Greetings, Survivors. We had some more non-submission issues this week, and the number of people who have non-subbed at least once is now up to nine (including the two that are already gone). This could get ugly. The forced curve was thus changed to 4, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1. You’ll catch me saying this a lot, but it felt criminal to give 1s on some of these. When I do a forced curve I score everything out of 100 and then put them in order at the end, and these scores were very high.

Well, who were they? Read on. The challenges are in the order that I read them, except I put the top scorer – which I initially read first – on the bottom.

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Zack Sauvageau, Spy Tag

Growing up, I couldn’t stop watching infomercials. I always found them fascinating; both the product and the actual program itself. The products were always a perfect solution to a problem you didn’t know you had, and the informercials were full of poor acting, shocked studio audiences, and over the top pitchmen. Today, I still enjoy them and with my hectic life I appreciate that many current informercials are the length of two or three standard commercials.

I think it would be a really fun challenge to have the Survivors create their own infomerical. There would be two portions scored on the challenge. The first portion would be to come up with a product: Your own solution to problems people don’t realize they have. The second portion would be to write a script for a short infomercial for the product they’ve devised. Each portion would be scored separately, and the average of the two scores is the score for the challenge.

The explanation of the product should be clear and describe both its appearance and use in some depth. The participants can include images if it will help demonstrate their idea. Be as diligent as possible to ensure that your idea is unique. It doesn’t have to be mind-blowing, some of the best inventions are slight tweaks to existing products (see: Pajama Jeans).

Have fun with the script. Obviously, the closer it feels to a real infomercial the better. If there’s anything unique about your spokesperson, definitely make sure to describe that. Also make sure to lay out the different scenes, shots, sets, etc. that would be included in your infomercial. If you need inspiration, go seek out a classic (I suggest the Magic Bullet or the Popeil Pasta Maker).

Ooh, I like this too. The infomercial portion could get real same-y, but I love the concept of you guys creating “solutions for problems we didn’t know we had. 2

Geoff Beckstrom, Spy Tag

Challenge Title: Law and Order

Description: The best Law and Order episodes opened with the same theme that deployed two
important components. Click here for an example if necessary.

1. The discovery of a dead body
2. A closing one liner by one of the lead detectives called to the scene

Gameplay: The game can played two ways depending on which component is provided.

Option A: Survivors are all provided with the same scene and circumstance surrounding the discovery of a dead body and the challenge is to provide the best sarcastic and dry one liner to close the scene.

Option B: Survivors are given the closing dialogue and one liner and the challenge is to write (with a reasonable word limit – remember these opening scenes are generally less than 90 seconds long on TV) an interesting and original scene and circumstance surrounding the discovery of a dead body and opening to a murder investigation.

Okay, I’m really loving these so far. Just one liner might not be much to ask, but a list of corpse situations could be cool. Or, I could do this as a late-game challenge. This could be good drama and also good parody. 3

Josh Mitchell, Spy Tag

The Game of Life! Survivor Edition

Players will choose a fictional character whose life was cut short and fill in a possible life using details and events from The Game of Life. Career, House, Salary, Kids, Life Tiles and any other space they may have landed upon. Players will be scored based on Creativity, Difficulty(Character Chosen) and humor. All entries will be scrambled and anonymous(the judges should have a mix from both teams). Judges(preferably 2 but it could be done with one as well) will be given 2 100k’s, 4 50k’s, 5 20k’s, 5 10k’s, 10 5k’s, and 10 1k’s to be given out at their discretion. When the everything is totaled the team with the most money wins!

I’m glad there were three non-submitters so nobody who submitted gets eliminated, because I dig this one too. That scoring system sounds like a pain in the ass, but otherwise this is a great concept.

Will Young, Spy Tag

“Baldrick’s Dictionary”

This challenge is relatively simple as you must provide the definitions of ten words selected by spooky. The catch is that each definition must actually not be the real definition for the word from a dictionary. However, it must still be accurate. In the two examples from Black Adder, Baldrick defines “C” as “big, blue wobbly thing that mermaids live in” and “dog” as “not a cat.”

Each definition must contain fewer than twenty words. Much like in Twenty Questions, spooky will award a point for the two best definitions for each word. Top two scores get immunity. If there are still multiple teams, then the lowest scoring team votes somebody off. If the teams are merged, proceed as normal in the vote.

Wordplay! My favorite! This could be either brilliant or a disaster, but I’m willing to find out. 3

Sarah Bizek, Ugly Juanita

What up, Survivors? How are we surviving so far? (Laugh at that joke, cuz it’ll impress the judges, and you need everything you can get at this point.)

This week’s challenge is gonna draw on your humor, creativity and taste in music. You’ll spoof a song, ala Weird Al! There are no rules about what songs you can or cannot choose, though it would likely be to your advantage to choose something that we’ll recognize. Wouldn’t want your awesomeness to be lost on us out of obscurity, would you? Your spoof should be the exact length of the original song, and yes, we’ll be checking, so don’t fuck this up, folks. And it’s as easy as that! Almost.

Warning: Here’s where the major creativity piece comes in. After writing your spoof, you’ll RECORD YOURSELF PERFORMING the song. And, yes, you read correctly. You MUST perform as the “lead singer,” if you will, but beyond that there are no other rules for your video. (Your singster skills will not be judged, so don’t worry if you’re tone deaf.) Think big, people. Think big. Buh-low. Our. Minds.

Submit your video in the usual way by 2:00pm Sunday. Scoring will be a standard scale of highest single score going to best spoof down through lowest score going to worst. Aren’t you so glad you don’t have team members to hide behind anymore? (Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!)

Smell ya later.

