The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Achewood => Achewood => Topic started by: Dexter on May 04, 2009, 10:08:01 am
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http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=05042009
I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the paradoxical invention of nachos in the Achewood universe, but on the other hand, the RSS title is "Romanticized Sketch of the Birth of the Nacho." so perhaps Little Nephew did not, in fact, invent nachos in the past so that he could later go on to invent nachos in the past.
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I like how much Onstad loves nachos.
I think that maybe I have just never had great nachos. I am always disappointed.
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The Welshmen are right, albeit for the wrong reason. THeir instinctive distrust makes sense. Anything more than tuppence for a nacho is the sort of madness seen only in Saracens and Papists.
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I like how much Onstad loves nachos.
I think that maybe I have just never had great nachos. I am always disappointed.
Have you ever made your own nachos? Broil chips beans w/ hot sauce mixed in and cheese. Take it out after it bubbles and salsa and guac and, if you want, sour cream, or whatever you want, I guess.
Oh My God.
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I just made the mistake of thinking too hard about this and I'm all confused, because I have never paid too much attention to the Molly's family part of the backstory.
They're dead, right? So somehow, in death, all the Welsh stick together? But I thought they were like 17th century Welsh, would they have had chili peppers? But wait, look at their outfits, are those neckties? Did they wear neckties then? And if they're dead, anyway, do they have chili peppers even if they didn't have chili peppers when they were alive?
Yeah, if I wasn't going to pay attention, this was the wrong time to start thinking about it.
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I just made the mistake of thinking too hard about this and I'm all confused, because I have never paid too much attention to the Molly's family part of the backstory.
They're dead, right? So somehow, in death, all the Welsh stick together? But I thought they were like 17th century Welsh, would they have had chili peppers? But wait, look at their outfits, are those neckties? Did they wear neckties then? And if they're dead, anyway, do they have chili peppers even if they didn't have chili peppers when they were alive?
Yeah, if I wasn't going to pay attention, this was the wrong time to start thinking about it.
Chili peppers were brought back in 1493 with Columbus. Cravats were worn by knights-errant so I'm sure the fashion would be around then. The hats, I'm not so sure.
Then again, Onstad doesn't care too much about historical accuracy. The curse of Gladdington Castle takes place in the late 1200's, yet a carriage driver with huge mutton chops is seen uttering the curse "Egads! May your son ..." The reason for this anachronism is the same reason that we have talking cats with only two breasts: because it's funny, stop overthinking.
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http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=05042009
I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the paradoxical invention of nachos in the Achewood universe, but on the other hand, the RSS title is "Romanticized Sketch of the Birth of the Nacho." so perhaps Little Nephew did not, in fact, invent nachos in the past so that he could later go on to invent nachos in the past.
Way way wait...they are in the past? I thought they were in heaven somehow. Doesn't Molly come to the cast by way of one of Beef's trips to the afterlife? And Molly's paw did, afterall, kill Li'l Nephew to bring him into the tribe (I seem to recollect a gun, placed stethescope style, and a memorable sound effect, "KOOJ"!). Someone 'splain!
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They are in the 'Ye Olde Welsh Catte Heavane', a place where they don't exactly have their fingers on the zeitgeist.
This thread title is all wrong. It should be 'I boo the Nacho as his father.'
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i'm amused by the fact that there is this level of introspection and analysis into a comic strip about talking cats, medieval welshmen and nachos.
it's like a little piece of cioran wiggled its way into your souls
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i'm amused by the fact that there is this level of introspection and analysis into a comic strip about talking cats, medieval welshmen and nachos.
it's like a little piece of cioran wiggled its way into your souls
As a flowchart, I have no soul.
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Way way wait...they are in the past? I thought they were in heaven somehow.
No no no... STOP thinking.
Yes, they are in heaven, but they died in the past. So, it makes sense that they talk funny and don't know what nachos are, when they get there. But why didn't they find out about nachos in all the time they've been in heaven since then? No one who died, like, last year, already told them? Does that mean that when people go to heaven they don't get to see the people who are already there? Except Little Nephew is some kind of exception? But if we don't get to see people who died in the past, then do we not get to see our loved ones who died before us? Or is there some kind of deadline or something?
NOOO STOP!
