[REV] End of Month Reviews - August 2004 [spoilers]

[Arspitzer]

Saxon Brenton wrote:
>     At first I was considering taking umbrage at the fact that the Daily 
>Paragraph Adventures clearly weren't paragraphs: they were simply a string 
>of sentences all joined together in one text block, thereby masquerading 

The Daily Super Textblock!  That's what I should have called it!

>as a single paragraph. This obviously worried Arthur as well, because in 
>#3 the Mighty Morphin' Paragraph Police made an appearance to complain 
>about just this stylistic violation... only to be vaporised by God using 
>his God vision. However, after that the series became the Daily Super-
>Short Story, which took care of the false advertising.

Yeah.  I had planned to do it as paragraphs.  Then I realized that It's
hard to cram complex ideas into one paragraph.


>     So far God has created Looniverse Y, then the character of Gotta-Luv-
>Me Lad, and continued on with incidents vaguely paralleling biblical acts 
>such as Gotta Luv Me Lad's search for a helpmeet in both Exciting Leather 

Helpmeet?  Is this some Australian slang you're using to confuse us 
Americans?
 

>LNHY #1

That should be Looniverse Y #1.

>     You know, when you sit down and think about it, it's amazing that a 
>shared writing universe like the LNH - which started as a joke thread 
>over a decade ago - should not only be continuing when other, more care-
>fully planned universes like Omega or Crossroads are, at the very best, 
>on indefinite hiatus, but is actually producing spin-off imprints from 
itself. An optimist might start theorising about the therapeutic >benefits 
>of comic book parody for letting off steam. A pessimist might start 
>theorising about lowest common denominators - before muttering about the 
>spread of cancer cells.

I'd say it's the anarchic nature of the LNH which makes it accessible.  
All you have to do to write an LNH story is write it, post it, and 
slap LNH on the subject line.

Crossroads died because it closed itself to new writers.

As for Omega, I think it was hard to become a new writer for them.  I 
think you had to go through some secret dark initiation ritual that 
involved sacrificing guppies or something.

(Ah, whatever happened to all those Omega writers?)

>I found the setup, and particularly the dementing spiel of the LNH 
>Member Detector, to be vastly amusing. But there's a paradox here that 
>kept nagging at me. A lot (but by no means all) of the humour came from 
>the metatextual situation of setting up a new universe's LNH, while at the 
>same time the LNHY NAQ (which I had read first) stipulates that the LNHY 
>continuity is (at least for the moment) a closed world, with no prospect 
>of crossovers. Under those circumstances, I'm not sure how long the joke 
>about being a new LNH franchise can be milked for.

I closed it off to Crossovers with other Imprints because those things 
tend to get messy.  I was hoping to attract new writers who felt 
overwhelmed by the massive LNH backstory.

Looking at how many new writers I've attracted though, it seems safe to 
say that the LNH's problem isn't a huge number of characters, confusing 
character usage issues, or a huge backstory.  It's simply that there is 
no new blood reading RACC.

I think it's probably because less people are reading USENET and more 
are drifting towards Web forums or Blogs or whatever.

I think the fact that there are only LNH stories this month is a 
bad sign for the health of the group.  I think it's a sign that the 
only thing keeping this group alive is a handful of old timers.

I wonder if someone made a call right now to create a serious superhero 
universe, like Badger did along time ago if anyone would take that call 
up?

Anyways, thanks for the reviews Saxon.  They're always appreciated.

Arthur "The Death of RACC is nigh" Spitzer