and
present:
Of Possible Alternatives
(a.k.a. The God of Copyright Infringement Takes a Holiday)
-------- Finale --------
by Jason Bertovich
©2013 by Jason Bertovich and Matthew Atanian
Boy Scouts ½ created by Matthew Atanian
Perspectives created by Jason Bertovich
Kenny's Laboratory created by Matthew Atanian
Of Possible Alternatives
(a.k.a. The God of Copyright Infringement Takes a Holiday)
-------- Finale --------
by Jason Bertovich
©2013 by Jason Bertovich and Matthew Atanian
Boy Scouts ½ created by Matthew Atanian
Perspectives created by Jason Bertovich
Kenny's Laboratory created by Matthew Atanian
“So, what did you think, Mr. Atanian?” Kenny asked as the screen went dark and the disc ended.
Matt stood there, still staring at the blank screen. He placed his hand to his chin and gave the question some thought. After a moment, he spoke, “The ending was confusing and utterly depressing. So, it definitely was an Evangelion-type universe, but…”
Matt paused and struggled to continued. Kenny looked up from his seat, “But what, Mr. Atanian?”
“It just… it just didn’t play out like it would have if I had wrote it. I mean, why didn’t it play out like my fan-fic? I thought that was the criteria we entered into your computer,” Matt asked.
“Well, the universe is a large and complicated place, and then there’s that whole business of free will and what not. No doubt, a Evangelion universe that’s exactly as you wrote surely exist somewhere out there in the multi-dimensional fabric of space and time, but it could take my computer years or even decades to find it and create that snapshot. For the purpose of this experience, the computer is trying to find some commonalities to the criteria entered, if not an exact match. We can try again, if you like,” Kenny explained and then offered.
Matt shook his head, “Nah, it’s okay. I at least got a chance to see something amazing and that’s enough for now. If anything it’s definitely given me some ideas on future chapters and if nothing else, I can avoid the crushing the reader under a wave of angst.” Matt then checked his watch and blinked. “Holy cow, I gotta get going, if I’m going to sneak in and get what I came for before my folks wake up. I should also get back to Japan soon, otherwise she’ll think I stood her up,” Matt said as he turned away to leave.
“Mr. Atanian…?” Kenny asked, confused.
“Long story. Long, long, LONG story. I’ll explain next time you come through from Japan. Promise,” Matt said over his shoulder and then was gone, leaving Kenny alone again.
Kenny checked his watch, blinked his eyes wearily, and then stifled a yawn. He should probably awaken Mr. Becker, if only to get him to a proper bed. Kenny sat up and walked to the door that led to the stairwell that led to the Entertainma-drome. As he opened the door, he called out, “Computer, light.”
A moment later, the lab went dark, save for the tiny shaft of light emitted from the open doorway. Another moment later, it was gone.
Matt stood there, still staring at the blank screen. He placed his hand to his chin and gave the question some thought. After a moment, he spoke, “The ending was confusing and utterly depressing. So, it definitely was an Evangelion-type universe, but…”
Matt paused and struggled to continued. Kenny looked up from his seat, “But what, Mr. Atanian?”
“It just… it just didn’t play out like it would have if I had wrote it. I mean, why didn’t it play out like my fan-fic? I thought that was the criteria we entered into your computer,” Matt asked.
“Well, the universe is a large and complicated place, and then there’s that whole business of free will and what not. No doubt, a Evangelion universe that’s exactly as you wrote surely exist somewhere out there in the multi-dimensional fabric of space and time, but it could take my computer years or even decades to find it and create that snapshot. For the purpose of this experience, the computer is trying to find some commonalities to the criteria entered, if not an exact match. We can try again, if you like,” Kenny explained and then offered.
Matt shook his head, “Nah, it’s okay. I at least got a chance to see something amazing and that’s enough for now. If anything it’s definitely given me some ideas on future chapters and if nothing else, I can avoid the crushing the reader under a wave of angst.” Matt then checked his watch and blinked. “Holy cow, I gotta get going, if I’m going to sneak in and get what I came for before my folks wake up. I should also get back to Japan soon, otherwise she’ll think I stood her up,” Matt said as he turned away to leave.
“Mr. Atanian…?” Kenny asked, confused.
“Long story. Long, long, LONG story. I’ll explain next time you come through from Japan. Promise,” Matt said over his shoulder and then was gone, leaving Kenny alone again.
Kenny checked his watch, blinked his eyes wearily, and then stifled a yawn. He should probably awaken Mr. Becker, if only to get him to a proper bed. Kenny sat up and walked to the door that led to the stairwell that led to the Entertainma-drome. As he opened the door, he called out, “Computer, light.”
A moment later, the lab went dark, save for the tiny shaft of light emitted from the open doorway. Another moment later, it was gone.
Kenneth Pendrell studied the black screen and rubbed his chin. He arched fingers together and leaned back in his seat, putting his hands to his mouth. He then looked over his shoulder and studied the white plastic figure that stood at attention behind him.
“Alpha-Seven,” Kenny stated.
“Yes, Kenneth?” the white figure asked, its voice a mix of English butler and digital synthesizer.
“Can you give me your impressions of what we just watched?” Kenneth asked the android.
“It appears that we have just witnessed another universe in which your dimensional duplicate has invented a device of a similar nature to your own trans-dimensional viewerscope. Judging by the contents of your counterpart’s version of the laboratory, he would appear to be of similar intellect,” The android answered. The android then paused and his eyes blinked mechanically. “As for apparent differences, the most easily discernible would be that your counterpart has opted for a human assistant as opposed to the android workers you employ.”
“Yes, it would appear that he also allows others besides his assistant to access the lab and appears to have an almost casual rapport with those individuals. What do you make of it, Alpha-Seven?” Kenneth asked, still sitting back with his fingers stepped to his mouth.
“It does not seem like an efficient way to run operations. Your methodology along with the multiple android workforce observing and maintaining experiments when you are not able has maximized the output of what your laboratory can produce. From a purely scientific standpoint, the universe in which we dwell would appear to be superior,” the android designated as Alpha-Seven responded.
“Indeed,” Kenneth said slowly. No, it does not appear to be very efficient.” He then paused and tapped his fingers to his chin. He then slightly turned his head toward the android’s direction. “That’ll be all, Alpha-Seven.”
The android nodded congenially. “Very good, sir. Thank you, sir.” The android then stepped away to leave Kenneth with his thoughts.
Kenneth continued to sit there. His thoughts dwelled on his counterpart. All he could see in his mind was that other version of himself, and despite all the inefficiency and potential setbacks his human lab assistant had caused, he couldn’t help but focus on the quiet smile that his counterpart always seemed to have. He was a man who was content and at peace with his universe. This gave Kenneth pause for thought: Could he say the same thing of himself?
Finally, he stirred in his seat. He then spoke, “Computer, please do a background data check on the following individuals: Matthew Atanian and Jonathon Becker. Also, please do a background data check on Boy Scout Troop 192 and the Pioneer Valley Council.”
“Processing,” the ethereal voice of the computer called out above him.
Kenny then smiled a little and wondered if he too would one day wear the same smile that his duplicate did. He was eager to find out. It was possibly the boldest experiment he would ever run.
The Human Experience.
Kenneth wondered if he was up to the challenge.
“Alpha-Seven,” Kenny stated.
“Yes, Kenneth?” the white figure asked, its voice a mix of English butler and digital synthesizer.
“Can you give me your impressions of what we just watched?” Kenneth asked the android.
“It appears that we have just witnessed another universe in which your dimensional duplicate has invented a device of a similar nature to your own trans-dimensional viewerscope. Judging by the contents of your counterpart’s version of the laboratory, he would appear to be of similar intellect,” The android answered. The android then paused and his eyes blinked mechanically. “As for apparent differences, the most easily discernible would be that your counterpart has opted for a human assistant as opposed to the android workers you employ.”
“Yes, it would appear that he also allows others besides his assistant to access the lab and appears to have an almost casual rapport with those individuals. What do you make of it, Alpha-Seven?” Kenneth asked, still sitting back with his fingers stepped to his mouth.
“It does not seem like an efficient way to run operations. Your methodology along with the multiple android workforce observing and maintaining experiments when you are not able has maximized the output of what your laboratory can produce. From a purely scientific standpoint, the universe in which we dwell would appear to be superior,” the android designated as Alpha-Seven responded.
“Indeed,” Kenneth said slowly. No, it does not appear to be very efficient.” He then paused and tapped his fingers to his chin. He then slightly turned his head toward the android’s direction. “That’ll be all, Alpha-Seven.”
The android nodded congenially. “Very good, sir. Thank you, sir.” The android then stepped away to leave Kenneth with his thoughts.
Kenneth continued to sit there. His thoughts dwelled on his counterpart. All he could see in his mind was that other version of himself, and despite all the inefficiency and potential setbacks his human lab assistant had caused, he couldn’t help but focus on the quiet smile that his counterpart always seemed to have. He was a man who was content and at peace with his universe. This gave Kenneth pause for thought: Could he say the same thing of himself?
Finally, he stirred in his seat. He then spoke, “Computer, please do a background data check on the following individuals: Matthew Atanian and Jonathon Becker. Also, please do a background data check on Boy Scout Troop 192 and the Pioneer Valley Council.”
“Processing,” the ethereal voice of the computer called out above him.
Kenny then smiled a little and wondered if he too would one day wear the same smile that his duplicate did. He was eager to find out. It was possibly the boldest experiment he would ever run.
The Human Experience.
Kenneth wondered if he was up to the challenge.
The End
…And elsewhere...
A Beginning
…And elsewhere...
A Beginning
Matt's Pre-Note Notes
Hello, folks! Hope you've enjoyed Of Possible Alternatives, Jason's epic tale on interdimensionality! But if you thought the story itself was epic... wait until you see Jason's notes!
That's right folks, we're in for some epic note giving here.
Jason originally wrote these notes in December of 2010, so there are a few things in them that are a bit out of date or slightly inaccurate. So if anything in his notes -- such of talks of future plans -- seems to contradict some of the other recently added Jason stories (or reality itself) then just look on what is presented in these notes as an artifact of the times.
The notes at one point also make mention of a failed attempt at a spin-off, Outlast, that people who have only discovered the Boy Scouts ½ Universe in more recent years may have never heard of. Yeah, these stories were not included in the website restoration, and I have no immediate plans to put them back up. But... I do still have them, so you never know. Someday, maybe they'll make an appearance on the "Extras" page. Until then, however, these mysterious writings will be being studied by top men. Top men.
Anyway, onto Jason's notes! Be back mid-way through with some (comparatively) brief notes of my own!
That's right folks, we're in for some epic note giving here.
Jason originally wrote these notes in December of 2010, so there are a few things in them that are a bit out of date or slightly inaccurate. So if anything in his notes -- such of talks of future plans -- seems to contradict some of the other recently added Jason stories (or reality itself) then just look on what is presented in these notes as an artifact of the times.
The notes at one point also make mention of a failed attempt at a spin-off, Outlast, that people who have only discovered the Boy Scouts ½ Universe in more recent years may have never heard of. Yeah, these stories were not included in the website restoration, and I have no immediate plans to put them back up. But... I do still have them, so you never know. Someday, maybe they'll make an appearance on the "Extras" page. Until then, however, these mysterious writings will be being studied by top men. Top men.
Anyway, onto Jason's notes! Be back mid-way through with some (comparatively) brief notes of my own!
Of Possible Author's Notes
Wow, it’s sometimes really scary what happens when you decide to sit down and finally put an idea that has been running around in the back of your head for the last five or six or seven years ‘down on paper.’ So 104 pages later and here we are and no, weary readers, we’re not done yet because I’m just chock full of end of story author’s notes and then go get yourself a snack because there’s a special feature to follow.
It’s been a good two years or so since the BS ½ universe has seen new material and that’s just far too long for my tastes, so this is sorta my way for making up for lost time. But why now? Why at all? Why me, for that matter? Ah, patience, I’m getting there. Seriously, you just read through 44,000 words of fiction, you think I could just sum up everything in a few scant paragraphs? If Perspectives part 5 taught you anything, it’s that I’m a gloriously loquacious bastard.
Anyway, this little foray back into the realm of the written word began back in November of this year (2010). I have been pursuing a lot of different interests the last decade or so, and while I wouldn’t trade the time I devoted and still devote to any of those pursuits for anything, I was finding myself drifting away from my first love, which is writing. It was frustrating for me to not find that motivation to string more than a few paragraphs together before giving up on an idea.
So I was determined to get myself back into shape and thus I attempted for a third time to complete NaNoWriMo (that’s National Novel Writing Month for those not familiar with the term.) The goal of this endeavor is to write a 50,000 word story in under 30 days. The official month for doing such is November. Basically, it’s the Bataan Death March of writing in which you don’t worry about editing or going back to revise, you just try and pound out an average of 1,700 words a day to meet the goal and tell something that resembles a semi-cohesive story.
My first two attempts at this were utter failures, but I was determined to try again and succeed. I got about 17,000 words into my story and I was quickly realizing that while there were bits and pieces I was enjoying, on the whole I was utterly loathing the story I was trying to write. I hadn’t done any real preplanning so I was making up the plot as I went with rather poor results. In the end, I realized I was writing a giant self-insert story that I couldn’t make work and was loathing the idea of trying to make it work.
Then I received a package from a very good friend. Its contents included a most wonderful gift – a hardbound edition of the first ‘year’ of the Boy Scouts ½ Universe sent to me by my fiend of the last 13 years, Matt Atanian. Me and Matt’s relationship is kinda like the tides. We move in and out of contact in a relatively constant cycle. We hadn’t spoken in about a year, prior to my wedding to a most wonderful woman (more on her later, promise), and a little after our first anniversary, I had accidentally dialed Matt up on my cell (I was intending to call my landlord who is also named Matt and thus his entry in my cell phone was next to the good Mr. Atanian.)
But now we were back in contact again and Matt’s gift was indeed wonderful and the much needed kick in the ass I’ve been needing. I reread the whole first series from cover to cover and found myself reconnecting with all the wonderful memories I had working in this little slice of literary real estate. To make a long story short, I felt something welling up in me, and that something was inspiration.
So, while I was hating the story I had been currently working on at the time, it had served its duty to a much higher purpose, because now I was used to sitting down at a desk, writing for long stretches at a time, and able to force myself to not give up at the first sign of writer’s block. As I closed the back cover of Matt’s gift, I decided that if I was going end up writing an SI anyway, then dammit, I’m going to make it an enjoyable experience, and there’s never been a more enjoyable experience doing SI than doing it in Matt’s world, so back into that world I dived.
Now, as I said before, Of Possible Alternatives is an idea that’s been running around in the back of my mind for a good five or six or seven years or longer. It’s origins go back over a decade to the Perspectives side story written by Bill Hughes, Of Possible Futures: The Tale of Neko-chan and Bertovich. Now mind you, I’ve always found that title quite misleading as not every ‘future’ mentioned was actually a future, per se, but rather an alternative universe including some parodic takes on some copyrighted materials. In fact, during the tale, the God of Copyright Infringement came down to put a stop to it.
Well, if there’s something Bill could do, then I could take it to the next level of excess. Alas, the idea sat in the dark unused corner of my mind for years until the time was right for it to jump out and shout ‘Surprise!’
So, um, Surprise!
It’s actually probably a good thing the idea went unused for so long because so much material for this story came from the fact that it was always just a concept that was never started. I was never locked into particular ideas and was always filing new ideas away mentally for later use. In fact, I had over a dozen more ideas that didn’t make the final cut, so they might make their way into the BS ½ Universe some time in future. When I finally did start writing, I had so much material to work with that I was never short of ideas. It was like a slowly simmering stew that got better as different ingredients were added at different times.
Wow, two pages of author’s notes so far and not a single word actually dedicated to the story itself. As I said, loquacious bastard be me.
Kenny’s Lab
The story primarily originates in Kenny’s Lab and the lab segments function as segues between the various short snippets that take place in these possible alternative universes. That was not going to be the original idea. The original idea for the sections that tied all the other segments together was going to feature the mysterious ‘Goddess’ of Hughes’ original Of Possible Futures story and indeed was probably going to involve her tying up the notorious God of Copyright infringement so she and some other gods and goddesses could enjoy a relaxed evening of watching universes that she ‘TiVo’d’ on her DRV or Digital Reality Viewer.