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It appears to be a matter of choice. Molly kept up with the times and was partying with Blister, after all.
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THE MOLLY PARADOX
starring Ashton Kutcher.
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I like how deliciously the cheese is dripping off the nacho as CS offers it to the skeptical Welshman.
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People, people. Sit down while Professor Toaster schools your fine asses.
So Heaven is basically just Heaven. But the Welshies from 1750 liked Wales in 1750, so they kept it that way. They're in the same Heaven as everybody else, just in a fenced-off area. Similar to how Colonial Williamsburg or Amish Country both exist in modern-day America, but in fenced-off areas. Molly hopped the fence to Regular Heaven where she met Beef. The Sanders Clan let Charley into their gated community because they liked him. Charley did no time traveling. He is in the present, but the ghosts are very set in their ways.
Here endeth the lesson.
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People, people. Sit down while Professor Toaster schools your fine asses.
So Heaven is basically just Heaven. But the Welshies from 1750 liked Wales in 1750, so they kept it that way. They're in the same Heaven as everybody else, just in a fenced-off area. Similar to how Colonial Williamsburg or Amish Country both exist in modern-day America, but in fenced-off areas. Molly hopped the fence to Regular Heaven where she met Beef. The Sanders Clan let Charley into their gated community because they liked him. Charley did no time traveling. He is in the present, but the ghosts are very set in their ways.
Here endeth the lesson.
It's like a bad M. Night Shamalamadingdong movie, except with dead talking cats instead of wooden actors.
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A wizard did it.
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It's like a bad M. Night Shamalamadingdong movie
But you repeat yourself.
Here's hoping for a human writer character whose planned book is going to save the world.
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People, people. Sit down while Professor Toaster schools your fine asses.
So Heaven is basically just Heaven. But the Welshies from 1750 liked Wales in 1750, so they kept it that way. They're in the same Heaven as everybody else, just in a fenced-off area. Similar to how Colonial Williamsburg or Amish Country both exist in modern-day America, but in fenced-off areas. Molly hopped the fence to Regular Heaven where she met Beef. The Sanders Clan let Charley into their gated community because they liked him. Charley did no time traveling. He is in the present, but the ghosts are very set in their ways.
Here endeth the lesson.
It's also that Molly's dad was kind of cheap if you remember. So they don't get to move around between the different planes and such.
On my birthday I get Nachos for every strip. I also had Nachos for dinner. So appropriate.
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Here's hoping for a human writer character whose planned book is going to save the world.
Ah but I am too busy feeling sorry for myself and my kind-of-but-kind-of-not broken toe.
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Yeah what became of that book you were writing?
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My brother had a seizure, turned out he has a disorder in the veins of his brain, I had to reconstruct my life around being able to drive him into work in the morning and drive him back, locked myself into a dayjob for longer than I'd thought with the terrible curse that is split-weekends to be able to do this and... two-thirds of a year later, here I am, too exhausted most of the time to do much more than scribble on messageboards and in facebook and my diary and so on.
Ain't a self-pity thing, I would and will do whatever I can do to help him eventually get better, but here we are.
There's that old Futurama chestnut, you know.
Something along the lines of:
"And why is there yogurt on your bed?" "It used to be milk and... well... time makes fools of us all."
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People, people. Sit down while Professor Toaster schools your fine asses.
So Heaven is basically just Heaven. But the Welshies from 1750 liked Wales in 1750, so they kept it that way. They're in the same Heaven as everybody else, just in a fenced-off area. Similar to how Colonial Williamsburg or Amish Country both exist in modern-day America, but in fenced-off areas. Molly hopped the fence to Regular Heaven where she met Beef. The Sanders Clan let Charley into their gated community because they liked him. Charley did no time traveling. He is in the present, but the ghosts are very set in their ways.
Here endeth the lesson.
I buy that.
Hey LFM, care to give a primer on what the book was/hopefully will be about? Is there a thread somewhere here for it, or what?
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LFM talked about it here (http://touamb.com/index.php/topic,4032.0.html), but I think it had mostly to do with issues of titling the work.
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John Lennon survives his assassination attempt to end up the defacto leader of the American opposition at the dawn of Reagan's America.
