(Sorry, couldn't really find a better place to put this...)

I transcribed this interview of Joss conducted by Ambrose Heron, and posted several times on Mr. Heron's website FILMDetail http://www.filmdetail.com/archives/2006/10/20/interview-from-the-archives-joss-whedon/ . This is not my material, and I make no claim to it. I'm simply offering it as of interest to anyone who might prefer to read rather than listen to it. It is transcribed as faithfully as possible, except in instances where I have edited out "ers" or "ums" or "you knows" in the interests of readability -- although I have left some in for flavour. I have not italicized or bolded or otherwise formatted this interview. Please provide your own emphasis, and always remember to read Joss's remarks keeping his voice and intonations in mind -- it's funnier!


Transcription -- 2/06 Joss Whedon Interview by Ambrose Heron

FILMdetail
A film weblog by Ambrose Heron
Re-posted October 20, 2006
Originally posted February, 2006

10/20/06 from AH:

"I’ve done a lot of interviews over the last few years with actors and film makers and I’m in the process of archiving them here on FILMdetail.
I’ll post some more up soon but for the moment here is one I did earlier this year with Joss Whedon. The writer and director came to the UK back in February to promote the DVD release of Serenity and you can listen to it below."

(AH original post on February 27th, 2006)

"Recently I interviewed Joss Whedon about the DVD release of Serenity.
Have a listen to the interview below."

.............................

AH: Joss Whedon, thanks for joining us.

JW: Thanks for having me.

AH: Joss, can we just talk a bit about the background to “Serenity” and how the TV show “Firefly” became this movie?

JW: Well, the TV show was brilliant and then it was gone. And when they cancelled it halfway through a year, I … as I told the crew, we were being cancelled, said that I wouldn’t rest until we had another venue to tell the story, because I believed it had not yet been told. And after a lot of searching, and… lot of, thinking that I was, ya know, gonna lose this fight, Universal Studios stepped in and they… just got it.

That’s all I can say. They understood what it was I was trying to do and they supported it and it wasn’t a huge movie for them, so they didn’t have to put all the pressure on it. They just let me do my thing, and helped me a lot doing it, and it went from being the hardest battle of my life to.. then having to write the script, which was an even harder battle, but ultimately, you know, with enormous support, which was not something I’d experienced during the show.

AH: You mentioned Universal got it, there, was part of the reason they wanted to make the film the fact that there was this sortof fanbase for the show, or did you.. was it just purely the strength of the script and the ideas you had?

JW: It was really just, you know… what sold it was the show itself. The DVD hadn’t come out yet, so they didn’t really know about the fan-base. They knew that there might be some sortof cult thing, but nobody really knew how big it was until well after they had commissioned the script. There was no script, there were just fifteen episodes and me saying, “Here’s what the story will be.” And they took it from there.

So they really came on board with very little. When I say they got it, all they did was watch it.

AH: And what, for you, were the challenges , both in resurrecting the show for, you know, from TV to film, -- what were the challenges writing and directing for TV and writing and directing for a motion picture?

JW: Well, the biggest challenge obviously was the source – because you have fans, you can’t -- and I myself as the storyteller -- could not live with the idea of contradicting or repeating something I’ve already done. But then that means I have a movie with nine characters who have all already met, which is a very difficult piece of business. So writing the script was really the most insane challenge, and not one that I care to repeat.

AH: And what would you say are the main themes of the TV show, and indeed, the film?

JW: Well, you know, the TV show and the film both – they’re both about freedom, and they’re both about what that means. And this is a thing that I think a lot of people mistake as being kind of American jingoistic go-get ’em Western sortof ideology. You know, “We don’t want that government looking over us.” It’s not about freedom… uh… it’s about freedom, meaning “the freedom to act,” as opposed to “freedom from acting.” It means personal responsibility, it means connection between people, as opposed to just doing whatever you want. It’s about becoming active, it’s about people who have given up learning that there’s still something worth fighting for. And the freedom to disagree – the fact that the villain is the kind of person I would like to sit down to dinner with, and I probably wouldn’t give the hero the time of day, nor he me, is very deliberate.

Because it’s about the idea that we are all different and if we don’t accept those differences, we will homogenize ourselves to death, and ultimately … the human condition can’t sustain that.

AH: Umm. Sc-fi is often a great way of exploring contemporary political, social issues. Was that something you wanted to do with “Serenity”?

