I’m sort of sick right now, and I went to be semi-early last night, aiming to get around 10 hours of sleep, but my body decided it was done with that after 7 of them, so I am taking the opportunity to blog.
These next few posts are a continuation of my “What’s been going on” series, but I’m titling them differently because they’re also in a category of their own, my latest projects. As some of you may know, my life revolves around my personal projects, which usually involve researching things, writing, or creating things, usually computer programs or some other kind of tool.
Right now I am in a period of transition between projects. A couple of weeks ago, on Good Friday at 3:12 in the morning to be exact, I finished a project that I had dragged out over a year and a half, editing my friend Brandon’s Lord of the Rings parody. The first half of this project was editing the text, and then I recorded and edited his readings of it over Paltalk, plus his reading of The Tugger, which is his Hobbit parody, and a couple of other shorter readings.
If you want to listen to it, here’s the TheologyWeb thread where I posted the files. The thread contains links to the other threads that contain the text files, if you want to read it. At the end of that thread, Brandon posted some of the funny grammatical, logical, and other problems I caught while editing the text, along with the frustrated or sarcastic remarks I made about them while editing and his comments on my comments. I also posted a link to yet another thread for the audio bloopers. Unfortunately, the forum I posted it in is only accessible to TWeb members. I may repost those sometime in one of the public forums. The audio and textual errors were the best part of the whole project. 😉
Warning: This parody is very long. Together the Lord of the Beef and the Tugger make up about 14 hours of reading. For that reason it is not the kind of project I’m going to be volunteering for again anytime in the near future.
Another warning: The parody might not make much sense to you unless you understand TWeb culture. It’s really less of a parody and more a set of TWeb inside jokes that use the Lord of the Rings as a framework. But Brandon included a preface that explains the major characters and jokes and should give you an idea of what’s going on. The Hobbit is called the Tugger, for example, because the central feature of Brandon’s TWeb parodies is the teasing of a member named RumTumTugger, who plays a female version of Frodo in the Lord of the Beef.
Even though the LotB isn’t a typical parody, Brandon has a remarkable ability to make connections, and I was impressed by the sheer number of elements he was able to pack creatively into the story, not only from TheologyWeb, but also Star Wars, Monty Python, Pirates of the Caribbean, probably other movies I can’t remember, various Internet memes, and many random American cultural features. It’s worth reading just for that.
So now that project’s done, and my mind has been freed. I will post about my upcoming projects tonight or tomorrow.
