Once Upon That One Time – Chapter 1

My name is Ryan, I’m 50 years ahead in time of whenever you are right now, and shit has — Just. Gotten. Real.

I know, that’s confusing, and I don’t care. Listen, I don’t have a lot of time. Only like, the next few hours, and then all hell is gonna break loose. Before that happens I’m writing everything that has happened in this past year to me, my friends, and the race we still call human beings. That hasn’t changed. A bunch of stuff has changed, but we still get called that, so there’s at least one win for us. Chock that shit up to the score board, ass holes.

49 years from where you are right now is pretty much the same. It has cars that don’t fly and run on crude oil, it has solar panels that no one uses except for like 3 people and they’re always so uppity about it, and the President of the United States is a white dude and has been since that one time that other thing happened. Then it all went haywire. Because white people are the worst. In case it all goes badly I’m going to write down everything that’s happened as quickly as I can and then put this letter into the time capsule code named “Plot Device” that can very actually go back in time and warn everyone what this planet has become – which is full of ass holes.

See, it all started when this science lab where scientists were paid to do science did something other than science. They might of accidentally sort of started a chain of events that ended in all of the remaining animals on the earth to evolve into genetically enhanced versions of themselves that you could tame if you had the balls. After that, the rest of the animals (who were not already paired up with a human being) were killed off or went to the woods or something, point is they are gone. Now the only human beings and animals left on this earth have their friends and each other. Some notes that are important to the story and that I won’t explain because there isn’t time and also fuck you is that some of these animals can talk, and some can’t. The ones who can’t talk aren’t called dumb to their faces cause that’s just mean but…they are. Sometimes that matches up with the human riding them, sometimes it doesn’t. Whatever blah blah so on and so forth.

Other important things include that there are about 1000 people left alive on earth, the sun is getting hotter each and every day, Pangaea is a thing again so the land is just all mushed together, and there is an ongoing war between the two factions called The Colony and The Disciples Inside the Calamity Kingdoms. I didn’t choose those names, someone else did. Also there are The Outlaws who aren’t really a faction, they are just people who don’t give a shit and are on their own side. That’s where my friends and I come in.

We are the leaders of The Outlaws. Pretty sweet, right? Yeah, I know it totally is.

Are job is to fuck shit up. For everyone. All the time. No matter who is doing what, we fuck it up. We figure the sun will roast us alive, the seas will swallow us whole, or everyone will end up getting stabbed in the face – so we might as well have some fun before any of that happens.

Before I go on with all that has happened in the past year I have to tell you about my crew. I can’t just start using names and telling stories without you knowing some background on these people. First off there is no leader, there are alphas and betas but we all decide what to do together. We aren’t some group of douche bags with one biggest douche bag who thinks they know best. No one knows best. People who think they know best is what got this planet into the situation in the first place. Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I’ll tell you bout my peeps.

There’s Abby and Mike who are married to each other. Abby, the cunning and the bold, rides Sepharoph (Seph for short) who is the king of the eagles. Mike, the logic and the balance, rides Jasper, the aging moose who is as wise as the amount of years he’s been alive grant him to be. Elliot, the wildcard, rides the Emperor Penguin Duo Koo and Stew who are strapped to his feet and make ice with their belly’s so he can slide around everywhere. Koo and Stew and stronger than most penguins and don’t like each other or change or learn lessons. There’s also Pat, who is on a brown bear that hasn’t changed at all.

Stephanie and JR are here too, they are engaged to be married on a mountain. Steph, the no bullshit go-getter and JR the deceptively kind ninja scientist ride on an albino Jaguar named Bertram and an Elephant the size of a house named Flounder, respectively. Marc, the hungry and bearded, rides a Rhino named Carl with steel for a horn that Marc forged himself in an erupting volcano. As for me, I’m on my trusty flying polar bear named Ralph who shoots acid out of every hole he has in his body. (that includes his butt)

Adam is on an iguana. GBaby is on an Emu. Kate walks. Also there are others who I will get too later as their story wouldn’t make sense yet.

So all of us are in the outpost like a year ago and then some shit got to shakin’, and I mean shaking bad. The earth basically had a fuckin’ heart attacked and changed all of its shit up. The Chancellor, the dick head leader of The Disciples, built a gravity device that brought all of the continents together again because, and I’m quoting Mr. Chancellor here, “Who needs friends when you made the continents friends once more.” Sad as shit, I know.

