I was asked what an earlier version of this meme meant. Usually my memes are pretty obvious, even the ones with second meanings are only very shallowly hidden. I briefly considered doing what Beckett did about the meaning of the play and the characters: He claimed that he knew nothing more than was in the script.

This is obviously a reference to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot which makes the two men  Estragon (Gogo) left and Vladimir (Didi) right. On day 2, Gogo complained that his leg had become infected from the kick he’d received on day 1. Beckett never said that the men were rough sleepers, but Gogo said he’d slept in a ditch the night before day 1 and also referenced that his clothes were rags. Many productions have dressed both men appropriately for the production’s time & place as rough sleepers.

I mostly work making collages of found art. My starting point is a one line joke then I go looking for freely usable art that works with the joke. I’d had “Day <<Some number>>, still no Godot. DEATH steps in.” in my mind for a few years and decided it was time to use it. Once I knew what I wanted to make I needed to find freely reusable images for the trees, Gogo & Didi. Open Clip Art to the rescue. The amputee image was perfect for GoGo while using the other image for Didi was balanced. The trees were a lucky find, there’s a graveyard in the background! DEATH is actually cut out of a photograph of me, wearing the “DEATH suit” performing stand-up. I can’t explain why, but I see the DEATH in this meme as being closer to the DEATH in my The Grin Reaper plays than to the one in my stand-up.

Waiting for Godot covered two days with the promise at the end of each day that Godot would come on the following day. However on day 1 the trees are bare, on day 2 they have leaves suggesting a longer delay than one night. At the end of the play I was left with the impression that Godot would never appear. The fact that I have numbered the day 12,345 has very little meaning. I wanted an obviously meaningless number that made this day well separated from the days of the play, but plausibly within the lifetimes of the characters. 1234 days is a little less than 3 years, 4 months. I felt more separation would be good. My first choice of 123,456 days turned out to be 338 years, far too long. 12,345 days is a little less than 34 years. A bit of a stretch but if we accept the men could be centenarians, it’s plausible. The 33 year delay would have made them even more decrepit and could explain what had happened to Gogo’s foot.

I now had all the elements to make an image matching the text and I did, but it lacked something. After a bit of pondering I added the observer as a giant face watching from behind the tree. Yes, it’s one of the cartoons representing me I often use in my memes, but for reasons I can’t explain I don’t feel it is representing me this time. I really don’t know who or what it represents. It could be Beckett, It could be Godot, it could be a deity, it could even be HR (A demon from The Grin Reaper universe) or just an ordinary bystander. Which brings me to a parallel to what Samuel Beckett said about the play. Maybe he was telling the truth?

Afterword: This is the image I chose for the watcher. I’ve cut it off below the waist & removed the microphone stand. The tree hides most of the torso & Didi hides the mic. Interestingly enough, unlike the other 350 odd cartoons of me I’ve collected, I no longer have the original of it, just 3 GIMP files last edited in 2024 I can import into new pictures when I want to use it. Unlike most other GIMP Layers, it’s just called “Pasted Layer” in the image file editor.

Solve it using a spreadsheet?

Circa 1980 I started being a database developer. Originally on non-relational (Hierarchical / Network) databases such as Burroughs Forte, CA(?) TOTAL and IBM's DL/1 but exclusively on relational databases since 1996. Given this, what I'm about to say may surprise you: There are some problems where a spreadsheet is the most efficient solution.

The real difficulty with spreadsheets is they can easily end up massively complex with data and business rules intertwined, resulting in a fragile mess that is incredibly difficlult to audit and often all but impossible to modify. They also tend to be poorly documented meaning that, when the original author moves on, nobody else can get up to speed fast enough to make timely changes to the rules.

I currently have two home grown "Databases" (In the wider sense) in constant use. One is a LibreOffice sheet with 3 active pages I use to manage the memes I post to my Julia Clement facebook page and other social media. Other than simple formulae making each element in each series of memes being three days after the previous one here and on Instagram and one series daily elsewhere there are no relationship between the tables or rows. A real database would have been overkill for this.