A braintrust of left-leaning scientists and artists (actual historical figures) tries to turn the tide back in the early eighties via precipitating a wide-scale telepathic awakening but things backfire very very badly, some in realistic ways, some in science-fictiony ways, until much of the United States is disbanded or ruined, except for the Eastern Seaboard and middle South which are being psychically manipulated into some kind of shadow play version of 1950s America.
The poorly organized underground, barely held together by the force of Lennon's fame, takes one last ridiculously-unlikely shot at success... building a machine to send out a distress call to parallel timelines, in hopes of reinforcements... but all it ends up doing is plucking a sort of timetraveller out of the stream of reality and depositing him, suddenly powerless, at their feet.
And the time traveller (more a rider of parallel dimensions, really, there's no going backwards, there's no changing the past, there ain't no going back) isn't particularly heroic, he isn't trying to set right what once went wrong or anything, he's been mostly squandering his abilities trying to find a world where a group of friends from his youth are all alive and in tact so that he can retreat back into the best part of his life.
A journey out of Manhattan, through the stitched-together ruins of the upper Midwest, to try and petition the only known person with time-type powers on that world ensues... John and his close circle of friends hoping that perhaps he'll help them upon meeting one of his own, the timetraveller hoping he can get help getting his powers back so he can return to his sad stunted quest.
Everyone's exhausted, everyone's tired of running but nobody really knows how to give up, just on momentum.
Bob Dylan is a born-again Christian country music star in the shadow America, Country Rob Zimmerman.
Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K Dick are two of John's closest surviving advisors.
The nexus of the telepathic control network are forty-or-so comatose telepaths, wired up to machines, broadcasting out complacency from the tops of the tallest buildings remaining in New York, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre.
At this point, I have no idea if it is proof that I am entirely mad.
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At the risk of out-Bobbying Isosceles, I have to ask - though this be madness, yet there is meth to it?
But no, it sounds interesting. I'm particularly curious re: samples of dialogues from the mouths of those long gone.
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John suffered an injury to his throat in surviving the assassination and can no longer speak... but a telepath is there to speak his ideas for him, though in her own words.
Phil and Kurt talk, though. Endlessly. Phil and Kurt as Rosencrantz and Guilderstern types, the insane mystic and the weary atheist in the face of all that fantastic madness, and their rolling debate as to the meaning of it all is one of my favourite aspects of the story.
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John Lennon survives his assassination attempt to end up the defacto leader of the American opposition at the dawn of Reagan's America.
A braintrust of left-leaning scientists and artists (actual historical figures) tries to turn the tide back in the early eighties via precipitating a wide-scale telepathic awakening but things backfire very very badly, some in realistic ways, some in science-fictiony ways, until much of the United States is disbanded or ruined, except for the Eastern Seaboard and middle South which are being psychically manipulated into some kind of shadow play version of 1950s America.
The poorly organized underground, barely held together by the force of Lennon's fame, takes one last ridiculously-unlikely shot at success... building a machine to send out a distress call to parallel timelines, in hopes of reinforcements... but all it ends up doing is plucking a sort of timetraveller out of the stream of reality and depositing him, suddenly powerless, at their feet.
And the time traveller (more a rider of parallel dimensions, really, there's no going backwards, there's no changing the past, there ain't no going back) isn't particularly heroic, he isn't trying to set right what once went wrong or anything, he's been mostly squandering his abilities trying to find a world where a group of friends from his youth are all alive and in tact so that he can retreat back into the best part of his life.
A journey out of Manhattan, through the stitched-together ruins of the upper Midwest, to try and petition the only known person with time-type powers on that world ensues... John and his close circle of friends hoping that perhaps he'll help them upon meeting one of his own, the timetraveller hoping he can get help getting his powers back so he can return to his sad stunted quest.
Everyone's exhausted, everyone's tired of running but nobody really knows how to give up, just on momentum.
Bob Dylan is a born-again Christian country music star in the shadow America, Country Rob Zimmerman.
Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K Dick are two of John's closest surviving advisors.
The nexus of the telepathic control network are forty-or-so comatose telepaths, wired up to machines, broadcasting out complacency from the tops of the tallest buildings remaining in New York, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre.
At this point, I have no idea if it is proof that I am entirely mad.
I think YOU just gave me a vein disorder in my brain.