As all of this is going on my friends and I are all sitting around, probably intoxicated, and being all like, “woah what’s going on?” Then we found out everyone was going nuts and dying and we said to ourselves, “let’s ride our animal friends into the night and see what’s to do.” So we all jumped aboard our animal friends except for Kate because she walks and went to the biggest building we could find immediately which was a liquor store that was made to look like the Lincoln Memorial. Inside we see the guy standing behind the register who is set atop a big fucking lion.

“Whatchu doin’ fools?” said the guy with the big fucking lion. Then we proceeded to explain to him what was happening outside and he was like “we should drink” to which we were all like “yeah that makes sense.” So we all start getting fucking wasted and next thing you know we sleep through the next few weeks and wake up, only to go outside and see a barren wasteland with nothing left standing as far as the human eyes can see. Seph, Abigail’s eagle friend, flew into the sky and told us that she could see something so we all hopped aboard our animals and headed off once more.

Except Kate. She got stabbed by that Lion.

Graham the Cracker

When I get creatively stunted while writing a certain project my method for getting rid of writers block is making the stupidest thing I can think of. Just turning off my brain, and making something so bad that it hopefully kickstarts my brain back into writing something of worth. I do things like this all the time but I never show people because…well, because they’re dumb. But I figure, it’s funny to me at least a little bit, so it might be funny to one more person. So here ya go, this was today’s. (click to make bigger)

Image

About Georgia Bound

Updates have been sparse due to the fact that I just finished principal filming and I’m soon to be editing a short film plus I’m writing a book with a release timeline of Spring 2014 – but I thought I’d give the blog at least a little something today.

Georgia Bound (Click for PDF) is a feature length film script I wrote in the summer of 2009 and edited with the help of my friend/editor Abigail Storiale – until I had a final product in 2011. Since then I’ve written two books and a short film that is coming out this fall plus a number of other things that no one will ever see and some things that people will see if they choose too.

The synopsis for the script is: In an effort to save his relationship, recent high school graduate Jim must venture south of the Mason-Dixon with the help of his new acquaintance, a mentally unstable taxi cab driver.

The script follows this kid who is desperate but is about to find out how far he would really go to save the only thing in his life that gives him happiness. It’s a coming of age tale and really worked out well as the first thing I had ever written because the premise isn’t a new one and the story is simple.

Through writing this I learned some film fundamentals – that every page of a script is about a minute of film time – there are certain points of almost every movie ever made that you should hit including establishing your major characters and then playing around with their personalities and eventually the all if lost moment followed by some sort of redemption. The all is lost moment is my favorite because once you know about it you’ll see it in everything. It’s basically the moment about 20-30 minutes before the end of the movie where all hope seems lost and you think there is no way for these main characters who hopefully by this time in the story you are rooting for will pull this one off – but then miraculously they find a way! Most movies are like this for a reason – a large portion of the population loves the formula. So for my first go at a movie script, I used it to teach myself that exact formula.

At the time I wrote it because I just wondered if I could write a movie script. Prior to sitting in my basement for two months that summer I had never written anything of creative worth – so this was a total shot in the dark. Now it serves at a spec script, meaning that it will hopefully someday prove to someone with a bunch of money that I can write a movie. If you find the time I invite you to give it a read – I’m very proud of it, and not because I think it’s amazing (I don’t think that) but because I think that I had an idea one day and then worked on it until I liked it – which is the most important part in my opinion for anything you choose to do in life.

Have a good one,

Ryan

Jurassic Park 4D: The Adventures of Zeb and Teddy

On a whim I started to write/produce an audio book with my friend Marc Gibson – cause I thought it would be fun and I needed a productive distraction from that movie I’m making this summer. We were talking about what would actually happen if Jurassic Park ended up being a real place. Then because there are two of us we decided two fictional characters should go through this scenario.  It’s in the future – Jurassic Park is opening of at Universal Studios and these two nerdy dudes who love this movie to death get the chance to be on the first ride along with the original cast…and then everything goes wrong.

Each episode will be  6-15 minutes long and it is available for free listens on SoundCloud (below)  Take a listen – it’s gonna be lots of fun!

Why I Hate my Best Friends Girlfriend

Is the title of a powerpoint presentation (Click through to see the whole thing)

Imagethat I wrote in 10 minutes on the afternoon of July 6th, 2010. It was stupid and not well thought out, but I was in the moment (it’s not fictional, I mean, most of the jokes are false but it was based on a real person) and I put it up on the internet without thinking twice. Everything before that post that I wrote had gone unnoticed. 5 likes or reblogs or whatever the internet uses as positive emotional currency these days – at the most. Many of the articles I wrote had 0 views. Unlike today when I average 20 views (which I love dearly and never take for granted btdubbs.)

