Drunk & Afraid

I recently took to twitter and regaled the story of drunken shenanigans when I lived in Korea, so I guess I'll post it here for future purposes.

It's Sunday and I have done nothing all day, planned on doing nothing all day, and was finally relieved to have something to do. It's about 4pm and I get a text from my friend 효진 (Hyojin) telling me I should come hang out with her and her friends. The plan was to meet in two hours. So I grabbed my backpack (normally filled with the proper things to survive a night that I may not return) and left for Seoul.

When I finally reach Hongdae, I give her a text to figure out where she and her friends are at. She give me directions to a "restaurant/bar" in the area called "Dorothy's Diary." Which in Korean I had to admit sounded more like some road thing, so I had no idea what it was gonna be. Turns out it's like a Wizard of Oz themed place and the Dorothy in Question is the one and only. There were drawings all over and a mannequin sitting at a picnic table in the front of the restaurant/bar. I feel I must explain this restaurant/bar deal. In Korea, people don't go to the bar and just get drunk and play bar games like pool or darts. No, in Korea you usually order food, then drinks. Sometimes you can just go in and order a small amount of food then a ton of alcohol. So you could imagine my confusion on what the hell the theme of this place was. It seemed like Wizard of Oz, but there was Korean food and alcohol everywhere. Not to mention, I didn't know that Dorothy kept a diary.

I walk into the restaurant and just start wandering around, which immediately put the hostesses on edge because I'm pretty sure they didn't think I spoke Korean, and I'm just this guy walking around looking into all the booths. Once I find the correct one, I open up the door and we sit down and start talking. There were three people in all, and outside of Hyojin I didn't know the other two people. One was named 경한 (Kyong-han) who was shortly going to the army, and the other was actually American born named Ernest. He was excited to talk in English and would constantly teach me new Korean drinking words and ask me what we'd say in America. Honestly, I didn't play drinking games that much, or drink all the much period before moving to Korea, so I feel I may have left him down. However when we were talking about drinks, he explained this drink that was a shot of Soju and then dropped in beer mixed with some Coke. This was going to be the killer of the evening, and I don't say this in a bad way. So he orders what seems like a million shot glasses and a "Big Boy" glass of beer, and we begin pouring the drinks.

Now, I'm not sure if either I'm a heavy weight drinker or what, but after I had about 13 or so of those, spread out with shots of soju in-between, Kyong-han had passed out, and shortly followed by Hyojin too. So I told Ernest that we should probably get her home. About here, I look at my watch and it is impossible for me to go home since the trains have stopped at 1am, so I ask if they know any motels. He tells me of the Sauna room that they were staying in and invites me to go with them. But first thing first, we have to get Hyojin home. This was such a chore, in-fact the next day after sleeping I realize that I was actually supporting all her weight, because my arms and chest were so sore from carrying her. Looking at her, she can't be more than 100 pounds, but it was like carrying a large dog who was trying to jump out of your arms the entire time. I'm trying to figure out where she lives by asking her constantly, and every few seconds or so wakes up and says something like, "left" or "this way." After about maybe 15 minutes of this, I finally get to what I'm convinced is her door. I think I may have blacked out slightly because I seriously thought I was sleeping, and this is where shit goes crazy for me.

We got to her door and I was so drunk that I could not understand why it wouldn't open. I thought maybe I was dreaming so that if I willed the door open, it would. I think we called her roommate and knocked on the door several times, but I don't think anyone was there. Somehow after what seemed forever, we got the door open and I helped her to what I assumed was her room. I tossed her on her bed and was already dead asleep. I turned to leave and as I walked out the door I don't remember if I closed it or not, but I remember looking for Ernest, who was now gone. Without much thought, I began walking into the darkness. Later on, I was thinking about the door and I began to wonder if I had just broken into someone's house and just left my friend there, because I seriously could not remember how we got into that house.

So it's dark out, I think at this time it's 1am and there are people, tons of people just doing. . stuff. Like picking up garbage bags, riding bikes, and construction. I'm scared out of my mind, why are there so many damn people outside right now? Where am I? Are there any hotels near here? I somehow get to a road, and start walking down it in way too much darkness. My how I hate being alone and drunk in unfamiliar places. Eventually I see this brightly lit beacon in the night that is a convenient store. I walk inside, and go buy some water and ask them in shockingly good Korean, "Is it okay if I stay here? I'm drunk and too afraid to go outside." The clerk's only response was something along the lines of, "Holy shit, you can speak Korean."

