Out of context theatre

"A man is worth roughly two cats?"

One of essayel's charries, in this thread in Morningstar Manor

Creative processes

You can use the same ingredients for making a nice Mediterranean salad, or for topping a pizza with; with a little ingenuity, you can even make a pasta sauce. You can do that as a writer, too. The author of Urquhart's canon re-used the ingredients of 'Death and the Devil' for a modern day thriller set in Cologne, minus the Patrician clients but with the Foreign Legion and a splinter group of the same instead of the Crusades. The book uses some of the same recurrent character archetypes in addition to plot element; the main hero is a heroine, though, which means she herself gets to sleep with the Urquhart-alike, instead of having to leave that to a secondary character, but she has to work through her own issues in order to beat him just like Jacob the Fox has to do with Urquhart. What really floored me was the way that charrie did and liked things I had established as Millicanon for Urquhart but thought I had made up as a likely bridge, from what was given in canon. That Stylish Bad Guy there, though, starts out with dried dates and ends up telling he spent eight years in Baghdad... And of course he's terribly good in bed, and a very considerate lover. Seems I can really trust my headvoice for Urquhart to be remarkably similar to the one that the author of his canon had for him and the other incarnations of that archetype.-

I have been mainlining 'Mad Men' recently, starting with it entirely for the sake of Christina Hendricks but quickly falling in love with the whole concept. That show is so meta! We learn as much about ourselves and our own time as about the 1960s, and we get to watch attitudes and technology changing, which is a good way of looking at history. History isn't a state, frozen in time by sticking the needle into a certain point of the time line, it's a process that we must learn to observe as it passes. It never stands still. Also, I like the way we get to watch the creative process in action, in the actual work these people do. The work isn't just the macguffin to get the characters to interact, it is central to the story line. Observing the way Don Draper tackles a subject is very enlightening. He's actually good at what he does. Even when he plays truant from work to go bonk his graphic designer girlfriend, he's working, as he gets some of his best ideas there, in post-coital chitchat. My favourite character so far, though, besides Joan Holloway (of course!!!) is Rachel Menken.  She has some serious style and pose, and is so independent she's a bit out of time there. I might consider apping her for Milliways after finishing with the series so far, if I weren't scared shitless at the thought of playing a Jewish New Yorker in a game that has some as muns. She doesn't take chauvinism and rudeness for granted, as everybody else does, and she doesn't fall prey to Don Draper's wiles as easily as everybody else. She thinks for herself; she demands independent thought from people that want to work with her. The characters are well thought out and so alive, even Joan swanning through the office being catty, with her impressive knockers and her red hair, being infinitely superior and always right. Of course she bonks one of the partners, but I somehow doubt she really gets what she needs and wants there...