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I'd read it.
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That sounds really good.
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It reminds me of this. (http://queryletters.blogspot.com/2005/08/its-like-i-set-off-bomb-in-my-script.html)
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Really, it's kind of all about idealism and the way that idealism cuts both ways. The way nostalgia is kind of the worst thing of all, sometimes, especially nostalgia for things that didn't actually quite happen that way.
Is a ruined world that knows why it was ruined better or worse than a world in ignorant denial? And is our world the first one or the second one? What happens when most of the people who were supposed to be changing the world settle down and get jobs and have kids and... is it losing perspective to stop trying to change the world in trade for protecting your kids or is it being realistic? Did the generation before mine accept their responsibilities or did they pass the buck to a generation of self-absorbed emotional cripples made completely ineffectual by the comfort in which they were raised and the fact that the slightest whiff of pain can cause us to fold? Can cause me to fold? Etc.
Did they get our parents to trade a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in the cage, for our sakes, and what did growing up in a cage exactly DO for us?
Is a person like John Lennon better as a dead symbol or alive in a world where everyone sort of expects him to lead because he's famous? Is it better or worse that he hates it but does it anyway because there's no one else to? Would we be better off without charismatic leaders to listen to for one generation and then watch history turn into cruel parodies, like Jesus, like Muhammed, like Gandhi, like anyone... or is that the very best we can hope for, warts and all?
What's a world like where the only people left fighting are tired old men and a world of children convinced by post-modernism and irony and telepathic assault that action is ultimately ineffective so why bother? And is that that world or is it ours?
And as for the time-traveller... what's the line between chasing your past down to hold it in your arms again out of loyalty and love and ideals... and just chasing your own fuck*ng tail? At what point is it noble and honourable and at what point is it a huge wasteful narcissistic wank?
Except, you know, not an essay on these questions that keep me up at night but...
Something of a cross between Gilgamesh and the Wizard of Oz and the teevee series "Jericho" and my own terribly guilty conscience for all the things that I could not save.
And spires topped with mind-controlling vegetative empaths called "Freedom Towers". And steam trains fitted with cloaking devices invented by Brian Eno. And a layman's misunderstanding of the mid-20th century theoretical physics theories of Hugh Everett and Feynman and so on. And the belief of some Native American tribes that Mackinac Island in Michigan was the first piece of land to rise back out of the waters after The Great Flood.
And, again, the fact that I'm probably not entirely sane. Anyway.
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Really, it's kind of all about idealism and the way that idealism cuts both ways. The way nostalgia is kind of the worst thing of all, sometimes, especially nostalgia for things that didn't actually quite happen that way.
Is a ruined world that knows why it was ruined better or worse than a world in ignorant denial? And is our world the first one or the second one? What happens when most of the people who were supposed to be changing the world settle down and get jobs and have kids and... is it losing perspective to stop trying to change the world in trade for protecting your kids or is it being realistic? Did the generation before mine accept their responsibilities or did they pass the buck to a generation of self-absorbed emotional cripples made completely ineffectual by the comfort in which they were raised and the fact that the slightest whiff of pain can cause us to fold? Can cause me to fold? Etc.
Did they get our parents to trade a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in the cage, for our sakes, and what did growing up in a cage exactly DO for us?
Is a person like John Lennon better as a dead symbol or alive in a world where everyone sort of expects him to lead because he's famous? Is it better or worse that he hates it but does it anyway because there's no one else to? Would we be better off without charismatic leaders to listen to for one generation and then watch history turn into cruel parodies, like Jesus, like Muhammed, like Gandhi, like anyone... or is that the very best we can hope for, warts and all?
What's a world like where the only people left fighting are tired old men and a world of children convinced by post-modernism and irony and telepathic assault that action is ultimately ineffective so why bother? And is that that world or is it ours?
And as for the time-traveller... what's the line between chasing your past down to hold it in your arms again out of loyalty and love and ideals... and just chasing your own fuck*ng tail? At what point is it noble and honourable and at what point is it a huge wasteful narcissistic wank?
Except, you know, not an essay on these questions that keep me up at night but...
Something of a cross between Gilgamesh and the Wizard of Oz and the teevee series "Jericho" and my own terribly guilty conscience for all the things that I could not save.