At the time I hadn’t found Reddit yet so I was really REALLY into Stumbleupon. I Stumbled every which way. So…I finish the last slide. I put it up on College Humor. Put it up on StumbleUpon, and left my house. Didn’t tell a soul.

The next day I wake up and, on a whim, I check the number of views. 10,000.

……10,000!!!!!!! Not only did it BLOW THE F UP but people LIKED IT….sort of. Most of the people who liked it liked it enough to re-blog and press the thumbs up. Most of the people who hated it REALLY let the StumbleUpon and College Humor comment sections know. A lot. Like, a lot a lot. Needless to say many people thought I was “Gheyyy” and a “Jealous Faggot” or a “Gheyyylord Jealous Faggot” which made even less sense… Nonetheless, I was excited! For a few seconds.

My thought process at that very moment was in this order exactly: Holy shit people are reading this. Holy shit people like it! Holy shiiiiiit some people reallllly hate it……..holy shit…..I really hope that girl/my best friend doesn’t use StumbleUpon.

I was in a true predicament. Nothing like this had ever happened to me. Do I take the article down so there is no way they will find it or do I keep it up because…well…cause…10,000! There were two major issues here. The first was, if you read it you will realize, it has its moments but it’s far from a masterpiece. My original idea was that if they had ever broken up in front of me I would always be ready with it so I could say “OKKKKK, let’s go to the slides!” The file I uploaded was just a rough draft of that stupid thought.

The second problem was that every moment I wasn’t acting – it was growing. 20,000 came in 1.5 days. 50,000 in 3 days. 100,000 in 4 days. At that point it didn’t matter if I took it down – people were downloading the file and re-uploading it on blog sites and internet cesspools like funny junk. It was everywhere. 5 days in it hit 200,000 hits. And then Tumblr happened… At that point I hadn’t told anyone what was going on and none of my friends had found it. I was a complete wreck.

By day 6 you could go to Google and type in “Why I hate” and it would auto fill to “my best friends girlfriend.”

Yeah. I was so screwed. OH and to top it all off, THE FIRST SLIDE HAS MY STUPID FACE ON IT.

A few things happened around that time. I finally told my friends who weren’t the people mentioned in the powerpoint about its existence. They thought it was hilarious. I then told them about how it blew up on the internet. They didn’t believe me. I then showed them the StumbleUpon page, which then had about 300,000 views. Then they laughed their asses off. For the record, I was the only one not laughing and I hate my friends.

Over the next year of my life, the same thing would happen about three times a week. Someone would send me a text or a Facebook wall post saying, “Hey…is this you?!” with the link attached. Then if it was on Facebook I would run to the nearest computer (I still had a flip phone at the time) and delete the post. Sometimes I literally ran. With a recently broken ankle. Like a banshee. Thankfully no one who I didn’t want to see it ever did while I cared. Eventually I just gave up and waited for inevitable, which I should of done from the beginning but hey – can’t blame a guy for trying…well….you can…and you probably should. I know I would.

The moral of this story is that if you write something that has a malicious nature and should be seen by no one – don’t post it on the internet, you idiot.

Every now and again I see it. Here it the most popular one on Tumblr. Not originally posted by me. 100,000+ reblogs.

And here it is on a bunch of different sites:

http://joyreactor.com/post/542538

http://www.funnyjunk.com/funny_pictures/960470/Why/

http://www.nert.me/pictures.php?current_id=50

http://cheezburger.com/5685190656

http://www.strangebeaver.com/2011/12/why-i-hate-my-best-friends-girlfriend/

http://angelaspinkyworld.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-i-hate-my-best-friends-girlfriend.html

http://willbarnesonline.com/wordpress/2010/12/02/why-i-hate-my-best-friends-girlfriend/

http://www.stumbleupon.com/content/2Oq2gu

The Google Search

It even inspired some others to create their own versions  that are incredibly similar.

There’s more, too. Lots more. Oh, and just to let you all know – The couple eventually split and I told the best friend about the Powerpoint. He laughed. Then I showed him that it had over a million views. Then he laughed until he cried.

Last time I checked, the original post had somewhere around 2 million views. The posts from other sites have about another million.

…Yeah. I know.