But when it came time to start writing, I opted for returning to Kenny’s Lab. Honestly, of the three series (or four if you count In Japan as a separate series) that make up the BS ½ Universe, Kenny’s Laboratory holds a special spot in my heart for it’s numerous sci-fi and pop culture references and the interactions between Kenny and Becker. Also, I love Kenny’s Lab and Kenny in particular for being the BS ½ universe’s own form of Sonic Screwdriver (or Applied Phlebotinum for those familiar with TVtropes.org).
Honestly, being ten years removed from the original Hughes story and that story being a Perspectives side story as well, I wasn’t sure how familiar those segments would be to readers. Kenny’s Lab however had been mentioned in both its own series as well as the main series, so in the end I decided to take that angle and run with it.
The Scout
A take on famed British sci-fi/suspense series, The Prisoner, starring Matt Atanian in place of Patrick McGoohan. This was mostly inspired in thanks to my wife renting the series on NetFlix. Matt’s never been shy about being a fan of the series, considering that Number Six makes an appearance in the Kenny’s Lab Finale, so it felt like a natural fit. Also McGoohan could be up there in the pantheon of Saints of Self-Insertion considering he was the Executive Producer of The Prisoner as well as its star.
This isn’t really a full blown story in itself but rather an abridged homage to the series it was parodying, including some of the more famous and quotable lines. More or less, this was just a bit to let readers know what to expect from Kenny’s invention.
A final note on this segment: I will neither confirm nor deny whom Number Six Eighty Three was a representative of, but it may or may not have ties to a specific Boy Scout Troop in Fairchance, PA.
Kill Bill Hughes
Come’on, you’ve all wondered what would happen if Nicole really did discover that Billy Hughes and Neko-Chan were one and the same. Besides, I couldn’t let Pulp Fiction be the only Tarantino movie to be quoted to obscene levels in this series.
Looking back on it now, I’m not sure if Nicole’s reaction is more or less extreme than her reaction was when Matt penned ADM/BS½ III: KSJ2K.
Encyclopedia Galactica
Nothing really special to say about this one other than no matter how much time passes since his death, Doug Adams continues to be the single biggest literary influence in my life and I don’t doubt that Matt probably shares similar sentiments or at least a warm sentimentality when it comes to Adam’s creations.
Honestly, I have no inside information on the actual origins of Kenny Pendrell. Matt has kept that a closely guarded secret and kept it secret despite cajolery, bribery, and outright threats, telling me that he would only reveal it for what he called, “The Right Price.”
Quack Experimental Fan-Fic Proctor Saga
Poor Proctor. No, seriously, poor Proctor. If there was ever a perpetual whipping boy in this series, it’s him. But he’s so good at the role, that it never ceases being fun to exploit it.
As for the mysterious Man in Black Hat in Trench Coat, it may have a little something to do with a certain Patron Saint of Self-Insertion anointing another certain someone as the King on Earth of Self-Insertion. The mysterious quote regarding a scene taking two years… well, that’s a story for another time, like say, several pages from now.
Yeah, I’m just inviting meteors to land on and crush Story-me, but luckily while I’m not the King on Earth of Self-Insertion, Story-me is an incredible guy capable of holding rational debates after suffering concussions, so I’m sure I, er, he will be okay.
Perspectives From the Training Ground of Cursed Springs
This segment was fun in that I was able to essentially take the writing style of the Perspectives series and use it to put my spin what is the main series’ plot hook. So, that means that sometime in the future Matt is going to have to write a Perspectives story about relational angst using the light-hearted style of the main series… Wha ha ha ha!
*ahem* sorry ‘bout that.
Anyway, when it came to choosing what particular cursed springs to inflict upon the current Perspectives cast, it came down to personal preferences as well as some nods to the original Perspectives stories.
Nicole and the Spring of Drowned Monkey – Sorry, no real deep philosophical reasons for this choice. Monkeys are simply my second favorite animal and Monkeys always equal comedy gold. There is nothing you can’t improve by simply adding a monkey to it.
John and the Spring of Drowned Triplets – Yeah, seems like just the perfect curse for a guy with three multiple personalities. If this had been a long running series, I’m sure the new clones created would start dressing like Toga and Jinnai.
Lina and the Spring of Drowned Snake – This is more of a subtle reference to the second Byte of Perspectives in which this new Goddess character gets cast out of the Divine Bureaucracy. The snake also happened to represent the most famous being ever cast out of a divine place, but please don’t take that to mean I think of Lina as evil. As I said, it’s just a subtle reference and not one worth dwelling on.
Jason and the Spring of Drowned Penguin – Oh yes, it always comes back to Penguins when it comes to the BS ½ universe, don’t it? Surely there must be some sort of reason why flightless waterfowl keeping making appearances. There is, but you’ll have to wait to find out what it is. Sorry.
Professor What
Ah yes, this was probably my second favorite part to write in the whole story. If it wasn’t too blatant, this segment was a rather ham-fisted tribute to the long running BBC property, All Creatures Great and Small. Oh wait, sorry, got my notes mixed up. This was a tribute to something called Doctor Who.
Okay, sarcasm aside, this was a blast to write, though I’m sure Matt would’ve no doubt approached it much differently than me. In terms of Who Fandom, I’m not what you would call a true blue Whovian. I never got into the classic series like so many of my fellow sci-fi fandom brethren. I just couldn’t get into it. The hokey special effects and make-up hindering of the suspension of disbelief, the terminally slow story pacing, and the never-ending feeling that if I hadn’t watched it from the beginning, I was not getting the full enjoyment of the story.
Then came the revival of five or so years ago. Well, actually I still didn’t watch it. But then came NetFlix Streaming and suddenly four series worth of New Who became available as well as three series of Torchwood. (Actually we started watching Torchwood first, not knowing it was a spinoff and then we found out Captain Jack was originally a companion character which got us curious enough to check out the new series.)
Long story short, we started watching the Chris Eccleston run and got hooked. In my opinion, they had finally fixed a lot of what made Doctor Who feel inaccessible to me. The pacing seemed much tighter, the effects and aliens didn’t seem hokey and cheap, and most importantly, it didn’t seem to assume that you knew 30 years of backstory. Then David Tennent came and replaced Eccleston and that was it. I became a Newbie Whovian. (Would that be “A Who-bie?”)
Obviously, Kenny and Becker take on the roles of The Doctor and his cavalcade of audience surrogates, sorry, companions. The Scouts from the Main Series take the roles of UN.I.T (or U.N.I.T. depending on how long ago we’re talking), with Matt being a fill in for Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, so chosen since I figured Matt would approve at least some reference to classic Who (while I’m not huge on watching the older stuff, I have enjoyed reading up on the back story), and obviously the Perspectives cast is filling in for Torchwood.
Well except for Proctor who was cast in place of Torchwood’s resident whipping boy, Ianto Jones. Oh, and why did I get to cast myself as the immortal omnisexual bad-ass Captain Jack replacement? Because I wrote the story. SI commandment #1 – author’s prerogative trumps all logic.
Kenny’s Professor is an amalgamation of the three most recent Doctors, mostly the Tenth with bits and pieces of the Ninth and Eleventh. Frankly, I really don’t think it matters which number they are, they all are chatty.
Matt Atanian Vs. The World
Video game humor meets Romantic comedy. If you haven’t see Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World then do so, with much haste. Also read the comic. Scott’s kinda a douche at times in it, but it’s still good.
The question could be asked why I didn’t cast Story-me in this little adventure, because like Scott Pilgrim, I too am a Bass playing gamer nerd with a sometimes dense lack of perception. Well, aside from wanting to give all three series representation in this story in relatively equal amounts, Nicole never had any ex-boyfriends, evil or otherwise, mentioned, and rather than create new cast members or badly recast other characters, especially when we already have this oft-mentioned but never-seen character of Rodney Kuntz to use, I decided to give Matt and Sarah the nod.
Becker’s Music Shop
As viewers of any 80’s sitcom will tell you, there will inevitably come to be one of those episodes where two characters will accuse the other of not having it as bad as the other and therefore they agree to switch roles for a day/week/month/spinoff series and thus gain a greater appreciation for all the other has to deal with and longs for the return to their former status quo.
Yeah, That’s not really what this story is about, but the preceding paragraph did kill about 15 seconds, so that’s something, eh?
It’s basically a role-reversal story at heart, taking the premise that if Becker would be the assistant to Kenny in his Laboratory, then inevitably if Becker was the dominant character, Kenny would be his assistant at a music shop.
Basically, it was an excuse to cram in a song reference, give story-me a rock star self-insert moment and pay homage to Eric Idle. Yeah, much like as was with Doctor Who, I can’t really claim to be the largest Monty Python aficionado in the world. Oh sure, I’m familiar with most of the classic sketches and even proposed to my wife after seeing Spamalot on Broadway, but I couldn’t spout off episodes chapter and verse like some hardcore Pythonites.
But it was a Pythoner that created one of my absolute favorite satires and this felt like a perfect opportunity to make a reference to Idle’s Mockmentary All You Need is Cash which chronicles the Pre-Fab Four, The Rutles. As a Beatles fan I really enjoyed the spoof of the Liverpoolians (and indeed The Beatles themselves did as well, save for Paul McCartney whom was absolutely frosty to Idle for some time after its release).
The song in question is Get Up and Go which was a parody of McCartney’s Get Back. It’s the only song from the movie not on the film’s soundtrack, mainly due to Idle taking Lennon’s advice to heart that McCartney would probably sue over how similar the two songs sounded if it was released on the album.
Girl Scouts ½
Ah, another staple idea of anyone wishing to explore alternative universes via writing fiction, that of the obligatory gender switch story/universe. If your characters are traveling around parallel universe, inevitable they’re gonna run into their female duplicate or a female version of some famous figure or find that women now are the more socially dominant sex or some other variation.
Honestly, it’s a great tool to use when sci-fi TV writers need to take a week off after a prolonged bender. You don’t have to create any new characters. Just take all the existing characters and chango-presto, new character but with(or without) boobs! Time to hit the bars early.
The biggest challenge isn’t coming up with a plot or dialogue (you just recycle those from a prior episode and account for the perceived gender roles and pronouns) but rather coming up with new names because your female/male duplicate would obviously still have a name exactly just like your own but, y’know, feminized/masculinized to show the gender change. Seems like writers never consider that if such and such was born a different gender then most likely the parents would’ve chosen a new set of criteria of determining their name like picking a different relative to name them after or something else.
Sliders had to go and ruin this cliché by naming Quinn Mallory’s female alternate Logan St. Clair. (her mother remarried and really, how the hell were they gonna feminize Quinn? Quinella? That sounds like a sandwich spread.)
My mother’s maiden name is Courtemanche and originally, Nick was going to be dating, in his own words, ‘a cougar’ but I don’t think that term was in the vernacular in 1997 so I went with the more classic ‘sugar mama.’
Neon Genesis Boy Scouts
Finally, the grand finale of our virtual journey through the possible alternates. This, by itself, could’ve been published as its own story, and is the only segment that is a complete story by itself. When it came to this particular story, it didn’t feel right to skimp or simply gloss over the premise. I was too attached to this idea, and to not give it the attention I did, seemed like a sin.
Matt and I are both Evangelion fans, and the series in question has always had a place in the BS ½ universe, be it the comical references to it in Main Series, to the using it to bludgeon the reader over the head with it in Perspectives. It’s an anime classic and even all these years later it still stands out on its own merits.
I honestly can’t remember how the idea of Neon Genesis Boy Scouts got started, I remember having this idea for several years, but I can’t remember if I shared the idea with Matt and he thought to make reference to it in the Main Series or if he had his own ideas that just happened to coincide with my own. Through 13 years of conversations and friendship, details and the such tend to get muddled badly.
In any case, plot wise this story is largely based off an idea I had for a non BS ½ story that involved telling what actually happened to NERV-01 and NERV-02 prior to the former’s destruction and the latter’s shipping off of Unit-03 to Japan. The story was going to be about two brothers who were each chosen as pilot candidates and through the backdrop of the course of their sibling rivalry, the events of Evangelion were witnessed.
As I was doing research on the story, I learned that NERV-01 was located in Massachusetts, so inevitably, I started picturing Kenny in the role of my main character and eventually, the story morphed into what you just read.
Timeline wise, the events of this story should all fit. NERV-02’s destruction occurs after September 11th 2015, (the Israfel attack) but before December 31st, 2015 (Third Impact), and also Kaji is not shot until after Bardiel takes control of Unit-03 and Shinji is forced to fight it. (Eva Wiki’s are great research material when you don’t want to sit down and watch 15 hours of TV and movies to reacquaint yourself with a timeline of events.)
Last thoughts:
Okay, that’s all I got to say about this little exercise, unless Matt picked up the gauntlet I threw down to him when I sent this story off to him, challenging to expand segments or create segments of his own. In which case, I might have even more notes to add, but if not, then it’s time to see what Matt thinks and then stay tuned because I’ll be back with some more to say on an entirely different subject, so take it away Matt.
It’s been a good two years or so since the BS ½ universe has seen new material and that’s just far too long for my tastes, so this is sorta my way for making up for lost time. But why now? Why at all? Why me, for that matter? Ah, patience, I’m getting there. Seriously, you just read through 44,000 words of fiction, you think I could just sum up everything in a few scant paragraphs? If Perspectives part 5 taught you anything, it’s that I’m a gloriously loquacious bastard.
Anyway, this little foray back into the realm of the written word began back in November of this year (2010). I have been pursuing a lot of different interests the last decade or so, and while I wouldn’t trade the time I devoted and still devote to any of those pursuits for anything, I was finding myself drifting away from my first love, which is writing. It was frustrating for me to not find that motivation to string more than a few paragraphs together before giving up on an idea.
So I was determined to get myself back into shape and thus I attempted for a third time to complete NaNoWriMo (that’s National Novel Writing Month for those not familiar with the term.) The goal of this endeavor is to write a 50,000 word story in under 30 days. The official month for doing such is November. Basically, it’s the Bataan Death March of writing in which you don’t worry about editing or going back to revise, you just try and pound out an average of 1,700 words a day to meet the goal and tell something that resembles a semi-cohesive story.
My first two attempts at this were utter failures, but I was determined to try again and succeed. I got about 17,000 words into my story and I was quickly realizing that while there were bits and pieces I was enjoying, on the whole I was utterly loathing the story I was trying to write. I hadn’t done any real preplanning so I was making up the plot as I went with rather poor results. In the end, I realized I was writing a giant self-insert story that I couldn’t make work and was loathing the idea of trying to make it work.
Then I received a package from a very good friend. Its contents included a most wonderful gift – a hardbound edition of the first ‘year’ of the Boy Scouts ½ Universe sent to me by my fiend of the last 13 years, Matt Atanian. Me and Matt’s relationship is kinda like the tides. We move in and out of contact in a relatively constant cycle. We hadn’t spoken in about a year, prior to my wedding to a most wonderful woman (more on her later, promise), and a little after our first anniversary, I had accidentally dialed Matt up on my cell (I was intending to call my landlord who is also named Matt and thus his entry in my cell phone was next to the good Mr. Atanian.)
But now we were back in contact again and Matt’s gift was indeed wonderful and the much needed kick in the ass I’ve been needing. I reread the whole first series from cover to cover and found myself reconnecting with all the wonderful memories I had working in this little slice of literary real estate. To make a long story short, I felt something welling up in me, and that something was inspiration.
So, while I was hating the story I had been currently working on at the time, it had served its duty to a much higher purpose, because now I was used to sitting down at a desk, writing for long stretches at a time, and able to force myself to not give up at the first sign of writer’s block. As I closed the back cover of Matt’s gift, I decided that if I was going end up writing an SI anyway, then dammit, I’m going to make it an enjoyable experience, and there’s never been a more enjoyable experience doing SI than doing it in Matt’s world, so back into that world I dived.
Now, as I said before, Of Possible Alternatives is an idea that’s been running around in the back of my mind for a good five or six or seven years or longer. It’s origins go back over a decade to the Perspectives side story written by Bill Hughes, Of Possible Futures: The Tale of Neko-chan and Bertovich. Now mind you, I’ve always found that title quite misleading as not every ‘future’ mentioned was actually a future, per se, but rather an alternative universe including some parodic takes on some copyrighted materials. In fact, during the tale, the God of Copyright Infringement came down to put a stop to it.
Well, if there’s something Bill could do, then I could take it to the next level of excess. Alas, the idea sat in the dark unused corner of my mind for years until the time was right for it to jump out and shout ‘Surprise!’
So, um, Surprise!
It’s actually probably a good thing the idea went unused for so long because so much material for this story came from the fact that it was always just a concept that was never started. I was never locked into particular ideas and was always filing new ideas away mentally for later use. In fact, I had over a dozen more ideas that didn’t make the final cut, so they might make their way into the BS ½ Universe some time in future. When I finally did start writing, I had so much material to work with that I was never short of ideas. It was like a slowly simmering stew that got better as different ingredients were added at different times.