Without actual examples of how these questions are addressed in the text, I have to say that the heartbroken solemnity with which you reference them in this summary makes your story redolent of the same "second rate tautological insularity" (as a friend of mine once said, explaining in part his distaste for David Foster Wallace's fiction) which plagues much of contemporary American fiction. On a personal level there's much to commend to it, since by writing about things we are able to outgrow them, and if this story helps you in getting it out of your system, all the better.
Having said that, however, I must also say that
And spires topped with mind-controlling vegetative empaths called "Freedom Towers". And steam trains fitted with cloaking devices invented by Brian Eno. And a layman's misunderstanding of the mid-20th century theoretical physics theories of Hugh Everett and Feynman and so on. And the belief of some Native American tribes that Mackinac Island in Michigan was the first piece of land to rise back out of the waters after The Great Flood.
sounds way more interesting to me, and got me really curious to know more.
Here's hoping that your actual text will punch me in the mouth and teach me to know when to be quiet.
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I mean, yeah, most of that stuff isn't hitting people over the head, it's mostly in the differences between that world and this one.
The level on which it is a "road-picture" through a semi-post-apocalyptic landscape with slightly twisted versions of political figures and the logical extensions of things like telepathy and teleportation being "real" are definitely the text, as it were.
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I mean, yeah, most of that stuff isn't hitting people over the head, it's mostly in the differences between that world and this one.
The level on which it is a "road-picture" through a semi-post-apocalyptic landscape with slightly twisted versions of political figures and the logical extensions of things like telepathy and teleportation being "real" are definitely the text, as it were.
Please tell me there is a pentagram-shaped city.
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It would be better if it was what remained of the pentagon after terrorist/freedom fighter/whoever attacks had half destroyed most of the walls.
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Really, it's kind of all about idealism and the way that idealism cuts both ways. The way nostalgia is kind of the worst thing of all, sometimes, especially nostalgia for things that didn't actually quite happen that way.
Is a ruined world that knows why it was ruined better or worse than a world in ignorant denial? And is our world the first one or the second one? What happens when most of the people who were supposed to be changing the world settle down and get jobs and have kids and... is it losing perspective to stop trying to change the world in trade for protecting your kids or is it being realistic? Did the generation before mine accept their responsibilities or did they pass the buck to a generation of self-absorbed emotional cripples made completely ineffectual by the comfort in which they were raised and the fact that the slightest whiff of pain can cause us to fold? Can cause me to fold? Etc.
Did they get our parents to trade a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in the cage, for our sakes, and what did growing up in a cage exactly DO for us?
Is a person like John Lennon better as a dead symbol or alive in a world where everyone sort of expects him to lead because he's famous? Is it better or worse that he hates it but does it anyway because there's no one else to? Would we be better off without charismatic leaders to listen to for one generation and then watch history turn into cruel parodies, like Jesus, like Muhammed, like Gandhi, like anyone... or is that the very best we can hope for, warts and all?
What's a world like where the only people left fighting are tired old men and a world of children convinced by post-modernism and irony and telepathic assault that action is ultimately ineffective so why bother? And is that that world or is it ours?
And as for the time-traveller... what's the line between chasing your past down to hold it in your arms again out of loyalty and love and ideals... and just chasing your own fuck*ng tail? At what point is it noble and honourable and at what point is it a huge wasteful narcissistic wank?
Except, you know, not an essay on these questions that keep me up at night but...
Something of a cross between Gilgamesh and the Wizard of Oz and the teevee series "Jericho" and my own terribly guilty conscience for all the things that I could not save.
And spires topped with mind-controlling vegetative empaths called "Freedom Towers". And steam trains fitted with cloaking devices invented by Brian Eno. And a layman's misunderstanding of the mid-20th century theoretical physics theories of Hugh Everett and Feynman and so on. And the belief of some Native American tribes that Mackinac Island in Michigan was the first piece of land to rise back out of the waters after The Great Flood.
And, again, the fact that I'm probably not entirely sane. Anyway.
I know it's something of a faux pas to link to low-brow fodder but this seems kind of apropos. (http://www.cracked.com/article_17377_if-9-stars-had-lived-long-enough-embarrass-themselves.html)