Geoff came up with the title of the Blog. He likes it and it’s kinda growing on us, which is dangerous because it’s probably stupid. There’s a well-known tendency in Dialog Recording called “Temp Love” whereby the people who need dialog in the game or movie or whatever right now just grab anyone at the developer and have them record the lines and use those until the real dialog comes in. It sounds terrible, but the people working on the project get used to it and then freak out when it changes and an actual actor is put in instead.
There may be some “Temp Love” going on here with the title.
Geoff likes it because in The Business, which is to say Hollywood, when an actor or director or very rarely a writer is bigger than the project he’s currently developing, the movie is referred to as “Untitled Will Smith Project.” In some cases, it’s known by that name for months after everyone knows the real title, because the real name is stupid, and Will Smith is obviously bigger than the movie.
It amuses Geoff to have an Untitled Matt Colville Project because my name is bigger than nothing and that’s the gag.
The subtitle is him quoting me in an IM discussion wherein I said…well, you can see what I said. I was casting about for Clever Names. I liked;
Deservedly Underrated
Because I thought it was a seemingly clever bit of nonsense. But I thought it was too cynical and he agreed.
I remembered Josh Friedman’s wildly popular blog, titled I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing. Probably given the quality of his content, any name would have been fine, but he picked that one because, he said, it was his favorite line of dialog.
I wondered “What is my favorite line of dialog?”
There are many contenders but the first one that struck me was one of the first lines in Deadwood.
“I may have fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no living cocksucker.”
Obviously that’s too long a title, I thought “Flatter Than Hammered Shit” would be a good title, but Geoff persuaded me out of it because he felt it perhaps gave the wrong impression about the content of blog.
So it remains The Untitled Matt Colville Project which I, a non-ironic fan of The Alan Parson’s Project, kinda like.
But we’re open to suggestions.