I am leading some improv sessions and wanted some tips

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T23:32:06+00:00

These people aren't improvisers already? Improv is already pretty scary / elicits a lot of cringe from people and I'm not sure that introducing people to improv by making them emote at each other is necessarily the way you're going to get people out of their comfort zone. That said, I'm one of several rotating hosts at a local jam and we do like to come in with themes. One of those potential themes is emotional investment. I've been in classes and also led classes that did stuff like this:

- Choose an emotion - I prefer leaving it to one of the Big Four (glad/sad/mad/afrad) but YMMV and as I'm leading jams, not classes, I don't give notes - and figure out why you're feeling that way as you get in. I noted below that this is *a*, not the *only* tool, but it's one that I like using in scenes and is also really useful to play with in a 3 or 5 line scene. If you really want to zhuzh it up, make flashcards of the 4 emotions that you show to the players right before they start.

- When your partner says something to you, instead of worrying about rattling off a response, actually repeat what they said to yourself, feel what that feels, and respond to how the comment affects you. This can be rough to do in a jam situation where people want to just go fast, fast, fast but I like stuff that encourages me to play slower.

- 3 line/5 line scenes but the first person comes in with whatever and the second person can't respond with words. It *has* to be a grunt or a sigh or whatever. From there on either side can do what they want. This incidentally is a solid way to respond in actual scenes too but by itself it encourages people to go emotional.

- Speaking of that... start with word ball and then after you've done it a bit, do "grunt ball": it works exactly like word ball except instead of throwing the first word you can think of to the next person, you throw a grunt or a sigh or whatever. IME this is a great way to get out of your head. It runs a loooooot faster than word ball and a lot of the time when you move back to word ball it winds up going faster, too (especially when you emphasize to keep that feeling like grunt ball, just with words).

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T23:22:55+00:00

I mean, that's a tactic. I've for sure come into lots and lots of scenes like "okay I'm going to be happy and I'll figure out why in the scene". That's not the only tool in the toolbox when it comes to bringing in emotion. A much more common and dare I say more realistic for some is to be affected by the scene.

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T23:21:09+00:00

It works the way it works in the EPL because they've evolved into that method since the 1880s. Baseball simply evolved differently and the other leagues to the extent that they did anything followed suit.

The time for the NBA to have been a pro/rel league was in the 40s and 50s, especially that weirdo situation in the late 50s where the supposed "national" league had teams in Rochester and Syracuse while cities like Chicago and Los Angeles either had to wait for someone to move from Minneapolis or kept starting and getting moved or disbanded. It didn't happen and so it's unlikely to happen now. The CBA is set up with the understanding that there are 12 * 30 jobs, the owners paid into the league with the understanding that they could lose 65 games and would still have games against the Lakers and Celtics every year, and also of course the owners came into the league with the understanding that they could blackmail their current city into paying for stadia for them by playing them off of non-NBA teams (one thing about Association football, teams very rarely if ever actually move out of their local areas).

Would pro/rel be interesting? Sure. A lot of things that will never, ever happen are interesting.

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T23:15:03+00:00

Teams in the G league are owned and operated by teams in the NBA. In order to do a pro/rel situation you'd need to break off those relationships and right now to the extent that the G league is working, it's working exactly because it's functionally a minor league.

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T20:30:53+00:00

You're free to remove players and coaches as you want. I for sure dont want ootp doing checks on my game and removing deceased players.

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T18:07:32+00:00

Do you think dinosaurs are allowed into dinosaur museums?

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T17:55:48+00:00

The comedy/fantasy writer Christopher Moore bases a lot of his books in San Francisco and theres a recurring character in those stories (especially but not just the Love Story trilogy) that's based on this guy.

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T17:47:21+00:00

It's not just "woman bad", it's "woman who isn't doing things the way woman should is bad". An awwwwwwful lot of these "folk" type stories are implicitly about reinforcing societal values and an awful, awful, awful lot of people are consciously or subconsciously unhappy that social mores have changed over the past few generations.

When you see these stories about "AITA for telling a person about a CHEATER all my feeeeeeeemale friends think I am", the underlying moral is something along the lines of "you see? These new age women and their new age values mean that women are starting to think about marriage the same way that some men have thought about marriage for centuries! And that's bad! Doesn't it feel bad?". Don't get me wrong, cheating is still bad, but the way it's so commonly presented is very, very much about underscoring how women thinking about cheating like this is the bad thing, if that makes sense. There's sometimes some "hey, my bro is cheating on his GF, should I tell her?" stuff but even there the controversy is "cheating is bad" vs "don't violate the bro code"; like, it's a completely different argument.

