You can say a lot of bad things about the lottery in general but isn’t it great how it gets people talking about what they would do with all that money and what their dreams are and how bright the future is looking right now? And maybe the secret is that if you didn’t win the lottery maybe you can still keep all that optimism anyway?
Shay Pierce, Turning down Zynga: Why I left after the $210M Omgpop buy (via joshuajabbour)
Zynga is a sleazy company and that’s why you won’t find me on Words with Friends or Draw Something.
I don’t care about being on a Harold team.
I don’t care about being on a Lloyd team.
I don’t care about being on a house team.
I just want to be back on an improv team.
Fuck the theatres for making that so hard to do.
I was just reading the Lloyd Team Announcement and a thought came to mind. The FAQ says:
Once on a Lloyd Team, would it be possible to be moved to a Harold Team?
Yes! Going forward, if/when there are positions to fill on Harold Night, performers will be drawn primarily from Lloyd Teams.
Going forward, the general progression through the UCB team system will be being placed on a Lloyd Team first and then being placed on a Harold Team based on performance on a Lloyd Team. Though it would be theoretically possible to be placed directly on a Harold Team in exceptional circumstances.
Could a Lloyd Team become a Harold Team?
Yes! If a Lloyd Team was excelling as a team, at the discretion of the artistic director, an entire Lloyd Team could be made a Harold Team. I want Lloyd Teams to focus on being the best teams they can be. As with all good improv, the focus should be on the ensemble and on excelling as a team, not excelling as an individual.
I would love for it to be the rule, not the exception, that entire teams are promoted from Lloyd Night to Harold Night. On the whole, I’ve seen more harm than good come from breaking up and reconstructing teams than simply letting successful teams continue. I don’t know if I believe anyone who thinks they know how to assemble a good improv team out of loose improvisors. I’m sure people have their theories, but has anyone in a position to assemble teams had even a 50% success rate?
All the awkwardness of Harold Auditions, right from the comfort of your browser.
Think you can make it on Harold Night before 2025?
(Also, I think Ben Ragheb made something similar. That’s great, too.)
Nice job, Kurt, but you should have taken the time to encrypt your jokes.
Actually, while I’m nitpicking: your code says
var PROBABILITY_FOR_CALLBACK = 100.0 / 500.0; var PROBABILITY_FOR_HAROLD_TEAM = 10.0 / 50.0;
That’s close but not accurate. According to Nate, there were over 400 people competing for 64 callback slots, so PROBABILITY_FOR_CALLBACK = 64/400 (16% instead of 20%). The second number is a little harder to guess, since the theatre doesn’t always take the same number of performers. But 10 (one new team plus two replacements) seems like a decent guess. So PROBABILITY_FOR_HAROLD_TEAM should be 10/64 (15.6% instead of 20%).
What’s interesting is that this year a full lineup of Lloyd teams will be created, which means that PROBABILITY_FOR_ANY_TEAM is 42/64 (65%) this year. In other words, people going in to callbacks on Tuesday have better than even odds of getting on a team.
What happens in the future will be hard to say, as the theatre begins having Lloyd auditions every six months, and Harold team members will be promoted from within. It’s not clear (and I’ll bet Nate hasn’t even decided) what the turnover will be every 6 months for Lloyd Night.
In summary, your mathematical model does not accurately capture the complexity of the situation. But I’m not sure it can be represented in any Turing-complete language anyway.
Guys, for real. The lack of a standard is driving me insane!
When we’re reblogging people, do we put our own comments over or under the original ones?
It’s called top-posting or bottom-posting.
When the Internet was exclusively available to civilized people, everybody would take the time to carefully edit their replies, quote only what was needed for context, and post the new text below.
Then Microsoft unleashed Outlook on the world, which actually made it difficult to bottom-post, and encouraged a generation of people to treat email as carelessly as gum chewing.
And here we are.
how dare you
At this risk of being crucified, I’m going to respond to this.
The overall problem I find with their open letter to “women” - besides the fact that it’s referencing a TV show that ended 8 years ago about women twice the age of most college grads - is that is speaks to a demographic I hardly ever encountered in NYC. Are there tube-top dress wearing, Pink Elephant frequenting, banker-flirting women in NY? Sure. Are most of the women living/moving to the city only interested in those things? NO. So please allow me to speak to the rest of the female population who might also feel slighted or offended by the Julias’ out-of-touch words of “wisdom.”
First, the CW is preparing a new Sex and the City spin-off based on a younger Carrie Bradshaw character. It’s mentioned in the second paragraph of Price & Allison’s letter. They aren’t just randomly writing about an 8 year old show.