JW: It’s not something that I set out to do, particularly, but you are, of course, informed by the times that you’re in. When I first described the Alliance, I said, “Sometimes the Alliance is America, the great democratic ideal, and sometimes the Alliance is America in Vietnam, the great democratic ideal that has become overreaching and arrogant and is somewhere where it has no place, doing terrible things.

And then, of course, we trundled into Iraq, while I was saying all of this, so it became a little more contemporary than I had, perhaps, hoped. But you’re always, when you’re making science fiction, drawing on what’s happening now, and everything that’s ever happened before. That’s what’s great about sci-fi.

AH: Another thing that I and a lot of the fans of the show and the film like is [its] dialogue. I suppose you know [that] from your other TV shows like Buffy. Is it important for you to put in one-liners, or is that just a natural thing that comes about when you’re writing shows like this?

JW: Well, you know, you wanna differentiate between one-liners and genuine humour. One-liners, you know, when they’ve been stuck into a movie at the last minute, you can always tell, and they stick out like sore thumbs and they’re rather embarrassing.

For me – most of my jokes are the kind of jokes that don’t translate. You can’t just say, “And then the guys says blah, blah, blah, blah-blah.” You have to sortof… they come from character, they come from the moment. And I can’t write without humour – I try – I’m one of those people who, you know, at a funeral -- I’ll think up seven really good jokes during the sermon at the funeral. I’ll try to keep them to myself, but it’s just the way my mind works. I can’t get away from humour.

But I love humour . I think humour’s really important because it defines people. When somebody makes a joke, that usually comes from their perspective being different than everybody else’s, which again, is what the movie is about, and it defines them as characters. So there are some funny lines, hopefully, in the film, but I tried not to make them one-liners, in the classic sense.

AH: One that stuck out for me was when a character in the film talks about knowing an old English poem, it did actually say something about his character as well as being funny. So is that an important aspect to the scripts?

JW: If a joke isn’t telling you something about the character, then it probably has no business being there. Unless you’re writing a particular kind of comedy, or, you know, a particular kind of thing. And if you’re doing, say, a TV show, you’ve got license to go off in different directions. But the thing about a movie is whatever a character says, is the only thing that they will ever say. So you don’t really have opportunities to get silly and go off and just sortof riff on something. If a character has five lines, that’s every single thing you’re ever gonna know about them… is those five things, so every line has a lot more weight to it… That doesn’t mean – I mean, I still get silly, because I’m a silly person, but yeah, you have to choose, very carefully.

AH: And another thing in the film – and I suppose in the Serenity universe, if you want to call it that, is the… there’s quite a lot of references, the film seems to be referencing things like… maybe Forbidden Planet or even – other things. What stories or other works – TV, film, books – were in your mind when making it, or was that, again, another natural thing?

JW: There were, actually, no deliberate attempts to reference anything, and there was no deliberate attempt to reference Forbidden Planet, although I understand that there was a number on a ship that was from Forbidden Planet. I was constantly having to tell people to stop doing that. The sound-mixers wanted to put the Wilhelm scream in – they not only put it in where I didn’t want it, they put it in the mouth of a woman because they didn’t know it was a woman. And I told them, “Take that out – this is not a game, this is not a self-referential…joke.” I don’t like that kind of post-modern “films-about-films.”

And I’m known for pop-culture references, so that surprises some people. But the fact of the matter is part of the reason I made Serenity was so that it could take place in an era during which I could make no pop-culture references. Having said that, though, of course there are obvious influences. I think the fact that Mal shoots not one but three unarmed men in the course of film probably has something to do with the revised Gredo scene. And I know for certain that the first guy he shoots…is very much inspired by a scene from Ulzana's Raid, the Robert Aldrich western…

AH: Which was a comment on Vietnam, as well, in a strange way…

JW: Um-hum. Yes, it was.

AH: And also the.. when I went through it when it first came out in the cinemas over here, I did a couple of internet searches on it, and the fan-base on-line seems to me to be massive. There’s a bunch of websites – fans of yours and this universe – is that something that you ever look at, or does that ever inform your work in a good or bad way?

JW: Well, I do look at the fansites, and, um… it informs my work in a bad way, in two ways. Well, one, because you spend enough time on the websites and you start to think that every living, breathing person in the world is a fan, and then of course, you know, nine people go to see your movie, and you’re like, “Oh, wow. Those nine people must have posted a lot.”

