioning that the twenty-first century will begin on 1st January 2001. The question now is what is worth mentioning these days.
Hunter likes the idea of mixing things up a bit. Grab a few relevant things from the book, grab a few articles online, and write some new stuff just for the disc. And that might be the best idea. There again: I'll have to try it and see whether it works in practise.
Meanwhile, I've got a month left to figure out V14. Everyone seems to like the current version, but I'm getting tired of it. Also, the formatting causes it to run off the right side of the screen in anything less than 1024*768. Not that many screens are less than 1024*768 by default anymore; but, a few people have set their screens back down to 800*600, for some reason, and consider it my fault that gremlin.net, best viewed at 1024*768 or greater, sidescrolls now that they've rebelled against the default technology. So I'm planning out version fourteen to fit into 800*600 again.
I, of course, am running at 1400*1050. Which no one seems to use. But, on a fifteen-inch laptop, ten-point font at 1400*1050 works out to about the size of the characters in a book. Strangely, I can read them from a metre away. That might just be me.
Beyond that, I'm not sure what V14 is going to be yet. I've got a couple of ideas, but nothing really solid. I guess I've still got a couple of weeks to figure it out.
I guess that's most of the news at the moment.
More later....
--Gremlin