Wow, two pages of author’s notes so far and not a single word actually dedicated to the story itself. As I said, loquacious bastard be me.
Kenny’s Lab
The story primarily originates in Kenny’s Lab and the lab segments function as segues between the various short snippets that take place in these possible alternative universes. That was not going to be the original idea. The original idea for the sections that tied all the other segments together was going to feature the mysterious ‘Goddess’ of Hughes’ original Of Possible Futures story and indeed was probably going to involve her tying up the notorious God of Copyright infringement so she and some other gods and goddesses could enjoy a relaxed evening of watching universes that she ‘TiVo’d’ on her DRV or Digital Reality Viewer.
But when it came time to start writing, I opted for returning to Kenny’s Lab. Honestly, of the three series (or four if you count In Japan as a separate series) that make up the BS ½ Universe, Kenny’s Laboratory holds a special spot in my heart for it’s numerous sci-fi and pop culture references and the interactions between Kenny and Becker. Also, I love Kenny’s Lab and Kenny in particular for being the BS ½ universe’s own form of Sonic Screwdriver (or Applied Phlebotinum for those familiar with TVtropes.org).
Honestly, being ten years removed from the original Hughes story and that story being a Perspectives side story as well, I wasn’t sure how familiar those segments would be to readers. Kenny’s Lab however had been mentioned in both its own series as well as the main series, so in the end I decided to take that angle and run with it.
The Scout
A take on famed British sci-fi/suspense series, The Prisoner, starring Matt Atanian in place of Patrick McGoohan. This was mostly inspired in thanks to my wife renting the series on NetFlix. Matt’s never been shy about being a fan of the series, considering that Number Six makes an appearance in the Kenny’s Lab Finale, so it felt like a natural fit. Also McGoohan could be up there in the pantheon of Saints of Self-Insertion considering he was the Executive Producer of The Prisoner as well as its star.
This isn’t really a full blown story in itself but rather an abridged homage to the series it was parodying, including some of the more famous and quotable lines. More or less, this was just a bit to let readers know what to expect from Kenny’s invention.
A final note on this segment: I will neither confirm nor deny whom Number Six Eighty Three was a representative of, but it may or may not have ties to a specific Boy Scout Troop in Fairchance, PA.
Kill Bill Hughes
Come’on, you’ve all wondered what would happen if Nicole really did discover that Billy Hughes and Neko-Chan were one and the same. Besides, I couldn’t let Pulp Fiction be the only Tarantino movie to be quoted to obscene levels in this series.
Looking back on it now, I’m not sure if Nicole’s reaction is more or less extreme than her reaction was when Matt penned ADM/BS½ III: KSJ2K.
Encyclopedia Galactica
Nothing really special to say about this one other than no matter how much time passes since his death, Doug Adams continues to be the single biggest literary influence in my life and I don’t doubt that Matt probably shares similar sentiments or at least a warm sentimentality when it comes to Adam’s creations.
Honestly, I have no inside information on the actual origins of Kenny Pendrell. Matt has kept that a closely guarded secret and kept it secret despite cajolery, bribery, and outright threats, telling me that he would only reveal it for what he called, “The Right Price.”
Quack Experimental Fan-Fic Proctor Saga
Poor Proctor. No, seriously, poor Proctor. If there was ever a perpetual whipping boy in this series, it’s him. But he’s so good at the role, that it never ceases being fun to exploit it.
As for the mysterious Man in Black Hat in Trench Coat, it may have a little something to do with a certain Patron Saint of Self-Insertion anointing another certain someone as the King on Earth of Self-Insertion. The mysterious quote regarding a scene taking two years… well, that’s a story for another time, like say, several pages from now.
Yeah, I’m just inviting meteors to land on and crush Story-me, but luckily while I’m not the King on Earth of Self-Insertion, Story-me is an incredible guy capable of holding rational debates after suffering concussions, so I’m sure I, er, he will be okay.
Perspectives From the Training Ground of Cursed Springs
This segment was fun in that I was able to essentially take the writing style of the Perspectives series and use it to put my spin what is the main series’ plot hook. So, that means that sometime in the future Matt is going to have to write a Perspectives story about relational angst using the light-hearted style of the main series… Wha ha ha ha!
*ahem* sorry ‘bout that.
Anyway, when it came to choosing what particular cursed springs to inflict upon the current Perspectives cast, it came down to personal preferences as well as some nods to the original Perspectives stories.
Nicole and the Spring of Drowned Monkey – Sorry, no real deep philosophical reasons for this choice. Monkeys are simply my second favorite animal and Monkeys always equal comedy gold. There is nothing you can’t improve by simply adding a monkey to it.
John and the Spring of Drowned Triplets – Yeah, seems like just the perfect curse for a guy with three multiple personalities. If this had been a long running series, I’m sure the new clones created would start dressing like Toga and Jinnai.
Lina and the Spring of Drowned Snake – This is more of a subtle reference to the second Byte of Perspectives in which this new Goddess character gets cast out of the Divine Bureaucracy. The snake also happened to represent the most famous being ever cast out of a divine place, but please don’t take that to mean I think of Lina as evil. As I said, it’s just a subtle reference and not one worth dwelling on.
Jason and the Spring of Drowned Penguin – Oh yes, it always comes back to Penguins when it comes to the BS ½ universe, don’t it? Surely there must be some sort of reason why flightless waterfowl keeping making appearances. There is, but you’ll have to wait to find out what it is. Sorry.
Professor What
Ah yes, this was probably my second favorite part to write in the whole story. If it wasn’t too blatant, this segment was a rather ham-fisted tribute to the long running BBC property, All Creatures Great and Small. Oh wait, sorry, got my notes mixed up. This was a tribute to something called Doctor Who.
Okay, sarcasm aside, this was a blast to write, though I’m sure Matt would’ve no doubt approached it much differently than me. In terms of Who Fandom, I’m not what you would call a true blue Whovian. I never got into the classic series like so many of my fellow sci-fi fandom brethren. I just couldn’t get into it. The hokey special effects and make-up hindering of the suspension of disbelief, the terminally slow story pacing, and the never-ending feeling that if I hadn’t watched it from the beginning, I was not getting the full enjoyment of the story.
Then came the revival of five or so years ago. Well, actually I still didn’t watch it. But then came NetFlix Streaming and suddenly four series worth of New Who became available as well as three series of Torchwood. (Actually we started watching Torchwood first, not knowing it was a spinoff and then we found out Captain Jack was originally a companion character which got us curious enough to check out the new series.)
Long story short, we started watching the Chris Eccleston run and got hooked. In my opinion, they had finally fixed a lot of what made Doctor Who feel inaccessible to me. The pacing seemed much tighter, the effects and aliens didn’t seem hokey and cheap, and most importantly, it didn’t seem to assume that you knew 30 years of backstory. Then David Tennent came and replaced Eccleston and that was it. I became a Newbie Whovian. (Would that be “A Who-bie?”)
Obviously, Kenny and Becker take on the roles of The Doctor and his cavalcade of audience surrogates, sorry, companions. The Scouts from the Main Series take the roles of UN.I.T (or U.N.I.T. depending on how long ago we’re talking), with Matt being a fill in for Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, so chosen since I figured Matt would approve at least some reference to classic Who (while I’m not huge on watching the older stuff, I have enjoyed reading up on the back story), and obviously the Perspectives cast is filling in for Torchwood.
Well except for Proctor who was cast in place of Torchwood’s resident whipping boy, Ianto Jones. Oh, and why did I get to cast myself as the immortal omnisexual bad-ass Captain Jack replacement? Because I wrote the story. SI commandment #1 – author’s prerogative trumps all logic.
Kenny’s Professor is an amalgamation of the three most recent Doctors, mostly the Tenth with bits and pieces of the Ninth and Eleventh. Frankly, I really don’t think it matters which number they are, they all are chatty.
Matt Atanian Vs. The World
Video game humor meets Romantic comedy. If you haven’t see Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World then do so, with much haste. Also read the comic. Scott’s kinda a douche at times in it, but it’s still good.
The question could be asked why I didn’t cast Story-me in this little adventure, because like Scott Pilgrim, I too am a Bass playing gamer nerd with a sometimes dense lack of perception. Well, aside from wanting to give all three series representation in this story in relatively equal amounts, Nicole never had any ex-boyfriends, evil or otherwise, mentioned, and rather than create new cast members or badly recast other characters, especially when we already have this oft-mentioned but never-seen character of Rodney Kuntz to use, I decided to give Matt and Sarah the nod.
Becker’s Music Shop
As viewers of any 80’s sitcom will tell you, there will inevitably come to be one of those episodes where two characters will accuse the other of not having it as bad as the other and therefore they agree to switch roles for a day/week/month/spinoff series and thus gain a greater appreciation for all the other has to deal with and longs for the return to their former status quo.
Yeah, That’s not really what this story is about, but the preceding paragraph did kill about 15 seconds, so that’s something, eh?
It’s basically a role-reversal story at heart, taking the premise that if Becker would be the assistant to Kenny in his Laboratory, then inevitably if Becker was the dominant character, Kenny would be his assistant at a music shop.
Basically, it was an excuse to cram in a song reference, give story-me a rock star self-insert moment and pay homage to Eric Idle. Yeah, much like as was with Doctor Who, I can’t really claim to be the largest Monty Python aficionado in the world. Oh sure, I’m familiar with most of the classic sketches and even proposed to my wife after seeing Spamalot on Broadway, but I couldn’t spout off episodes chapter and verse like some hardcore Pythonites.
But it was a Pythoner that created one of my absolute favorite satires and this felt like a perfect opportunity to make a reference to Idle’s Mockmentary All You Need is Cash which chronicles the Pre-Fab Four, The Rutles. As a Beatles fan I really enjoyed the spoof of the Liverpoolians (and indeed The Beatles themselves did as well, save for Paul McCartney whom was absolutely frosty to Idle for some time after its release).
The song in question is Get Up and Go which was a parody of McCartney’s Get Back. It’s the only song from the movie not on the film’s soundtrack, mainly due to Idle taking Lennon’s advice to heart that McCartney would probably sue over how similar the two songs sounded if it was released on the album.
Girl Scouts ½
Ah, another staple idea of anyone wishing to explore alternative universes via writing fiction, that of the obligatory gender switch story/universe. If your characters are traveling around parallel universe, inevitable they’re gonna run into their female duplicate or a female version of some famous figure or find that women now are the more socially dominant sex or some other variation.
Honestly, it’s a great tool to use when sci-fi TV writers need to take a week off after a prolonged bender. You don’t have to create any new characters. Just take all the existing characters and chango-presto, new character but with(or without) boobs! Time to hit the bars early.
The biggest challenge isn’t coming up with a plot or dialogue (you just recycle those from a prior episode and account for the perceived gender roles and pronouns) but rather coming up with new names because your female/male duplicate would obviously still have a name exactly just like your own but, y’know, feminized/masculinized to show the gender change. Seems like writers never consider that if such and such was born a different gender then most likely the parents would’ve chosen a new set of criteria of determining their name like picking a different relative to name them after or something else.
Sliders had to go and ruin this cliché by naming Quinn Mallory’s female alternate Logan St. Clair. (her mother remarried and really, how the hell were they gonna feminize Quinn? Quinella? That sounds like a sandwich spread.)
My mother’s maiden name is Courtemanche and originally, Nick was going to be dating, in his own words, ‘a cougar’ but I don’t think that term was in the vernacular in 1997 so I went with the more classic ‘sugar mama.’
Neon Genesis Boy Scouts
Finally, the grand finale of our virtual journey through the possible alternates. This, by itself, could’ve been published as its own story, and is the only segment that is a complete story by itself. When it came to this particular story, it didn’t feel right to skimp or simply gloss over the premise. I was too attached to this idea, and to not give it the attention I did, seemed like a sin.
Matt and I are both Evangelion fans, and the series in question has always had a place in the BS ½ universe, be it the comical references to it in Main Series, to the using it to bludgeon the reader over the head with it in Perspectives. It’s an anime classic and even all these years later it still stands out on its own merits.
I honestly can’t remember how the idea of Neon Genesis Boy Scouts got started, I remember having this idea for several years, but I can’t remember if I shared the idea with Matt and he thought to make reference to it in the Main Series or if he had his own ideas that just happened to coincide with my own. Through 13 years of conversations and friendship, details and the such tend to get muddled badly.
In any case, plot wise this story is largely based off an idea I had for a non BS ½ story that involved telling what actually happened to NERV-01 and NERV-02 prior to the former’s destruction and the latter’s shipping off of Unit-03 to Japan. The story was going to be about two brothers who were each chosen as pilot candidates and through the backdrop of the course of their sibling rivalry, the events of Evangelion were witnessed.
As I was doing research on the story, I learned that NERV-01 was located in Massachusetts, so inevitably, I started picturing Kenny in the role of my main character and eventually, the story morphed into what you just read.
Timeline wise, the events of this story should all fit. NERV-02’s destruction occurs after September 11th 2015, (the Israfel attack) but before December 31st, 2015 (Third Impact), and also Kaji is not shot until after Bardiel takes control of Unit-03 and Shinji is forced to fight it. (Eva Wiki’s are great research material when you don’t want to sit down and watch 15 hours of TV and movies to reacquaint yourself with a timeline of events.)
Last thoughts:
Okay, that’s all I got to say about this little exercise, unless Matt picked up the gauntlet I threw down to him when I sent this story off to him, challenging to expand segments or create segments of his own. In which case, I might have even more notes to add, but if not, then it’s time to see what Matt thinks and then stay tuned because I’ll be back with some more to say on an entirely different subject, so take it away Matt.
Matt's Mid-Note Notes
Hmm? What? Oh! My turn, eh?
First off, I should make clear that I consider Of Possible Futures as a single story. Much like The Lord of the Rings is a single novel that was divided into three parts for printing by the publisher, so was this story delivered by Jason as a single piece which was then split up by me. With the extreme length of the piece, it made it easier to get it online in multiple parts. And I suspect it might make it easier for readers to digest at their own pace, by reading one or two parts at a time or plowing through the entire epic at once.
As is probably obvious, I decided to take a cue from the framing device when placing the story on the website, which is why it is located in the Kenny's Laboratory section. But I don't consider this story to strictly be a "Kenny's Lab" story. Rather, it is a story encompasses the entirety of the Boy Scouts ½ Universe thus far. Characters and situations from the main series, Perspectives, and Kenny's Lab are all examined and reinterpreted in this text. And, of course, chronologically it can be placed during Boy Scouts ½ in Japan, given that Matt had obviously come from there when he made his appearance in the lab. So this story appears on the Kenny's Lab section of the website mainly for convenience. It needed someplace to go, so that is where it went. But in reality, this story is a "Boy Scouts ½ Universe" story.
Now for some brief notes on some of the individual segments.
In his notes for Encyclopedia Galactica, Jason wondered if a certain man named Douglas Adams might have had any inspiration on me. Well... It may not be a coincidence that the Girl Scout troop that the Porters belong to is Troop 42. And, if that is not enough evidence of my possible affections for the late Mr. Adams, then I present a photo of one corner of a room in my apartment, in which you might spot a picture frame containing a few Boy Scout patches that I designed back in the day.
First off, I should make clear that I consider Of Possible Futures as a single story. Much like The Lord of the Rings is a single novel that was divided into three parts for printing by the publisher, so was this story delivered by Jason as a single piece which was then split up by me. With the extreme length of the piece, it made it easier to get it online in multiple parts. And I suspect it might make it easier for readers to digest at their own pace, by reading one or two parts at a time or plowing through the entire epic at once.
As is probably obvious, I decided to take a cue from the framing device when placing the story on the website, which is why it is located in the Kenny's Laboratory section. But I don't consider this story to strictly be a "Kenny's Lab" story. Rather, it is a story encompasses the entirety of the Boy Scouts ½ Universe thus far. Characters and situations from the main series, Perspectives, and Kenny's Lab are all examined and reinterpreted in this text. And, of course, chronologically it can be placed during Boy Scouts ½ in Japan, given that Matt had obviously come from there when he made his appearance in the lab. So this story appears on the Kenny's Lab section of the website mainly for convenience. It needed someplace to go, so that is where it went. But in reality, this story is a "Boy Scouts ½ Universe" story.
Now for some brief notes on some of the individual segments.
