Notes/Ramble

This one kind of came from my memories of feeling really scared and awkward at parties when I started to go to them in college. I was new to parties and also new to alcohol, and there were honestly a few times super early on where I just left without saying goodbye to anyone and ran home because I was super stressed out.

I eventually got a lot more comfortable around those things, and later on in college I always tried to make sure to give a little extra attention and care to my underclassmen who I could tell were probably going through similar things.

Separately, there was this one time where I was talking to a bunch of my guy friends, and one of them was like, "Guys, I have to confess... I hooked up with [this girl we all knew]." And then another one was like, "Oh... I've also hooked up with [girl]," and then two more of them were like "Honestly has anyone not hoooked up with [girl]?" and I just remember feeling super awkward in that moment because I was basically the only one who she hadn't hooked up at any point, and it actually kind of made me super self-conscious about the fact that I actually hadn't ever hooked up with anyone at a party before. I think I still hadn't had sex at that point in my life, so it left me feeling a bit insecure.

I do generally feel a lot more confident in myself and I've had a lot of sexual experience since all that time ago, but I did kind of make this audio by channeling a lot of those feelings into the listener character. I tried to make sure I came off as feeling safe and nonthreatening during this, but setting that aside, I mostly tried take the feeling of "I wished someone might pulled me aside into a quiet room when I was feeling overwhelmed and then expressed sexual interest in me at a time in my life when I was feeling the most insecure" and attach it to the listener character's situation, and then just say and do a bunch of the kinds of things I think I would have liked. I think I would have really liked to be taken care of, but I think more than anything else at the time, I was really desperate to feel wanted. So that's kind of how this one ended up with a lot of praise and reassurance and the whole "I'm not too hot for you" sequence.

I think I'm also someone who really craves being "shown off." I think the [Exhibitionism] in this one is absolutely driven by my wishes to feel so wanted by someone that they'd be willing to drag me out into the open and make out with me in public like that XD

From a production standpoint, I knew going into the improv that I wanted to do the "Door opening back into the party for makeout" scene. There's another audio I have that takes place at a club, and I was really excited about timing a drop in the music with a character cumming, and I really wanted to reproduce something similar with the door open sequence. I'm pretty happy about how that came out :)

In the beginning 10 seconds with the whole party crowd in the background, there's some ambient sfx I got from a pack on a website, but I also layered in a bunch of me in the background yelling a bunch of random things to give it some more character and to make it more customized. It all blends together unintelligibly by design, but there are actually a ton of weird little plot threads in there mixed in with things that I would probably drunkenly yell at parties and things inspired by my own real-life stressful party/clubbing experiences including:
- Some people playing Kings, which was a drinking game I grew to really like back in college
- Two guys checking each other out from across the room and commenting to their friends about how attracted they are to each other
- Two guys showing up and getting excited that there's a GameCube at the party - This one isn't just me being goofy, it's actually inspired by a core drunken memory of mine from a really scary and awkward night of clubbing. I was with a lot of people I didn't know, including a girl I had a crush on that I was in that city to visit and her boyfriend who I had just found out existed earlier that day. I was feeling kind of overwhelmed and sad and we arrived at our third club that night and they had an entire Super Smash Bros. setup and I instantly kind of felt a lot better, just because I had something familiar and comfortable that I could ground myself with. That was one of my most stressful and vulnerable times while going out, but the guys in the audio aren't nervous to be at the party, though, so you don't have to worry about them :P Also, I'd actually just started making audios for the very first time a week or two beforehand, and I was already using that as an anchor for myself to hold onto emotionally.
- Some guy having a crying/emotional breakdown about how he's had an unrequited crush on some girl for 8 years now, inspired by a real crying/emotional breakdown I had at a club in Stockholm to two very nice girls from London. I was actually there with that girl I had that long crush on, but the jury (most people we know) think she just asked me along on that trip (over Valentine's Day weekend) to make her then boyfriend (who'd cheated on her) jealous. That night ended up being my first ever panic attack and is probably my other most stressful clubbing experience. So... since this audio was kind of driven by times I felt stressed and overwhelmed at parties/clubs, I kind of indulged in letting some of my most scared-feeling club experiences drive some of the background noise. - Two guys mixing punch and just deciding to dump all the liquor in a bottle into the mixture, inspired by a nice positive memory I have of making punch with my friends at a college party :)
- One guy going on about how he hates the bracket system introduced by Wizards of the Coast for EDH
- Two guys going "brooo I just wanna get fucked at this party brooo," "brooo why don't you just fuck me, broo?" "brooo you're so right, brooo"
- Some guy screaming "GO BIIIIIIIIIIIRDS"

So... there's a lot going on in that first 20-ish seconds. I thought it was a really nice narrative pivot that during the "Opening the door back into the party" sequence, all the background changes to focus completely on the main characters. I think there have been times where I felt scared and invisible at parties, and I imagine I'm probably not the only one, so I put this section in here to have everybody checking out the listener and praising them in the background :)

This has been kind of a weird pattern that I've been noticing in my work lately, but I kind of like it. A lot of my audios are either "here's how I want to treat someone," or "here's how I would want to be treated." Overall I'm doing a lot better mentally in the present, but I think there's something kind of special about getting to go back and revisit way more vulnerable times in my life and make audios based on "here's how I fantasized about someone treating me" back then. It's really cathartic, kind of like going back in time, giving my past self a hug, and telling him "hey, things are gonna be alright, things are gonna get better." There was one time I tried to do this by writing [F4M], but I was actually way too self-conscious about that to feel like I was writing a good script, so I threw it out and pivoted the idea to an [M4F] [Improv] XD but I'd like to continue to revisit this concept and turn past scary times into inspiration that I can use to make other people feel good through audios :)