And then, of course, everybody’s so anxious for a sequel that, you know, there’s just all these posts about, “Ohhh, it’s the end of the world because we didn’t do that well.” And you get very depressed. That’s really the only downside. The upside obviously is that they’ve been an inspiration and they’re fun to converse with. And I learn from them, not necessarily, you know, exactly what to do, but I can read the rhythms, I can see what’s not registering, I can see which character needs to be, you know, pushed a little more, given a little more love, and that’s very useful.

AH: So, for the future, is there likely to be a sequel or some kind of follow-up to this, or is it a case of “wait-and-see”?

JW: I think it’s unlikely, I made the movie to have all the closure it could possibly need, but I would never rule it out – because the fact that this got made at all is quite a dream…

(This is a transcription of the Fanboy Radio phone interview with Joss Whedon on November 26th, 2006. It is transcribed solely for informational purposes; it is not my material, and I make no claim to it.

While I have identified when it is Fanboy talking, and when it is Joss speaking, there were many times when I could not tell which Fanboy was talking. I could have figured it out, but, I’m sorry, I was really trying to get to the Joss material, and so have just hopped over that little aspect of the transcription. My apologies to the Fanboys involved - I don't think you are interchangable. Occasionally, I have omitted “ums” or spliced together a sentence where someone was fumbling slightly…I did very little special formatting, so provide your own mental italics and bolding, etc., and always try to add Joss's voice in your head when reading his words, 'cause it's funnier that way. Very occasionally, the voices were unintelligible, and I have noted where this occurs. There may be typos, but do forgive, it’s late and I’m sleepy…)

--------------------------

You’re listening to Fanboy Radio, the Voice of Comics. Today’s episode is #352, with Joss Whedon. FanboyRadio is brought to you by our sponsors, Funimation Entertainment, Comichole.com, Y2Comics, Comic Price Guide.com, and Discount Comic Book Services.

(blah-blah-blah – a minute or so of advertising that I’m not transcribing…)

Scott: Hey, now, everybody, this is in fact Fanboy Radio… my name is Scott…

Oliver: …And I’m Oliver. And we’ve got quite a few people in the studio today…we’ve got Shawn (“Hello”) we have Meg (“Hi”) we have David (“yo”) and we have Britta taking your calls at 817-257-7631. Hi, Britta.

Britta: The phones are already all lit up.

Scott: Ahh, they are…

Meg or Britta: Everyone’s excited.

Scott: We have good news and we have bad news. Oliver, what to you want first?

Oliver: The bad news.

Scott: The bad news is that our guest is… will be joining us very shortly. He’s not on now, but he will be… he’s on his way… The good news is that our guest is Joss Whedon.

(Ed. - Some all-around squeeing…)

Meg: I’m so excited.

Scott: Meg, you’re excited?

Meg: Who would guess that I would be excited about Joss Whedon being on here? I mean I only talk about him about every single episode…

Scott/Oliver: Really, the Fangirl Joss Whedon Show.

Scott/Oliver/Dave?: Well, Actually, this has been a nice couple of weeks for us, now…

Oliver: Yeah, you got the whole kinda ensemblee going on here.

Scott: What is that you’re wearing, Meg?

Meg: Kaylee hair, a Jayne shirt, and I’ve got my Wonder Woman cape draped over the seat. I was gonna wear Buffy shoes, but my clogs are much more comfortable.

Scott/Oliver: Just not committed enough, really…

Scott/Oliver/Dave: I was sporting my Xander outfit today…

Scott/Oliver/Dave: I’ve got my “Joss is My Master” tattoo on my chest…

Scott: That’s my favourite shirt ever, “Joss is My Master Now”

Oliver: So, if people want to join us, to talk to Joss Whedon, what’s that number again?

Scott: 817-257-7631. And of course, we’re gonna be talking about Wonder Woman, Astonishing X-Men, which he is the writer of, Buffy and Angel, Firefly and Serenity, and Runaways… And then there is a lot of other things…Honestly, since the people at whedonesque .com found out about the show, they have invaded the Fanboy Radio Message Board…

Meg: I think that he beat Alan Moore in the number of posts…

Scott: Well, if this is a competition, than yes, Alan Moore is destroyed.

Meg: Alan Moore will have to come on again to defend his honour.

