The loneliest number since the number one.

[dejana]

Some unrelated stuff.

LiveJournal is owned by a bunch of money-grubbing bastards. This is hardly news, but it bears repeating given recent developments. In case you haven't already heard, LJ has done away with the Basic (free + no ads) account option when creating a new journal. There is now no way to join LJ (or create new socks or communities) without generating revenue for SUP. And of course, they attempted to slip this by everyone hoping the existing users wouldn't notice. When they got caught, they tried to feed the angry masses the absolutely asinine excuse of three options being "too confusing" for new users.

Also, I stumbled on this website today, and got sucked into an interesting article about humor. [direct source - the entire article has plenty of comedic value itself.]

Essentially, the incongruence theory of humor suggests that an event registers as "funny" when it starts out by conforming to established patterns, but then defies the person's model of reality by taking an unanticipated but logically valid detour.

What this makes me realize is with "The Bad Crack" AMV, I essentially created one of those really irritating "comedy" fanfics where a ton of random stupid crap happens and it's not actually funny at all. There's no pattern, no logic. And like those clueless authors, when it failed I didn't understand why people didn't find it amusing.

On the other hand, it could be that I was aiming for the other half of the paragraph:

In a similar way, humor can occur when a nonsensical sequence suddenly reveals an underlying coherence, a method frequently used in joke punchlines.

i.e., "Look at all this random craziness in Azumanga Daioh! omgwtf? Aha, they're all on drugs!"

Still, the failure. It seems to me that cons are looking more for the first kind of humor. At Anime North 2006, for example, there was an Excel Saga video of the second type that I thought was absolutely brilliant. I downloaded it later and watched it a million times. But it lost the contest.

Just some thoughts.

Comments

[sache.livejournal.com]

... Is this the same vid with the distracting background?

[sea_thoughts]

OMG, seriously?! I would never have joined LJ if it weren't for that option. >.> What's the matter, not enough money?

[revolutionaryjo.livejournal.com]

I don't know, I would actually argue that your vid relies on the established pattern of "we expect the shows we watch to not be on drugs." So it applies, although it could apply more directly if that were established somehow in the video itself. The song itself makes that difficult though.