Agent of HINDER (part 13)
Super Sunday: Network City Radio
In the cybertechnotopia known as Network City, the crew of a radio station stuggle to keep the place going in spite of slipping ratings and the fact they are all weirdos.
Eugene is the station manager. Eugene doesn’t even really want to work at the Network City Radio, as its been nothing but a source of stress for him for years. But he needs money and has few other options. He is the type who would sell over anyone for a quick buck, and is prone to lying and get rich quick schemes that always end in disaster.
Clark is the station’s most famous on-air personality. His duclet voice is beloved by listeners and Clark has a swelled ego because he knows how famous he is. He is constantly demanding special treatment, and usually gets it because the station can’t afford to lose him.
Nellie works for Eugene to try to keep things running, but she’s also trying to get a career started as a journalist. She is much more interested in making Network City Radio a respectable business than a profitable one, and that causes friction with Eugene. She also hates to admit it, but she has a crush on Clark.
Ace is the station’s head of technology and has cybernetic implants that let him control technology. This gives him a lot of power in the station, and he craves more, but he is a coward who will often bend to the whims of those with more personality. Don’t feel too bad for him, though. Any time things go his way even a little, he starts to act like a real jerk. He has also been sleeping in a secret room in the station so he doesn’t have to pay for an apartment.
If there’s one thing I know about sitcoms, it’s that radio stations are a prime setting for them. It worked for Frasier and Newsradio and WKRP in Cincinatti. Setting my show in Network City not only gives it a premise I am sure hasn’t been done, but also shows how I can still use my sitcoms to flesh out these fictional universes I’ve been building up over the years.
Agent of HINDER (part 12)
Super Sunday: My Third Mother
Okay, here it is! Super Sundays’ theme for 2018 is Sitcom Sundays. Every week, I’m gonna come up with the Situation for a situation comedy and sketch the cast. I’m not saying I’d actually be trying to make these shows, this is actually just a further pretense for me to fill out fictional universes with characters, but it could be a fun pretense, I hope. Look, it’s this or I spend all my waking hours committing burglaries. I’m slightly less likely to be arrested for this. So, here we go!
A woman marries a mother of two, thus becoming the third mother those kids have had.
Hannah is a teacher who has just recently fell in love and married Evelyn Snyder, a widowed mother of two. Always full of self-doubt, Hannah is very nervous about “replacing” the lost mother of those kids and hopes that her wit and sarcasm can get her through.
Evelyn was a hard-working businesswoman until her first wife, Danielle, died in a car accident. The tragedy not only took away her life partner, it also derailed every plan Evelyn had and for her life. This led to some hard times for Evelyn. Falling in love with Hannah has brought her back to herself and, now that the two have married, she is ready to get back to work. Every few episodes she’d have to learn a lesson about not prioritizing her work life over the family, you know how it goes.
The oldest of Evelyn and Danielle’s children, Grant likes Hannah well enough, but is still coming to terms with his mother’s death. Hannah is convinced that Grant hates her, which itself is something Grant finds annoying. He’s also just reaching an age where he wants to be spending more time with his friends than his family anyway, which just exacerbates things. Now Grant is constantly nervous, trying to act the way he wants to live, but also not give the impression that he’s unhappy with the family situation. It’s rough on the poor kid.
Jordan, the youngest of the Snyder kids, doesn’t remember Danielle as well. Hannah thinks that is especially tragic and has started to overcompensate in this by trying to inundate the boy with pictures and videos of his late mother. This confuses Jordan more than it helps, which is a shame because Jordan is kind of an idiot to begin with.
Grandma Morrisford is the mother of the late Danielle. She’s a bitter, manipulative woman who wants her grandchildren to be happy, but also wants to punish Hannah, whom she treats nice at first, but constantly tries to mislead into embarrassment. When Hannah finally catches on to the schemes, Grandma is forced to downgrade to acerbic mockery, but she’ll put her whole self into it.
One of the more common setups for a sitcom is to take “unusual” lifestyle circumstances and mine them for jokes. This can be done mean-spiritedly, to mock the unusual for not being normal, or it can be done in such a way as to normalize the “unusual” so it becomes more accepted by the mainstream. In our current world, gay marriage is less “unusual” than it once would have been considered, but let’s pretend this show started a decade or so back and roll with it.
2016 Ender?
I must now face the wrath of the Dark Lord Char’Nagh, for I have failed him this year. I set a bunch of goals for myself at the start of 2017 and I not completed them all in time. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised about that, considering that I apparently labelled last year’s End of Year post as the “2017 Ender” so, as far as this site knows, the year was over before I even started on those goals. I doomed myself!
Realistically though, I did alright. Only three goals on my list were not completed. The sad thing is that two of them were the biggest projects I set for myself:
Obviously, one of those is Secret Government Robots. My webcomic is now several years past the time it was supposed to end. I swear I have worked on it. I’ve even got pages fully completed and ready to go up, but it remains incomplete. One obstacle I’ve got here is that I’ve finished the story in my head and in my notes, so all that is left is the drawing. The drawing is my least favourite part of doing a webcomic. I am a reluctant artist. And I don’t really have an audience here. This is a story I told for myself, and myself knows the ending. But I’ll get it done.
The other of my largest projects this year was to read the Decameron. I didn’t even get halfway through. Other reading-based goals included just “Read Ten Novels” and “Read Two Collections of Short Stories” and I beat those easily enough, then exceeded them. I spent lots of time reading extra books when I ought to have been reading the Decameron, because it was a written goal of mine. This is a symptom of my second obstacle toward getting these goals done, they were both pretty daunting. I put them off as long as possible, to focus on other things, and then as the end of the year drew close, I knew I wasn’t going to get them done, so I just didn’t do them.
Clearly I need to find another way to focus on large projects. Perhaps the best thing about setting those goals is that it’ll train me to recognize how I focus on things and I’ll be able to plan accordingly in the future. Perhaps.
(I mean, also I was sick for three months of 2017. The kind of sick where even reading was hard for me to focus on. I didn’t want to use that as an excuse, but I have to admit, it did happen. Let’s hope I won’t have that in 2018.)
As I said, there was a third project I did not complete. It’s just a minor little thing (though it got more complicated as I went on), and is about half done. I don’t feel as guilty about not finishing, and still intend to do so this year and put it on the site. I will say no more at this juncture.
So this year, I’ve set fewer goals of some kinds, and more goals of other kinds (expect more Beekeeper Reviews this year than last, for example), but I still feel like I’ve got two big projects (and one small one) hanging over my head. Let’s try this again…
