I actually caught a commercial that I did not fast forward thru. They were talking about how Ryan's real g/f is gone but he and Allison are getting along. It even has Ryan make a comment about how Allison is his type. If BB is mentioning this I can see them hoping these two will remain so they can exploit this.

I think the partnership of Ryan/Allison has been damaged beyond repair.......

Remember the famous saying..."Expect the unexpected!"

Vince - could you clarify? Do you mean that the antics of Allison are going to get them evicted, or her antics would prevent any relationship developing between them?

Allison was under a prank attack a day or so ago, and Ryan refused to help her.

He will play the challenges with her, if there are any more in their future (highly unlikely) but for all intents and purposes, he's given up on the whole thing. She's still campaigning to stay, as pointless at that is, but he's not.

We interrupt Joshuah's week-long power trip to bring you the following:

The hamsters have been told that sometime soon, they will hear an alarm go off in the house. When this happens -- regardless of when it happens -- they are to get down to the living room and follow the instructions they find there. Oh, and they're supposed to remember that they have to expect the unexpected. Which by definition is impossible, but it's the hamster cage and good luck watching them realize that.

In other news, the ever-loyal Matt is now trying to make out with Sharon as a means of power securing. Sharon is aware of his intentions and finds them funny. Natalie has no idea what's going on. Matt is now calling himself America's Playa. Matt believes he now controls Sharon. Matt is extremely stupid.

Oh, and speaking of extremely stupid, here's a lightly-transcribed entry from last night's backyard conversation, cleaned up from Jokers:

'Natalie is complaining about Matt. Adam tells her straight up that she's too emotional about him already: Matt doesn't want to deal with it, and neither would he.

Natalie claims that she isn't, to which Adam replies "Look how emotional you get when he won't cuddle. Think about how emotional you would be if he gave you some (term for male genitalia)."'

Such a great casting tool job.

We now return you to Joshuah's reign of error, still in progress.

Some of the hamsters (particularly Sharon) are starting to realize they've got too few evictions left for too many weeks, and are starting to wonder if people will be coming back. Joshuah may not care as long as Allison stays gone, because he feels she's a virus. (Well, I suppose Mr. STD would know...) Joshuah feels the end date for the season will be March 25th: Chelsia also believes it'll be a short season. The idea of couples breaking apart doesn't seem to be present in the house at the moment.

Allison, in her attempts to stay, is resorting to bribes. James has promised her his for $750 and a carton of cigarettes. So at least now we have something new in the promise department to go back on...

Well, you get yourself a Bible, then a stooge to help you carry it and you go around the house exorcising the evil that dwells within it.

Then, you and said stooge create magical tin foil hats to wear on your head. Ya know, for the evil.

When you get all tuckered out by all this, someone will be along to distract you. Naked. Oh, except for the sock.

Guess the exorcism didn't take. They're all STILL THERE!!

Oh gawds. Things I did not need to see at eight in the morning.

Apparently Joshuah's intent was also to stop evil from re-entering the house: the ceremony was partially meant to ward off returning hamsters. He also prayed (in private) that his deity remove evil from the house. (Clearly this didn't work: Joshuah's still there.) Also that he lose ten pounds and last another week. (To be determined.) And later at night, he went in the backyard and asked for a sign. (Nothing happened.)

Just what we always needed: Gay Male Amber. Or to quote Allison on one of his summonings, "Raging psychopath, please go to the Diary Room."

And you don't want to know what James was doing with that sock before he came out wearing it . You really, really don't.

A quote from Sheila: 'I haven't seen one sane person in this house.' She admitted this included in mirrors.

do we now have an icky sock of James's to add to Matty's icky towel (also from last night)?

So anyone going to tackle Big Brother in the Story Competition forum?

Are you volunteering?

Personally, I think it's one of the hardest series to do.

Good gawd NO! I am masochistic, but even I have my limits.

I was just wondering if anyone hated him/herself was brave enough to tackle it.

