ObliGoations

Do I know me, or do I know me?

I knew that, eventually, the pressure to use a space for which I’m paying the privilege would peter out and I’d be left in my default state of not doing much of anything. A lot of that is going to be due to my strict “no selling out” policy which morally rejects all kinds of monetization and revenue streams for this whole mess. I stand by it – I’m not popular enough to get any worthwhile value from selling out just yet. : p

But yeah, I guess the “new toy smell” sure ran out quick, eh? I wish I could say I was more surprise.

Anyway, since I’m self-guilting into a rare puddle of productivity, but with no tangible opinions to blast out into the void, I figured I might as well start cataloguing some of the “dumb improv fiction I make up to impress my kids”.

(It doesn’t even work any more – they’re in that age where the attention span just don’t exist)

“The Goat Story” was probably (and you’ll find out, a touch ironically) the most well defined subgenre of kid-fiction I came up with. The premise started with “Goats are assholes, right?”, and grew naturally from there. It’d be set on a farm, obviously, and episodes (for it almost immediately switched from simple stories to pretending as if this were some sorta TV show) would just be the main group of goats being unrepentant dickheads to the human farmer guy.

Stories would generally follow a verbal pattern along the lines of “so then, in this one episode, [x]”. It eventually developed a loose meta narrative. Like, each episode was pretty well self contained, but each season would introduce some new wrinkle to the setting, or set the theme for what kind of crap would go down.

From memory:
* Season 1 – Standard farm shenanigans. As the season finale, the goats get caught up in their own prank and get corpsified. But that’s no problem, because…
* Season 2 – Pretty much the same, but the goats are also ghosts now, so they can incorporate poltergeist shenanigans into their antics. For the finale, they gut abducted by aliens.
* Season 3 – Having almost immediately taken control of the spaceship, the goats use their new techno toys to zoom around the planet, visiting their mischief on various other countries’ suspiciously similar farms, farmers, and and exciting new cast of goat buddies with only slightly racist affectations. For the finale, the inevitable happens and the core group of goats (give or take some fan favourite newcomers, and an unspecified number of generic extras) fuck off to outer space.
* Season 4 – “But they’re in space?” Ends with the goats marooned on a mostly deserted planet.
* Season 5 – Pretty much just “Lost in Space”. They finally repair the spaceship at the end and head back to Earth
* Season 6 – They get mistaken for actual aliens instead of original Earth goats, so they’re mostly confined to government facilities and testing labs for this one. I think I pulled a “Gremlins 2” for this one as an excuse to get new major cast goats with dumb, exotic powers.
* Season 7 – The goats start a cult.

That’s as far as it ever got. If there was ever any S8 stuff, I’ve forgotten it.