Archive for the 'Anecdote' Category

 

The Song at the End of Kamen Rider Ryuki 33

Monday, September 17th, 2012

So I’ve been marathoning older Kamen Rider shows to help me fall asleep. (Not that they’re boring, but I’ll talk more about that another time.) And as I watched episode 33 of Ryuki, I was on the verge of dozing off until I got to the end of the episode.

Without ruining it for anyone who’s never seen the show, the end of this episode has a deliciously over-dramatic slow motion sequence backed by an amazing instrumental song. Folding laundry has never been so hype. But I also knew I’d heard that song somewhere before, so I was suddenly wide awake and searching the web to figure out what it was.

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Research Before You Speak

Monday, February 28th, 2011

Last night, I was watching an old South Park episode while trying to fall asleep, and a few particular lines stuck out to me. Richard Dawkins started talking to Mrs. Garrison about flying spaghetti monsters. And I thought to myself, “Hey, wait a minute. Didn’t Futurama have an actual flying spaghetti monster in their episode about the evolution debate? I remember it saying something like, ‘I am a flying spaghetti monster. Do you mean to say that I evolved from some kind of manicotti?'” I thought it was too much of a coincidence that two shows with episodes about the evolution debate would feature something as particular as flying spaghetti monsters, so I started thinking that Futurama (the newer episode) had ripped off South Park.

I love both of those shows, so this was a startling realization for me. I started writing this big comparison between the two episodes in my head, until I then switched to the idea of making a YouTube video out of it. I’ve never uploaded a YouTube video before, so I was getting excited thinking about how I’d make it. I would use low quality screenshots and audio instead of full clips, to make it as fair use as possible, and I’d record some narration for it. Thinking about all of this greatly reduced my tiredness, so I decided I’d at least take some screenshots and make some notes while I was up and it was on my mind.

First I searched around the web to make notes about the two episodes, and to see if anyone else had already pointed this out. And in the process, I discovered that “flying spaghetti monster” wasn’t just a throwaway term from South Park. It was around well before that episode, and is a pretty widespread argument in the evolution debate. In fact, while reading about it, I realized I had heard about all this before, but I guess it slipped my mind at some point.

So, obviously, Futurama didn’t steal the concept from South Park. I would have felt pretty stupid if I’d made a whole big comparison project out of it and (re-)learned all this later. Crisis averted, I guess. But I am kind of disappointed that I no longer have an idea for my first YouTube video, and I won’t get to talk to myself on a microphone. Maybe some other day I’ll have my chance to be on YouTube.

National Word Writing Month

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I was attempting to consistently work on a project throughout the month of November. Not a novel (maybe next year), but some things for the site. And I was pretty consistent about it, but not at the quantity I desired. Anyway, since I intended to focus my free time almost entirely on this project, it wouldn’t leave much room for other activities, like watching television. But I came up with a great idea to counter that: November sweeps. I could justify watching TV by “covering” the November sweeps episodes of all the shows I keep up with by making more of my disjointed rambles about them. So I watched shows while I worked on my project, and made notes that I later turned into complete sentences (though some things are still only in note form, as of this writing).

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TFAW is Pretty Cool

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Story time. I moved across the US a couple years ago, and I couldn’t bring my car with me, so I sold it a few months before I moved. The local comic store was 35 minutes away by car, and since gas prices were pretty bad at the time, it was not easy to convince someone else to take me there. Thus, I started ordering my comics online at Things From Another World until I moved. But after I moved, the comic store here turned out to be 25 minutes away (which isn’t much better), and rarely has what I’m looking for in stock, so I decided to just keep ordering comics from TFAW.

Fast forward to the present. They shipped my copy of Buffy #34 in early April, and come the middle of May, it never got here. (more…)