Personally, I would find it hard enough to come up with antics that are even more over the top than this bunch of I-couldn't-get-on-any-other-reality-tv-show-cause-I-failed-the-psych-profile-rejects.

In a way, that over-the-top quality is the central freedom of a fictional BB season. You can go completely into the lunatic fringe and stay there because anything you could come up with is probably something the show's considered, starting with stupid twists, ranging through insane contestants, and wrapping it all up in a theme no reasonable person would have ever considered putting it on the air. No matter how far beyond the borders you think you're venturing, you're still in show territory: you just got there first.

Of course, it might help to (unlike this season) have at least one person the viewers/readers could remotely stand. My first thought for a storyline would be 'one or more sane people struggling against the occupants of a madhouse, an uncaring show, an inattentive host, and a sadistic viewership mostly comprised of VFTW posters on their day off.' Imagine a first-person BB from the viewpoint of a puppeteered America's Player Part II, with the show, the other players, and especially America all working to make hir life as hard as possible -- then watching that player make it all work for hir. (Probably to lose at the end at the kicking feet of a jury that wants revenge. The show's funny like that.)

But BB does have problems if you translate it to fiction. For starters, the setting is -- limited. Very, very limited. (One of the central themes for a season is likely claustrophobia -- but it can be overplayed.) You have a house and a backyard. Better dress them up well, because you'll be seeing a lot of them.

The duration is arguably the biggest problem. Take a season all the way to the end, and you're covering ninety days of action. That's practically an order of magnitude over what's been attempted or accomplished so far: Survivor is thirty-nine days, the Race course typically takes about a month to run and the Mole contestants will likely work around that scale. Ninety days is a lot of material to work with.

How much do you show? You can't just base it around the most typical show events: competitions, nominations and votes, the occasional interview and contestant feature segment. Do you use a DAW Chorus of sorts to cover some of the live feed events? How much is seen through the insider viewpoint? No one can manage every hour of every day -- but even if the contestant is in the relative dark, there are times when the readers have to have a more complete idea of house events. And the writer can't go to the guinea pigs feed.

The host is her own minor hell. There are going to be competitions which get miscalled, questions that make no sense, interviews somehow attempting to remove insight, and the occasional outright forgetting of which player she's talking to. None of which even remotely stretches the character as she's already established herself. Whee!

Oh, and then there's the contestant pool. If you're doing a typical season, you probably have fourteen of them, and there ain't no such thing as tribes: pretty much everyone can be around at any given time, and typically, all of them are talking. Or more likely, screaming. That's a lot of people to track at any given time, especially in group scenes -- some of which will inevitably degrade into shoutfests.

As a fictional season, Big Brother has a lot of problems to overcome.

As a real series, it arguably has even more.

There would need to be, I would think, a singular vantage point (maybe one of the show people who only watches one room 12 hours a day, or a specific house guest) for the story telling.

However one would still need to track what is going on everywhere else in the house, although with Big Bother logical consistency isn't that necessary so one could do fairly random things and still have it seem plausible even if you never explain how the heck it happened. After all I don't think the people involved in a good portion of the blow ups can explain what the heck just happened.

I do think it's a strong candidate for first-person. The DAW Chorus -- for the thousands upon millions who missed Survivor: The Society Islands, it's a group of Internet posters putting up live commentary at points within the storyline -- is the kind of plot device that could work again in covering gaps. (Just for the sake of not killing the readership, a writer might want to avoid the apparent Jokers typing house style.) BB might work best when we're really stuck with a contestant, watching the madness unfold from a main reference point. Third-person is a ton of tracking and enough location switches, even within the limited realm of the house, to produce whiplash.

(Censored), I've even got a title if anyone wants to use it: Big Brother: The Hamster Chronicles.

And when all else fails: isolation booths!

LAST EDITED ON 03-03-08 AT 03:28 PM (EST)

First - Complete admiration for the work you and Zoid put in, I don't think I could attempt it and function at work, and the dreams must be maddening. But what you do is so nice and smart that I promise, I will catch up. I love it so far.

