The Wacky Rantings of Ari Black

11:27am: Another Wacky Adventure with Stick Man & Blobby
Another attempt at a web comic.

8:37pm: The Wacky Adventures of Stick Man & Blobby
Here's my first attempt at a web comic. I don't draw, but I'm still trying for the funny. Let me know what you think.

6:50am: And then what happened?
... Shedig stooped and gathered the pieces of his shattered blade. His namesake. That which had been with him for as long as he could remember. He felt his heart break into as many pieces as he went about his sad work. Around him, his companions watched in wide-eyed sorrow. Only Deleren had the courage to approach him. She knew enough not to help him with something so personal but stood quietly behind and placed her hand softly on his shoulder.

He felt her presence and took some solace in it but could not find it within himself to respond. When he had gathered every last sliver of steel, he rose, towering over Deleren, but seeming smaller. His eyes were clear and did not waver, but she could feel the waves of despair radiate from him. He walked slowly across the room and gently placed the shards of his sword on the great black anvil of the beast it had helped him defeat. He did so with such tenderness, as putting a child to rest in it's bassinet, that there was scarcely a sound. He walked, head hung, back to Deleren's side. Still his eyes were clear and bright and he spoke without quaver, but she could hear the anguish within him all the same.

"I am undone. It has always guided me to the true path. Now I am alone."
Deleren chanced to place her arm around his and looked up at the forlorn warrior, "Perhaps then, it's time for us to find our own path. Together."

For the first time since the shattering of his blade, Shedig looked into her eyes, the same question as always shining from within them. She smiled and softly touched his face and led him away and out of the forge, their companions following respectfully behind.

For a long quiet moment, the forge was silent but for the crackling of the fire and then, from out of the shadows, came Torik. As muscled and determined as if none of the ill-fate that had befallen him had occurred. He walked to the black anvil that was once his and would be again and looked down at the steel. The sword pieces glowed brightly against the sooted black of the iron anvil and for a moment, though it could have been the firelight, he saw the shape of a dark red dragon move across the blade. He smiled and carefully picked up the pieces of steel, speaking to them as he would a child, "Your journey is not yet over my old friend. Once you were great and I shall make you great once more."

And then there was silence, except for the sound of hammer on steel.

****

I once developed some stories about Shedig and his adventures. They were intended to only be told verbally, so I never wrote them down. Seeing as it's unlikely that I will become a travelling bard, perhaps now is the time to put them to paper.

6:48am: Yes, but is it funny?
I'm not a comic genius by any means. I would never group myself with Peters or Carlin, Williams or Murphy, but I do have my moments. I want to talk to you about humour and some of the elements that go into it. So, every day for the next 140 weeks I will be making a new post on humour...

Funny? Perhaps only to me, but I'm willing to bet that notion of a 140 weeks of daily posts made someone giggle. Which illustrates what I feel is one of the primary forms of humour; the unexpected. Although used often in slapstick and other forms of humour, the unexpected is best demonstrated in the short joke form. It can be in the guise of exaggeration, juxtaposition, and even simply a twist ending.

Here are two examples of jokes. One, I feel, is funny. The other, well, you decide.

A guy walks into a bar and sits down. He orders a drink and the bartender, giving him a funny look, serves it to him. Everything is normal about this guy except that he has a very large orange for a head. The bartender ignores him for a while but can't contain his curiousity, so he goes up to the guy and says, "I don't want to be rude, but I just have to know, why do you have an orange for a head?"
The guy looks up from his drink and recalls the tale to the bartender.

One day, he was walking on the beach and he tripped over an old oil lamp. He took it  home and started cleaning it and a genie appeared and said that he'd grant him three wishes.

First, he wished for a million dollars. The genie told him to open his wallet and there was a million dollars in it. Then he wished for all women to be attracted to him, the genie told him that from now on all women would be attracted to him. Then the genie told him to think very hard about his last wish. He thought and thought, carefully weighing all the options, making a list of the pros and cons of each choice. Two days went by before he had decided on his last wish. He summoned the genie and wished for an orange for a  head.

Not the punchiest of jokes and it usually takes a moment, or longer, for people to get the punchline, but I think it's a fine example of the form. Here's another similar one.

A guy walks into a bar and sits down. He orders a drink and the bartender, giving him a funny look, serves it to him. Everything is normal about this guy except that he has a very large orange for a head. The bartender ignores him for a while but can't contain his curiousity, so he goes up to the guy and says, "I don't want to be rude, but I just have to know, why do you have an orange for a head?"
The guy looks up from his drink and says, "I found a magic lamp and asked the genie to give me an orange for a head."

Now, it's the same joke, same punchline, but this version isn't really funny at all. The reason is that it lacks the element of the unexpected. They both have a surprising character of a guy with an orange for a head, but in the first version, the gag is created by the buildup. The victim, i.e. the listener, of this joke is waiting for the guy to slip up in some way or for the genie to turn out to be malicious. The unexpected is that the freak wished for his fate straight out.

This orange head joke is more subtle but uses the same gag as a very well known joke.

Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.

