Notes
[These are early notes when i was trying to flesh out the story.]
Overview: Chapters are marked with seven stars.
day 1:
story so far:
Basically, the council of 300 is a take on the comittee of 300 conspiracy theory. Instead of being world leaders influencing the policy of Europe, and therefore the world, the comittee of 300 is simply a bunch of mediocre entertainers who take themselves too seriously. The agenda of the council is world domination, but domintiona through forcing mediocrity on the people. In my original idea, it would be jeff foxworthy or pauly shore as an example. Generally it should be like an army of zombies, but instead its a co-ordinated army of hacks who spread a certain kind of mediocrity and unacceptance.
Economics:
Economics is described as a parasite living off of resources. The parasite has lifecycles: it either kills itself, kills its host, or reproduces. The economic unit can stay conjoined, but risks the same issues, or can completely separate and face the same issues. These economic units gain a weight of bureacracy, which can help keep the
Marketing assholes:
Marketing assholes are a meta-marketer who has taken every cue of how to aggressively market something, only without the goal of getting paid, or really getting anything out of it. The marketing asshole is essentially a virus on a parasite. While the parasite itself replucates, and ensures that more things will be built on it, if the stem goes bad, so does the bunch. Marketing assholes work orthogonally to this, they seem to have their own fuel, and seem to attack randomly. A marketing asshole will try to sell treesap futures on cows to a peasant, and only for a percentage of whatever transaction there is. They never enter into a deal where they dont get something, but it is not always monetary. They would as soon do a deal for 10 million dollars, as for a slat of fishscales, as long as they got a single thing. They simply proposed deals and complted them, as long as they remained on top.
Curiously, their sense of dealmaking is well-honed, they can pull rediculous deals through foresight, but still cant monetize them. They grasp, and successfully drain at any connection they can make, and operate on the bureacracies, no matter how well managed and make them depend on other economic structures. Its baffling.
Protagonist: Chuff — a marketing asshole in traing. Chuff should only learn how to be a better marketing asshole, he shouldn’t have any revelation of character.
Also: “Hand carved” sandwiches are delicious.
Arteries: If there is a broader goal to the plot, it should be about the arteries of our society that act so close to the arteries of our hearts of our bodies. Now, this is not a heart in the romantic sense of something acting close to us or our culture, but instead that is a vital organ that pumps blood, is susceptible to disease and is not always somethign we want to think about. So far, I have proposed two different arteries: the American economy, which is represented by individual “revenue streams” with advertisers manipulating the intake, and traders at the top speculating on the overall intake of each organism. The economy is described by the overall health of the collection of these organisms.
The other artery suggested is that of roads between cities. In this sense, if the flow of goods managed to stop flowing from sources to cities, or that trade stopped in between cities, then the source of all those other organisms would dry up. It is an artery in the same sense of the financiers in that there are rest stops and tourists that leach on to it to syphon off what they can, be it for charity or sustenance.
The contrast to the arteries is people who live outside the direct flow of money. In the sense of businesses being organisms, they are simply the bureacracy that feeds off the fat of the particular end of the revenue stream. The contrast to the roads is the people living at the end of them.
So, in the sense of marketing assholes, they are pretty much a type of economic vampire, or zombie, or something horrible. They are described initially as vultures or buzzards, maybe sharks. Things that exist pretty much to feed and then only feed until its time for the next kill. What I should stress again about marketing assholes is that it is purely instinctual and that greed does not really play a part in it, they really only exist to keep going, with the understanding that the rest of them will keep going as long as there is some way to make a deal with things. While they lack the technical understanding of waht they are selling, they have a quick capacity for picking up vocabulary, and their ruthlessness for just closing a deal shines through whatever they are negotiating, they can use language as a weapon of insecurity, and their instinctual smug confidence regardless of their track record or accomplishments has proven just wears on.
The act of disruption occurs when a marketing asshole latches on to an organization that provides a legitimate service and actually requires the use of some well packaged ideas. Fortunately, this almost never happens, and when it does it is not usually a lynchpin of a large city, as they are usually buried in complex systems that can fail easily. But when the act of a marketing asshole shuts down a critical artery, it can be devastating. This is not to say that any such incident is necessarily caused by a marketing asshole, it could just be an incompetant contractor, which is also likely. With marketing assholes, however, it tends to be a vortex of continuous negation. When a crappy contractor fucks up a bridge, sure you can just spend 20 years rebuilding it poorly. Where a marketing asshole strikes, it leaves a radioactive corpse.
Note: at 80k — A battle with Truckumonculous in the Thundarium!
11/23/2009:
Double Note: it only goes to 50k! i think i meant 80%!
The sandwiches:
The sandwiches are an addictive plot in the councils plan to force mediocrity through the people and at the same time preserve their status on the highest tiers of mediocrity. This is controlled in one end by the marketing assholes who push it through a kind of business-to-business deal, but as it escapes the corporate parasitic hierarchy, it somehow becomes let loose on the american public as a whole, who take it with the same stead as americans take other substances.
The meat, naturally is hand carved. It is sort of like spam, but its contents are unknown. It stays warm, and insulates, and is surprisingly non greasy.
Next round:
The store runs out of “hand-carved” meat, because the truckers havn’t been passing through for a while, the store is bare. Nickles has no choice, but to go on a long haul through the arteries armed with nothing but an axe and his flammable liquor. Its not quite a wasteland, its more of a wet forest so things dont burn well, but do make spectacular explosions.