Pics 55: Poetry Slam

Finally, the last original content of Date Ariane Remastered is a "Poetry Slam".  A number of people have suggested adding a karaoke bar to Date Ariane, as that is something that is popular on dates these days, and there was a time I enjoyed going to karaoke nights at local bars, too.

The problem you run into is music rights.  Karaoke works when people sing songs the rest of the bar is familiar with, so you need famous songs, and famous songs means money, unless you stick to old public domain songs published before 1927, so unless you want to choose between "Daisy", "Battle Hymn of the Republic", and "Amazing Grace", karaoke isn't good to do.

An old fashioned "poetry slam" at a coffee bar, which gained notoriety in the late 50's and 60's with the "Beat" generation involves reading your own poetry, or making stuff up on the fly -- something that has evolved into "rap battles" in the late 90's.  I actually listened to Jack Kerouac reading his famous "Beat" poem On The Road while writing this.

So I decided to create a new puzzle based on the concept of making up poetry on the spot.  I emulated the feeling of making up poetry on the spot by actually making up poetry on the spot.  Poetry is not something I am good at, and it shows in this puzzle, but that's OK -- that's the point.

The puzzle involves taking an opening line, and picking from a list of second lines, and then picking from a list of third lines, and then picking from a list of closing lines. About a third of the resulting poems get audience approval, two thirds are failures.

Some cameos: The band "Ameca Meca" from Something's In The Air is sitting on the couch in the back, the first poet is Lydia trying out some song lyrics to the audience.  

The second poet is the robot programming boss from Hopepunk City talking about white holes which is an idea I got stuck in my head to better explain the inconsistencies in the big bang theory, cosmic background radiation, cosmic inflation, and dark matter.  But not being an astrophysicist myself I don't have anyone to bounce head canons like this off of, so I explained my big idea in a series of haikus and put it into the game.  Yes that's Veronica sans robot arms sitting across from him.