#i dont understand queue

nonasuch:

nonasuch:

nonasuch:

nonasuch:

1percentcharge:

1percentcharge:

Mockumentary set in medieval England with no explanation as to why or how a camera crew is there

A lot of people have mentioned monty python and the holy grail on this post which is accurate but I was envisioning more of a the office/what we do in the shadows type sitcom complete with talking heads and will-they-or-won’t-theys and with the technology that allows the mockumentary genre to exist going completely unquestioned by the entire cast despise it not occurring anywhere else in the otherwise realistically portrayed setting

…hang on, I think there’s a workable premise here.

The camera crew is a team of time-traveling scientists, studying an isolated village. They don’t bother trying to blend in with the locals much, because they know the village will be wiped out by plague in a few years and no trace of their expedition survives in the historical record. The villagers think they’re wealthy-but-eccentric travelers from a distant land, and they’ve bought off the local lord, a minor knight who doesn’t pay much attention to his serfs anyway.

The scientists are jaded. They’ve all been on multiple expeditions to doomed communities, and they’ve learned not to get too attached to their subjects. Part of the mockumentary format includes their video diaries, internal squabbles, and personality conflicts. The rest is interviews with the locals, footage of the crew tagging along with them in their daily lives, and the various experiments members of the crew are running.

(Most of their research is innocuous: water and soil samples, collecting plant and animal specimens to restore future biodiversity, measuring linguistic drift. All their planned human-subject research had to pass an ethics review board.)

(That said, sometimes opportunities for impromptu data collection arise. And sometimes you get bored and want to know what would happen if you projected a 40-foot holographic cow on the road outside the village.)

(The time travel science ethics review board has very clear rules about starting cults: no matter how funny you think it would be, don’t.)

The tone of the show is pitch-black comedy, at least to start with. The crew is burned out and cynical, the villagers are poor and underfed and overworked. Nobody’s doing their best work, or even trying to, really. This is a team that couldn’t get better, sexier, more exciting assignments, and a village full of people whose idea of a better future is a harvest that fails less than last year’s.

But over the course of, say, three seasons — not quite as long as it’s going to take for the plague to arrive — the research team does something they’re really not supposed to do. They get invested. They start to care, a little. They give the villagers a tiny bit of help, here and there — and they’re shocked to see just how much the villagers manage to do with that help.

But the villagers are still doomed, even if they’re clever and curious and likable. Even if a few of them are smart enough to figure out that the research crew aren’t just weird rich foreigners. Even if letting them all die is starting to feel like a waste, or even a crime.

There’s nothing they can do about it. History is very clear about the village’s fate, and they can’t change history.

Right?

ooh ooh okay. the cold open for every episode (the equivalent to B99’s morning meeting cold opens) is the expedition leader going over a video message from her future self. like just a day or two in the future. usually it’s nothing big, just letting her know about any events in the village that they should try to get recordings of, and warning her about any new bullshit her underlings are going to try to get away with.

in theory she would also get warned away from any actions that could negatively impact the timeline, but this is an extremely low-stakes, low-prestige assignment. everyone with actual career prospects is fighting tooth and nail for the sexy assignments, like pre- volcano Pompeii or Yellowstone. nothing her team can do here really matters, so she never gets warned about anything major.

until sweeps week, probably.

some fun running gags:

the scientists always say decades without specifying the century, leading to constant misunderstandings

“hey it could be worse, we could have been stuck in the 20s”

“what are you talking about? the 1920s are a dream assignment compared to this!”

“oh lol no I meant the 2020s, my bad”

“you know what I miss? live music. when I was stationed in the 90s I got to go to so many concerts”

“no shit? oh man did you get to see Nirvana live, that would rule”

“no but I did see The Magic Flute in Vienna! with Mozart conducting!”

additional running gag: the show starts when the team has already been on site for a while, so most of the villagers are already pretty blasé about seeing future technology. BUT there is one villager who just. always loses her shit, every time. without fail. just full on “BACK, foul creature!!!! WHAT is this FIENDISH SORCERY you wield????” while her neighbors are like “okay calm your tits Maud, they do this every tuesday and it’s fine”

running gag that i am unashamedly stealing from star trek: constant references to events and cultural figures from future history (ie the period between now and when the scientists come from). also it’s never clear, based on the scientists’ offhand references to their childhoods and home lives, whether their future society is a blissful utopia or a very weird dystopia.

running gag with eventual payoff: there are two small and very grubby village children who like to follow the crew around. they never speak. we get lots of reaction shots of the two of them staring blankly at whatever nonsense just happened.

after at least two years of this, a member of the crew is trying to fix a piece of equipment and having no success. the two small children wander into frame (as they often do) and the scientist ignores them (as he usually does)

only this time, the smaller and grubbier child wordlessly pulls a tool out of the scientist’s toolbox and hands it to the larger and slightly less grubby child, who fixes the problem and hands the tool back to the (now dumbfounded) scientist. they walk away, still silent. now it’s the scientist’s turn to stare blankly into the camera.

for maximum comedy the expedition head should be verging on Michael Scott levels of obliviousness. just floating along in a bubble of reassurance from her future self that there’s nothing to worry about.

