(no subject)

Has anybody else ever seen this "Good, Bad, Ugly" (or something like that) show on TLC? The premise of the show is that people come on it who need something planned, and they get get a choice between three people- one who's famous in that field, one who works in it but isn't that great, and one who's never done any work of that kind before. For example, the only episode I've seen in full had a band that was making their first music video and had a choice between a man who's worked with lots of famous bands, one who makes five-minute short experimental films, and a bartender (they chose the bad, and it came out alright). The people have no idea who's who of course.

I have a theory about this. Provided the person you chose doesn't need much specialized knowledge (like film production for the people above) I think the further down the hierarchy the person you chose is the better the work they do will be. See, the expert's not going to care that much. They can just phone in their performance (so to speak), and as long as it's decent it's no skin off their back. On the other hand the other two people, especially the "ugly", would be made fools of on national (OK, OK, cable. But that doesn't sound as good.) television if they did bad jobs, so they'll try a lot harder to do good jobs. And if the "bad" person is trying to break into the field then they could ruin their chances if they do an awful job.

Of course, I've only seen one full episode, plus the end of another (in the second they chose the "ugly" to do a wedding, and from what I saw it seemed lovely enough) plus hearing about another from my mom about another episode where someone chose ugly and got a really good job out of them. Other episodes may blow my theory completely out of the water. We'll see.

(no subject)

I? Am weak. Any challenge I see that interests me I must do, no matter how many other things I have on my plate and completely ignoring that I need to take November off for Nanowrimo.



It's too sweet to resist. Choose either your first active fandom or your favorite childhood book/show/whatever and write a fic. I chose first fandom, which was Fairy Tales. I was six or seven, in second grade, and didn't realise what it is I was doing when I started writing horrible horrible Mary Sues set in fairy tale worlds and sharing them with friends. I still remember my very first fic, mostly because I still have it somewhere and every so often I drag out my ancient writings to laugh at. It involved me going to the library and finding that all the words were missing, then noticed they were being kidnapped by various boy fairy tale characters (the only one that stands out is the Pied Piper leading off a bunch of words with his music) inside of illustrations in their books. Then I joined up with fairy tale princesses to rescue the words.

Really, considering what a huge fairy tale freak I am to this day, it's surprising I never went back to it on my own. I did have an idea once for a Frog Prince slash semi-humor rewrite, which is what I'm going with now, but I (clearly) never actually wrote it. Maybe the memories of my terrible early fics just scared me out of it, which I realise is stupid since at the time I'd only know how to write for about a year and a half so it's stupid to carry any shame over how bad they were.