And I appreciate the insight to what it might take to think thru the doing of a BB series, it's actually kinda intriguing the way you lay it out.

Now, what pops into my mind is to do it totally from the vantage point of one hamster, and lay it out as a mystery. Which wouldn't have foreordained conclusion.

One would have to get away from the viewpoint of being in the audience watching the show, or reading the book, or even the idea that it was a fictional BB series (which it actually would be), but that it is more of a personal experience. It wouldn't be a mystery in the sense that there is a central crime to solve, but in the sense that one is involved as the crime is being committed around you. Or a series of mini-crimes.

Not putting yourself into the mind of each character could make it a more manageable project. Perhaps less entertaining as well.

An actual crime (a murder? murders? A subtly serial killer cast in the show?) wrapped in the guise of a BB TV show?....Nah, too Jessica Fletcher.

I'm going to come back to this later and see if I made any sense.

ETA: I think I just repeated Estee (roughly at least) - Beg pardon. Also for thread jack

LAST EDITED ON 03-03-08 AT 05:09 PM (EST)

No, I think I am to blame for the thread jack. . But now you have me thinking........

Just when I think the hamsters can't be any dumber, they surpass all my expectations.

I've thought about BB as my next project. However, I've also thought about the fact that there's so much that would go into it, at least the way I write. I could release an episode of All-Stars II every week. TARX takes about two weeks an episode, including the episode itself, the blogs, the news feeds, Elimination Station, and the post-boot interviews. And at the rate I'm writing, the finale is going to take months to write and will have to be released in segments. I can't promise it will be done by Christmas.

Then picture what it would take for me to tackle BB. I have a concept for a season of BB (I'll give one spoiler: if it happens, the Chenbot is history and one of those from TARX fills in) but the sheer amount of work involved would be enough to drive me insane. Plus, there's the little PG-13 requirement. I've been able to stay on the PG-13 side of things thanks in part to the magic of bleeps, blurs, and bloggers cleaning up their potty mouths (trust me, there's a good reason bloggers say "hell" and "damn" a lot...it's better than some of the alternatives.)

A season of BB takes probably 10-12 weeks, runs at three hours of air time a week compared to one hour, airs nightly on Showtime Too, and has 24/7 live feeds. There's no way in hell one lobster can cover all of that and get it all done before the next President leaves office, especially considering I have a job, a wife, and a dog. It might work as a collaborative project, but then that would probably take longer just to coordinate what happens in the house, and God knows we'd step on each other's toes.

I picture it this way - some excerpts from the Live Feeds would be released to RTVW along with the episodes, blogs, and usual rigamarole I give with a season. The After Dark segments would probably be on a three-tiered system - the tame stuff that's pertinent to the story, which would probably be released, then the wild stuff, which would be released via PM, and then the really outrageous stuff that doesn't even begin to touch PG-13, which may have to be sent via e-mail or something but would be written upon request.

Even so, with all that going on, it would take fricking forever to write. Survivor was downright doable. TAR is tricky and would help if I could make myself have ADD like Ron (hey, he said it about himself.) BB would be a little like building a model of the Statue of Liberty out of toothpicks and Jell-O. It's doable, but it takes forever, it falls apart at every turn, and it doesn't accomplish anything.

Except maybe showing what BB would be like with a real host.

It appears that the veto meeting is underway.

are safe for another week. Shelia & Adumb are the replacement noms after Matty & Natty toook themselves off the block

It would be smart for them to get rid of Sheila and Adumb. Everyone in the house dislikes Josh and Allison so they would be good to go up against in the final.

LAST EDITED ON 03-03-08 AT 12:35 PM (EST)

It would be smart for them

I think I found the flaw in your theory.

Very true Estee!! What was I thinking?? I would love Ryan to stay though since he looks so much like my husband! I am nothing like Allison or Jen (thank goodness!!)

Siren = Coup D'Etat 2.0?

Allison has taken up some nail polish and a piece of paper towel and went to the guinea pig cage and was possibly writing down letters that were in the mini cage before Josh came in and she scrambled to put them away.............