In his notes for Encyclopedia Galactica, Jason wondered if a certain man named Douglas Adams might have had any inspiration on me. Well... It may not be a coincidence that the Girl Scout troop that the Porters belong to is Troop 42. And, if that is not enough evidence of my possible affections for the late Mr. Adams, then I present a photo of one corner of a room in my apartment, in which you might spot a picture frame containing a few Boy Scout patches that I designed back in the day.
(Sadly, while a design for it exists, and I do still have it somewhere, the "Mostly Harmless" patch never got made...)
When talking about Perspectives From the Training Ground of Cursed Springs, Jason speculates that there must be some reason that penguins make such frequent appearances in Boy Scouts ½. Well, as for Jason's curse, I suspect it may have something to do with a sporting team that is local to his real life residence. As far as my own love of these flightless aquatic water fowl, and why those same water fowl might also frequently torment my fictional avatar... Well, as I am not myself much into the world of sport, I cannot claim any connection there. In my case... it is just because penguins are awesome and adorable! (I suspect that if I had discovered the adorableness of bunnies before beginning Boy Scouts ½ that we may have had bunnies rather then penguins... but as I think about it, it is better that it was penguins, anyway, as they have the greater comedic potential.)
Matt Atanian vs. The World! Interesting to have the infamous Rodney Kuntz make an appearance. However, I make no promises that, should he ever make a proper appearance, that his characterization will be exactly as it was here. But don't take that as a knock against the cannon status of this story. The Rodney here is obviously one from an alternate universe, and thus would not be identical to the "real" Rodney.
I did make a slight addition to this segment, specifically adding Hughes's brief appearance. Hopefully Jason doesn't mind! But frankly, Scott's admission regarding Patel's e-mail that he skimmed it is made sublime mainly by Wallace's reaction, and thus this story needed a Wallace surrogate to make the same reaction to Matt's e-mail skimming.
Girl Scouts ½. Poor, poor Gelinas. I'm not sure if Jason thought of this. Heck, I'm not sure if Jason even knows the pronunciation of Gelinas. But, given that it is a soft g rather then a hard g, I suspect that she might (even if it was not mentioned in this story) have the nickname, "Jill-Jill." And I further suspect she doesn't like it.
This segment featured another brief tweak of mine... Or rather, the response to this segment had a tweak. As Jason wrote it, he had Matt thinking of this universe's version of him as an evil twin because she liked hot tea. Given how often in fiction Matt has declared a love of iced tea, that reaction is a somewhat understandable assumption on the author's part. However, in truth I do quite enjoy hot tea as well! So much so that (while not completely above using bags if necessary) I can somewhat snobbishly prefer using loose leaf. So I changed Matt's reaction to one of being appalled at the use of a tea bag. Seemed to maintain the joke while not preventing fictional Matt from being able to enjoy a nice hot cuppa in a future tale. (In fact, the recently published Boy Scouts ½ in Japan, part 5 did have him doing so.)
Finally, interesting that (unless the curses are also different in this universe, and it is hot water that changes one to their cursed form) Perfume is still female in this dimension. But hey, I see it as an interesting quirk. I suspect Kenny will be making a study of this.
And lastly... Neon Genesis Boy Scouts. Jason couldn't quite remember where this idea originated, and was not even sure if he might have suggested it to me. Personally, I always thought it an idea of my own, although now Jason has put doubt in my mind. Did he suggest it to me at one point, which I have forgotten? Did I suggest it to him, and he has forgotten? Or did we think of it independently, because it is an awesome idea?
Well, after all of these years I can no longer say which would actually be the truth. But I'll officially go with the last option, where we both independently had the idea. Seems to be the one that is kindest to everyone involved.
So yeah... Neon Genesis Boy Scouts. Since the Boy Scouts ½ Universe is one that shares many similarities with this so called "real" one in which we live, then it stands to reason that if in 1997 I had had the inspiration to begin writing stories about myself and a group of friends existing in a world in which an anime universe is reality then fictional-Matt would have had similar notions. But since in the Boy Scouts ½ Universe, Ranma ½ is not fiction, then obviously that could not be the tale from which fictional-Matt took his inspiration. So, what else was popular with anime fans in the late 90's? Why, Neon Genesis Evangelion, of course!
And so, at one point it would be decided that, in universe, Matt had created a fan fic called Neon Genesis Boy Scouts.
Now, not that I had ever written any of it, but I shall admit that I had thought a bit about it. I don't know if I ever shared any of these thoughts with Jason, but if I didn't, then I'd have to say he is a hell of a mind reader. Of course, I suppose since in Evangelion there was a branch of NERV in Massachusetts, that makes for a natural setting for Neon Genesis Boy Scouts. (Speculation says that this branch is likely attached to MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Obviously, Jason ignored that part to place NERV-01 under the Church in the Acres. But one of the tweaks I made to this part of the story was to make a nod to that MIT connection, by stating that there was a diversionary public face of NERV located there to divert attention from the secret base under the church.)
Anyway, the tone of this part gets quite dark... But hey, that is Eva! I never did detailed planning on Neon Genesis Boy Scouts (what, with never planning to actually write it) but I do rather think that the part of it that Jason wrote here would fit in quite well within the fan fic series. I should think that early parts of the story would be lighter, more comedic, and more fan-servicey. But then, as the series progresses, we would get to this point, and these events would take place. After this, there would be a few final stories in which the third impact occurs, great sacrifices are made, people die tragically, but somehow some of the youth (at the very least, Kenny, Bill Gelinas, and the Porter twins) after indulging in some major (and oddly animated) internal conflict, end up on a desolate post-apocalyptic beach with an ocean of LCL (far down the shore from where Shinji decided he needs to choke a bitch). Or I suppose I could be a complete bastard and say that they're standing on the opposite side of the giant blue ball... But nah...
I tried not to do too much tweaking to Of Possible Alternatives, wanting to leave it as much Jason's story as possible, but what tweaking did occur, a majority of it happened within Neon Genesis Boy Scouts. Even still, I'd say that my additions or changes make up at most 5% of the segment (probably less), and that the vast majority of the tale is still Jason's work. Hopefully he does not mind what minor changes I did make.
As far as presentation goes, while it is very much part of the whole, I did think it would be fun to present Neon Genesis Boy Scouts as if it was somewhat stand alone. This is why the page that that part of Of Possible Alternatives is on has nothing else, no other alternatives and none of the framing story. Just pure Neon Genesis Boy Scouts. It even got its own title graphic (which is what I'd like to think the graphic is in-universe on fictional‑Matt's fan fiction) and the usual Of Possible Alternatives titles were saved for the end of that segment.
Anyway, enough from me for now. Jason has many, many more things to say!
When talking about Perspectives From the Training Ground of Cursed Springs, Jason speculates that there must be some reason that penguins make such frequent appearances in Boy Scouts ½. Well, as for Jason's curse, I suspect it may have something to do with a sporting team that is local to his real life residence. As far as my own love of these flightless aquatic water fowl, and why those same water fowl might also frequently torment my fictional avatar... Well, as I am not myself much into the world of sport, I cannot claim any connection there. In my case... it is just because penguins are awesome and adorable! (I suspect that if I had discovered the adorableness of bunnies before beginning Boy Scouts ½ that we may have had bunnies rather then penguins... but as I think about it, it is better that it was penguins, anyway, as they have the greater comedic potential.)
Matt Atanian vs. The World! Interesting to have the infamous Rodney Kuntz make an appearance. However, I make no promises that, should he ever make a proper appearance, that his characterization will be exactly as it was here. But don't take that as a knock against the cannon status of this story. The Rodney here is obviously one from an alternate universe, and thus would not be identical to the "real" Rodney.
I did make a slight addition to this segment, specifically adding Hughes's brief appearance. Hopefully Jason doesn't mind! But frankly, Scott's admission regarding Patel's e-mail that he skimmed it is made sublime mainly by Wallace's reaction, and thus this story needed a Wallace surrogate to make the same reaction to Matt's e-mail skimming.
Girl Scouts ½. Poor, poor Gelinas. I'm not sure if Jason thought of this. Heck, I'm not sure if Jason even knows the pronunciation of Gelinas. But, given that it is a soft g rather then a hard g, I suspect that she might (even if it was not mentioned in this story) have the nickname, "Jill-Jill." And I further suspect she doesn't like it.
This segment featured another brief tweak of mine... Or rather, the response to this segment had a tweak. As Jason wrote it, he had Matt thinking of this universe's version of him as an evil twin because she liked hot tea. Given how often in fiction Matt has declared a love of iced tea, that reaction is a somewhat understandable assumption on the author's part. However, in truth I do quite enjoy hot tea as well! So much so that (while not completely above using bags if necessary) I can somewhat snobbishly prefer using loose leaf. So I changed Matt's reaction to one of being appalled at the use of a tea bag. Seemed to maintain the joke while not preventing fictional Matt from being able to enjoy a nice hot cuppa in a future tale. (In fact, the recently published Boy Scouts ½ in Japan, part 5 did have him doing so.)
Finally, interesting that (unless the curses are also different in this universe, and it is hot water that changes one to their cursed form) Perfume is still female in this dimension. But hey, I see it as an interesting quirk. I suspect Kenny will be making a study of this.
And lastly... Neon Genesis Boy Scouts. Jason couldn't quite remember where this idea originated, and was not even sure if he might have suggested it to me. Personally, I always thought it an idea of my own, although now Jason has put doubt in my mind. Did he suggest it to me at one point, which I have forgotten? Did I suggest it to him, and he has forgotten? Or did we think of it independently, because it is an awesome idea?
Well, after all of these years I can no longer say which would actually be the truth. But I'll officially go with the last option, where we both independently had the idea. Seems to be the one that is kindest to everyone involved.
So yeah... Neon Genesis Boy Scouts. Since the Boy Scouts ½ Universe is one that shares many similarities with this so called "real" one in which we live, then it stands to reason that if in 1997 I had had the inspiration to begin writing stories about myself and a group of friends existing in a world in which an anime universe is reality then fictional-Matt would have had similar notions. But since in the Boy Scouts ½ Universe, Ranma ½ is not fiction, then obviously that could not be the tale from which fictional-Matt took his inspiration. So, what else was popular with anime fans in the late 90's? Why, Neon Genesis Evangelion, of course!
And so, at one point it would be decided that, in universe, Matt had created a fan fic called Neon Genesis Boy Scouts.
Now, not that I had ever written any of it, but I shall admit that I had thought a bit about it. I don't know if I ever shared any of these thoughts with Jason, but if I didn't, then I'd have to say he is a hell of a mind reader. Of course, I suppose since in Evangelion there was a branch of NERV in Massachusetts, that makes for a natural setting for Neon Genesis Boy Scouts. (Speculation says that this branch is likely attached to MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Obviously, Jason ignored that part to place NERV-01 under the Church in the Acres. But one of the tweaks I made to this part of the story was to make a nod to that MIT connection, by stating that there was a diversionary public face of NERV located there to divert attention from the secret base under the church.)
Anyway, the tone of this part gets quite dark... But hey, that is Eva! I never did detailed planning on Neon Genesis Boy Scouts (what, with never planning to actually write it) but I do rather think that the part of it that Jason wrote here would fit in quite well within the fan fic series. I should think that early parts of the story would be lighter, more comedic, and more fan-servicey. But then, as the series progresses, we would get to this point, and these events would take place. After this, there would be a few final stories in which the third impact occurs, great sacrifices are made, people die tragically, but somehow some of the youth (at the very least, Kenny, Bill Gelinas, and the Porter twins) after indulging in some major (and oddly animated) internal conflict, end up on a desolate post-apocalyptic beach with an ocean of LCL (far down the shore from where Shinji decided he needs to choke a bitch). Or I suppose I could be a complete bastard and say that they're standing on the opposite side of the giant blue ball... But nah...
I tried not to do too much tweaking to Of Possible Alternatives, wanting to leave it as much Jason's story as possible, but what tweaking did occur, a majority of it happened within Neon Genesis Boy Scouts. Even still, I'd say that my additions or changes make up at most 5% of the segment (probably less), and that the vast majority of the tale is still Jason's work. Hopefully he does not mind what minor changes I did make.
As far as presentation goes, while it is very much part of the whole, I did think it would be fun to present Neon Genesis Boy Scouts as if it was somewhat stand alone. This is why the page that that part of Of Possible Alternatives is on has nothing else, no other alternatives and none of the framing story. Just pure Neon Genesis Boy Scouts. It even got its own title graphic (which is what I'd like to think the graphic is in-universe on fictional‑Matt's fan fiction) and the usual Of Possible Alternatives titles were saved for the end of that segment.
Anyway, enough from me for now. Jason has many, many more things to say!
Back to Jason
Thanks, Matt.
Well, that’s it for the story, but I’m hoping you won’t mind sticking around for a little longer for what might be a little bit of self-indulgent writing. There are some thoughts I’ve been wanting to share for a while now, and with this story’s publication, it felt right to finally share them. So, please bear with me while I bare my thoughts…
Well, that’s it for the story, but I’m hoping you won’t mind sticking around for a little longer for what might be a little bit of self-indulgent writing. There are some thoughts I’ve been wanting to share for a while now, and with this story’s publication, it felt right to finally share them. So, please bear with me while I bare my thoughts…
Retrospectives from the Writer’s Desk
A 13 Year Journey Through the World of Boy Scouts ½
A 13 Year Journey Through the World of Boy Scouts ½
So here we are, once again. Sitting on the cusp of another new decade, and perhaps it’s the new year and the new decade approaching, or perhaps it was Matt’s gift, or perhaps it’s just that I’m getting older, but the feeling to wax nostalgic has been growing strong, so let’s wax, shall we?
[A quick note from Matt here! I may interject the occasional comment into these notes, which will be differentiated by being inside of square brackets like this. Now back, once more, to Jason! -- Matt]
Of Possible Alternatives is the 10th BS ½ Universe story written by me that has been published by Matt (I don’t count Outlast, not only because it was de-published, but because it was a bad idea that should’ve stayed inside my brain and never escaped in the first place, so I’ve ret-conned it from my memories and by all means please feel free to do the same.) It’s a Nice round number and unless I’m mistaken, only topped by Matt himself in terms of writing contributions toward the BS ½ Universe (so, y’know, go me. Yay!)
And I feel proud that those contributions were not just limited to the spin-off series, Perspectives but also including things such as a chapter of the Kenny’s Laboratory saga and a side-story in the main series. I take some pride and satisfaction in that Matt thought well enough of my writing to allow me to spread myself across his universe and not just a single angst-filled corner filled with overly friendly people who smirk a lot.
But more importantly, I feel blessed by the good friendship I share with Matt, one that’s lasted for 13 years and stood up to the usual peaks and valleys that all friendships tend to have, even more so with those who origins are born from the online world. Amazing as it sounds, but through all those years of friendship, the two of us have been in the same place at the same time maybe less than a handful of times. In fact, of all the relationships that started through meeting online, only two survive as something other than “casual acquaintance.” One is my wife. The other is Matt.
So where did it all start? How did a software clerk from southwestern Pennsylvania end up befriending an Assistant Scoutmaster in western Massachusetts and end up inflicting his scribbles upon this stranger’s literary universe?
In the Beginning…
In the far back ancient times of 1997, I was fresh out of high school and fresh into the great big grown-up world of college. It was a bright and exciting time and the whole world looked like a giant oyster ready to be shucked. (Shucked, I said Shucked; get your minds out of the gutter!)
This time was particularly exciting as this was my first time with access to an actual decent internet connection, via the campus’ computer lab. Up to that point in time, my online presence was limited to local run BBS’s (god, I feel like I’m dating myself so badly as half of you ask “What’s a BBS?”) and occasional emails shared through the old Blue Wave offline mail system. So now this whole new online world was opened before me, and much like an
explorer landing on a new shore, I went into the unknown, unsure what I would find.
At that time, my ‘otaku cred’ was non-existent. My otakuness was only 3 years in the making at that time and most of my exposure was limited to what Sci-Fi Channel offered during their once a year spurts, what I could rent from the local video stores, and by hunting down whatever anime I could from local comic shop, music stores, and the such (again, dating myself horribly.) So, now with this whole new world of information ready to be explored and having a noticeable hole in knowledge to fill, I dove into web’s online anime communities, coming back up for air only to write term papers and generally not flunk out of college.
In those heady days, when the web was wild and untamed, finding specific information or find specific communities, especially on subjects like anime or specific anime series, was like the colorblind man trying to find the one slightly off-white pebble in the quarry full of white stones. Information was so disorganized and scattered. Search engines were still in their early days and thus, not very useful. It was up to the fan community to organize itself and thus, sites like the Anime Web Turnpike (hereby referred to as the “AniPike”) were born.