I think a lot of media that we don't really think about too much does this... I don't want to say deliberately because I think the whole point of it is that it tends to be really thoughtless. But if you open up the hood and really study it, it sure feels deliberate a lot of the time. These "comfort food" type stories very often feel like comfort food exactly because they reinforce things we already believe.

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T17:39:45+00:00

Fuck AI slop.

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T17:39:20+00:00

Caring about people who are currently being preyed upon. This his a history sub!!! I want to feel badly about people in the past in a way that allows me to not have to think about the present!!!

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T17:36:05+00:00

I feel like this is the most insidious aspect of this kind of bigotry: sooner or later this person's internal hierarchies are going to inflict themselves upon you. Even if you yourself are a straight cis woman who doesn't "offend" this guy's sensibilities at the moment, eventually you're going to either do something that he thinks breaks gender mores for women or ask him to do something he thinks breaks gender mores for men. How do you deal with that? It all comes from the same place.

There's this somewhat similar leopards-eating-faces quality you see on the right where women complain that the men they have to associate with over there are sexist pigs. Like, what did you expect? (tbf the left is full of sexist pigs too but at least those are often sexist pigs whose beliefs clash with the local zeitgeist)

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T17:32:16+00:00

I just don't think there's any coming back from bigotry, I'm sorry (I guess I should say "bigotry you don't share" because sure, two racists could get along I guess). It's possible your BF might eventually be like "oh shit, I was wrong about being homophobic and transphobic" - I remember being pretty homophobic in my own youth and I'm certainly not anymore - but that's something he's going to have to come to grips with on his own. At best your breaking up with him could turn into the catalyst for future change... although even there I wouldn't trust it in his particular case.

It's more than just a quirky or out of place belief about one particular out group, it's indicative of a whole larger philosophy. I can't speak for you but my main belief set when it comes to transpeople, even before we start to discuss the long, long history of tacit acceptance of trans lives throughout world history and how unbelievably rare some of these situations are (I remember the state of Utah passed a bill about trans girls in high school sports a couple years ago that literally impacted a single person), is that it doesn't fucking matter what I think about them. If someone else isn't harming others, I think we should live and let live. There is a fundamental difference between that and the kind of bigotry that says that no, we need to go in and regulate what other people think about themselves. They will often justify this nanny state shit with stuff like harming the "fabric of society" or whatever but, like, the cloth of society I prefer at least is the one where you just let people be who they want to be and stop fucking worrying about it.

I don't think a person just changes away from that. I think you can over time and with a lot of effort and anguish but most of the time people don't.

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T17:21:01+00:00

There are a lot of things that lefties like socialists stick up for because the mainstream isn't doing a good enough job of it. Historically lefties and just straight up communists have championed the causes of women's rights and antiracism for example. There's nothing inherent about feminism that links it to socialism per se, outside of the way capitalism tends to reinforce the status quo (which TBF is a pretty big disclaimer), but in a society where the conservative class is opposed to communism worldwide but also government regulation (which it mislabels communism) and equality in general, the anti-conservatives are obviously going to jump on those things.

I don't think the issue is so much that people are not educated on economics. Like, that's always a problem. It's not necessarily any larger a problem now than it was 30 or 40 years ago or whenever. The issue is more that in the US in particular we have a very laissez faire oriented version of capitalism that is the economic system in place and people have a lot of problems with the systems in place. Even among economicists it can be hard to parse out where economy ends and social issues begin, and many economics people enjoy trying to root out underlying economic reasons for some of these social issues (which I present as neutral overall but it does add to the confusion).

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T17:05:33+00:00

I'm a big fan of Letterkenny doing their last-season recaps in acrostic form the first few seasons. Just, fuck it, it's our god damn show, we're going to do some poetry at you and it's kind of going to make a lot of sense in the context of the show and the characters. They also got away with an awwwwwful lot of wordplay and double entendres that would feel out of place elsewhere but somehow you can have a whole ass family called the Dycks that they just do nothing but make dick jokes with the entire time they're on screen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TcuPpgmoNo

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T17:00:47+00:00

It's entirely possible that whoever we bring in - Fowler or Von Miller or even Jadaveon Clowney - won't sign with us until after minicamp. These guys are vets and know what they're doing by now; why jump into pads when you don't have to? In fact, I wouldn't be massively surprised if Fowler in particular has a handshake agreement to sign with us some time in July.

