I’m Writing for “The Know”

I guess all those years of faux journalism on GamerSushi paid off. For the last few weeks, I’ve been writing for Rooster Teeth’s gaming news channel on YouTube, The Know. I’m filling in for a bit while Ashley Jenkins is on a trip that is totally not a big deal.

So far the experience has been a total blast. It’s cool to dip my toes into these waters again, and I actually love seeing this side of the process. Meg and Ashley are total pros, and really know how to add color and energy to a script, especially considering how many bad puns I like to sneak in. It’s also nice to write something and then have an audience see it almost immediately for a change, compared to most of my projects which have to slow cook for months on end.

Anyway, if you’re a fan of video games and want to stay up-to-date on the industry, you should check it out. So far, only one person has called for me to be fired in the comments, so maybe I’m doing alright.

Here are some of my favorites from the last couple of weeks:

Continue reading →

My Favorite Episodes of The Leet World

7 years ago, which is forever in internet time, my friends and I produced a ridiculously stupid show in Counter-Strike: Source called The Leet World. A show that we’re bringing back, fully animated in Source Filmmaker either late this year or early next year.

I really do say ridiculously stupid in the most affectionate way I can here. In a lot of ways it’s totally immature (especially in the earlier episodes), but I sort of look back fondly on those rough edges, and that we put out content for people to see without over-worrying about how to hone it to perfection. Over time, the show improved in basically every area, and I’m really proud of how the later episodes balanced story and character. It essentially became a Counter-Strike soap opera.

For all its ridiculousness, The Leet World actually managed to tell a decent story (albeit a silly one). At the time, it was one of the more well-watched machinimas, and many content creators have told me it was the reason they started making videos in the first place. And as absurd as it is that we decided to make hours of content using Counter-Strike: Source as the canvas, it actually lead to us doing bigger things and gave me some of the opportunities I’ve had in my career as a copywriter and a writer for Rooster Teeth.

So here are some of my favorite episodes of The Leet World, presented in a completely arbitrary order. Continue reading →

Rooster Teeth’s Burnie Burns Talks 11 Years

It’s no secret that Rooster Teeth, creators of Red vs. Blue, are pretty much my favorite content producers online. The company recently hit their 11 year anniversary, which is an even more impressive milestone when you consider that they started making online videos in a time before YouTube.

This week, Burnie Burns, creative director, wrote some thoughts on what it means to him to hit this mark, and what it was like the first time Rooster Teeth realized that it had a global audience, thanks to the web. Touching and inspiring stuff.

Spinning Plates and the Snowflake Method

I suck at writing novels. I’m not being down on myself, it’s just a simple truth. Unfortunately, I would like to write novels for a living one day. So yeah, those two things kind of collide in the worst way possible.

In many ways, being a writer is like being one of those dudes that spins plates. I’m not really sure if there’s a technical name for that, and I really don’t feel like Googling “that dude who spins plates”, but I’m sure you get the gist of it. Basically, with first drafts, there’s always something else to fix. Whether it’s general copy, something thematic, a dumb character, a bad piece of dialogue or just terrible story crafting, some plate is always going to be wobbling. You might drive yourself mad trying to keep up with it all. Continue reading →

Why I Love the Internet: The Tale of Qwikster

There are some things that are so Internet that you can’t even begin to describe them. I’m sorry not to have a better word for the bizarre organic phenomena that occur across this vast network of tubes, but I’m sure someone smarter than me will come up with one and make a billion dollars while I cry into my Voltron blanket.

In case you aren’t a Netflix subscriber, or you didn’t read that weird personalized e-mail from CEO Reed Hastings, you might have missed out on the news that Netflix is splitting DVD and Streaming not only into two plans — but separate businesses. Continue reading →

On Humor and Finding Community

Community

One of my recent obsessions the last couple of months has been the show Community, Dan Harmon’s meta-comedy that pokes fun at sitcoms and practically every other genre that has graced our TV sets.

I recently borrowed Season 1 of the show on DVD, and somehow I fell down the rabbit hole of listening to the commentary tracks for every single episode, something I’ve never really done before with a series like this. Or any series, for that matter. Continue reading →

The Casting of the Pods

As an Internet savant, it’s only natural that I discovered podcasts five years after everyone else. For some reason, I’ve missed out on these little Mp3 nuggets of goodness. Not that I was unaware of their existence, but let’s get real- who has time for them when they have important things to do like play video games and re-watch seasons of Dexter? Not this guy.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve downloaded just a handful of podcasts including Rooster Teeth’s Drunk Tank as well as Brandon Sanderson’s Writing Excuses to listen to them at work. It’s a great little way to get in the zone, and with Writing Excuses in particular, gives me some cool inspiration for that novel writing fad I’ve hopped into. Another one on my list would be the Penny Arcade D&D podcasts, which I’ve heard are just sidesplitting in their hilarity (or hilariousness, if you prefer that word).

Anyway, this is where I ask you what podcasts you recommend for me, this fledgling Web user who has apparently missed a boat that sailed a long, long time ago. Do not judge me too harshly.

Writing for Yourself as the Audience

Aesops FablesYou can’t please everyone, so you might as well please yourself. It’s one of Aesop’s Fables and a song by Rick Nelson, but it’s a true thing that I think writers need to keep in mind as well. In a recent post on her blog, Jane Espenson, writer on such shows as MASH and Buffy, discusses the question of if in today’s age of high speed communication, does the audience have a much greater impact on the storylines of shows than ever before.

In a move that made me incredibly happy, Jane discounts that idea completely. The short of it is this: write for yourself as the audience. And from my (extremely) limited experience, I’d say she is 100 percent correct.

The answer I give to this is that I consider myself to be the audience I’m writing for. I write what I would want to see. Continue reading →

Soviet Union’s History Via Tetris

Lately I’ve been doing some ranting about derivative videos on the tubes, but here is a special one that manages to rise above even my disdain for them and the majority of their brethren. It’s a music video that tells the complete history of the Soviet Union to the theme of Tetris, and I think it’s something special that seems to have been largely overlooked.

This is probably because it didn’t have a cute nerdy chick in it, or because it is well done and clever. Who knows? Continue reading →

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