It was through the AniPike that I had decided to link my freshly formed and poorly organized anime fan fiction (as well as whatever else I could create) site, the now long lost to the fires of nothingness that claimed all of GeoCities, BoneparteOzaki’s Little Old-fashioned Interdimensional House of Horrors (The name ‘BoneparteOzaki’ was my online alias for several years, inspired by Leona Ozaki’s personal mini-tank Boneparte from Dominion: Tank Police, the first anime I saw and actually knew that is was anime.)
Once my site was linked under the listings for Fan-fiction on the AniPike, I excitedly scrolled down the list to see my site’s still new and shining name on display for the whole world… and then I saw the name right after mine on the list – Boy Scouts ½.
Boy Scouts meets… Ranma ½? That’s an odd combination, I though to myself. I mean, I was a Scout myself until my sophomore year of high school and I must admit that I thought such a combo would seem to go together like chocolate and sushi. My curiosity was piqued, however, so I clicked, and I read, and I laughed.
Honestly, it wasn’t the Ranma ½ elements that kept me reading through those early chapters (at the time I started, there were only four out with the fifth coming shortly after my first visit.) It was the Scouting parts that grabbed hold of me and would not let go. At heart, despite all the curses and wacky cases of mistaken identities, these were stories written by a guy who really enjoyed the Scouting experience and the friends he made because of it. The stories of summer camp and waterfront tag boards and dining halls and playing magic were so much like my own experiences (though, we only used a dining hall my first year and we played D & D instead of Magic) and the friendships I had formed through scouting (included amongst them, my best friend Travis.)
As I read those early stories, I said to myself, Here’s a guy who likes Anime, British comedy, Sci-fi, plays Magic: the Gathering, and seems to have a lot of interesting stories to tell. I bet this guy’s an interesting chap to get to know. After all, I like all those things and I think I’m pretty interesting. I should contact him and see if he’s really as interesting as he seems. So I did. I sent off an email telling him that I enjoyed the stories he was writing and how wonderfully familiar they seemed to my own experiences and that if he was ever interested in chatting with someone about it, then I was always looking
for new friends and acquaintances. I think I then ended the email promising to regal him with a story in regards to my troop’s unfortunate run-in with a bear on a weeklong backpacking trek. (Hmmmm… hey Matt-kun, did I ever actually tell you that story or is that a 13 year old loose-end?)
I don’t know if I was really expecting a reply, but nothing ventured, nothing gain, right? I did receive a reply and thus I replied back. Then I received a reply to the reply and thus replied again. Here we are, 13 years later, reflecting on a chance encounter. A chance encounter based off the alphabetical listings of two different anime fan-fiction websites. Synchronicity? Fate? Who can tell, but it’s been a hell of a ride so far.
Joining the Team…
About a year or two later, after several emails and finally meeting face to face at Otakon ‘99 in Baltimore, Matt found himself writing part 11. I’m trying now to remember exactly how I got involved, so if my memory is faulty, I’m sure Matt will interject and correct me. [You think my memory is any better? Ha! --Matt] I do believe the discussion centered around malls, seeing as I was working at one at the time. I think at one point, I sent off a snippet of a scene involving Ryoga’s encounter with those sometimes indecipherable mall directory signs and, for the hell of it, wrote in a character witnessing Matt and Carolyn’s reaction to Ryoga’s explosive depression. This character, a sales clerk working at the Electronics Boutique by the name of Jason, was me of course. Honestly, I wasn’t really expecting Matt to use the entire scene as written, especially not my little self-insert, but he did and in that moment, Story-me was born.
But Story-me had company and they were Story-John Hoelscher and Story-Fenny Lin, two other members of the Cruel Angels Mailing List [CAML(pronounced “Camel”)], who made cameos as other mall employees whom Matt and Carolyn encountered during that faithful trip. As soon as I saw this, the seed was planted. He had just created an ensemble cast who shared a common thread, that of being mall employees. Why, if such employees are encountering exploding mall directories and cursed shoppers, what else and who else could this plucky trio encounter? What perspective of Part 11’s events would these non-cast members offer? I mean, it was akin to giving Fortinbras an entire 10 minute soliloquy. Or writing an entire back story for the Greek Chorus.
And that term, ‘Perspective’, just stuck in my head. Thus, when I finally started putting this idea down on paper, I titled it A Perspective From the Food Court, which was then changed to Perspectives From the Food Court to account for the fact that there was more than just one character. I then opened this story as such:
[A quick note from Matt here! I may interject the occasional comment into these notes, which will be differentiated by being inside of square brackets like this. Now back, once more, to Jason! -- Matt]
Of Possible Alternatives is the 10th BS ½ Universe story written by me that has been published by Matt (I don’t count Outlast, not only because it was de-published, but because it was a bad idea that should’ve stayed inside my brain and never escaped in the first place, so I’ve ret-conned it from my memories and by all means please feel free to do the same.) It’s a Nice round number and unless I’m mistaken, only topped by Matt himself in terms of writing contributions toward the BS ½ Universe (so, y’know, go me. Yay!)
And I feel proud that those contributions were not just limited to the spin-off series, Perspectives but also including things such as a chapter of the Kenny’s Laboratory saga and a side-story in the main series. I take some pride and satisfaction in that Matt thought well enough of my writing to allow me to spread myself across his universe and not just a single angst-filled corner filled with overly friendly people who smirk a lot.
But more importantly, I feel blessed by the good friendship I share with Matt, one that’s lasted for 13 years and stood up to the usual peaks and valleys that all friendships tend to have, even more so with those who origins are born from the online world. Amazing as it sounds, but through all those years of friendship, the two of us have been in the same place at the same time maybe less than a handful of times. In fact, of all the relationships that started through meeting online, only two survive as something other than “casual acquaintance.” One is my wife. The other is Matt.
So where did it all start? How did a software clerk from southwestern Pennsylvania end up befriending an Assistant Scoutmaster in western Massachusetts and end up inflicting his scribbles upon this stranger’s literary universe?
In the Beginning…
In the far back ancient times of 1997, I was fresh out of high school and fresh into the great big grown-up world of college. It was a bright and exciting time and the whole world looked like a giant oyster ready to be shucked. (Shucked, I said Shucked; get your minds out of the gutter!)
This time was particularly exciting as this was my first time with access to an actual decent internet connection, via the campus’ computer lab. Up to that point in time, my online presence was limited to local run BBS’s (god, I feel like I’m dating myself so badly as half of you ask “What’s a BBS?”) and occasional emails shared through the old Blue Wave offline mail system. So now this whole new online world was opened before me, and much like an
explorer landing on a new shore, I went into the unknown, unsure what I would find.
At that time, my ‘otaku cred’ was non-existent. My otakuness was only 3 years in the making at that time and most of my exposure was limited to what Sci-Fi Channel offered during their once a year spurts, what I could rent from the local video stores, and by hunting down whatever anime I could from local comic shop, music stores, and the such (again, dating myself horribly.) So, now with this whole new world of information ready to be explored and having a noticeable hole in knowledge to fill, I dove into web’s online anime communities, coming back up for air only to write term papers and generally not flunk out of college.
In those heady days, when the web was wild and untamed, finding specific information or find specific communities, especially on subjects like anime or specific anime series, was like the colorblind man trying to find the one slightly off-white pebble in the quarry full of white stones. Information was so disorganized and scattered. Search engines were still in their early days and thus, not very useful. It was up to the fan community to organize itself and thus, sites like the Anime Web Turnpike (hereby referred to as the “AniPike”) were born.
It was through the AniPike that I had decided to link my freshly formed and poorly organized anime fan fiction (as well as whatever else I could create) site, the now long lost to the fires of nothingness that claimed all of GeoCities, BoneparteOzaki’s Little Old-fashioned Interdimensional House of Horrors (The name ‘BoneparteOzaki’ was my online alias for several years, inspired by Leona Ozaki’s personal mini-tank Boneparte from Dominion: Tank Police, the first anime I saw and actually knew that is was anime.)
Once my site was linked under the listings for Fan-fiction on the AniPike, I excitedly scrolled down the list to see my site’s still new and shining name on display for the whole world… and then I saw the name right after mine on the list – Boy Scouts ½.
Boy Scouts meets… Ranma ½? That’s an odd combination, I though to myself. I mean, I was a Scout myself until my sophomore year of high school and I must admit that I thought such a combo would seem to go together like chocolate and sushi. My curiosity was piqued, however, so I clicked, and I read, and I laughed.
Honestly, it wasn’t the Ranma ½ elements that kept me reading through those early chapters (at the time I started, there were only four out with the fifth coming shortly after my first visit.) It was the Scouting parts that grabbed hold of me and would not let go. At heart, despite all the curses and wacky cases of mistaken identities, these were stories written by a guy who really enjoyed the Scouting experience and the friends he made because of it. The stories of summer camp and waterfront tag boards and dining halls and playing magic were so much like my own experiences (though, we only used a dining hall my first year and we played D & D instead of Magic) and the friendships I had formed through scouting (included amongst them, my best friend Travis.)
As I read those early stories, I said to myself, Here’s a guy who likes Anime, British comedy, Sci-fi, plays Magic: the Gathering, and seems to have a lot of interesting stories to tell. I bet this guy’s an interesting chap to get to know. After all, I like all those things and I think I’m pretty interesting. I should contact him and see if he’s really as interesting as he seems. So I did. I sent off an email telling him that I enjoyed the stories he was writing and how wonderfully familiar they seemed to my own experiences and that if he was ever interested in chatting with someone about it, then I was always looking
for new friends and acquaintances. I think I then ended the email promising to regal him with a story in regards to my troop’s unfortunate run-in with a bear on a weeklong backpacking trek. (Hmmmm… hey Matt-kun, did I ever actually tell you that story or is that a 13 year old loose-end?)
I don’t know if I was really expecting a reply, but nothing ventured, nothing gain, right? I did receive a reply and thus I replied back. Then I received a reply to the reply and thus replied again. Here we are, 13 years later, reflecting on a chance encounter. A chance encounter based off the alphabetical listings of two different anime fan-fiction websites. Synchronicity? Fate? Who can tell, but it’s been a hell of a ride so far.
Joining the Team…
About a year or two later, after several emails and finally meeting face to face at Otakon ‘99 in Baltimore, Matt found himself writing part 11. I’m trying now to remember exactly how I got involved, so if my memory is faulty, I’m sure Matt will interject and correct me. [You think my memory is any better? Ha! --Matt] I do believe the discussion centered around malls, seeing as I was working at one at the time. I think at one point, I sent off a snippet of a scene involving Ryoga’s encounter with those sometimes indecipherable mall directory signs and, for the hell of it, wrote in a character witnessing Matt and Carolyn’s reaction to Ryoga’s explosive depression. This character, a sales clerk working at the Electronics Boutique by the name of Jason, was me of course. Honestly, I wasn’t really expecting Matt to use the entire scene as written, especially not my little self-insert, but he did and in that moment, Story-me was born.
But Story-me had company and they were Story-John Hoelscher and Story-Fenny Lin, two other members of the Cruel Angels Mailing List [CAML(pronounced “Camel”)], who made cameos as other mall employees whom Matt and Carolyn encountered during that faithful trip. As soon as I saw this, the seed was planted. He had just created an ensemble cast who shared a common thread, that of being mall employees. Why, if such employees are encountering exploding mall directories and cursed shoppers, what else and who else could this plucky trio encounter? What perspective of Part 11’s events would these non-cast members offer? I mean, it was akin to giving Fortinbras an entire 10 minute soliloquy. Or writing an entire back story for the Greek Chorus.
And that term, ‘Perspective’, just stuck in my head. Thus, when I finally started putting this idea down on paper, I titled it A Perspective From the Food Court, which was then changed to Perspectives From the Food Court to account for the fact that there was more than just one character. I then opened this story as such:
This is a work of complete and total fiction. Well, most of it is…well, actually none of it is. The names and places mentioned haven't been changed because no one was innocent. The events mentioned happen during Boy Scouts ½, part 11: Matty's New Wardrobe? Shopping Spree from Hell. The characters in focus are thought to be mere extras, but as this story unfolds, it is revealed that it is in fact they who are the true heroes of this world.
Now, without further ado, I present part 11.5 of Boy Scouts ½…
As far as introductions go, there have probably been others that were more egotistical and non-sequiturial, but probably not many. But it was a beginning and more importantly, there was a story that actually followed it. And after that story was done, another sprang to mind, so I wrote it and sent it off, and much like what happens when you feed the bear, Matt was now stuck with me.
Matt then made the most grievous of errors - he suggested a trilogy. Matt should’ve known better, really. After all, we were both Doug Adams fans, and for Doug Adams fans, a trilogy means no fewer than five stories. It also created something special: From what Matt had dubbed “the world’s most gratuitous self-insertion fan-fic” had now spawned “the world’s most gratuitous self-insertion spin-off.” It was a title I planned to live up to.
I’ve written before about why I went the direction I did with parts 3 through 5, in the author’s notes in those stories, and this is more about retrospective and new insights not previously known, so I’m not going to rehash those points. If you are interested, they’re all there in the now dusty archives that make up the Perspectives page on the BS ½ Universe website.
A Matter of Character…
Matt’s choice of characters for addition to Part 11 was not without it’s own set of problems. If I was to write this story, these were the characters I was going to have to use and later, when the story starting getting more in depth and not just based on the fact that these three worked in a mall, these were the characters I was going to have to develop.
As said before Matt had chosen John and Fenny because they, like myself, had been members of CAML with Matt. At Otakon ’99, Matt had come down to attend his first anime con, at which I think he ended up sharing a room with me, Travis, and another pair of friends, whose names unfortunately escape me at this time. It was here that Matt finally met John, whom I was friends with, having met the year before, and Fenny, whom, and let’s be honest, I think Matt was completely smitten with. (Don’t worry Rachel, I think that phase has long passed, so no worries.) [I was at most, I would say, "toyfully smitten," never having any serious ambitions. It was more one of those fun to joke about "what if?" things. -- Matt]
While, the three of us weren’t the only characters to play a role in Perspectives, we were the primary players. So, I would like to take a moment to discuss them. I’ll exclude myself because, frankly, this whole things is pretty much a behind the scenes of me.
John Hoelscher
John is a man, whom I would call one of my best friends. We met at Otakon ’98 by chance. It was my first anime con and I was still unsure what exactly to expect. Then, this guy wearing a blue suit, looking surprisingly like Katsuhiko Jinnai of El-Hazard fame, came up to me holding a camera and asked that all important question, “Who are you supposed to be?”
Now, for those reading, I will now give as best a description of what I looked like at that moment as I can. I was wearing black jeans, black shoes, a long-sleeved black shirt, a quarter of my face was painted black and I carried a black walking stick. My hair was sprayed silver. I was not cosplaying a character, but rather as a character type. I was the background character from all those space operas, that poor soul who would look up from the console, turns to whoever was in charge and shouts, “Captain/Commander/whatever, they’re firin…” at which point, the ship would explode and he would be dead. I was, in essence, a Generic Space Pirate. So, that was what I told John.
He looked at me, arched an eyebrow and took a step back, “I’ll take your picture, anyway.” And he did and then just as soon as we had met, he ran off to capture others on film. As fate would have it, it would not be our only encounter that day.
Later that day, Travis, our mutual friend Jason (yes, another Jason, and yes, it did make group conversations confusing, especially since we both preferred to be called Jay), and myself decided to participate in the con’s Live Action Role Playing (LARP). The premise of this LARP was that we would each take various anime character roles and acting together or against each other we would solve the various problems the game master would throw at us over the three day weekend and during the twice daily large group sessions. I had gotten in early and had decided to choose the role of Makoto Mizuhara from El-Hazard, which was still open and available. Soon enough, I was accosted, in character, by the character who would be my adversary for much of the weekend, that being Katsuhiko Jinnai, who was being played, and to perfection might I say, by John.
Thus, that entire weekend I found myself playing against this man, and we started to play off each other more and more, with me finally foiling him before the grand climax. In fact, the final scene for the game was Jinnai chasing Makoto across the DC Mall, cursing him for foiling his evil scheme (and the group picture taken afterward shows him attempting to ‘strangle’ me). It was a lot of fun, but more importantly, we found ourselves talking when we weren’t ‘in character’ and got to realize we had a lot in common. We swapped emails and websites and as soon as we returned to normal society, we kept in touch.
