Break a Leg

Hey, everyone!

Yuri here -- I haven't checked in for a while but I've let good ol' Jennifer regale you with his adventures and good ol' Drew to cuss at you for enjoyment. We've been busy trying to finish the DVDs, pitch new shows and create something new for all of you to enjoy -- I promise that soon, very soon, we'll have something.

But right now, we desperately need your help.

Our hard drive holding Episode 2 and 3 has, well, self-destructed. It's dead and it needs to be recovered which, apparently, is going to cost at least around 1200-1500 dollars. We wanted to reach out to you -- our dear, beloved fans -- and ask if you or anyone you know has the technical know-how to recover a hard drive.

As payment, we will give you a free copy of the DVDs, signed by the entire cast (or most of them, anyway) and, if you do it very, very quickly, we will thank you in a special Break a Leg video in your honor and probably name.

We really need your help -- so please, please, please let us know if you can help us!

Thanks everyone! And hey, check in once in a while, we're all reading the boards and the blogs, come and say hi, we're here!

Thanks!

-Yuri

Right, so, I said two weeks ago that I'd be back next week with more Tales From Yuri's Anus Imagination, and then I fucking talked about Twitter. Sue me, I'm sucked into that internet whore just like every other celebrity I know... through Twitter.

So we left off with Gino getting a haircut and then delivering us some delicious Little Caesar's pizza. We destroyed those pies with a gusto formerly relegated to Dean Stockwell threatening to mercilessly pry open Ellen's brain for clues to the secret of Cylon regeneration.

Oh, sorry. Spoiler alert in prior paragraph.

Anyhoo, after a quick break and miraculously no defecating (if you'd seen that bathroom, you'd know why), we all started to get back to work. Gino had to head out again to pick up another pizza, because the prior ones he'd brought just didn't cut it, and we were predictably floundering about without his constant cries of "Work harder not smarter, assholes!"

We needed the break, it had to be after midnight and we knew we had several more hours to go.

Everything's going fairly well and then Gino returns with the next round of pizza. No haircut this time, but when Yuri opens the box I notice something odd. Let's re-enact it:

Me: It's not sliced.

That's pretty much it. We have one big round fucking slab of dough with cheese and sauce all over it, and no slices.

Gino is so insanely borderline incompetent when it comes to pizza retrieval.

His next errand though faired a bit better, as he returned at around 2 or 3 AM with a bottle of Glenfiddich Scotch and some plastic cups. Yes, that's right, Gino is officially awesome. I'll tell you this man, I'll tell you this, one sip of that shit cleared up my burning eyes and Yuri's sore throat. One sip for each of us not, like, one sip total. 

I'm a Glenfiddich fan until the bitter end.

We finally managed to wrap it all up at that location (seen the rough cut, it looks amazing as usual), then we all start loading the van for the trip back to the hotel. Fairly uneventful drive except to say that Justin can't even follow a map on his GPS-enabled 3G iPhone.

We all got to the hotel and hit our respective sacks at about 6 AM (fun fact: I woke up the prior morning at 4:30 AM), and our call time the following day was supposed to be 9. Yeah right, Gino made the call to push that to 12 Noon while on the ride to the hotel. 

Guess what time Dustin, Hillary, and I (sharing a room; me and Dustin in one bed, Hill in another) woke up? 11 AM. Guess what time everyone else woke up? 12 Noon. Par for the course. We had some breakfast at a little coffee shop on the corner then finished the shoot at the second location.

I can't really discuss the second location without giving away too much about the project, plus it all went swimmingly (read: boringly) anyway, so we'll just skip it.

Hopefully Yuri can drop by soon with some details on the project itself, because we can't wait for you all to see the finished product. It's phenomenal. Stick a "fucking" in there too, like "phenome-fucking-nal", no, or "phenomena-fucking-l". That's the one.

The moral though is that I just got paid for the job and I'm hoping that my good-natured but 100% intentional insults ingratiate me enough with Gino to keep us all working all year long. Thanks for reading!

I play a game called Kingdom of Loathing.  Some of you may be familiar with it.  Some of you may not care.  A care.  And it's my blog.