The other database is to manage my "stupid superheroes" info sheets that I am hoping to start posting in September. This currently has ~~ 170 heroes and villians but will soon have associates (Think Batman's Robin, Spiderman's Aunt May, Womanman's Manman, Doctor Doctor's Nurse Nurse, Receptionist Receptionist and Cleaner Cleaner) and teams (Think Marvel's Avengers and X-Men). Then there's loosely related characters, for example a remarkable number of characters have their origins in the improbably large number of accidents in Field Marshal Britain's secret nuclear research facility, I think he deserves an info sheet. It took me around a minute to decide that this was not a good match for a spreadsheet so I've turned it into a MariaDB database.

So why are so many things that would be better as a database turned into spreadsheets? I see three main reasons:
1) "If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems look like nails." If it's the only way you know to collate and manage information ...
2) "Gatekeeping" by the IT department. Developers are a scarce and expensive resource, corporate environments restrict what they work on often ignoring the real needs of frontline departments in favour of pet projects ...
3) "Years of enhancements" where a nice simple spreadsheet kept having more requirements added to it sometimes in the form of 4) "Immortal Prototypes" where the original spreadsheet wasn't very simple but was only supposed to be temporary until IT developed the real one ...

As an aside, I've seen a lot of negativity towards tools like Microsoft Access. Ignoring that it was buggy and tended to corrupt databases, I'd much rather help an amateur clean-up and improve a badly implemented database than some of the overly complex spreadsheets I've been asked to help with.

No single point of failure

 We have a philosophy that there should be no single point of failure for our shows. This applies to people as well as tech, but this document is going to concentrate on the tech. For people it means we both know how to do everything that needs to be done and every item in the main set of tech is light enough for either of us to carry unassisted.

With tech, when we say no single point of failure, we mean that if any single item gets broken or fails we have a workable solution that will allow the show to continue. This doesn’t necessarily mean a direct replacement, it means we have something else that can substitute for the broken item and we know how to apply it. It is acceptable that the replacement is not as good or as easy to use as long as it lets us present the show.

Virtual Fringe Festival

A huge number of live performances have been cancelled around the world in 2020, including the festivals that helped many creatives find audiences.

We've watched this with much pain & have decided to create a fringe festival of live streamed events & shows in August and September. Like many other fringe festivals, it is unjuried (open access). Unlike other festivals, we don't restrict the number of shows that can be in the festival.

Live Streaming Comedy

I just watched an experienced comedian struggling with the live streamed experience. It's a different environment & simply not the same as performing before a live audience. You just have to imagine they are there & are reacting. Streaming through a medium like Facebook means you not only can't hear the audience reaction, but there may be a non-trivial delay before the audience even sees your video and hears your joke, IIRC you need to allow 30 seconds, which means you can't rely on text "ha ha" comments arriving at the right time.

Not watching other comedians

After a lineup show other comedians sometimes ask me for "notes" (feedback) on their performance. I usually can't do this in a useful way, this is specially true for shows I'm helping to run such as our own One Mic Stand-up but also applies when I'm just a member of the line-up.

If I'm at a show, I'm almost always there to work. I may be a performer, I may be the MC, or I may be the producer.

The Grin Reaper at Auckland Fringe 2020

It's finally no longer under embargo. We're putting our comedy play The Grin Reaper on as part of Auckland Fringe in 2020.

The shows will be at 8 PM 26-28th February at TST Studio, 37 Mt Eden Road. That's right next door to The Powerstation.

This won't be quite the same show as we did in Palmerston North. We're going to have three cast members which means that the monologues we wrote to cover costume changes won't be needed. Two of them advanced the plot enough that they'll be kept and the others will be gone. This should make the play much tighter.

Tickets will be on sale soon & meanwhile you can follow us either on Facebook or our dedicated website The Grin Reaper.

DEATH as a "small man"

Two years ago today I wrote this on Facebook.

"I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel and story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. " -- Philip K Dick
Substitute comedy/comedian for novel/novelist and this is remarkably similar to what I aspire to do with my comedy. Tell my truth through jokes and hopefully get some of the underlying message to my audience. Who knows, maybe I'll change the world for the better in some tiny way?