Ten years later, I was standing next to him as his best man at his wedding to a wonderful woman and friend named Nicole. Eighteen months after that, he stood with me as a groomsman at mine as I married a wonderful woman by the name of Sarah. Funny how life is, ain’t it? (Rachel, not to put any undue pressure on you or anything, but if you do one day plan to make an honest man out of Matt, can you please change your name to Kirstin? The coincidental irony would be, quite frankly, flippin’ awesome.) [Uueweh! -- Rachel] [Yeah, that's not bloody likely... She wants to keep her last name, it isn't likely she's changing her first one! Sorry, Jason. -- Matt]
So, you would think that a man I was as close to as him would provide easy material to write for, right? Not quite. Remember, when Part 11 came out, we had only known each other about a year. So, most about what I knew was more based on the present John I knew at the time and only a few details of his past, which were spun and extremely exaggerated for story purposes.
The three personalities vying for control? Well, that has no basis in reality. John’s about as sane as you or me. Okay, that’s an outright lie, but he does not suffer from Multiple Personality Disorder. The three personalities idea was based off John’s, at the time, obsessive cosplaying style. John could really get into a character and when he got into a character, he got into the character. At Otakon ‘98, and for pretty much his entire cosplay career, he was Jinnai. At Katsucon ’99, he was Shinji Ikari.
What about Touga Kiryuu? Well, at the time of writing Perspectives part 4, John was extolling the awesomeness of Revolutionary Girl Utena, particularly how awesome Touga was. Knowing John, I assumed that meant another costume was forthcoming so that became the basis for the third personality. So when did he cosplay as Touga? Never. He never made the costume. As I said, life can be funny.
Touga-John was always a pain to write, because I never actually saw Utena. All I knew was from what John told me and from what I could gather from character art. Even all these years later, I still have only watched a few episodes of that particular series so if I had to write him as a character it still wouldn’t be much better than what I understood back then, a sort of elitist upper-crusty-type guy who also fences in some sort of weird end of the world sword fighting club. (I would like to point out for future generations that I might be the first person to coin the phrase ‘upper-crusty-type guy’.)
If I could go back in time, I might’ve talked to John more about his character and gotten his take on things before expanding his scenes in Perspectives, part 4. I think at that time I was too excited to get new material written that I didn’t want to be slowed down by such things, and that was probably a mistake, and not the last one I’ve made.
Fenny Lin
The Bouncy One. Wherever did that title come from? Oh yes, now I remember. I think it stemmed from our first meeting of which this Asian girl wearing a black mini-skirt with a white blouse and stockings skipped over to me and Matt and said more or less the following, “Hi, I’m Fenny. I bounce.” And she then proceeded to do as such. It does leave an impression, and I do think it left one on Matt.
I wish I could say I’ve got a long retrospective on Fenny where I can regale you all with stories of a long friendship, much like I have with John. I can’t. After that convention, I maybe spoke to her maybe twice more and only saw her maybe a handful at times at conventions in the years that immediately followed. Honestly, even when we did talk, it wasn’t much more than fandom chit-chat. I really didn’t get to know her and I don’t think I probably ever will now.
That’s other side of life being funny. That’s okay, though. It doesn’t fill me with regret or anything. Though, it did and still does make writing her as a character tougher because I don’t have much to build off of. That’s one of the reasons I kinda put her on a bus at the end of the first Byte. It just made it easier if I ever planned to do a follow-up. (Of course that all changed when Matt wrote Byte Two and then I started Byte Three.) Honestly, I’m more attached to the memories of Story-Fenny than I am of the real Fenny and that might be a bad thing to say, but it’s the honest thing to say.
The whole goddess thing was, as Matt speculated then, inspired by Ah! My Goddess! which is another one of those anime references that I made without actually have seen the series, but mainly pieced together from general synopses and overviews. The concept of her actually being a death goddess was a later decision I made as I began writing Part 5. Honestly, it was an idea I should’ve taken more time developing and I kinda pounded it into the plot like a square peg into a round hole.
As a side note, I ended up taking the basic plot a Grim Reaper deciding to quit and become a goddess of love and turned it into a script for a film writing class in college. The name of the film’s female love interest for the poor male our Grim Reaper is trying to set up? That would be ‘Nicole Porter’, whom is saved from a pair of racists attackers by the male romantic interest. Yeah, I do recycle material from time to time.
Now, back to Fenny. Her two ‘sisters’ Sonyarina and Jordiko are actually based on two friends of Fenny’s whom I noticed hanging out with her during the cons I saw her at. Their names were Jordi and Sonya and I still have a picture of all three dressed as the Powerpuff Girls, which is what inspired me to add them to the story. Much like Fenny, I never really got to know them very well. I pretty much made up their last names in Part 9, but since they were supposed to be aliases, I suppose that’s okay, right?
If I had to do it over, would I still have included her the way I did? Probably. As I said, I do tend to think of Fenny Lin as the Story-Fenny and not as the person whom I used to know all those years ago, and as she never complained (at least to me) about her portrayal, I suppose it was okay. If push ever came to shove, I could always go back and ret-con the character’s name. Again, that’s probably a dick thing to say, but this is me being honest, and I can be a dick sometimes.
Ty
Ty was an original character created by me. Actually, you can say that he was the original character created by me since he’s the one character from my stable of stories who seems to show up, no matter what I’m writing. Below is an excerpt about Ty from my 2001 Honor’s Thesis Project:
Matt then made the most grievous of errors - he suggested a trilogy. Matt should’ve known better, really. After all, we were both Doug Adams fans, and for Doug Adams fans, a trilogy means no fewer than five stories. It also created something special: From what Matt had dubbed “the world’s most gratuitous self-insertion fan-fic” had now spawned “the world’s most gratuitous self-insertion spin-off.” It was a title I planned to live up to.
I’ve written before about why I went the direction I did with parts 3 through 5, in the author’s notes in those stories, and this is more about retrospective and new insights not previously known, so I’m not going to rehash those points. If you are interested, they’re all there in the now dusty archives that make up the Perspectives page on the BS ½ Universe website.
A Matter of Character…
Matt’s choice of characters for addition to Part 11 was not without it’s own set of problems. If I was to write this story, these were the characters I was going to have to use and later, when the story starting getting more in depth and not just based on the fact that these three worked in a mall, these were the characters I was going to have to develop.
As said before Matt had chosen John and Fenny because they, like myself, had been members of CAML with Matt. At Otakon ’99, Matt had come down to attend his first anime con, at which I think he ended up sharing a room with me, Travis, and another pair of friends, whose names unfortunately escape me at this time. It was here that Matt finally met John, whom I was friends with, having met the year before, and Fenny, whom, and let’s be honest, I think Matt was completely smitten with. (Don’t worry Rachel, I think that phase has long passed, so no worries.) [I was at most, I would say, "toyfully smitten," never having any serious ambitions. It was more one of those fun to joke about "what if?" things. -- Matt]
While, the three of us weren’t the only characters to play a role in Perspectives, we were the primary players. So, I would like to take a moment to discuss them. I’ll exclude myself because, frankly, this whole things is pretty much a behind the scenes of me.
John Hoelscher
John is a man, whom I would call one of my best friends. We met at Otakon ’98 by chance. It was my first anime con and I was still unsure what exactly to expect. Then, this guy wearing a blue suit, looking surprisingly like Katsuhiko Jinnai of El-Hazard fame, came up to me holding a camera and asked that all important question, “Who are you supposed to be?”
Now, for those reading, I will now give as best a description of what I looked like at that moment as I can. I was wearing black jeans, black shoes, a long-sleeved black shirt, a quarter of my face was painted black and I carried a black walking stick. My hair was sprayed silver. I was not cosplaying a character, but rather as a character type. I was the background character from all those space operas, that poor soul who would look up from the console, turns to whoever was in charge and shouts, “Captain/Commander/whatever, they’re firin…” at which point, the ship would explode and he would be dead. I was, in essence, a Generic Space Pirate. So, that was what I told John.
He looked at me, arched an eyebrow and took a step back, “I’ll take your picture, anyway.” And he did and then just as soon as we had met, he ran off to capture others on film. As fate would have it, it would not be our only encounter that day.
Later that day, Travis, our mutual friend Jason (yes, another Jason, and yes, it did make group conversations confusing, especially since we both preferred to be called Jay), and myself decided to participate in the con’s Live Action Role Playing (LARP). The premise of this LARP was that we would each take various anime character roles and acting together or against each other we would solve the various problems the game master would throw at us over the three day weekend and during the twice daily large group sessions. I had gotten in early and had decided to choose the role of Makoto Mizuhara from El-Hazard, which was still open and available. Soon enough, I was accosted, in character, by the character who would be my adversary for much of the weekend, that being Katsuhiko Jinnai, who was being played, and to perfection might I say, by John.
Thus, that entire weekend I found myself playing against this man, and we started to play off each other more and more, with me finally foiling him before the grand climax. In fact, the final scene for the game was Jinnai chasing Makoto across the DC Mall, cursing him for foiling his evil scheme (and the group picture taken afterward shows him attempting to ‘strangle’ me). It was a lot of fun, but more importantly, we found ourselves talking when we weren’t ‘in character’ and got to realize we had a lot in common. We swapped emails and websites and as soon as we returned to normal society, we kept in touch.
Ten years later, I was standing next to him as his best man at his wedding to a wonderful woman and friend named Nicole. Eighteen months after that, he stood with me as a groomsman at mine as I married a wonderful woman by the name of Sarah. Funny how life is, ain’t it? (Rachel, not to put any undue pressure on you or anything, but if you do one day plan to make an honest man out of Matt, can you please change your name to Kirstin? The coincidental irony would be, quite frankly, flippin’ awesome.) [Uueweh! -- Rachel] [Yeah, that's not bloody likely... She wants to keep her last name, it isn't likely she's changing her first one! Sorry, Jason. -- Matt]
So, you would think that a man I was as close to as him would provide easy material to write for, right? Not quite. Remember, when Part 11 came out, we had only known each other about a year. So, most about what I knew was more based on the present John I knew at the time and only a few details of his past, which were spun and extremely exaggerated for story purposes.
The three personalities vying for control? Well, that has no basis in reality. John’s about as sane as you or me. Okay, that’s an outright lie, but he does not suffer from Multiple Personality Disorder. The three personalities idea was based off John’s, at the time, obsessive cosplaying style. John could really get into a character and when he got into a character, he got into the character. At Otakon ‘98, and for pretty much his entire cosplay career, he was Jinnai. At Katsucon ’99, he was Shinji Ikari.
What about Touga Kiryuu? Well, at the time of writing Perspectives part 4, John was extolling the awesomeness of Revolutionary Girl Utena, particularly how awesome Touga was. Knowing John, I assumed that meant another costume was forthcoming so that became the basis for the third personality. So when did he cosplay as Touga? Never. He never made the costume. As I said, life can be funny.
Touga-John was always a pain to write, because I never actually saw Utena. All I knew was from what John told me and from what I could gather from character art. Even all these years later, I still have only watched a few episodes of that particular series so if I had to write him as a character it still wouldn’t be much better than what I understood back then, a sort of elitist upper-crusty-type guy who also fences in some sort of weird end of the world sword fighting club. (I would like to point out for future generations that I might be the first person to coin the phrase ‘upper-crusty-type guy’.)
If I could go back in time, I might’ve talked to John more about his character and gotten his take on things before expanding his scenes in Perspectives, part 4. I think at that time I was too excited to get new material written that I didn’t want to be slowed down by such things, and that was probably a mistake, and not the last one I’ve made.
Fenny Lin
The Bouncy One. Wherever did that title come from? Oh yes, now I remember. I think it stemmed from our first meeting of which this Asian girl wearing a black mini-skirt with a white blouse and stockings skipped over to me and Matt and said more or less the following, “Hi, I’m Fenny. I bounce.” And she then proceeded to do as such. It does leave an impression, and I do think it left one on Matt.
I wish I could say I’ve got a long retrospective on Fenny where I can regale you all with stories of a long friendship, much like I have with John. I can’t. After that convention, I maybe spoke to her maybe twice more and only saw her maybe a handful at times at conventions in the years that immediately followed. Honestly, even when we did talk, it wasn’t much more than fandom chit-chat. I really didn’t get to know her and I don’t think I probably ever will now.
That’s other side of life being funny. That’s okay, though. It doesn’t fill me with regret or anything. Though, it did and still does make writing her as a character tougher because I don’t have much to build off of. That’s one of the reasons I kinda put her on a bus at the end of the first Byte. It just made it easier if I ever planned to do a follow-up. (Of course that all changed when Matt wrote Byte Two and then I started Byte Three.) Honestly, I’m more attached to the memories of Story-Fenny than I am of the real Fenny and that might be a bad thing to say, but it’s the honest thing to say.
The whole goddess thing was, as Matt speculated then, inspired by Ah! My Goddess! which is another one of those anime references that I made without actually have seen the series, but mainly pieced together from general synopses and overviews. The concept of her actually being a death goddess was a later decision I made as I began writing Part 5. Honestly, it was an idea I should’ve taken more time developing and I kinda pounded it into the plot like a square peg into a round hole.
As a side note, I ended up taking the basic plot a Grim Reaper deciding to quit and become a goddess of love and turned it into a script for a film writing class in college. The name of the film’s female love interest for the poor male our Grim Reaper is trying to set up? That would be ‘Nicole Porter’, whom is saved from a pair of racists attackers by the male romantic interest. Yeah, I do recycle material from time to time.
Now, back to Fenny. Her two ‘sisters’ Sonyarina and Jordiko are actually based on two friends of Fenny’s whom I noticed hanging out with her during the cons I saw her at. Their names were Jordi and Sonya and I still have a picture of all three dressed as the Powerpuff Girls, which is what inspired me to add them to the story. Much like Fenny, I never really got to know them very well. I pretty much made up their last names in Part 9, but since they were supposed to be aliases, I suppose that’s okay, right?
If I had to do it over, would I still have included her the way I did? Probably. As I said, I do tend to think of Fenny Lin as the Story-Fenny and not as the person whom I used to know all those years ago, and as she never complained (at least to me) about her portrayal, I suppose it was okay. If push ever came to shove, I could always go back and ret-con the character’s name. Again, that’s probably a dick thing to say, but this is me being honest, and I can be a dick sometimes.
Ty
Ty was an original character created by me. Actually, you can say that he was the original character created by me since he’s the one character from my stable of stories who seems to show up, no matter what I’m writing. Below is an excerpt about Ty from my 2001 Honor’s Thesis Project:
Ty is a character who was created by me in the fall of 1998 and since his creation, he has found a way into almost all my short stories and creative efforts. He is never the same exact character in each story, though almost every time I have redefined him, a few characteristics have remained constant: His physical appearance is almost always the same and he is almost always a being of some supernatural origin.
Appearance-wise, Ty is loosely based on a member of my thesis committee, Dr. Michael Slaven. At the time I created this character, I was also attending two of Dr. Slaven’s classes and his appearance at the time seemed to be a rather perfect match for the type of character Ty was, especially in terms of body type, hair and facial hair.
The other consistent characteristic of Ty is that he is often a representative of some supernatural element. He has been an agent of a group of ancient beings who use him for the purpose of searching down young women and bringing these girls to these ancient beings for their insidious purposes. He has also been a part of a deity-based bureaucracy with the purpose of hunting down ‘rogue’ gods and goddesses who break established rules. For this story Ty is a Japanese Oni, a group of goblins/demons known for their tendency to cause mischief and misery.
Ty is almost always a traveler and often finds himself amazed at human behavior and interaction. Indeed, he seemed to be a perfect fit when I needed to have someone listen to Marcus’ story in the bar. Ty, a traveler and supernatural being, is a character Marcus can actually relate to because Marcus is also a traveler with a supernatural background. Because of this unspoken bond, Marcus feels much more comfortable relating his tale and vocalizing his feelings, something Marcus as a character needs since Trevor is no longer with him to act as a balance.
Ty is a character whom I’ve always felt could be something special and as such, every time I resurrect him for a new story, I seem to flesh him out just a bit more. The Perspectives version is still pretty rough, but he was slated for some pretty big things in Byte Three which I think would’ve moved him more into the spotlight.
Story-me Vs. Real Me
Yeah, I know I said wasn’t going to focus on myself in this section, but there was points I wanted to make and there really wasn’t a better place to segue them in. People might actually wonder exactly how close to real life is the depiction of myself represented by story-me. That’s a hard point to address because in many ways the depiction is very exaggerated and in others it’s very close to home.