KoL (as it is known amongst its constituents) is a free, online game, that is basic in every way, but it's design.  The art is stick figure drawings; the all the text is in Arial; basically all you have to do to play is choose an option, point and click.  The game itself is actually pretty complex, with lots of quests, items, areas, events, pop-culture references, etc.  If you haven't played it, it's worth checking out (www.kingdomoflothing.com). If you have played it and don't like it, hey, I don't like seafood or tomatoes, so no biggie.

I was introduced to the game a few years back by a previous girlfriend, but only recently have I started to explore other aspects of the game and the communities associated with them.  One of these aspects is a radio show that is run by people who play or have played KoL.  This radio program is freem and streaming on line 24/7/365.  You don't even have to play the game to listen to the radio.  But if you DO play the game, you can log into the radio chat channel and talk with the DJ's and whoever else might  happen to be logged in as well, which personalizes the experience a bit.  Eventually you get to know some of the DJs and some of the other people that hang out in chat.  Aw, faceless online friends that you interact with...kinda like Break a Leg!

The DJs are from just about anywhere in the English speaking world.  We have several Americans, but also Brits, Scots, Dutch, Welsh (Fun Fact: did you know people from Wales are not called "Walers"?), etc.  All these different people bring with them different tastes in music and different styles of DJ-ing.  For instance: some people will just talk and play music.  Nothing wrong with that.  Other people will play games during their shows: which gets me closer to my point.  

Some of the games are based on random elements: i.e., one DJ has a secret code that he will play at various times throughout his show.  Then the people that send him a message with the correct answer when they hear the code are in the running to win a prize.  Then he will randomly determine which of the people with the correct answer will get a prize.  Then that person has to pick from 1 of 3 "mystical prize doors": basically three prizes of the DJ's choosing - one crappy, one good, and one awesome.  Anyway, there's lots of different contests played at different times.

Here is where I've created a niche: some DJ's like to have contests that require some vocal skills and the ability to record them in a playable format. I figured these were more my style.  You may remember a while back where I pirated a copy of some audio software and put a couple songs together.  As usually happens, my patience for putting those songs together along with my already deficient attention span caused my production of those songs to fall off.  But since finding out about these contests, I've had a renewed interest in recording stuff.

The first contest was what a particular DJ called "Skaraoke".  She made a post on the KoL forums announcing the contest and that all you had to do to enter the contest was to post on that string in the forums.  Then on a predesigned date she took all the people on the list and randomly assigned them a song.  Each enteree then had to record themselves singing along to that song, karaoke style.  I got coupled with Every Breath You Take By the Police.  Now, my singing voice is ok if I can use all of it, i.e. belt it out there.  But having roommates, neighbors, and a crappy microphone means I have to tone it down a bit.  Plus, I couldn't hit the same octave as Sting with a Howitzer.  So I cheesed it up and threw in an impression of Gizmo, Kermit the Frog, and a Gregorian Choir.

I won the contest.

And that was just the beginning.

I have won every Radio KoL contest in the last 5 months that required some sort of vocal recording.  It's gotten to the point where people are A) asking me if I'm participating to gauge whether they should bother or not, and B) asking me for advice on their recordings. 

Now, you'd really think this would be some kind of sign that YES, I should be pursuing voice acting, and you'd think right.  And I say to that: I'm working on it.

Anyway, play games, listen to music, prizes: Kingdom of Loathing, people.

Oh, and just to show how close a group of friends we have become just from playing the game and listening to the radio: a bunch of people that are local to the SF Bay Area are meeting up at Wondercon in San Francisco this weekend.  What will happen once we get there, I have no idea.  Probably geek out about KoL.  That's what geeks don.  They geeks out.  That's why they call it geeking out.  It's done by geeks.  And damnit, I'm a geek.

Happy Jenday!

I've had a Twitter account for quite a long time, but it's only recently that --

Let me back up.

I used to think that Twitter was stupid. I guess I probably still think that Twitter is stupid, but now I use and refer to it everyday.

I've had a Twitter account for quite a long time, and followed a handful of people who also followed me back. I rarely updated, I rarely referred to the site to see what they had written. It was all just a big joke, really.

Then one day one of the people I was following (Twits?) mentioned that Rainn Wilson had a brand-new account (his first Tweet (seriously?) was on January 27), and that got me curious. I started following Rainn Wilson, and thanks to the brilliance of Twitter I perused Rainn's Following list and started following Stephen Fry, David Lynch, and Tina Fey. I skipped Jimmy Fallon for obvious reasons.

