The Adventures of Luke and Joe

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Yes, yes, I know, this is the first post in, like, forever.  I can either write blog posts or scripts, which do you prefer?  That's what I thought.

Anyway, Pardon is not the finale.  After an epic case of writer's block and something like six complete rewrites I surrendered and just wrote this up.  And it's funny so everyone wins.

Next week, the season finale.  As those of you who follow us on Twitter already know: MAAAAATLLLOOOOOOCK!

On Sunday I entered and was subsequently beat up in a poker tournament hosted by TV's Wil Wheaton (finished 52nd, not my finest hour).  While playing some of the other participants and I got to discussing our various projects and I said I would tell our loyal viewers about their sites.  So go check these places out, not just because they're run by better poker players than me but because they're cool people:

GameHounds
Riff Raff Theater

There were more but I lost your URLs.  Email me and I'll add you to the list.

I'm talking to you, Felicia Day fans.

I put it on the About page but it bears repeating: For the love of god don't start at Episode 1x01.  This ain't Lost, the episodes stand alone and the early ones are terrible, and they get funnier as the series goes along.  Jump around, pick some at random, don't feel obligated to do them in order.  Plus we've even changed machinima programs since Season 1.  Not a good representation of the series.

If you're looking for some recommendations here are some of my favorites:

4x03 - Lodi
3x12 - What Is Love?
3x13 - A Very Joe Christmas
4x02 - April Fools
3x04 - Camping Trip
2x10 - Beardless

Last week's episode was late, but this week's episode is on time despite going up on the same day.  Why?  Because new episode day is Monday now.

The why is a long, boring story, but from now on there will be a new episode every Monday morning.

Also, don't want to wait all the way until Monday morning?  Become our fan on Facebook and get access to the occasional special Sunday afternoon preview. It's the easiest way to not forget to watch the new episode.

The long-awaited season premier is up for your viewing pleasure. I know I'm biased but I really like this one, here's hoping we can keep up this level of quality for another 15 episodes.

Oh, and while I have you here, become a fan on Facebook for reminders of new episodes and even the occasional sneak preview if Geiiga gets done early.  I wouldn't hold my breath but it's a possibility.  It's a relatively new thing so tell your friends.

I realize I usually use this for self-promotion but I'm going to rant for a minute.

Like many people, I'm unhappy with the changes made to Facebook.  But the source of my unhappiness isn't completely as a user but also as someone who's used Facebook to promote his business.  The recent changes have rendered it essentially useless for marketing, which by all accounts was their ticket to a profitable future.

Of course first I'm complaining from the standpoint of a user, using an analogy about a microwave.

Let's say Facebook is a microwave.  Throw in a burrito, a bag of popcorn, a Hot Pocket, cooks it right up.  It's the most popular brand of microwave in the world, sells more units than anything else.  Of course one day a specialized popcorn maker, by which I mean Twitter, starts getting popular.  All it does is make popcorn but its sales are going through the roof so Facebook starts to get nervous about its dominant position.

One day everyone wakes up and their microwave is a popcorn maker.  Sure you could pull some stuff out and reconfigure it and maybe squeeze a frozen burrito in there but the fact remains tour great multi-function device is now a single-function device.  What used to be one function among many has become the only thing it does well, all to compete with a rival which wasn't any real competition at all.

But that's just a minor inconvenience to me.  What the changes to Facebook really hurt was Luke and Joe's marketing model.

The old Facebook home page was a running scroll of a wealth of information.  Not only was it status updates but what your friends were doing.  If they broke up with their girlfriend, if they have a new favorite show or, and this is the important part, what they became a fan of.

It was great for someone like us because for every one person who likes your site and becomes a fan, at least 50 people are automatically told about it.  And in fact you could go further.  Through Facebook Connect, every person that watches an episode would automatically inform all their friends that they were here.  And since friends have similar tastes it's targeted advertising that builds on itself exponentially.

But now why bother?  We have a site to get information out to our customers, we don't really need that, and that's really all they have left to offer.  Why drive traffic to Facebook or buy ads from them if there's no viral potential?  It doesn't make good business sense for us, which means changing their core model didn't make business sense for them.

I understand what they were thinking, that they had to compete with Twitter, but I don't understand why nobody in their organization pointed out the flaw in driving away businesses to attract more celebrities.  Even aside from taking utility away from their users, I don't understand the logic of taking utility away from the advertisers that keep you in the black.

And that concludes my rant.  From now on, just comedy.

Part 1 of our blaxploitation epic Julio Jones, PI is live.  The whole thing is one big unit cut up into six pieces so, you know, it's supposed to end abruptly.  Next week will pick up where this left off.

So enjoy, tell your friends, and...that's pretty much it.  I had to wrestle with this thing to get it up so that's all I've got.

Yeah, it's been a while.  But I'm back now and ready to update you on what's going on in the Luke and Joe universe.

First, as you may have noticed, Season 3 is over.  Treason is the finale.  But, unlike the prior offseason breaks, there will be content!  Awesome content.  You'll be treated to the blaxploitation epic Julio Jones, PI.  It's still loosely Luke and Joe in that both Luke and Joe are in it, but it's also better.