Second, why is the fact that they are addressing a demographic you hardly ever encountered a problem? You acknowledge they exist. You object to the idea that they represent all women, but are they saying that? Their op-ed is titled “A warning to a new generation of women — don’t let ‘Sex and the City’ ruin your life” — but that’s like reading, “Hey kids, don’t do drugs,” and getting upset about the implication that all kids everywhere want to do drugs.
(Also, it is very likely that an editor, not the authors, wrote that title. The text of the piece isn’t actually a letter addressed to anybody; it’s just Price & Allison writing about their own experience as disillusioned fans of the Sex and the City, and hypothesizing about whether The Carrie Diaries will have the same effect.)
You seem to believe that Price & Allison think every woman who moved to New York City did so because of Sex and the City. Do you honestly think they believe that? Or is it more likely that they did, met other women who did, and are now discussing women like themselves who got duped by a television show which made life in New York seem easier than it is.
Part of “treat your scene partners like geniuses” means not running with the most asinine interpretation of somebody else’s words. Everybody* is quick to jump to the conclusion that the other guy is an idiot because that’s the easiest way to justify yourself as right and them as wrong and nobody needs to consider anybody else’s perspective on the world.
*By “everybody” I didn’t mean “every single person in existence”, just as Price & Allison didn’t literally mean every woman in existence would rather be Carrie than Samantha or Miranda or Charlotte. They are talking about themselves and the type of women who moved to New York to live out the fantasies portrayed on that show. So what if you aren’t a part of that group? That doesn’t make it any less real.
If I say “everybody would rather be a billionaire than a pauper” (while making a point about how greed can be harmful), and you produce a group of people who would sincerely rather not be billionaires, congratulations, you have demonstrated that you like to argue.
Spoiler alert: here’s the conclusion of Price & Allison’s op-ed:
So a warning to the next generation of Carrie acolytes. Treat “Sex and the City” like “Star Trek.” A strange new world you will never visit except on TV.
This is a sensible message about a problem with a lot of TV shows that portray young people living in cities. It’s great that you were too smart to be fooled by it, or that it never appealed to you in the first place. Good for you.
When people put on deodorant they know they are perpetuating a lie. But when they drink soda, they want it to be genuinely good.
Apropos of nothing, I just like this bit of design:
The background color is also slightly evolving from layout to layout, preventing the page emitting too much light into your already strained eyes. For a page with a white background color, when the browser window widens, its brightness rises accordingly. So I made the background color dimmer and dimmer as the window’s width gets larger. It’s not scientific at all, and I might need to adjust my color values to fully achieve my goal, but it’s a start.
You can think of making art as product-based or process-based. Creation or performance. Permanent or transient.
I don’t think there’s a real dichotomy here. In other words, I don’t think whether or not you have a artifact at the end has much to do with the making of art.
You do work. Somebody else experiences it.
The difference between a product or a performance is just whether the audience is seeing you do the work. In the case of a product, the audience doesn’t see anything until all the work is done. In the case of a live performance, they see a part of it (or all of it, in the unlikely event that you’ve didn’t practice or prepare).
But the work is the thing. If you really want to make a product and have a great idea for how it should be but you don’t actually enjoy the work that is required to create it, you won’t. In other words, it’s still about the process. It’s just a performance you do in private.
I think I used to aspire to the former. I wanted to make stuff and have something to show for it. (I’ve heard lots of improv people describe that as a drawback of improv.)
I think I’ve stopped thinking that way. I think I appreciate the immediate experience more. I think I like performing, and experiencing, and doing. I think I don’t see the process as a necessary step in order to get to the product; I think I see the process as the point.
When people complain about improv in this regard, they are never saying that the improv would be better if we could capture it and play it back effectively. It’s not about the improv. It is, as you say, whether they “have something to show for it.” It’s a selfish (though justified) desire for evidence that you could use to profit from the time you spent on it.
I think what you are actually saying is you are enjoying improv for its own sake and no longer care if you can parlay it into a job.
I think I’ve felt that way for a while, but never put my finger on it. I hated writing sketch comedy because it wasn’t fun; the “I hate writing but I like having written” argument didn’t move me. I don’t feel good when I’ve written something that goes well; I feel good when I’m performing and it goes well.
I’ve always suspected when writers say they “hate writing” they actually mean they hate being obliged to write on demand, hate getting started, hate having to write when they aren’t feeling it. But I think when they are actually writing, they love the act of writing.
But they don’t realize this (and therefore give bad advice) because, when their minds are in that state, they forget that they are writing.
Hello new followers! The wonderful Kate Beaton linked to us and our temporary hosting has now broken. We’re scrambling to get our permanent hosting sorted out for you as soon as we can. Thank you for your patience!
Thanks for answering the question of whether a free Dropbox account is a usable platform for podcast hosting.
