‘the critic’ sits across from me at my day job. i’m kind of a wanna be art director, but she is the real thing. we spend close on 9 hours a day together.
she is very smart and has talent coming out of her ears.
i once read somewhere about the writers who worked on seinfeld. there was a whole team of them. they would sit in a room together and toss ideas around. so one of the writers would say something like: what if we have this super strict soup nazi? and then he would read out some of the jokes he’d written for the soup nazi. then all the other writers would say: ‘that’s funny’ or ‘that’s hysterical’ or ‘that’s a hoot.’ But none of them would ever crack a smile or laugh out loud. That’s how developed their senses of humour were.
the critic is a little like that. if she actually laughs out loud at something i’ve written, then i know it’s a gem. a smile is also good. and sometimes she’ll just read it and say: ‘that’s funny’ and then i know i’m safe to publish it. or she’ll shrug her shoulders, then i know it’s complete crap and consider dragging it to the trash.
so i’m implementing a special new rating system for the critic on my blog. i ask her what she thinks of most of the stuff i write anyway, so i may as well let you know what she thinks every now and then.
i offered her a series of different icons:
the critic – thumbs up icon 1: “no, that’s too severe”
the critic – thumbs up icon 2: “too boring”
the critic – thumbs up icon 7: “hmmmph”
the critic – thumbs up icon 56: “it’s ok”
ultimately we both like this the most:
as you can see, she thinks this post is ‘not funny at all’, i have to agree, although i wasn’t really going for funny here.
i’m not exactly sure how it’s going to work going forward, we may end up canning it after the first week, specially if the critic doesn’t like it, but as with all this internetweb stuffs, we’ll figure it out as we go along.
ps: the critic’s laugh-ometre is based on something i found somewhere online. If i can track it down again i’ll let you know where it’s from.