Scott/Oliver/Dave?: Joss Whedon has an interesting fanbase, ‘cause he’s probably got the only fanbase that if he ever fell upon hard times, he could stay at any one of their houses, they would feed him, take care of him, like, there’s this sense of carfing for him…

Scott: Meg would bathe him…

Scott/Oliver/Dave: Alan Moore… I don’t know if people would let him into their house.

Scott: Even his biggest fan? No, no, no, he could come stay with me… After that show, I think that people would definitely have an open home, he’s definitely… honestly more approachable after the show we had with him…

Oliver/Dave: He’s a mate.

Scott/Oliver/Dave: He’s a mate.

Scott: But Joss is going to be on the show. One of the things I want to talk to him about is… because I was informed by the whedonesque players… was this new movie or TV show called Goners.

Meg: Goners, yes, I’ve heard of this.

Scott: What is this?

Meg: This is another kind of scary movie type thing. There’s not a lot of information on this, it’s hard to find stuff.

Scott: Right… and the fans of this… and of course, it’s not even out yet…

Oliver/Dave: …and it’s already got fans…

Scott: It’s already got fans… they’re calling themselves Gonerians (Ed. He pronounced it like the venereal disease…)

Oliver/Dave: Oh, jeez. Ow.Oh, dear. Oh, my… it burns.

Meg: That shirt’s gonna be difficult.

Scott: I’ve honestly been very … there’s been a lot of internal conflict on whether or not to do (Sub or Flub?) with Joss… while a lot of people were clamoring, “Please don’t do it with Alan Moore,” I think a lot of people would want to hear it with Joss…

Oliver: I don’t think we’re going to have time… just as a matter of pacing the show…look at the number of pages of questions you have…

Scott: Three pages we have to get…

Oliver: We never even get through one and a half…

Dave?: It’ll be like lightening round…

Scott: We already have too much show for the show we have left…

Meg: I think we just need an extra hour for the show…

Scott: We can lock the doors of the studio… I think it’d take a while for people to get in here…

Dave?: Start flipping over desks, chairs…

Meg: I’m willing to do that…

Scott: There’s many other properties that he’s also been associated with in the past few years, like…

Others: Like?…

Scott and others: Waterworld… now, did he write the final script for that?

Meg: I think he was just a script doctor, like he added a few punchlines for it, but by the point… the time he got on it, it was a little too late to save it.

Scott: I see. And he then also was a part of Alien 4: Resurrection…

Oliver/Dave?: For which we forgive him…

Meg: Toy Story.

Scott: Toy Story, which was one of the greats of that time…

Meg: Speed.

Scott: Speed? I didn’t know about Speed.

Meg: Yeah, he changed the main bad guy…

Scott: Oh, good…

Meg: You forget, I did a 20-minute documentary with slides for my senior thesis project in high school.

Scott: About Joss Whedon.

Meg: Yes, I did.

Scott/Oliver: Well, let me just ask you something, Meg, before we get him on the phone here… shortly… What is it about this guy? What is so appealing about this guy’s work, and Joss… what is it?

Meg: Personally, for me, it gave my father and I something to talk about and not argue about. My parents and I kindof bonded over watching the show. We turned it on one day by accident. We were like, “Oh, we’ll just see what happens…”

Scott: Referring to Buffy…

Meg: Referring to Buffy. We just never stopped watching. It became a thing – we would tape it, and then later that night, we would all hang out in the living room and just watch it. It gave us a platform to talk about… ‘cause the shows are so smart, they covered so many topics that I as a teenage girl was going through at the time, it just made a great jumping off point.

Scott/Oliver: Now, Buffy has come to an end… but there will be a Season 8, in comics…

Meg: In comics…

Scott: In comic form…Very interesting. A lot of people were talking about… and I’ve seen the series once all the way through, really, really liked it… I think I was spoiled by Firefly and Serenity, though, ‘cause that was maybe a little more for my age group, whenever I first got it, and it was very hip and modern when it first came out… and I just took a lot of ownership of Firefly and Serenity, I just loved that stuff…But this Season 8 of Buffy…

Oliver: Yes.

Scott: It’s gonna have a little bit of a role reversal for Buffy, I think she’s gonna take like this role of a mentor, as opposed to always having a Watcher over her constantly…

Meg: Well, that was a part of the whole show was about her growing up, it was an overall theme of the show…

Scott: Now, is she going to turn into a Watcher?