Story-me has never been a static character in that I wrote him and said, “This is me as I was circa-1997.” Honestly, it probably would’ve been better if I had did that because, in ways, the fluid nature of the character has tendencies to create contradictions and glaring plot holes. Story-me has almost always been more representative of who I was at the time of writing the story he was in. Since I constantly change and grow as a person, so does the character, which, as said before, can complicate things when the story is supposed to only take place in a period of one year between 1997 and 1998.
Even the character’s age is mangled. Story-me is 20 years old. In 1997, I wasn’t 20 years old but rather I was actually 18. I wrote the story in 1999 and thus when I inserted myself into the story I pretty much just used my current age almost unconsciously. Honestly, if there was one thing I could go back and ret-con in those older stories, it would be that. As I said in the part 3, an age difference between romantic partners doesn’t bother me, but I think Jason and Nicole’s dating each other would seem more kosher if it was an 18 year old college freshman dating a high school junior with only a 2 year age gap. It just feels a little less skeezy, but then again maybe that’s just current, older me talking. A 31 year old married guy who worries about things like life insurance and house buying not feeling as comfortable with the decision I had made back when I was college me.
The other issues that tend to crop up is that since story-me is representative of the person I was at the time, suddenly the character displays new interests almost overnight. My wife told me that within the Harry Potter fan-fic community this phenomenon is known as the “Pepperjack Cheese Syndrome.” It’s where the author suddenly finds a liking for something and therefore, now a character likes the same thing, often to the point of bludgeoning the audience over the head that said character likes this thing. The story in question where this syndrome was named, basically featured a story where Hermione raved about and ate almost nothing but Pepperjack Cheese during the course of the seemingly uncheese-related story.
Now that I’ve brought up this point, I’m sure some people (i.e. Matt) might be able to look back and point out the obvious cases of this occurring. Part 1’s wrestling daydream sequence was one as well as the reference to ECWCWWF’s Extreme Thunderous Attitude (though to be fair, wrestling games were extremely popular at that time and thus part of the reference was time-frame appropriate). The references to DDR in the later parts were another. Even the story you just read doesn’t escape this phenomenon as Real Life-Me only starting playing bass guitar two years ago (though since it is a parallel universe, I think that one at least gets more of a pass than some of the others.)
So, while going back and reading some of these stories can be induce cringes in myself for lack of consistency about the characters, I also find them interesting as I can use them as a time capsule image to look back on myself at that time, abet a slightly distorted and exaggerated time capsule image.
Oh, and to finally answer the question that might be on your minds as to whether or not I actually smirk as much as Story-me would seem to indicate. Unfortunately, yes. I’m one of those few people not really blessed with a good poker face, so I tend to smirk, a lot. Yes, it has gotten me in trouble more often than I would care to admit.
Seriously, what is the deal with Penguins?
Ah, the Penguin references. What is me and Matt’s seeming affection for these flightless waterfowl? It’s not like we live anywhere near the Antarctic to witness these creatures at play. So what is with all the Penguin references?
And of course, by “all” I mean, um, three. Well, three and a fourth that was left on the cutting room floor, but they’re there and there’s a reason for them. Well, at least there’s a reason when I do it.
I’m from Southwestern Pennsylvania, which is most identified by the city of Pittsburgh (I actually now do live in the city proper, having moved there to make my fortune around 2005). Pittsburgh is mainly known for once being home of most of the nation’s steel manufacturing, having the most bridges of any US city, second in the world only to Venice, and of course the long and storied sports history.
One of my longstanding loves is that of pro hockey and that love is expressed in my near obsessive fandom of the local team, the Pittsburgh Penguins. Seriously, my cubical is like a shrine to the flightless birds and in the office I’m widely regarded as “The Penguins Guy.” My wife, she of the most infinite patience which I am forever grateful for, will testify that when the Pens won their third Stanley Cup championship, I proceeded to run around the apartment like a spaz, stopping mainly to pick her up and spin her around in celebration. So, yeah, I like hockey.
Heck, even Matt made a reference to this in a story he penned, though he misunderstood the reference when he wrote it. There’s a scene in Perspectives part 8 in which John asks Lina out on a double date. When he’s successful, story-me congratulates him by saying “He Shoots and Scores!” while pantomiming a basketball shot. Matt got the line from our email conversations in which I would use it tell him he nailed a scene or story, but I think he associated it with Basketball (and that’s understandable considering the Basketball Hall of Fame is in Springfield) but when I was using it, it was actually a reference to the common Hockey play by play call when a goal is scored (and if I mimicked Hockey Hall of Famer and Legendary Penguins Play by Play Man, Mike Lange, it would be more like “HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE SHOOTS AND SCOOOOOOREEEESSSSS!!!”)
So mystery solved. As for why Matt makes so many references to Penguins, I have no clue. I think he might just be really weird. Matt, want to clear up the mystery once and for all? [Yeah, I kind of actually already addressed that in my notes above! So, there ya' go. -- Matt]
On Finally Getting the Last Word…
In a friendship that’s lasted 13 years, there’s been remarkably little conflict. Oh sure, there’s been disagreements from time to time regarding such and such scene or the tone of such and such story, but nothing where we couldn’t eventually come to a compromise or at least an understanding.
Well, except that one time…
A decade ago, I wrote my only actual side-story in the main series (excluding the one you’ve just read) that didn’t turn into a full blown spin-off, called Girls’ Night Out, Guys’ Night In. Matt’s inclusion of it in the hardbound BS ½ omnibus brought a warm feeling to the heart as well as the memory of the one time I vehemently disagreed with Matt back to the forefront of my mind.
Now, first off, Matt did include the scene in question in the story without any major revisions, for which I am thankful. I didn’t want this little retrospective to paint Matt as some sort of editorial Ogre who forced his will on the poor writing staff. When something of mine had been edited or revised, I usually agreed in the end that it was for the best and Matt’s always taken my opinions into consideration before finalizing changes.
So, why this time in particular so stuck in my memory? Ah, well, after the story went online, I was reading the final version as well as one of my favorite aspects of writing for Matt, his editor’s notes. Well, for this particular story, the notes were as follows:
Story-me Vs. Real Me
Yeah, I know I said wasn’t going to focus on myself in this section, but there was points I wanted to make and there really wasn’t a better place to segue them in. People might actually wonder exactly how close to real life is the depiction of myself represented by story-me. That’s a hard point to address because in many ways the depiction is very exaggerated and in others it’s very close to home.
Story-me has never been a static character in that I wrote him and said, “This is me as I was circa-1997.” Honestly, it probably would’ve been better if I had did that because, in ways, the fluid nature of the character has tendencies to create contradictions and glaring plot holes. Story-me has almost always been more representative of who I was at the time of writing the story he was in. Since I constantly change and grow as a person, so does the character, which, as said before, can complicate things when the story is supposed to only take place in a period of one year between 1997 and 1998.
Even the character’s age is mangled. Story-me is 20 years old. In 1997, I wasn’t 20 years old but rather I was actually 18. I wrote the story in 1999 and thus when I inserted myself into the story I pretty much just used my current age almost unconsciously. Honestly, if there was one thing I could go back and ret-con in those older stories, it would be that. As I said in the part 3, an age difference between romantic partners doesn’t bother me, but I think Jason and Nicole’s dating each other would seem more kosher if it was an 18 year old college freshman dating a high school junior with only a 2 year age gap. It just feels a little less skeezy, but then again maybe that’s just current, older me talking. A 31 year old married guy who worries about things like life insurance and house buying not feeling as comfortable with the decision I had made back when I was college me.
The other issues that tend to crop up is that since story-me is representative of the person I was at the time, suddenly the character displays new interests almost overnight. My wife told me that within the Harry Potter fan-fic community this phenomenon is known as the “Pepperjack Cheese Syndrome.” It’s where the author suddenly finds a liking for something and therefore, now a character likes the same thing, often to the point of bludgeoning the audience over the head that said character likes this thing. The story in question where this syndrome was named, basically featured a story where Hermione raved about and ate almost nothing but Pepperjack Cheese during the course of the seemingly uncheese-related story.
Now that I’ve brought up this point, I’m sure some people (i.e. Matt) might be able to look back and point out the obvious cases of this occurring. Part 1’s wrestling daydream sequence was one as well as the reference to ECWCWWF’s Extreme Thunderous Attitude (though to be fair, wrestling games were extremely popular at that time and thus part of the reference was time-frame appropriate). The references to DDR in the later parts were another. Even the story you just read doesn’t escape this phenomenon as Real Life-Me only starting playing bass guitar two years ago (though since it is a parallel universe, I think that one at least gets more of a pass than some of the others.)
So, while going back and reading some of these stories can be induce cringes in myself for lack of consistency about the characters, I also find them interesting as I can use them as a time capsule image to look back on myself at that time, abet a slightly distorted and exaggerated time capsule image.
Oh, and to finally answer the question that might be on your minds as to whether or not I actually smirk as much as Story-me would seem to indicate. Unfortunately, yes. I’m one of those few people not really blessed with a good poker face, so I tend to smirk, a lot. Yes, it has gotten me in trouble more often than I would care to admit.
Seriously, what is the deal with Penguins?
Ah, the Penguin references. What is me and Matt’s seeming affection for these flightless waterfowl? It’s not like we live anywhere near the Antarctic to witness these creatures at play. So what is with all the Penguin references?
And of course, by “all” I mean, um, three. Well, three and a fourth that was left on the cutting room floor, but they’re there and there’s a reason for them. Well, at least there’s a reason when I do it.
I’m from Southwestern Pennsylvania, which is most identified by the city of Pittsburgh (I actually now do live in the city proper, having moved there to make my fortune around 2005). Pittsburgh is mainly known for once being home of most of the nation’s steel manufacturing, having the most bridges of any US city, second in the world only to Venice, and of course the long and storied sports history.
One of my longstanding loves is that of pro hockey and that love is expressed in my near obsessive fandom of the local team, the Pittsburgh Penguins. Seriously, my cubical is like a shrine to the flightless birds and in the office I’m widely regarded as “The Penguins Guy.” My wife, she of the most infinite patience which I am forever grateful for, will testify that when the Pens won their third Stanley Cup championship, I proceeded to run around the apartment like a spaz, stopping mainly to pick her up and spin her around in celebration. So, yeah, I like hockey.
Heck, even Matt made a reference to this in a story he penned, though he misunderstood the reference when he wrote it. There’s a scene in Perspectives part 8 in which John asks Lina out on a double date. When he’s successful, story-me congratulates him by saying “He Shoots and Scores!” while pantomiming a basketball shot. Matt got the line from our email conversations in which I would use it tell him he nailed a scene or story, but I think he associated it with Basketball (and that’s understandable considering the Basketball Hall of Fame is in Springfield) but when I was using it, it was actually a reference to the common Hockey play by play call when a goal is scored (and if I mimicked Hockey Hall of Famer and Legendary Penguins Play by Play Man, Mike Lange, it would be more like “HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE SHOOTS AND SCOOOOOOREEEESSSSS!!!”)
So mystery solved. As for why Matt makes so many references to Penguins, I have no clue. I think he might just be really weird. Matt, want to clear up the mystery once and for all? [Yeah, I kind of actually already addressed that in my notes above! So, there ya' go. -- Matt]
On Finally Getting the Last Word…
In a friendship that’s lasted 13 years, there’s been remarkably little conflict. Oh sure, there’s been disagreements from time to time regarding such and such scene or the tone of such and such story, but nothing where we couldn’t eventually come to a compromise or at least an understanding.
Well, except that one time…
A decade ago, I wrote my only actual side-story in the main series (excluding the one you’ve just read) that didn’t turn into a full blown spin-off, called Girls’ Night Out, Guys’ Night In. Matt’s inclusion of it in the hardbound BS ½ omnibus brought a warm feeling to the heart as well as the memory of the one time I vehemently disagreed with Matt back to the forefront of my mind.
Now, first off, Matt did include the scene in question in the story without any major revisions, for which I am thankful. I didn’t want this little retrospective to paint Matt as some sort of editorial Ogre who forced his will on the poor writing staff. When something of mine had been edited or revised, I usually agreed in the end that it was for the best and Matt’s always taken my opinions into consideration before finalizing changes.
So, why this time in particular so stuck in my memory? Ah, well, after the story went online, I was reading the final version as well as one of my favorite aspects of writing for Matt, his editor’s notes. Well, for this particular story, the notes were as follows:
Over all, this was a good story and I enjoyed it immensely. There is still one slight thing that, unfortunately, bothers me…
Jason letting Kenny win.
I’m not saying that Jason-kun wouldn’t do that, I’m saying he wouldn’t have to.
He wouldn’t even have to loan Kenny one of his decks.
Kenny may be socially awkward, but under that hides a mind far exceeds that of a normal human. His genius allowed him to fully comprehend the game mechanics, after all, after only reading the rulebook. (My mediocre skills at the game, just to give you a comparison, only came about after a summer of intense tutelage at the hand of the Aberts.) Kenny’s mind is capable of such tactical genius that he would be able to play against anyone. Pit Kenny against a master player of the game using any deck they wish. And Kenny would win at the game using only any random starter deck!
Of course, there is a rationalization we could use to explain this. Perhaps Kenny wasn’t playing to his full abilities for the same reasons that young Clark Kent wasn’t on the Smallville Football Team… He was simply hiding his abilities.
In closing, even if it did provide me with a bit of a headache, I know that any re-writes Jason did he’d rather not have done, and in fact I would have been happy to have left the story alone, except Jason didn’t wish the story to be non-canonical. Thanks, Jason-kun, for the wonderful story! I’m glad we were able to work everything out in the end.
See what he did there? It’s positively a bit of editorial insidiousness of Machiavellian proportions. Mind you, this was written by Matt after much debate in which other revisions had been made prior to the story’s publication. Yeah, the scene survived and it survived as written, but even still, he had to go and get the last word in on the subject, knowing that there would be no more debate now that it was officially online.
That’s Snarfinkle kind of insidiousness.
So, what’s a guy to do a decade after the fact? Why, not let it go and get the final word on the subject, of course. Okay, not really. It’s not really a final word on the subject if Matt so chooses to not let it be, but I would like to finally have the chance to present my counterargument to Matt’s points on the subject.
Ahem.
I had played my fair share of Magic: The Gathering, as well as other collectible card games, and almost all of them share three important elements when it comes to winning the game.
1. Strategy
2. Deck Building
3. Luck
You almost will never win a game without the presence, even in the smallest amount, of all three elements. You can have a great strategy to win, but if you don’t have the cards necessary to pull it off you will lose. You can have all the best cards, but if you have no strategy to tie them together you will lose. And if you lack both a cohesive deck strategy and the cards to make it work, your luck will have to be so high that it would give the appearance of cheating to everyone else. Conversely, even if you do have the right cards for the deck, and you’re a strategic mastermind, if your luck is non-existent then you’ll never draw the cards you need for them to be any use to you.
And really, that is the main point of the deck building phase of the game. You have developed a strategy to win the game a particular way, so in turn you will want to load the deck with the specific cards necessary to make that strategy work and you will want to build the deck in such a way as to maximize the probability that you will draw those cards in a timely fashion so they are of some use to you. In essence you’re boosting your own luck. That’s almost why you never saw extremely large decks win major tournaments because they almost never drew the right cards when they were needed.
Then there’s the whole issue of fact that the creators of Magic during that time were not nearly as concerned with things such a game balance as they are now. By the time I came into the game, a couple years too late unfortunately, there were a collection of out of print and extremely expensive cards that were so powerful and that were so mind boggling useful that any deck that contained some or all of them had a distinct and tangible advantage over decks that did not. If you faced a player and you were both playing the same strategy, but he built his deck with the more powerful and expensive versions of the cards while you were using the cheaper, more balanced, and more available versions, you would most likely lose because your opponent was able to pull off his strategy faster and more effectively. The only real hope you had was that luck was on your side and that you drew the cards you needed and that he was not drawing his, so while it was possible to win, it was more based on luck rather than any real skill.
So, while Kenny’s skills were never in question in regards to this story, he was at an obvious disadvantage while playing with the other players because the only cards he were a pre-made starter deck which were balanced and built to play against other pre-made starters. If a player was using one and had not done any modifications to enhance it, he would find playing against players with access to a wider variety of cards held a tremendous advantage over them.
As Virtual Albert Einstein told Virtual Stephen Hawking, “All the quantum fluctuations in the universe will not change the cards in your hand.”