the cold open is like “good news! the supply drop will go smoothly, no hiccups” and then in the episode we see that their supplies from the future, which were supposed to be teleported to an uninhabited clearing in the woods, landed in the village square in front of the church. on a sunday. and the villagers opened the crates and walked off with a bunch of future tech that the crew now has to hunt down and reclaim.

and they tell their boss none of this, so when she goes to record her message for her past self at the end of the episode she can be like “good news! ” and carry on living her life with the serene confidence of someone who believes in horoscopes and also gets to write her own horoscopes, because her staff makes sure she never knows about their constant fuckups and eleventh-hour saves.

if this is your jam, while you’re waiting for it to get made may I point you in the direction of

every Connie Willis novel

soaugust:

mutualintelligibility:

“It’s often unhealthy to hyper-analyze your sexuality to the point where how you experience it changes where you belong. This is why the idea that broader terms are somehow more restrictive is baffling. Continuously breaking labels down and creating terminology for each facet of one’s identity shrinks communities until it’s just one person convinced that they’re the only one who relates to their experiences. It isolates people and ignores the importance of individuality within a collective identity.”

On Hyperpersonalized Sexual Identity

The author also dropped some gems in the last paragraph of the short article:

c9eeeeed:

darkcomedies:

darkcomedies:

the most insane double casting i’ve heard of is ophelia and horatio being played by the same actress. the implications of that drive me crazy

you guys are doing things in the tags of this post

#to this day my favorite performance of hamlet i’ve seen is one where there were two hamlets#one was the dutiful son and the other was his vengeful id#and they split all the lines in the play depending on which hamlet was speaking#all the soliloquies became arguments between the two and it was SO good#the second hamlet doesn’t appear until hamlet’s father appears and tells him Claudius is to blame for his death#he opens to curtains and his first line is ‘Murder?’#and the other characters can’t see that second hamlet at first - just the initial one#until slowly throughout the play the second hamlet is the one they look at and interact with#until finally the first hamlet - the dutiful prince - is the one who’s ignored#anyway it was metal as fuck holy shit#i wish i could watch it again but i have no idea if it was recorded (viarythyme)

bunnystiel:

learning

kerleyfries:

pain tolerance

pensivelyplayfulme:

pensivelyplayfulme:

Since Citizen’s United made corporations legally people, I think, like people, they should be jailed (separated from society, unable to do jack shit) instead of fined when they commit heinous acts and I think we should impose a “natural lifespan” on them where if a corporation reaches a 100 years old they just die.

And I’m not kidding.

• Think about what happens if work knowingly and purposefully shorts you $100 on your paycheck versus what happens if you pocket $100 from the register.
• Think about what happens for on-the-job negligent deaths versus the maximum sentence for manslaughter by an individual
• Think about what happens if you defraud the federal government versus if banks do it

If they get human rights they deserve human culpability

headspace-hotel:

itsbenedict:

etirabys:

Was staring at a piece of infrastructure, pondering on the strangeness that, as sturdy as it was, it required maintenance and eventually replacement. That everything was like this – except for biological constructs that could perpetuate themselves. But they mutate. So – what if we could build everything out of biology? Our sinks and bridges become immortal – yet destined to become eerie, shifted, unrecognizable things within thousands of years.

this is an out-of-context journal entry you find discarded in an abandoned science lab in a horror game

okay but like…what kinds of selective pressures affect bridges

mini-wrants:

Love it when people act like proving “rape or incest” exceptions for abortion are even possible, lmao

Quick, prove you were raped so you can access an abortion! How? I don’t know! Maybe you’ll have to get a rape test done at the hospital and prove you have sufficient bruising? Maybe it’ll require filing charges? Maybe it’ll require a full ass criminal trial which is gonna take longer than 9 months, lol.

Prove you were a victim of incest! How? I don’t know, because if you’re a victim of incest you might very well be a young child who doesn’t have the emotional strength and knowledge to even describe the abuse that’s happening to you, let alone advocate for your rights. And even if you are an adult, I dare you to go in front of a judge and detail the sexual abuse from you brother/father/uncle and come out of that untraumatised, all to get permission to have access to abortion. Make sure you get the courage up in just a few weeks!

What about threats to life of the mother exceptions? Quick! What’s the line you draw there? If a mother has extremely high blood pressure and diabetes and is at risk of death early enough in the pregnancy, is that enough for a termination? What about if the mother has an ectopic pregnancy? Or do we have to wait until the mother is suffering from sepsis and shock, blood poisoning maybe? Do mental health issues ever factor in?

It is literally impossible to place such restrictions on abortion that actually work, that are feasible and acceptable to those that would otherwise ban abortions outright.

Abortion on demand is the only answer.

lizstiel:

first thing I heard, clear as a bell: d̸̫̚e̷̝̋a̴̤̔n̶̟̎ ̶̝̓w̶̰̕i̴̞̿ṅ̴͓c̶̲͠h̷͎͂è̷̝s̴͙̚t̵̰͘e̵͗͜r̶͐͜ ̵̠̇î̸̖s̵̞̈́ ̸͕͐s̴͎͑a̷̜̚v̶̛͖é̵̱d̸͔̏

carrotfricker:

if anyone’s going to destroy this world, it’s me.