Has the Siren actually gone off yet since it was announced?

If that's the case, it'll have to come soon for the current nominees, who are running seriously short on clock -- and given that the next episode typically covers everything through the Veto ceremony, with Wednesday for the eviction, it brings up the question of when they'd show it. If it touches the nominations at all, then it just about has to happen in the middle of the live episode. Otherwise, we're either looking at a very weird Wednesday airing or a total disruption of the normal show schedule.

LAST EDITED ON 03-04-08 AT 04:59 AM (EST)

and that's without factoring in whatever that "twist" that will change the game involving the soon-to-be evicted couple...... unless this Siren is a part of it.

ETA: Since the notification of the Siren/Alarm came on Saturday, between the POV Competition and the POV meeting, there is a chance that there will be some mention of it on tonight's (Tuesday's) show.............

What is the siren? I am missing something here.

Post #34. I didn't know it was a siren sound at the time.

Now it looks like hamsters making fun of the Chenbot is a guinea pig offense. (James triggered it.)

Joshuah continues to bash Allison (and it sort of sounds like James & Chelsia are planning a verbal assault of their own, maybe just in case Allison stays). Joshuah thinks it'll be embarrassing for Allison to have her family see her verbally ripped on television. Joshuah also thinks Allison was cast as the psycho-be-yotch and he was cast as -- and I quote -- 'the funny crazy gay'. Joshuah has graduated Always Yell Loudly from the debate school of never letting anyone else finish a sentence. Joshuah has been bashing Matt in privacy (arguably as a warm-up) and continuing to delve into Amber-prayer with increasing frequency.

Joshuah has absolutely no idea what the outside world thinks of him.

We can only hope he'll feel the Haggie-effect.

Or maybe a series of packages containing flaming dog-poo.

Mailed by me.

LAST EDITED ON 03-03-08 AT 08:59 PM (EST)

He's in Dallas... I figure there can't be too many little gay T-Sips out here who spell their name that way.

I'd even provide the dog-poo.

Well, I've found a J Welch who lives in the "gay ghetto" area of Dallas. Don't know if that would help.

HMMMMMMMM. Just saw a show featuring Dallas's "Gayborhood"

There is only one J Welch living in that area?

LAST EDITED ON 03-04-08 AT 00:44 AM (EST)

Yep. All the others are in more outlying areas.

Oh, cool, post 69.

None of them have any idea what the outside world thinks of them. I guess I'm in the minority, but, I don't think Joshuah is nearly as terrible as Allison or Matt. I just don't. At least he's apologized numerous times to & about Amanda. The rest just keep blaming her for things that are happening since she's been out of the house.

LAST EDITED ON 03-03-08 AT 07:51 PM (EST)

At least he's apologized numerous times to & about Amanda.

He continued to get his share of dead father/noose jokes in after the apology (just out of her earshot), and still pulls out the theme every once in a while even with Amanda gone.

How we each see the contestants as relating to each other on the Absolute Scum Scale is going to be a matter of personal opinion. I hate Matt for having no visible morals, his complete lack of caring about what he's doing to Natalie, and his arrogance/pride in the prior two. I hate Allison because she never factors in what her little games might do to everyone around her, treats her partner as a chew toy, and feels she's perpetually in the right regardless of the evidence. But as for how much I hate them expressed as absolute rankings...

...well, there's a reason we haven't had any Love Lists this season. There's no one to love.

Loathe Lists, while serving the same purpose, just never caught on.

Well I Love James and to a lesser extent Chelsia, but I'm probably in the minority.

I think James is wicked hot. ;)

I shall place them on the "don't hate them, but they're probably just as awful" list.

They're just not as visibly obnoxious. However, I don't doubt that they probably say horrible things, just like the other hamsters...

I've seen some of the live feeds (free 3 day trial ends tomorrow) and he's incredibly sweet to his partner. That's what made me love him.

Chelsia said ealier tonight, "Let's just all kill each other right now because that would be splendid."

