How to riff a book

[Gumba Masta]

[Pak-Man]

I've actually pondered this, and I think it could be done. You plug in your MP3 player, Disembaudio reads a Sync line, you pause. Once you've read the sync line, you unpause and enjoy your riff. It would probably take a small slice of forever to make a Rifftrax for a book though, unless it was REAL short. :^)

[AmandaGal]

The problem being, you'd have to read at the exact same speed as Mike Nelson

Which may not be a problem, but I find people generally don't read at the same speeds.  He could riff audiobooks though...which are always read a bit too slow for me.  I think the readers take a downer before they read because they           always           seem           to           draw             out              the              words.

[Gumba Masta]

I just thought of something,
 What if you could take a transparent sheet, print the riffs in slightly opaque boxes and then put those sheets on the pages and then read the riffs at the appropriate text block.
Of course, books would still be a humongous task to riff.

[Steve-O]

Well, you could do it with footnotes.  The transparent sheet would basically just have a bunch of numbers on it, which would direct you to a riff at various points.  The riffs themselves would be in a separate book.

It would probably work better with an electronic book, if those ever catch on.  You'd run a small application that would intersperse a bunch of hyperlinks throughout the text.  When you get to a hyperlink, you click on it and it plays a short audio file containing the riff for that paragraph.

It would work, but I suspect most people would think it was kind of dumb.

[Gumba Masta]

[ChrisHanel]

A couple years back I found a group of people that MST3k'd bad fan fiction by literally just injecting the text file with interruptions from Mike/Joel and the 'bots. I did an entire chapter of an actual novel... the Star Trek book "The Kobiyashi Maru" by an author that escapes my memory at the moment. I tried posting it for reactions and IIRC, the reaction I got was a confused one, as if I had missed the point of the focus being on fan fiction rather than quasi-serious published literature.

Oh well... live and learn. I know for a fact my riffing wasn't that good, so it's probably for the best that I've lost it.

-Chris

[Compound]

Chris,
While I have no knowledge of this thing called "misting", generally you don't riff the published stuff for a very simple reason. It's much riskier legally. If I riff a Star Trek fanfic using Mike & the bots, and the fanfic writer gets mad, there's really not a lot of legal recourse. He can't sue me as he doesn't have legal rights to the Star Trek characters. (Well, he can try, but Paramount will probably become very interested very fast and sue him.) But if I do the same to a Star Trek novel, Paramount and Del Rey (who *do* have the legal rights for the characters as well as a possible plagiarism case) could not only sue me but also the folks at BBI. And that would really suck, especially since we'd be exposing people who had no idea as to what we were doing to a lawsuit that could forever doom a certain cowtown puppet show.

(Not a lawyer. Don't play one on TV. My legal advice may or may not bear any resemblance to the laws in your area. And yes, "Fair Use." Blah, blah, blah. I'd prefer that I, nor anyone I know, not be the test case for whether it applies or not for mistings. Which, of course, I've never done.)

Oh, and Gumba, they have done that to some webcomics. I won't mention one involving a certain artist with a liking for fursuits and a liking for also threatening lawsuits, but there is a rather well done one out there that riffs one of Jack Chick's tracts about the evils of D&D.

[ChrisHanel]

Found a great example of the typical formatting of a literary MSTing:

http://www.geocities.com/mst3kfiction/TheProject.html

-Chris

[PsypherPunk]

Plenty of audiobooks out there to start on...