Episode 446 - Ready Player One: The Adventures of Jack, chapters 1-2

Episode 446: Ready Player One: The Adventures of Jack, chapters 1-2

Imagine trying to eat knowing that there’s a microfibre crotch inlay that’s likely gotten a lot of use right next to your table.

Meet Jack. He has two pistols, an assault rifle, a sniper rifle, a sword, two knives, several suits of armour, an invisibility cloak, a sports car, a motorcycle, a fleet of shuttles and a huge spaceship that he runs his repair business from. Who is he as a person? Well that doesn’t really matter. What does matter is listing the inventory of each and every character in the fic so we know what they’re carrying on them at any given moment. And so join Jack and his loosely defined friends as they do stuff for no real reason, talk about Wrestlemania and avoid piano lessons in Ready Player One: The Adventures of Jack. Damn straight!

Riffers: Dan, Rebecca Bartley, Tsuneo Tateo and Rick R. Mortis

Written by: Zogster and Rick R.

Episode 445 - Robotech the New Age

Episode 445: Robotech the New Age

Take a timeout from the space war

Meet Coates, Ruby, Dan and Sparky. Who are they? No clue. Why do we care about them? Your guess is as good as mine. So why is this fic all about them? That is indeed a mystery that will never be resolved at all. What we can tell you is that they’re a bunch of pilots on board a spaceship who spend their time firing heatseekers at Pods, getting drunk, engaging in unfunny comedy antics, firing heatseekers at Pods, going on dates, talking to their pet pug and firing heatseekers at Pods. So get your hazmat suit, your maxed out credit card and your outdated unfunny stereotypes for Robotech the New Age. Approved by a tactical genius!

Riffers: Dan, Rebecca Bartley, Tsuneo Tateo and Rick R. Mortis

Written by: Zogster and Rick R.

Rebuild of Elmer Studios, year ten

Ten years. Wow.

Honestly, when we started this project, we had no idea where it would go. The whole idea of ‘rebooting’ Elmer Studios was a sort of ‘sure, why not’ thing with the plan being to simply keep going for as long as we could or as long as we had material to go on with. Instead, the whole thing took us in completely unexpected directions. The B-Teams, the lost pilots, the guest cast, Storm Force and the rabbit hole that it led us down and so on.

Had you asked me where this would be in 2012, I would have had no clue. And yet, here we are. And we’re still going.

In the last year, we covered seventeen episodes, which was on the low side of things. There were mitigating circumstances, including a problem with uploads that meant that there were no episodes released in October of 2021. But that wasn’t all that happened.

Episode 444 - Son of Primus, chapters 11-20

Episode 444: Son of Primus, chapters 11-20

He figures this is his life now. Just being shuffled between different cells with the occasional uncontrolled re-entry

Remember when this fic was a Need for Speed crossover? I don’t, and apparently neither does the fic. What it’s actually is about is how Stripes is the stupidest person in the universe, and yet everyone stands around and congratulates him for it. And so as he alternates between falling through space, running away from danger and leaving his friends to face the music, being interrogated and held hostage, Stripes keeps asking himself ‘why me’, despite the fact that everyone keeps reiterating the plot at him. So get your Crack Calibre Laser-Blazer Broadsword for the next part of Son of Primus! Maybe even featuring Cross and/or Razor!

Riffers: Dan, Rebecca Bartley, Tsuneo Tateo and Rick R. Mortis

Written by: Zogster and Rick R.

Lost Fanfics

 As of when I write this (March 2022), Fanfiction.net is still more or less alive; not floating but not quite drowning for the moment. How long it will stay like that is another matter. While many pundits have been predicting the imminent death of the site for years, it has somehow managed to keep going despite all of that. Likewise, while many have been expecting Archive of our Own to overtake it in terms of growth and content any day now, that hasn’t happened either.

Of course, the death of Fanfiction.net would be a terrible thing, despite how much we joke about it. The simple fact is that the site represents a tremendous repository of fanlore going back to the late nineties. Many of the fics on it exist there and there alone. Some may have been posted on other sites that have since been lost to the death of Web 1.0; most simply have never been posted anywhere else at all. And on the day that Fanfiction.net does die (and many do see it as a when, not an if), they will indeed be lost forever. Of course, that also doesn’t prevent authors from removing their fics from fanfiction.net; when such happens, that fic becomes lost.

We’ve seen a lot of that in our time. The original Elmer Studios run was in the era of personal websites, small archives and the like, with fanfiction.net creeping in there at the end. Conversely, the modern run started in the age of fanfiction.net and Ao3, while watching the personal website and the small archive die around us, as well as a number of other sources that we have turned to in past. Many of the fanfics we have riffed now simply exist nowhere else at all, at least not in their ‘raw’ format.

So I thought I’d do a tour of some ‘lost’ fics.

Episode 443 - Son of Primus, chapters 1-10

Episode 443: Son of Primus, chapters 1-10

Having plunged through the atmosphere of an unknown planet and impacted into a giant crater only to be trapped by a cannibalistic robot, Stripes is more convinced than ever that jumping out the airlock was a good idea.

Having formerly been a street racer, our hero Stripes (sadly not an orange tiger cassette guy) has been abducted, transformed and is now on the run from a mystic destiny, all while mooning over that one hot cop girl from that one Need for Speed game. Can Stripes escape his enemies, both old and new? Why would you have a ‘was all a dream’ twist in the middle of the fic? Why would you even write a crossover if it has nothing to do with anything? None of these questions will be answered, but you probably expected that. So get your orbital mind control lasers and your feet pedes for the first part of Son of Primus! 

Riffers: Dan, Rebecca Bartley, Tsuneo Tateo and Rick R. Mortis

Written by: Zogster and Rick R.

Episode 442 - Death's Fixer, chapters 7-9

Episode 442: Death's Fixer, chapters 7-9

Judy has realised that her crappy childhood didn’t feature any dragon chases and she feels strangely robbed

As Death’s Fixer continues its relentless advance, we have to ask a big question. What is V actually doing for this fic? They’re not finishing story quests, they rarely fight bad guys and they’re at the stage where getting their clothes cleaned is a major plot point. And while Judy gets drunk, Panam complains about the parking and Takamura passes out in a back alley, the fic shifts its focus to other popular Cyberpunk 2077 characters, like Harry Potter, Neville Longbottom, Ginny Weasley, Blaise Zabani, Cruckshanks and Dobby the House Elf. So shoot straight, conserve ammo and never do a deal with a dragon for another three chapters of Death’s Fixer. Yes, there is actually a dragon in there.

Riffers: Dan, Rebecca Bartley, Tsuneo Tateo and Rick R. Mortis

Written by: Zogster and Rick R.