This one is so old that no one remembers that it's actually funny, but many eggs ago someone was told this joke for the first time and it would have been a real knee-slapper. It contains the same elements, in a much simpler form, as the orange head joke. The question posed to the listener creates an expectation of something unexpected. When the mundane answer is given, the expectation of the weird makes the mundane answer weird by comparison. Thus the joke is funny... For about a half millisecond.

See you tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day...

10:50am: It's not that I'm lazy....
It's really not.

I do my schoolwork.... When I absolutely have to.

I've rewritten my MUD driver at least four times trying to get it up to the standard I want. That's a total, from scratch, no copy & paste, rewrite. That's a lot of code there.

It's just that I'd rather spend my day reading Ghastly's Ghastly Comic or watching my cats dream than sitting at my computer writing. I love writing, which is to say that I detest it with every fiber of my being but have the drive to tell the stories that bounce around in my head in the desperate hope that they'll find someone else to bother.

I'm starting to fill up one of my journals with small ideas that pop into my head and sooner or later the guilty looks it keeps giving me is going to cross the line and force me to sit and write out something.

Oh! Something unrelated. Wil Wheaton is hilarious. If you've watched Star Trek: TNG, you either loved or hated Wesley Crusher. Personally I thought he was a douche; that's the character not the actor. He was the worst written character on that show just after Tasha Yar, who said "rape gangs" far too often for her short tenure on the program.

What I'm trying to say is that I wouldn't have looked up Wil's IMDB profile. But I happened upon this comic in Ghastly's and it inspired me to Google old Willy. Lo and behold, there is the man's website blog and, as it turns out, he's funny as hell. I highly recommend you read the whole site but start with this posting.

Prattle prattle prattle. I'll shut up now.

7:39am: The Hell?
So I'm standing in line at Loblaws, and I'm bored so I'm scanning the racks of chocolates and razor blades and stuff and that's where I come across the new Mach 3 sales pitch. If you don't know what a Mach 3 is, which is doubtful, it's Gillette's newest line of disposable razor. It's really very good, I use one, anyways...

So I'm looking at the racks and there's this Mach 3 packaged with a 10 PIECE SCREWDRIVER. I'm not talking about CostCo packaging where they tape two or more products together as a "package" and give you a deal on it. No. The /SCREWDRIVER/ was /IN/ the /PACKAGING/ with the /RAZOR/.

Who came up with this idea? Is there a big market for this? Picture it, it's 1:00 AM, some lonely, scruffy bearded man comes muttering into Loblaws. He looks around in frustration and screams at the closest stock-person, "Damn it! I need a shave! And I need to change the batteries in this *he holds it up* walkie-talkie! Give me a product that solves my problem!"

It's not like screwdrivers are rare, let alone Gillette's territory. Maybe they're spreading out into new fields and they want people to associate the new line of Gillette Tools with the popular Razor Blades.....

And goddamnit! New release movies /should NOT/ cost $5 per. That's just sick. Sick, sick, sick.

9:22am: Chain Writing
Back in, ooohh, grade 5, my class was given a writing assignment. We were given the first part of a story and we had to write our own ending. The story was All Summer in a Day, for those of you who are interested. After we were finished the teacher read each of the assignments to the class. Mine was the darkest, angstiest, and, of course, the /best/ one :->

All arrogant boasting aside, I really enjoyed the process, so I thought I'd try to enlist some writers out there into a group writing project. I'm going to post the first part of a story, the first few paragraphs, of a story of my own devising, then I'd like all of you eager paper-crumpling beavers out there to write your own addendum, it need only be a few more paragraphs, and the story will develop from there.

So, here goes:

The horse and rider flew up the mountain path, the horse’s powerful legs barely touching the ground. The rider’s cloak billowed in the wind.

He had been this way many times in his life and rarely had to glance down to navigate between the clinging roots and upthrusting rocks of the mountain. Cresting the peak, he reined in his horse and tethered it to a tree.

Instinctively dropping into the hunter’s stride he walked softly across the grassy plateau, barely disturbing the ground. Letting his cowl fall, he uncovered a boy’s face, no more than sixteen. The wind caught his hair gently and a curl fell across his brow. He brushed it away absentmindedly. He often came here to think or simply to escape, for a time, the rigors of the day to day.

He sat upon the watching rock at the edge of the peak and looked down at the valley spread out below. The path by which he arrived snaked down the cliffside and fed into the Traveler’s Way running across the valley. A road led for a league from the Way to the walled city of Trineas, known more commonly as the Training Grounds. Here the King’s knights and advisors trained and studied and fought for higher rank. From his vantage point he could see the market being readied, the shopkeepers preparing for the traders to arrive. Further, the manor’s courtyard could be seen. He could hear the ringing of sword on shield as the knights began another day of training.

The Trendor River wrapped playfully around the city and fed into the canal that ran through the city’s heart. It was here that the boy had spent his entire life. He knew nothing more than this city and valley and did not care to know more. Behind him his restless mount whickered and a mountain pheasant burst suddenly from the treetops, catching the boy in a memory.