So, yeah, Kenny could very well best most master players simply based on his tremendous mind, he’d still be hard pressed to pull out a victory if his opening hand consisted of say, four non-swamp land cards, a Giant Growth, a Baron Sengir, and a Colossus of Sardia. He’d be really, REALLY hard pressed to pull out the win if, after drawing those cards, his opponent plays two Moxes, a Black Lotus, a land, a Lightning Bolt, a Llonowar Elf, then a Wheel of Fortune, then plays two more Moxes, followed by a Time Walk and then proceeds to uses the six to none mana advantage to cast a few nice sized creatures on that free turn. That’s not as an extreme of an exaggeration as I wished it was. If you went to enough tournaments in the nineties, the tournaments were dominated by what were coined as “Briefcase Guys.” Their main strategy consisted of a briefcase of cash and whatever the best cards at the time were. It’s pretty much why I stopped playing competitively and only played casually with friends.
But let’s get away from discussion of deck manufactured luck for a moment and get to the heart of the matter. Jason letting Kenny win. Matt makes a good point that Jason wouldn’t have to let Kenny win and that’s very true, but at that point in time, Jason doesn’t regard Kenny as an equal.
He’s only just met him and what he sees is a young, slightly socially awkward kid playing at a distinct competitive disadvantage. He doesn’t know that this kid has all these incredible gifts. He just sees something unfair and he wants to level the playing field.
And while the playing field has been evened up, Kenny just had the bad luck in playing a multiplayer game against Jason’s specific deck. As I said in the story, the deck wasn’t the most victorious deck ever created, but it did have an advantage in multiplayer games that had gone long. If Jason got his ‘wall’ down, players could still find ways to damage him, but usually did so at the risk of making themselves open to attacks by the other players, so most people would rather opt to attack the other players first and go after that deck last, which is pretty much what happened to Kenny and by the time he had to no longer worry about attacks from the other players, it was too late in the game to break down the ‘wall’ Jason had erected.
And when it got to that point, Jason let Kenny win, because, again, he didn’t see Kenny as an equal yet. He thought he was doing a nice thing. When Kenny confronts him, he doesn’t say “I’m a frickin’ genius who has access to a transdimensional gateway, so lay off the pity, asshole.” He rather makes it known that he knew that Jason had let him win and quite pointedly. If the pair had played again, one on one, on an even playing field, then there was no doubt in my mind that Kenny would’ve wiped the floor with him.
I probably could’ve done a much better part of conveying that last part, so that’s on me as a writer. In any case, that was the sum of my argument that I’ve wanted to make these last ten years. Thank you for indulging me on that rather lengthy rant.
[Matt's last word: "Tpppphhhhh!" -- Matt]
So, where do we go from here?
So, we’re coming to an end of this retrospective and now comes the big question – Why? What is the point of this whole exercise if I’m just going to go back into the perpetual ether and not come back for another two or three years? That is the point, I’m not.
There’s been this feeling inside me for some time and I wasn’t sure what it was. I couldn’t put into words what it was and why it was there. It was just this sort of general discontentment that I couldn’t shake no matter how many wonderful things had come into my life. I was finally able to solve that mystery. I know the source of that feeling and, more importantly, what had to be done. It was unfinished business and the only way to solve unfinished business is to finish it.
I thought I could leave Perspectives behind and go onto to other bigger projects, to finally go out and write that Great American Novel that everyone talks about and, as I found out, when I tried, I just found myself frustratingly stopped by writer’s block. It seemed like the only time I could get any writing done it was when I was working in the BS ½ universe. As I kept returning back to do things like Kenny’s Lab or other stories, it was simply a placebo for what I really needed. I needed to finish Perspectives. It has sat unfinished, on a cliffhanger, for several years now and, without even realizing it, that fact was eating at me.
I had tried to finish it, honestly, but some things happened to kill the momentum. At one point, I had planned to scrap all the remaining chapters and write one, long final chapter to tie up the loose ends and possibly leave the door to tie in with Matt’s in Japan chapters of the Main Series (Matt himself ended up doing the same thing with the Kenny’s Laboratory series, scrapping planned chapters for one long finale.)
I wrote about 20 pages of material and then a computer crash killed them deader than corduroy. They were gone and there were no back-ups to be found. It was a crushing blow that I pretty much never recovered from.
And even if I had recovered, a new thing happened - Life. Life had changed a lot from the days I originally wrote and conceived the Third Byte of Perspectives. The Travis and Charlotte wedding that was supposed to be the background for that series suddenly became a complication. Trav and Charl, a couple that was so long term they should’ve qualified as common-law, broke up messily, and it burned some bridges within our social circle. It felt very wrong to move forward with that idea, but I had already established it in Part 10, it wasn’t like I could just ignore that particular plot point.
Then there was my own relationship. I’m married to a most wonderful woman, a person whom I treasure more than anything on God’s green Earth, and to suddenly to write about this other version of me proclaiming love for another girl, even a fictional one, seemed to border on being unfaithful. I was so afraid of to do that to her that I thought it better to bury it rather than finish it.
Ultimately, it took time and personal reflection to learn some things. One of those is that my heart belongs to Sarah and nothing could ever make it betray her, especially not the world of fiction. I had allowed self-doubt and baseless fears push me into a corner instead of confronting them. Well, that ends now. If I can’t put up that mental barrier between the real world and fiction then I can’t call myself a writer, and despite all my faults, I do call myself that. I’m going to do what writers do – F’n write.
[I can sympathize here a bit... When I began Boy Scouts ½, I was very much a single person. Thus, it was safe to think of fictional me longing for a made up character. (And, of course, I masochistically made it so that that fictional character wanted nothing to do with the fictional me!) But now, I have someone, and am quite happy with her! On one hand, it is odd to write about "me" going after someone who isn't Rachel. But on the other, the "me" in question is the fictional Matt, who after all these years has become rather more separate an entity from the "real" me then he was when I began this venture... So even if it is odd on one level, fortunately it is a separation I can make! -- Matt]
As I said before Of Possible Alternatives is the 10th story (hopefully) published by Matt here on the BS ½ universe. It is, however, not the 10th story written. It is actually the 11th. There’s a story that has sat incomplete for two years and that’s where my immediate attention is turned toward. Matt, that is my Christmas present for you. I’m going to finish In Japan part 4 and finally complete the Neko-Haten scene that has tormented us both for so long. It was wrong of me to dump my writers block on your doorstep like an abandoned baby in a basket and I am going to make it up to you. [No worries, Jason! Although, on my end... sorry for this story having been delayed for so long... and thus it actually is the 11th in publication order, as well! -- Matt]
As the Afro’d one once told you, Matt, “Continue.” I’m going to make sure you can.
And after I finish In Japan part 4, I’m going to take a short break to gather up my notes and ideas and then I’m going to finally finish Perspectives. It’s not a plan or a hope or a desire. It’s what is going to happen.
I’m not under the delusion that vast groups of people have waited with bated breath for me to complete this series. I’m not even sure if anyone else will read it aside from Matt and myself. But y’know what? I’m cool with that. I want to finish it because it’s what I need to do and if anyone else takes enjoyment from it, then that’s just icing on the cake.
Mmmmmmm, cake.
See you all again soon. Thirteen years down and only a lifetime more to go.
That’s Snarfinkle kind of insidiousness.
So, what’s a guy to do a decade after the fact? Why, not let it go and get the final word on the subject, of course. Okay, not really. It’s not really a final word on the subject if Matt so chooses to not let it be, but I would like to finally have the chance to present my counterargument to Matt’s points on the subject.
Ahem.
I had played my fair share of Magic: The Gathering, as well as other collectible card games, and almost all of them share three important elements when it comes to winning the game.
1. Strategy
2. Deck Building
3. Luck
You almost will never win a game without the presence, even in the smallest amount, of all three elements. You can have a great strategy to win, but if you don’t have the cards necessary to pull it off you will lose. You can have all the best cards, but if you have no strategy to tie them together you will lose. And if you lack both a cohesive deck strategy and the cards to make it work, your luck will have to be so high that it would give the appearance of cheating to everyone else. Conversely, even if you do have the right cards for the deck, and you’re a strategic mastermind, if your luck is non-existent then you’ll never draw the cards you need for them to be any use to you.
And really, that is the main point of the deck building phase of the game. You have developed a strategy to win the game a particular way, so in turn you will want to load the deck with the specific cards necessary to make that strategy work and you will want to build the deck in such a way as to maximize the probability that you will draw those cards in a timely fashion so they are of some use to you. In essence you’re boosting your own luck. That’s almost why you never saw extremely large decks win major tournaments because they almost never drew the right cards when they were needed.
Then there’s the whole issue of fact that the creators of Magic during that time were not nearly as concerned with things such a game balance as they are now. By the time I came into the game, a couple years too late unfortunately, there were a collection of out of print and extremely expensive cards that were so powerful and that were so mind boggling useful that any deck that contained some or all of them had a distinct and tangible advantage over decks that did not. If you faced a player and you were both playing the same strategy, but he built his deck with the more powerful and expensive versions of the cards while you were using the cheaper, more balanced, and more available versions, you would most likely lose because your opponent was able to pull off his strategy faster and more effectively. The only real hope you had was that luck was on your side and that you drew the cards you needed and that he was not drawing his, so while it was possible to win, it was more based on luck rather than any real skill.
So, while Kenny’s skills were never in question in regards to this story, he was at an obvious disadvantage while playing with the other players because the only cards he were a pre-made starter deck which were balanced and built to play against other pre-made starters. If a player was using one and had not done any modifications to enhance it, he would find playing against players with access to a wider variety of cards held a tremendous advantage over them.
As Virtual Albert Einstein told Virtual Stephen Hawking, “All the quantum fluctuations in the universe will not change the cards in your hand.”
So, yeah, Kenny could very well best most master players simply based on his tremendous mind, he’d still be hard pressed to pull out a victory if his opening hand consisted of say, four non-swamp land cards, a Giant Growth, a Baron Sengir, and a Colossus of Sardia. He’d be really, REALLY hard pressed to pull out the win if, after drawing those cards, his opponent plays two Moxes, a Black Lotus, a land, a Lightning Bolt, a Llonowar Elf, then a Wheel of Fortune, then plays two more Moxes, followed by a Time Walk and then proceeds to uses the six to none mana advantage to cast a few nice sized creatures on that free turn. That’s not as an extreme of an exaggeration as I wished it was. If you went to enough tournaments in the nineties, the tournaments were dominated by what were coined as “Briefcase Guys.” Their main strategy consisted of a briefcase of cash and whatever the best cards at the time were. It’s pretty much why I stopped playing competitively and only played casually with friends.
But let’s get away from discussion of deck manufactured luck for a moment and get to the heart of the matter. Jason letting Kenny win. Matt makes a good point that Jason wouldn’t have to let Kenny win and that’s very true, but at that point in time, Jason doesn’t regard Kenny as an equal.
He’s only just met him and what he sees is a young, slightly socially awkward kid playing at a distinct competitive disadvantage. He doesn’t know that this kid has all these incredible gifts. He just sees something unfair and he wants to level the playing field.
And while the playing field has been evened up, Kenny just had the bad luck in playing a multiplayer game against Jason’s specific deck. As I said in the story, the deck wasn’t the most victorious deck ever created, but it did have an advantage in multiplayer games that had gone long. If Jason got his ‘wall’ down, players could still find ways to damage him, but usually did so at the risk of making themselves open to attacks by the other players, so most people would rather opt to attack the other players first and go after that deck last, which is pretty much what happened to Kenny and by the time he had to no longer worry about attacks from the other players, it was too late in the game to break down the ‘wall’ Jason had erected.
And when it got to that point, Jason let Kenny win, because, again, he didn’t see Kenny as an equal yet. He thought he was doing a nice thing. When Kenny confronts him, he doesn’t say “I’m a frickin’ genius who has access to a transdimensional gateway, so lay off the pity, asshole.” He rather makes it known that he knew that Jason had let him win and quite pointedly. If the pair had played again, one on one, on an even playing field, then there was no doubt in my mind that Kenny would’ve wiped the floor with him.
I probably could’ve done a much better part of conveying that last part, so that’s on me as a writer. In any case, that was the sum of my argument that I’ve wanted to make these last ten years. Thank you for indulging me on that rather lengthy rant.
[Matt's last word: "Tpppphhhhh!" -- Matt]
So, where do we go from here?
So, we’re coming to an end of this retrospective and now comes the big question – Why? What is the point of this whole exercise if I’m just going to go back into the perpetual ether and not come back for another two or three years? That is the point, I’m not.
There’s been this feeling inside me for some time and I wasn’t sure what it was. I couldn’t put into words what it was and why it was there. It was just this sort of general discontentment that I couldn’t shake no matter how many wonderful things had come into my life. I was finally able to solve that mystery. I know the source of that feeling and, more importantly, what had to be done. It was unfinished business and the only way to solve unfinished business is to finish it.
I thought I could leave Perspectives behind and go onto to other bigger projects, to finally go out and write that Great American Novel that everyone talks about and, as I found out, when I tried, I just found myself frustratingly stopped by writer’s block. It seemed like the only time I could get any writing done it was when I was working in the BS ½ universe. As I kept returning back to do things like Kenny’s Lab or other stories, it was simply a placebo for what I really needed. I needed to finish Perspectives. It has sat unfinished, on a cliffhanger, for several years now and, without even realizing it, that fact was eating at me.
I had tried to finish it, honestly, but some things happened to kill the momentum. At one point, I had planned to scrap all the remaining chapters and write one, long final chapter to tie up the loose ends and possibly leave the door to tie in with Matt’s in Japan chapters of the Main Series (Matt himself ended up doing the same thing with the Kenny’s Laboratory series, scrapping planned chapters for one long finale.)
I wrote about 20 pages of material and then a computer crash killed them deader than corduroy. They were gone and there were no back-ups to be found. It was a crushing blow that I pretty much never recovered from.
And even if I had recovered, a new thing happened - Life. Life had changed a lot from the days I originally wrote and conceived the Third Byte of Perspectives. The Travis and Charlotte wedding that was supposed to be the background for that series suddenly became a complication. Trav and Charl, a couple that was so long term they should’ve qualified as common-law, broke up messily, and it burned some bridges within our social circle. It felt very wrong to move forward with that idea, but I had already established it in Part 10, it wasn’t like I could just ignore that particular plot point.
Then there was my own relationship. I’m married to a most wonderful woman, a person whom I treasure more than anything on God’s green Earth, and to suddenly to write about this other version of me proclaiming love for another girl, even a fictional one, seemed to border on being unfaithful. I was so afraid of to do that to her that I thought it better to bury it rather than finish it.
Ultimately, it took time and personal reflection to learn some things. One of those is that my heart belongs to Sarah and nothing could ever make it betray her, especially not the world of fiction. I had allowed self-doubt and baseless fears push me into a corner instead of confronting them. Well, that ends now. If I can’t put up that mental barrier between the real world and fiction then I can’t call myself a writer, and despite all my faults, I do call myself that. I’m going to do what writers do – F’n write.
[I can sympathize here a bit... When I began Boy Scouts ½, I was very much a single person. Thus, it was safe to think of fictional me longing for a made up character. (And, of course, I masochistically made it so that that fictional character wanted nothing to do with the fictional me!) But now, I have someone, and am quite happy with her! On one hand, it is odd to write about "me" going after someone who isn't Rachel. But on the other, the "me" in question is the fictional Matt, who after all these years has become rather more separate an entity from the "real" me then he was when I began this venture... So even if it is odd on one level, fortunately it is a separation I can make! -- Matt]
As I said before Of Possible Alternatives is the 10th story (hopefully) published by Matt here on the BS ½ universe. It is, however, not the 10th story written. It is actually the 11th. There’s a story that has sat incomplete for two years and that’s where my immediate attention is turned toward. Matt, that is my Christmas present for you. I’m going to finish In Japan part 4 and finally complete the Neko-Haten scene that has tormented us both for so long. It was wrong of me to dump my writers block on your doorstep like an abandoned baby in a basket and I am going to make it up to you. [No worries, Jason! Although, on my end... sorry for this story having been delayed for so long... and thus it actually is the 11th in publication order, as well! -- Matt]
As the Afro’d one once told you, Matt, “Continue.” I’m going to make sure you can.
And after I finish In Japan part 4, I’m going to take a short break to gather up my notes and ideas and then I’m going to finally finish Perspectives. It’s not a plan or a hope or a desire. It’s what is going to happen.
I’m not under the delusion that vast groups of people have waited with bated breath for me to complete this series. I’m not even sure if anyone else will read it aside from Matt and myself. But y’know what? I’m cool with that. I want to finish it because it’s what I need to do and if anyone else takes enjoyment from it, then that’s just icing on the cake.
Mmmmmmm, cake.
See you all again soon. Thirteen years down and only a lifetime more to go.