Now this isn't some exclusive club, anyone can follow these people and read whatever the hell stream-of-unconsciousness nincompoopery they decide to cram into 140 characters or less. What struck me immediately though was how all of the people on this list use Twitter so very differently, and that is precisely what got me (and I imagine everyone else) hooked.

Take David Lynch for instance. He uses Twitter for about 3 things: a daily weather report, a notice that the video daily weather report is available on his site, and a thought of the day. Yes, this is that David Lynch. 

Rainn Wilson uses Twitter much the average person would, which is what make his Tweets (I'm getting tired of this terminology) all the more riveting. "What? You love Trader Joe's too? We're practically lovers!"

Tina Fey, who also started fairly recently, predictably uses her account for mostly funnies. In going back through her history though I found an inordinate number of poop jokes. I then realized some of the poop humor had actually, unmistakably, been written on the pooper itself. Genius!

Then there is the dark, evil side of Twitter. This is the side with the marketing guys, the professional social networkers, and the people who invite you to join their Facebook group so you can learn how to make $10,000 a day on Twitter. Holy smokes!

What happened within minutes, literally, of following Rainn, Tina, David, Stephen, etc., was a deluge of followers following me. None of the above unfortunately, it was seemingly just the Twitter Sith, the marketers and networkers trying to drive up their numbers by following me and hoping I would follow back. I fell for it for a day or two then quickly wised up.

I'm still on the Twitter Crack, I even have an iPhone app dedicated to it to make life easier. I just keep waiting for the day Rainn Wilson Direct Messages me and asks me over for a play-date with his child. And my child too of course, not just me. That would be a weird play-date.

I would have to say that I think the audition process is the most horrendous part of the acting profession.  You are walking into a room with one or maybe several people that you HAVE to impress or you don't get the job.  You are walking in there hoping you look like whatever it is they're looking for and you often have no idea what that is.  You have this little piece of paper that shows your previous work, but there is nothing on that piece of paper that says how good the production was or how good you were in it.  You have a picture of yourself which, if you're like me and hate most pictures taken of yourself when you're trying to look normal, only serves to remind somebody who the hell you are. E.I., "Who the hell is Chad Yarish?  Oh right...that guy."  You go in, hoping you're not sweating or shaking too much; hoping that you don't have some previously unnoticed stain on your shirt; something in your teeth; your fly open; a renegade booger, or any number of other social faux pas.  You go in hoping you don't butcher your monologue, hoping your voice doesn't come out sounding like Gilbert Godfrey, hoping you don't trip over anything...just generally hoping.

So, this summer Sonoma County Rep is doing a new version of The Three Musketeers.  I went to the audition last night for said show.  Good times.  This was also the audition for all the other shows the Rep is doing this summer.  Each of these shows has a different director, so in theory you could have been auditioning for several different people all at the same time, all with completely different ideas about who you should be.

Now, I've worked with the Rep before, and I knew everybody in the room and had worked with most of them, so that should have taken some of the pressure off.  And for the most part, it did.  Except for one.

You may remeber a while back I wrote a blog that was pretty scathingly insulting about an experience I had with one individual's theater company, and this individual found and read the blog, and was duely insulted and let me know, and I apologized.  I have had no contact with that person since that incident.

So when I walk into the theater to do my bit and I see this person in the seats amongst the auditioners, I immediately thought "Well, shit."  Fortunately, I was not auditioning for him.  But just having him there watching me as everybody else was watching me was kinda distracting, as you might imagine.  

But I'm a professional, or at least I try to act like one...mostly.  So I got up, I did my monologue, and I did as I think any professional would in my shoes: I avoided all direct contact with this individual.  My monologue was ok.  I've done better.  In truth, I think I really just wanted to get the hell out of the room.

I have a feeling that the afore mentioned individual may have mentioned something of our confrontation to the others, because the guy I was actually auditioning for let me finish, told me I was already called back for several parts and he would see me Monday, and sent me on my way.  I only take not of this because a friend of mine had auditioned just before me and she had done 2 monologues and they had chatted her up for a while afterwards.

I think in the end all will work out fine, but I think this is a pretty good example of that whole burning bridges thing.  And I think the ultimate lesson here is: don't name drop when you're flaming on a public forum.

Happy Jenday!