We talked about how I was a translater, Korean Reunification, his stance on North Korea, you know regular everyday conversations.So I stayed at this convenient store, just talking to these two guys helping them work, and we had some good conversations.  Every so often the long haired one would go outside for a smoke and there was usually a new character in this story waiting outside. This one particular time, a woman was yelling at these cops. I could not understand her, but my two new friends were nice enough to let me know that she was hit by some guy. Now if she was hit by like a fist in the face, or by a car, I couldn't be sure. To be honest, I don't think they knew either. I think she almost fought with the cops, and they eventually somehow got her into the squad car and took her away. She was pretty hostile about the whole situation, but most old Korean women are about everything. 

After 4-5 hours of this, the subways start to run, and having worked at this place, literally restocking, and partaking in squid jerky, which tastes exactly how you think it would, I decided to make good my escape. I don't remember what happened between leaving the store and getting home, but I somehow made it and slept until 9pm the next day. I later learned that I wasn't actually abandoned on the street outside of Hyo-jin's apartment, but that Ernest and Kyong-han had actually passed out in the street. I've tried to return to find that store to say hello and hang out with the shopkeepers again, but I have no idea where I was, and I never could find it again. 

How MCIHAD was born

I'm not entirely sure anyone reads this at all, but I figured I might as well just put some behind the scenes sort of stuff in here.

So when we started doing "Mom Can I Have Another Dollar?", Nick was originally living out in Florida in the same apartment complex as myself. We were eager to make some new sketch comedy as we used to years ago. When we originally started, we were incredibly ambitious with very little experience in what the hell we were doing, but we thought what we had was funny or at least entertaining so it seemed like it was always worth our time. However, what we have now, is education. Nick came out here to go to film school, and I came down similarly to go for a bachelors in audio engineering. So we should be able to make better videos right? Well we still had the same issues we always run into, no people to help us make anything. At least no one committed as we were.

So I had gotten all this arcade paraphernalia, and Nick would come over nearly every night where we would get drunk as lords and go through our favorite old arcade games, and even play new ones we'd discovered using Hyperspin. After a few days of this, Nick suggested, "You know, why don't we just record ourselves doing this? We're already gonna get drunk and play video games, why not make something of this?" I'd always hated the idea of making our channel about video games, because it seems like everyone does it. I actually like a lot of channels on YouTube that are focused on gaming, but it seemed, cheap and too easy to do. I didn't want to just do something everyone else was doing, and I only ever considered doing game related stuff if it was a unique angle. I don't think I'd ever run across a channel that specialized in playing specifically arcade games, so I thought, "Why not?"

Nick and I made a few "Proof of Concept" episodes for the show and were showing them around to other people, asking if they thought it would be funny or interesting. We got a few people saying they liked it, but then we showed it to our old cohort, Keith. He seemed to latch onto the idea and immediately wanted to insert himself into the equation. I really liked that idea, only one problem, Keith lived over 1,300 miles away. So how would we do this regularly? Well, Keith didn't seem to have an issue with coming all the way down Florida way just to do the show, so thus was born our "Seasons". We sit and play these games for about a week straight until we have something crazy like 50 episodes which give us a few months worth of content. We all have military background and are used to lack of sleep and being pushed past a point of comfort, but these sessions are literally some of the most exhausting things I've experienced. You can sometimes hear the fatigue in our voices, and when Nick isn't in an episode, you can bet it's because he needs a break from doing the show. Keith though, that guy is a monster when it comes to doing this thing. He's either completely on, or completely off, and it's a struggle to keep up with him on the days where we're all literally exhausted. Then much like the storm of humanity he is, he blows out of our lives for a few months until the next "session" is set to start.

And that's how your sausage is made folks.

We Pretty Much Just Do Let's Plays Now

Hello out there, assorted fiends and fiendettes. This is your good pals at Proper Villains (now Trouble Planet, sort of) to breathe fresh life into the bloated corpse that is our middling social media space. Let's set straight a thing or two about recent goings on!

First, our Youtube channel is now called Trouble Planet, which will be the name under which Proper Villains Films continues to operate on its very irregular schedule. For those not in the know, Proper Villains is the name of our sketch comedy group, one that has pretty much always operated strictly on a "when we have spare time" basis and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. However, our channel now has a new and much more active feature, unrelated to sketches, and this is what prompted the name change.

So, at Trouble Planet, our primary activity at the moment is a new Let's Play series we call  'Mom, Can I Have Another Dollar?' It's about playing coin-op arcade games with a limited allowance, the idea of the show is to approximate the experience of wandering about an arcade and finding stuff that is worth your finite disposable allowance. In practical terms though it's just 10 minute installments of us bullshitting around over game footage in real time.

That's all! There may be further intermittent sketch stuff here and there but for the most part Trouble Planet is about gaming now. Enjoy.

Explanans!!

Rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated; in fact following a recent incident wherein half my face and lower mandible was singed off by a hot Italian sausage dinner, heated to what I conservatively described as a "somewhat excessive" degree, I subsequently adopted a nihilistic attitude toward flavorful cuisines of all sorts, having just recreantly dredged myself form the nadir of existential torpor wherein I ate only Navida yogurt straight out of the carton, because of the "fuck spoons" policy I had adopted in a fit of nihilistic desperation.

That reminds me, according to a recent poll, 73% of Americans agree that the earth is a den of thieves and needs to be met with celestial justice at the hands of a vengeful star. (The target of the poll was myself; I count myself as approximately two thirds of a person.) This is an axiom undeniable; but what of our sketch troupe, the Baleful Lads?

It goes without saying a man cannot produce comedy with only half a face; fortunately to my unexpected surprise I found that I had mysteriously "gotten better" upon waking one dismal November morning. Since that inexplicable reversal of fortunes I have been devoting most of my time to authoring vaguely threatening letters to Cold Stone Creamery; one needs to keep sharp lest your skills atrophy. It's also a good way to unwind after a full day of sitting motionless in a room with a dead expression in my eyes. Being driven to seek conversation exclusively form a small electrical fan is probably not seen as ideal life circumstances by most of polite society, but there are few options in the tenebrous depths of suburbia, and there aren't many better uses for a fan in the dead of winter.

Troubling nonsense aside, allow me to shed some light on the future plans of our ephemeral gang of story doers. Nick "Nicholas Nicolai" is fixing on pursuing formal training in the art of film production in the coming year, constituting a significant change in station for the intrepid monster. Hopefully he will find success as a helpless creature trapped in a dark place; easy to seize and manipulate, I shall say, to your own twisted whims. It will be extremely rad if we have a guy in our orbit who knows how to use a dolly.

For my own part, crippling face immolations aside, have been fixing to pursue haphazard measures as professional development in the direction of Studio City. I know a guy basically. I will endeavor to gain handsome payment to write the same alarming nonsense that I have done for funsies for years upon years now. This radical and risky gambit may spell my certain doom, but I have learned time and again that doom is the medium through which life communicates its ferocious intentions to us. Not to paint myself a creature of caprice, I do have some backup schemes on standby in case LA confirms my worst suspicions about itself. Most of them involve exiling myself to the jungles of Indochina.

To my erstwhile cohorts: good luck out there, you reckless fools.

Bastards!

Uncertain times like these prompt a man to consider their future moves upon the devious Chinese Checkers board of life, awash at all times with the knowledge that a single false move can leave you cornered on a massive, multicolored pentagram, desperately seeking an interstitial escape route while facing the dawning inevitability of your own compulsory ritual blood letting. (I am hazy on the rules for Chinese Checkers.) Point being: I am engaged in single combat with one of the chiefest lieutenants of Big Bastard Life, the Future. The moment has come to seek greener (possible blacker) pastures and pursue new windows of opportunity (which may be windows to oblivion), and it is to this end that I brilliantly faked my death so as to remove myself quietly from the daily goings on of the Villains and set my sights on Studio City.

See, my heart's wish would see me finding gainful employment, rich avenues for personal growth and ample opportunities to exploit my interest in the written word. But, we are, in the words of Nickie R, "living in a world of whores." A world made by whores, for whores.
True words, sir, true words. But in order to supply myself with a fitting delusion of potential until my ultimate barista-centric destiny unfolds, I have all but solidified a scheme that will take me to the west coast, and the doomed lands that gird its terminal reaches. It would be nice to produce comedy for a "for reals" living; this I regard very seriously as the Ideal Outcome. Granted, the possibilities are fraught with disappointing outcomes: even if I get a script bought, there's all the reason in the world to think it would be mutilated and reengineered to fit the needs of financial advisors to mighty studio heads, and the beacons to which the filmgoing publics proverbial dollar is drawn is a bona fide shit festival indeed. Yes, the stakes are high indeed. It will take a high degree of risk, endless hours of soul-shattering work and impeccable good fortune….

Which is exactly why I am led once again to reflect on one of life's truest axioms: The world is your oyster if you're a con artist. Oh, God, is it ever. Sure my quaint notions of writing for the joy of it might be dashed agin' the rocks and left to putrefy in a metaphorical tide pool, but with even my modest mastery of the written word, I could possibly attempt to cash in on a vapid lighting-in-a-bottle situation, after the fashion of the creators of Twilight and Harry Potter. With only minimal effort and negligible amounts of imagination, I could obtain the closest our society affords you to a license to print money- and oh how sweet it would be. I mean how much actual time do you supposes it took to write? 3 business days? 4? In any case, something within one week, I imagine. And for that one week's desultory labor you are made wealthy beyond my wildest imaginings. The conclusion we must draw is clear: Fuck you, dreams! From now on I'm all about the shysterism! Hell, it'd even work to get paid oodles just to not make anything, right?