Oliver/Dave?: I don’t think so. If this is Season 8… for many of the hardcore Buffy fans, there’s this book, Queen of the Slayers which basically picks up right after the last episode of the last season. If you read Queen of the Slayers, it seems like she does take on a kind of a mentor role, but I don’t know if you’d call her a Watcher, per se…

Meg: ‘Cause Watchers watch… and Slayers slay, and she kinda does both…

Oliver/Dave?: Yeah. She’s a little too much of a micro-manager to just sit back the whole time…

Scott: Well, fill me in on this book because where the TV series left off, she was in a kindof bad place…

Oliver/Dave: There’s a ton of Buffy books, and I’ve only read a few of them. My wife has read, I think, almost all of them… and a lot of them fill in between certain seasons, and some of them come towards the ends of seasons, and the Queen of the Slayers is the one that really does pick up. And you know, there’s probably debate among Buffy fans as to whether or not the books are canon, ‘cause that’s what all geeks fanboys talk about is what’s canon and what’s not, but … do we know if this is gonna be published by Dark House or IDW, who’s got the rights to Buffy.

Dave/Oliver: I think it’s Dark Horse, cause they’re not gonna cover Spike and stuff like that, ‘cause it’s covered by IDW…

Oliver/Dave: Dark Horse does incredible stuff, but I’ve always liked IDW’s work with the Joss properties a little bit more…

Scott: It’s always fascinated me that they’ve split up ownership of properties that are in the same universe to different… television stations and comic book companies… why is that? We’ll have to ask him, we’ll have to ask Joss…

Oliver: This has been a big Joss day…

Scott: It’s been an incredibly big Joss day…

Oliver: I was swinging by to pick up comics on my way in, and they had the big “Joss Whedon is My Master” T-shirts in the window at Lone Star.

Meg: They also had a nice little display that I suggested… they asked me for a theme suggestion, and I said, “You should do Whedon. Do a big Whedon display.”

Oliver: I think the lesson we learned today is that it’s Meg’s world and we all just live in it.

Meg: A happy, glittery world.

Scott: Now, Astonishing XMen has really been tremedous for comics. A lot of Whedon fans have gotten back into comics, XMen got good again. Now XMen really got good again, to be honest with, with New Xmen, and Grant Morrison… there’s was a while there, for quite a few months, about a year or so, when Grant Morrison left Marvel, and Xmen went back into this lull…

Oliver/Dave?: It was almost as if they were trying to undo what Grant had done…

Scott: I don’t know why…

Oliver/Dave?: And then Joss Whedon came along, and he seemed to be very faithful to what Grant Morrison had tried to establish.

Scott: Right. It really brought things back, especially in terms of the… now, we’re getting into the… what… 17th or 18th issue, we’re talking about old bad guys from the Grant Morrison run… and a lot of things about beasts, de-evolution, it’s just been a fascinating read, and honestly, one that we really, really enjoy…. A lot of humour… Kitty Pryde is yet again, another one of his sixteen year old heroines that are (ruling?) the world…

Meg: But he’s matured her very well, indeed.

Scott: He has. She’s not sixteen at all. She’s mid-twenties-ish, and she’s got a relationship with Colossus, which is nice and ironic, and she can (Ed. - face the things? Little bit I can’t get…) Love that relationship there, but Oliver, we might have time to bring this up… ya lost?

Oliver: I’m lost as a ball in high weeds. I don’t know what’s real, I don’t know what’s happening…

Scott: Yeah.

Oliver: I mean, it’s a good story, don’t get me wrong, I just don’t understand what’s happening. So, you know, who better to explain, than…

Meg: The man

Oliver: The man himself, who is writing said book.

Scott: I’m not sure, we’re just answering the phone here…Joss Whedon. Are you Joss Whedon?

Joss: Yes, it is.

(Ed. - Now, just take it for granted that everyone at Fanboy laughed throughout Joss’s comments, because Joss, was, of course, with the funny, and everyone laughed and giggled, but I’m not putting in all the laughs…)

Scott: (Ed. - voice suddenly goes an octave higher…) Joss Whedon, thank you for joining us here on Fanboy Radio.

Joss: My pleasure.

Scott: I’m glad you called us. This way we can surpass (Ed. - by-pass, I believe he means.) all that telling you that we’re going to be broadcasting and recording this, but I do have to say, you do have to avoid, unfortunately, George Carlin’s “Seven Deadly Words.”