11:38pm: The blood thickening music is a surprising relief from the noise in which my daily life exists. I can feel my mind quieting as it is pummeled by the endless cacophony. Even sleep cannot bring me this kind of peace. There is a surprising joy in this place. Watching the passing of faces, all bedecked for the night. All seeking their own pleasures, whether in others or in a shared solitude, it does not matter, all can be found in the jungle of sound, in the presence of these creatures of passion and fury. Their frenzied gyrations will cease only when exhaustion overtakes them and even then but for a short time. Perhaps I will become one of them or find pleasure in there company. But that is a dream far distant, for now, I am only able to watch and keep a keen ear to their ritualistic song. Whose words holds meaning I cannot yet conceive of, nor do I search for a teacher. For this is a knowledge that one can learn but not be taught. Is there one among them that can guide my hand but not my mind? I sorely wish for such a person, but fear them, for they will change me inexorably, and that new way fills me with the dread of the unknown. Do I wish to be a creature of the night or simply a stolid ghost that passes unnoticed amongst their midst?

Except for a little punctuation that's a word for word transcription from the piece of paper, mistakes and all.

9:11pm: *yawn*
I was doing so well too.

I almost had a pattern of entering consistently. Now I want to write about something but I can't make my brain work to do it. So I end up copping out and writing about the fact that I have nothing to write about.

This is like a bad English exam.

Mr. Bean the movie is on. I hate TV, but I can't concentrate on anything so I'm just vegging.

7:32pm: When Santa's got to blow, go go!
Humbug, I say! Humbug!

What's with Christmas anyway? I can understand someone having a religious holiday. You believe something and there's a day you celebrate it? Good for you. Power to ya. I just can't stomach how it's completely infiltrated our entire surroundings. You can't turn a corner or connect to a media, TV, Internet, radio, without be bombarded with holiday cheer.

I'm not a scrooge, if you want to be happy, be happy. If you want to give people gifts, do so. Nearly everyone likes getting gifts. It just sickens me how it's everywhere. All the people who celebrate Christmas know when it is. They don't have to be told by the stores that they should buy gifts, THEY KNOW. They've been doing it for years. This isn't a new holiday.

I think what it comes down to is that the religion is in the government. That bothers me. We're in a time of such political correctness that people are arguing whether they should be calling a tree a Christmas Tree or a Holiday Tree... A rose by any other name...

Don't get me wrong, It's crucial that a government recognize, a give leeway for, the holidays of the people it works for. The recognition should be reasonable, though. To take it to a logical extreme, if Satanists were given the same privileges as those who celebrate Christmas, we'd have Pentagrams painted in the windows and dead animals hanging from every second tree.

I know I know, the Christmas celebrators are in the majority. That matters for a political group, but not a for a religious one. You want to paint decorations in the window of the shop you own, or decorate your house? That's your right, and it will be nice to see people celebrating their chosen religion. It shouldn't be forced down our throats, though.

You go have yourself a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Have it quietly, though. With your family, with your congregation. Not running amok in the streets and public places.

This is all a dream, I just know it. It's just some bad sandwich I ate before I was born.

12:09am: God fearin' folk
Who's right? What's the right religion? If the right religion is the one that is divinely inspired, how can you tell the prophet from the huckster?

Of course, if you believe your religion, then you believe your prophets are true and all others are false. But that's a matter of faith rather than fact.

Also, the religions of today may have the same name, but are quite different than what they were at the time of the prophets.
How can we say this or that religion is the true one, when the facts and traditions are so clouded by human interference.

That's really the crux of the issue. From ground zero of God's message hitting the prophet's brain there is human interference.
Each person would interpret the message, whatever it may be, in a different way. Every repetition would be different and, likely, greater than the one before it.

If you're going to believe in divinely inspired religions, I think it's easier to accept the idea that all the prophets are true and that each prophet them-self and their community took a different spin on the message and ran with it.

So the question is, if all the prophets are true, doesn't that make all religions true. On first thought, yes. But if you think about it, the real answer is that none of the religions are true.

It all depends on what you think religions are. If you consider them to be the mandate of your deity, then you're fooling yourself. The message, if there was one, has been clouded and twisted and changed to suit the needs of the controllers of the religions over thousands of years.

But if you think of religions as a life path, a way to bring order to the randomness of existence. A way to bond a community, which might not have worked together, under a common idea. Then it doesn't matter what religion you choose, as long as it is something you can truly get behind, something that you're not simply going through the motions of. Then all religions are true. All have a purpose, and like variety in nature, the plethora of chosen of religious belief allow you to find one that will fit you, rather than fitting yourself to your religion.

6:58pm: Out with the old, in with the new.
Cleared out all that old rubbish. Time to start fresh. As Anny Oklee used to say:

BANG!

So anyways, some poetry. *spotlight**snapping fingers*

Speed,
Wind,
Power,
Freedom,
The metal beast screams beneath me,
It knows who its master is.

Speed,
Wind,
Power,
Recklessness,
A heel slips, finds itself trapped in a spoked cage,
The beast groans in anger.

Speed,
Wind,
Powerlessness,
Pain, the beast bucks and jumps upon me,
I know who my master is.

*snapping fingers**tomato*