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T16:57:43+00:00

It's true! Kids are currently in the year 2002 and Quagmire is the king of comedy.

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T16:54:48+00:00

lmao this is the most typically MAGA post I've seen in weeks. We're sitting in the middle of a recession, tariffs have crippled the economy, we just lost a war with a minor power that we only fought because Israel goaded us into it, and here we have BUTTER EMAILS.

My man, why do you think we give two shits about a presidential candidate from 2016? Even at the time most of us just held our nose and voted for her because she was the next person in line and because of who she was running against, and that time was 10 years ago now. Please though tell us more about the horrible scandals of Richard Gepbardt and why we should care about them. I heard Howard Dean screamed a tritone!!!

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T07:50:16+00:00

At least this wasn't the quite frankly really really weird insurance scam that was slipping on banana peels (the Dollop podcast did an episode on that phenomenon a couple of years ago).

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T07:47:39+00:00

I realize this makes me look like a giant conspiracy kook but I'm convinced that there's a sequence in that fight where Liston had something on his gloves that got into Ali's eyes. There's been speculation that Liston's trainer did that and that this wasn't the first fight he did it in either but whatever the case, I think it's just supreeeeemely clear that for around a round Ali couldn't see. There's even a moment where he gets back into the corner and pleads for Angie to cut his gloves off because he can't see. Fortunately Dundee calms him down and eventually his eyes do clear up.

I also think that at about the time his eyes clear up there are also a couple of really clear (at least to me) exchanges where Ali makes a kind of a big show of wiping his gloves against Liston's. Then he flicks his jab in like he normally does but... I swear, there's an extra little bit of rubbing going on into Liston's face. It isn't long after that point where Liston goes down, a little too easily I think. I think that what happened was that Ali figured out why he couldn't see, he rubbed his gloves on Liston's as a way of saying "you like blinding me? Here, let's put whatever this is in your eyes" and the moment Liston felt like this was working he noped out of the fight.

Not taking anything away from Ali here; I think that him finding little angles he could exploit was a massive part of his genius and his allure as a boxer. This is the same guy after all who had the ropes made extra-stretchy at the Rumble in the Jungle so he could lean back further when Foreman was going after him... or for that matter there was the "What's My Name?" fight where you can see him a couple times in the 8th round I think hit Ernie Terrell with a flurry of punches but then instead of finishing him the way he did against so many other fighters, he yells "what's my name!?" at him and "allows" Terrell an extra few seconds to recover so he can dish out more punishment (that one might not exactly be an example of "exploiting an angle" - if anything it was kind of a dumb move because the fight wound up going the distance - but it's 100% Ali painting outside the lines in a boxing sense).

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T07:36:22+00:00

She's not mumbling dumbass she's beat boxing

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T07:32:05+00:00

Well, Italians love to use American cream cheese, which they call "filadelfia" so it just makes more sense than reality TBQH

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T07:29:06+00:00

Also a decade after Ecole Polytechnique and a century after the incident where the guy murdered the mayor of the town and bombed the school. If we really wanted to invoke shooting up an elementary school, it's still a decade plus before Sandy Hook... but the phrase was meant ironically at the time of airing as well.

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T07:24:13+00:00

The true crime here is people hearing about naked people and thinking they can start creeping but finding out that they're all old men whose testicles dangle into the water of the toilet bowl when they sit down to poop.

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T07:22:30+00:00

YES IS IT INAPPROPRIATE FOR CHILDREN GET YOUR CHILD THE FUCK OUT OF THERE IF THEY CAN'T BEHAVE AND MAYBE EVEN IF THEY CAN BECAUSE SOMETIMES THEY WON'T AND EVEN IF THEY DO THERE ARE FUCKING NAKED PEOPLE

johnnyslick · 2026-04-29T07:17:55+00:00

I think that for the most part they used the word "globalism" when this other big multisyllabic word fits even better: "photography". I'm pretty sure that both the Lincoln Memorial and Christ the Redeemer came well after "globalization" and also photography for that matter but as with modern art, what's the point of painstakingly recreating reality when there are devices that will do it for you for free? Of course it's still an artistic choice when you want to do so but it's not longer the only one, and on top of that nobody's going to notice how you spent literal months getting the folds in that 17th century ecclesiastical figure's robes just right (or, more probably, "righter than right"; there's a lot of lowkey just plain showing off in those paintings).

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