A moment of clarity, if you will.

that was a very sarcastic statement.

For all his douchiness, James has at least had a few redeeming moments on the show, particularly the way he handled the situation with Amanda.

Yep, at least he has a few functioning neurons and the ability to shut the obnoxiousness off when need be.

While that may or may not make up for all the rest, he at least has some humanity and intelligence lurking inside of him. I'm not so sure about the rest of the hamsters.

I will agree with that from what I have seen. And isnt' he the one who said he would donate his money? I thought the person who said that was actually sincere when they said that.

Joshuah is a piece of crap, plain and simple.

Tribe is pushing up my daisies!

In case anyone still cares what's happening in the cage:

Sharon told Joshuah that Matt is coming on to her as a means of saving himself. They agreed that she should lead him on so that he continues to think he is safe with them. (Don't these idiots know they are only in power for ONE WEEK, and in fact they have NO power once they make their nominations?)

Gnat is running around the house "studying." She said she has to start preparing early for HoH comp since it takes her a long time to study. Well, I suppose that's fine. HOWEVER, she's going around telling everyone the things she's noticing that are weird about the house (ie she's discovered lots of things come in eights). She reports her findings to people, and when she leaves the room, they laugh. Sharon and Josh spent a lot of time with Gnat in the HoH room last night and then bashed her incessantly after she left.

Joshuah still hates Allison. He is dictating how the votes should go and the hampsters don't like it. He wants it to be a tie so that he can have the satisfaction of evicting Allison himself.

I would love it if Adam and Sheila go home instead. No on ehas to listen to Josh. And because he has no shot at HoH then he could very likely go home if he doesn't change very soon.

Me too.

Tribe is pushing up my daisies!

On one hand we have the "Lonely Goatherder" from the Sound of Music (Yodel lay hee!)

and on the other hand we got an unnamed song from Hannah Montana.............

HGs (Josh, James, Sharron, and Chelsia) freaking out thinking the siren will go off tonight and ruin the chance of getting Ali out of the house.

The siren did not go off last night.

I'm starting to think that the siren may not go off, and they just wanted to freak out the hampsters.

lost by tribe

TODAY! Day 1: Diary for Big Brother 9 ala Jericho

This just in from an insider source!

The Alarm will go off after Showtime - sometime between 12am - 4am PST. Feeds will be cut at one point though not for long. It's going to be something that has been done before but with a BIGGER SHOCKER.
The house will be on total lockdown. Producer Allison will fill the HG's on what's going to happen via the TV. People will be coming back! The last 5 HG's that were evicted are in sequester right now on the set of BB. Can you say BUENO?!?! Amanda is coming back for sure, she's loved by CBS <3.(Bringing Amanda back stirs the pot) The HG's might come back in different ways - one might be put in the yard, one in the storage room, one in the HOH and another HG in a room that is locked. Stay tuned . .more to come!

>TODAY! Day 1: Diary for Big
>Brother 9 ala Jericho
>
>This just in from an insider
>source!
>
>The Alarm will go off after
>Showtime - sometime between 12am
>- 4am PST. Feeds will
>be cut at one point
>though not for long. It's
>going to be something that
>has been done before but
>with a BIGGER SHOCKER.
>The house will be on total
>lockdown. Producer Allison will fill
>the HG's on what's going
>to happen via the TV.
>People will be coming back!
>The last 5 HG's that
>were evicted are in sequester
>right now on the set
>of BB. Can you say
>BUENO?!?! Amanda is coming back
>for sure, she's loved by
>CBS <3.(Bringing Amanda back stirs
>the pot) The HG's might
>come back in different ways
>- one might be put
>in the yard, one in
>the storage room, one in
>the HOH and another HG
>in a room that is
>locked. Stay tuned . .more
>to come!

Does the last five include the 2 that are evicted tonight?

And Joshuah will be in the backyard, hanging from the camera mount in a self-created noose.

I'm sorry. Was that a bad thing to say?

They haven't been given an HoH run-thru this week........

Take that for what it's worth on both fronts.........