I guess this one could have the pitfalls of not everyone having recording equipment, but I give people plenty of warning on this one, or run another Grab Bag, it would be all good. We’ve had a lot of Weird Al-centric pitches in this challenge in the past, but actually having to record them adds a layer of awesomeness I wasn’t expecting. 2

Rachel Dwyer, Ugly Juanita

Publicity Stunt

Imagine you are a minor celebrity whose popularity is declining, you own a business whose losing business, you are trying to promote a new product, or you are running for office. Give a detailed pitch about a publicity stunt that will promote and increase the visibility of your product, business, or self. The perimeters of this challenge are that the stunt must be feasible and legal (as much as possible given general legal knowledge). Points are awarded based on ease of operation, creative design, least expense, largest impact/visibility, clarity of presentation and general aesthetic beauty, genius, and ingenuity. Feel free to submit an audio-visual aid to support your idea.

I’m kind of running out of ways to say “This is a really fun idea.” It’s not a real “final” challenge, but I’m just about to schedule a Grab Bag again anwyay. 1

Bret Highum, Ugly Juanita

Create a challenge- Team-write a story

I think almost everyone has played the game of Telephone, where a sentence is whispered from one person to the next to see how butchered the sentence will be at the end. Most people have also played Mad Libs, where the player fills in the missing words to make a silly sentence. This is a bastard combination of the two.

Both teams are given a subject, and the teams are allowed to choose a genre (comedy, horror, etc.) so they all know what tone the story is aiming for. The first player will write a sentence, and e-mail it to an arbitrator, either Spooky or someone he chooses. The arbitrator sends on only the nouns and verbs of the sentence to the next player, who then writes a sentence to try and continue the story with very little information about what the first player’s sentence was about. Each player receives all the nouns and verbs from all the previous players, so they have a little more information to go on, but not much. Once everyone on the team has written their sentence, Spooky can reconstruct the entirety of the stories to judge them and display for our general amusement.

Judging is by how coherent the finished product is, how well the team stuck to the genre, and if Spooky thought it was interesting to read.

Now, this is GENIUS in theory, but I’m not so sure about practice. If I was to judge the entirety of the story, the teams would just keep track of their stories in a separate document so they could make them as coherent as possible, right? I’d play the crap out of this challenge in person so no shenanigans were possible, but it’s a flawed internet game, unfortunately.

Hmm…however, I have an idea how to tweak it to make it possible. Stay tuned, bitches. 1

Zillah Glory, Spy Tag

find a legitimate outtake family photo.
script the inner dialogue.
points given for: plausible ridiculousness and otherwise good writing.

send both image and (insert length limit) script in for challenge.
independent friend of KW to rate photos – those points to go into safekeeping for team/crucial moment later.

K: Well, that’s very minimalist. This could be fun, but I’m worried we’d get a bunch of similar entries. I suppose I could suggest specific photos, but then it’s essentially a caption challenge and isn’t all that similar to the pitch here. 1

Peter Bruzek, Ugly Juanita

You know that one guy at the party who you simply cannot stand to be near? He thinks that the music is too mainstream, or that guy who doesn’t think you really, truly understand the symbolism in the end of Fight Club? Maybe it’s just the guy that talks about his collection of toy tractors for thirty minutes. Whoever they may be, It’s time to walk a mile in their shoes… those bothersome, exasperating shoes.

The name of the challenge is “That One Guy”, and the point is to write up a one-sided conversation in which you are as annoying and obnoxious as possible. Talk about how other just don’t ‘get’ your collection of silk scarves, whatever. Just make Kelly hate you within a couple of paragraphs, and you’re golden.

The word limit is 300, after all, that one guy always gets under your skin within about 30 seconds, anyway. Scoring is on the forced curve, because what’s more loathsome and irritating than having to give or good score to someone who doesn’t deserve it (or conversely not being able to give a good score to someone who does)?

I love it. I mean, I’m sure reading them would tire me the hell out, but I love it all the same. I’d just have to be careful how many people were left when I ran it. 3

Andy Rustlelund, Spy Tag

“We’ll let you know”

Many great, and not-so-great, movies get green-lit every day in Hollywood. What if (gasp!) the movie executives get it wrong sometimes?

Your task: pick a critically-acclaimed or well-loved movie, and write a rejection letter from a movie studio to the screenwriter. Go into the gory details about why this movie is so awful.

AND/OR

Pick a movie most would generally consider a flop, or terrible movie, and write a glowing acceptance letter from a movie studio to the screenwriter. Again, the more detail the better.

The judges could pick the movie or movies to write letters for, but I think it would work best if each writer came up with his or her own movie/s.

Scoring would work on Kelly’s favorite forced curve system (KFFCS™).

Great start. This sounds like some snarky fun, particularly the first bit, since a great script can easily be made to look terrible onscreen, but I think both could be great. Also, it’s easily doable. 4

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First of all, I’m not convinced I found the final challenge in here. This was an interesting group in that the pitches were all interesting, but none really felt involved or specific enough to end the game. So, expect to see a lot of them run, but I’m not certain if any will end the game yet.

Non-submitters: we had three, including two new ones for some reason! Ben and Colin from Ugly Juanita, plus JG from Spy Tag.

Spy Tag: 3/-1/1/2/4/2/3 = 14/7 = 2.00
Ugly Juanita: 2/3/1/1/-1/-1 = 5 /6 = 0.83

It seems rumors of a soon-to-be-close game were greatly exaggerated.

Colin and Ben will automatically vote for themselves. Votes from you other four are due Saturday at noon Central and we’ll see if I can throw up a challenge that inspires everyone to show up, eh?

Cheers, Survivors.