I then proceeded to forget about it it until Facebook reminded me.

Interesting anniversary

Interesting anniversary. Four years ago today I announced that I was dropping out of comedy for a few weeks. Except it wasn't as Julia Clement I announced it, it was done under my birth name.

At that point I was living a weird mixed life where in a very few contexts I was Julia & not in others. Tessa Clement knew & I think I'd made contact with Genderbridge. What I didn't say in this post was that my plan was to return to the stage as Julia.

That Question (Short Story)

I looked straight at him, I had guessed this question would come and I thought I was prepared. I had a well rehearsed answer, an answer I had told myself so many times and occasionally told others I knew it by heart. It was an answer I believed.

In retrospect I should have seen the danger signs.

Characters and Cast of Ten Years a Comedian

I've just added a page listing the cast and characters for the 10 Years a Comedian show to the website. Obviously Julia, Tessa & Nicola are the cast while DEATH is a character and it was easy to list all four. Then there were three interesting cases.

DEATH's Literary origins

This is a follow-on to my previous posting about DEATH the character.

Basically Terry Pratchett's Death and DEATH are both parodies of other personifications of death and we've both used pop-culture references as a starting point but ended up in different places.

I drew on similar sources to Pratchett, especially Bergman's The Seventh Seal and was aware of Death Takes A Holiday (Although possibly not the same remake as Pratchett used as a basis for Reaper Man) & obviously have read Pratchett. I was definitely influenced by psychopomps like Tarakeshwara & Charon.

DEATH returns

I'm having fun posting on Facebook as DEATH. Since I decided to revive the character for my 2019 Auckland Fringe show 10 Years A Comedian, 3 In A Skirt and created a page for it, it's taken on a life of its own. (Sorry about the puns). My rules are fairly simple:

• Anything I publish as DEATH is in character
• DEATH is not cruel and does not kill, just shows up at the time of death and so has a detached attitude to death considering even disasters as more-or-less equivalent to attending a rock concert. Fortunately I've yet to go to a concert that bad. Other than that DEATH has a pretty human set of emotions, especially when discussing its relationship with the other three horsemen
• DEATH has a love-hate relationship with human technology. In many ways it is a geek. 
• DEATH is self aware to an extent. The original 2008 script contained "I AM AN ANTRO-MOR-PHIC PER-SON-IFIC-ATION I AM A  MET-A-PHOR AND NOT AN IN-TRO-SPEC-TIVE ONE EITHER" and I have no intention of retconning that away.
• DEATH doesn't draw the obvious conclusion that it is a fictional character and is incapable of noticing anything saying that it is one or that I portray it on stage.
• DEATH is aware that I exist and am doing a show in which DEATH appears, but, as mentioned above, can not be aware that I am portraying DEATH in that show
• I'm not intending to have DEATH break the 4th wall.

These rules mean that it can interact with my posts and even comment on me outside the forbidden knowledge but I don't want to go down the path of metafiction to places like Spike Milligan arguing with the fictional Dan Milligan in Puckoon or being like the characters in Illuminatus! who wonder if they are characters in a novel after encountering the Leviathan. 

Thinking about it, I'm finding it interesting that my first outing onto the comedic stage was as a conscientious but slightly geeky grim reaper and my second was as a hygiene nut who started off talking about wanting to kill 100% of germs before revealing the ultimate futility of it all. I wonder if these were MET-A-PHORs for the way I was holding on to the cisgender myth I had constructed for myself.

I have to admit that I have become fond of DEATH and am seriously considering recycling the character with new scripts for my 2020 show.

Needed code optimization

My introduction to SQL was circa 1995 when a large data warehousing project had managed to build a month-end data analysis routine that they discovered was going to take more than 31 days to run. They read somewhere that embedded SQL was faster & I was asked to rewrite it in C with embedded SQL. I worked with an SQL "specialist" & I did the C part, except he occasionally modified the C when I wasn't available.