Joss: Okay, I will.

Scott: This is FCC airspace…. (Ed. – squeakiest voice yet.) It’s an honour to speak with you, sir.

Joss: I don’t remember his words.

Scott: I could tell them to you, but then we’d be off the air.

Meg: We have to get a little beep machine…

Scott: Those same words that they wouldn’t let you use at least on television… Angel and Buffy… But just so people will… this is a reminder, for everybody, that our guest today is Joss Whedon. He is the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel t.v. series, current writer of Marvel Comics Astonishing Xmen and the upcoming writer of Runaways, but most of all, the most exciting project, in my opinion, is the upcoming Wonder Woman live action movie that Joss will be directing .. Joss, thank you for being on the show, and really, thank you for being you.

Joss: Well, you know, thank you, it’s very beautiful… Okay, bye (Mike?) it says 4:58, I wasn’t wrong…

Scott: Mike!

Joss: That doesn’t mean is didn’t say 4:00 several times… before it said 5:00p.

Scott: I know it said 3:58 on my end…

Joss: (unintelligible…)

Joss: … apologies for my lateness…

(All disclaim importance of lateness…)

Scott: No problem. If it’s okay, we’d like to start with Wonder Woman, because we do have page after page after page of, of course, Buffy and Angel and Firefly and Serenity questions…

Oliver: And we’ve got phone callers lined up already…

Joss: And we can actually sortof finish the whole Wonder Woman subject really quickly…

Scott and Oliver: Oh, really?

Scott: You can’t talk about it?

Joss: No, I’m writing it, I’m still writing it. I know it sounds ridiculous, I mean, I know it sounds like it must be “Remembrance of Wonder Woman Past,” must be a thousand pages long, but it’s not, I’m just slogging away… So there’s really nothing to say…

Scott: Nothing to say.

Joss: Except that I’m the sort of person who likes to do things very meticulously and then humiliate his assistant on radio. I feel bad about that, I mean, I realized we were live.

Scott: What’s your overall take on the character of Diana Prince? I mean, is she an intimidating feminist, a caring naturalist, a (?) superhero, or what?

Joss: Yes

(All laugh)

Joss: You know, she is intimidating, because she is an Amazon and a princess, and somebody who believes very strongly in what she is. I don’t believe that she’s an intimidating feminist in the sense that that term’s usually used. It’s not because she’s a feminist that she’s intimidating, it’s because she’s frikkin’ Wonder Woman. And, um, you know, she can kill you with her pinkie. She doesn’t because she’s good. You know, the things that’s interesting to me about her is that she’s simply, that she’s so righteous and so completely above human nature that she doesn’t see it in herself and until she does, she’s not actually that effective a superhero.

Scott: Ooh, interesting. I’m fascinated by it, and fascinated to really read… to watch this movie as possibly a solo movie…

Joss: I noticed you said “read this movie.” On the interweb, no doubt…

(This marks 23:41 into the interview recording. Here resteth the transcriber… To be continued soon…)

That's interesting. So much for the whole "it was the Browncoats who made this movie happen" meme.

Sorry, people, this thread is meant to post links to your own whedon-related creations, sites, blogs, etc.

Not to post other people's, or your own articles in full.

I agree! And, since nobody has posted in forever...





These two above are sketch cards and measure 2.5" x 3.5".

And...


Thanks for looking!
L

Those are absolutely fantastic!

Do you have a website?

Thanks a ton, UnpluggedCrazy!

The "WWW" box has my linkage, but I post regularly at DeviantART 

Silly me. I forgot there were the WWW boxes.

Checked out your website; excellent work. I especially loved your Pulp Fiction image. Your Uma Thurman is spot-on.

No big...I forget that too.

Thanks...I like that one myself. Uma has a fantastic face!

This is probably not the right place, but anyway. I made a userstyles.org style for whedonesque.com which turns the site into a dark-on-light site. I'm a professional web developer, and I always have to rant about how light-on-dark websites give me terrible headaches and how they are very very bad for eye strain (unless you live in a dark musty basement).
http://userstyles.org/styles/10312

So if there are other people out there who think the same thing, they are now able to install this style if they use the Stylish extension for Firefox.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2108

Oh, and I also stole this idea:
http://b.chaosworks.org