The exchange in my head goes somewhat like this:

The producer snaps up my shitty script, nods approvingly, says:

 "Now this is the kind of bullshit that could make someone a lot of money! That someone is not us, because we will never make this turd. But we also don't want anyone else making it; it's just the kind of crap that could sell today. So we'll pay you for it. We'll pay you for it and never, ever produce it. Take this $200,000, less than couch cushion money to me, but a sum vast beyond reckoning for yourself. Take it and festoon your tiny existence with garbage to excess the likes of which you never imagined possible until now! Do so with such single-minded fury that your next salient thought will be only the realization that you are already dead!"

And I would, I would do this thing. I would take his money in a heart beat.

And the producer guy would lean back, those baleful doll's eyes of his devoid of human expression, and he'd ejaculate vociferously across his desk, like a blinding torrent form some infernal geyser, and I would gleefully lunge hither and yon, catching as much of his rage seed in my gob as possible, letting globules splatter upon me like so many raindrops.
And amongst the maelstrom, a cheque for 200,000 big ones would make its way to my hand, groping blindly against the deluge, and I'd turn heel and run form his office with all haste as he screamed oaths after me, with a kind of rage that would kill an angel.
I would steal away to the bank and cash that bastard of a paycheck with nary a missed beat, semen stains still visible on my person. The teller would nod knowingly- she has seen this all before.

"Sold your first screenplay, huh?" she'd say.

I'd cough up a healthy wad of greed semen on her fine polished desk, and she'd laugh it off:
"Oh don't worry, we have a guy for that." she'd say.

 "We have several guys."

That… that is more or less what I've pieced together about how LA works from second-hand accounts, anyway.

In truth, eschewing all stability and sources of income in favor of becoming one of Hollywood's catamites is still thinking small. When I think of the inordinate reward bestowed upon bastard lords like drug king pins and televangelists by all societies in human history, I find myself wishing only that I was on the winning side of the bastard struggle. It would be nice, to fully appreciate the fetid underpinnings of society but to also be one of the few who can be nothing but unilaterally benefited by it. To see the most corrupt public figures and hear the most deplorable sentiments broadcast bereft of shame and know that these creatures are not my nemesis, but my competitors.

Those are all mostly already crowded fields, the entrances to those old boys' clubs heavily guarded, and I imagine they are rightfully suspect of outsiders. More feasible perhaps would be worming my way into some low-level government job, like a state lawmaker. Do those positions pay much? Even if the pay is modest, it seems like a pretty sweet gig. I think I'd make a dandy no-name politician- I would never need to be concerned with being featured in national reporting except as an anonymous effigy of all that's wrong with whoever some yokel happens to want me to represent, and there is virtually nothing I could say or do that would be so ludicrous as to disqualify me from the position. A fine racket, I must say. And a tempting one, too, as the ship has sailed on the college textbooks.

God, so many bullshit industries! A world teeming with whores! And why am I not fortunate enough to be one of them? Probably because they generality require charisma in vast quantities. Even a simple holistic medicine scam requires too much single-minded drive. Starting  a business, even a brick-and-mortar trap for slow pokes, takes a certain kind of moxie that my withered heart is too frail to play host to.  But this… thing I've written has already gone to strange, terrible places. And for some reason I detect a slight current of negativity throughout- this is not my mind! It is merely the result of staring down the daunting magnitude of the tasks ahead. But my ambitions are there, and my moves are not chosen in caprice. With luck, they will not prove my undoing.

Here's hoping, you vile fiends!

--KCR

Hiatus over

So obviously there was a period of time where we weren't making any videos but it kind of seems like we're going to be able to make videos a lot more often. At first the loss of Keith Richards in the fire was huge and resulted in several pools of thought being forever untappable, but we were able to find someone who stepped up and tried to help us fill the void, so you might have already noticed a new regular showing up in our movies. Also at the cost of Keith's life, we are now able to film on a some-what more regular schedule and somehow in the grief state that most people have entered people are seemingly more willing to appear in front of the camera, with some already having done so and others making verbal agreements.

The last video we shot was "Nicholas vs the Order" and some people might be curious the origin to this one. Well, I think it was more or less a conversation exactly like what happened in the video. One thing that we could not do though was actually go into a fast food place and shoot the video as there would have been sound issues and inconsistencies that would have spouted up in between shots due to people coming and going so we had to green screen it. Although of our better green screen ventures, it is of course not at the best it could possibly be, as we do not have the space to use a green screen correctly. But hey, a lot of you didn't even notice, so whoops killed the magic.

Anyway wanted to say we're being a lot more active again so check out our stuff.




-Kyle

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