While that's going on I'm putting together the Luke and Joe Season 3 DVD.  What's that you say?  There's no Season 1 or 2 DVD and all the content is right here on our web site?  That may be true, but I'm making it anyway.  The quality will be higher, it will play on your giant TV, and we might even offer it in HD on Blu-Ray for some reason.  It'll be awesome.

Also there's other stuff I can't talk about.

STAY TUNED

Winning the 48 Hour Machinima Film Festival (by which I mean dominating because we're geniuses) made us eligible for the 48 Hour Film Project International Shootout, which is like the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions except with more nerds and less money.

Ok, maybe I'm being unfair to our competition.  Assuming all 40 other teams were nerds just because they had nothing to do but lose to us for an entire weekend, including both a Friday and a Saturday night, probably isn't fair.  I'm sure they had perfectly reasonable explanations.

Anyway, the result was Found Money, which was the requires subject.  We had to include a briefcase with $500,000, a cabbie named Calvin Deedle and make it a thriller.  We did all those things.

So watch and enjoy.  And, you can't vote or anything, but maybe if everyone sends cash to the festival organizers we'll win.  I'm not promoting cheating of course, mostly because we don't need the extra help, but send non-sequential unmarked bills to the festival organizers.

We got something around 10x normal traffic on New Year's Day and I can't for the life of me find where you all came from, so if you've got a minute email me at danny@lukeandjoe.com and let me know how you found the site.

If you do I will answer one question you include in the email, any question at all.

Just wrote and recorded the next two episodes last night and today.  They're short, but good.  But weird.  But good.

Of course you probably want an explanation of how weird.  I emailed the script to myself and the Google ad that came up was for emuoildepot.com.

Seriously.  Emu Oil Depot.  That exists, and that's the ad that was served to me based on the script for the Jan. 8 episode.

I can tell you can't wait.

A Very Joe Christmas is up and available for viewing. It's one of our favorites so enjoy.

And of course all of us here wish all you Christians a merry Christmas, to those of you who are Jewish happy Haunkkah, to our African-American fans a happy Kwanzaa, to the pagans out there a joyous winter solstice, and to the athiests happy two days off with pay in two weeks.

Medieval Dating has won the following awards at the 48 Hour Film Project Machinima Competition:

Best Directing
Best Writing
Best Acting
Best of the Machinima Competition

We're awesome is basically what I'm saying here.  Go watch the thing and bask in our glory.

The first annual Luke and Joe Christmas Special, A Very Joe Christmas, is written as of about ten minutes ago.

I know I say this a lot but this is easily my favorite script yet.  It is absolutely awesome.  It's a combination of It's A Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol and, well, it's the best.  Ever.

But like any present you have to wait until Christmas.  First is the ominously-titled What Is Love.

The episode will be up tonight rather than this morning.

It's Geiiga's fault again.  Direct complaints to him.

That is all.  Stand by.

This season, I admit, hasn't had a lot of Joe.  And someone out there must like him, right?  So we're solving that problem in December with the Joetacular Joecember Joestravaganza!

This is an idea so amazing, so innovative, so fresh and new that I didn't even come up with it until it was already underway!  This week's episode, Revenge, centers on Joe.  The next as I mentioned is The Adventures of Joe.  In the one after that, Joe might open a rave, I haven't really decided yet.

So I figure, why not add a fourth and make it a ridiculously tacky event?  I love tacky events.  I feel like a used car dealership here.

Enjoy the month of everyone's fifth-favorite character.  You earned it.

Geiiga fell asleep in his chair so Episode 3x10, aptly titled Revenge, is going to be up by the end of today rather than before the beginning of today.  So keep your pants on.  Unless you're an attractive woman, then you're free to leave them off.

But good news!  The next episode, The Adventures of Joe, is one of my favorite scripts.  It involves Vegas and shootings, though oddly enough not shootings in Vegas.  Of course I'm not in it so you're going to have to look past that.

That's right!  The technical demons have been defeated and the riff is go!

http://www.rifftrax.com/iriffs/luke-and-joe-present/luke-and-joe-present-bloody-pit-horror

Go.  Purchase.  Enjoy.

The long-awaited riff of Bloody Pit of Horror, the one that was supposed to go live on Nov. 5, is still in the works.

It's a technical problem apparently.

But, as you can see from this here blog thingy right on the home page so conveniently, we're making some site upgrades to prepare for its arrival.  Like decorating the new baby's room before that baby is even born, when it's still fun and exciting and not a vomit-encrusted sleepless nightmare.

On the bright side we're still churning out episodes.  The one above for example, about the election from the point of view of the media.  It has a Joe Biden cameo so there's that.  And I'm writing a new one as we speak, despite the fact it's scheduled to go live on Thursday, because that's the level to which I procrastinate.

STAY TUNED

Yes, yes, I know, there was no episode last week. But we have a good reason. We were putting the finishing touches on a super secret project which I will reveal to you right now:



That's right, Luke and Joe have branched out to making fun of bad movies. We had to skip a week of episodes to finish up our first riff under the RiffTrax iRiff program, Bloody Pit of Horror.

Of course the rushing was for naught, it won't be up for about a month, but it's awesome anyway and I'd show you if we had that much bandwidth. But for now, enjoy this poster: