MiSTing: Yellow Submarine

So, here’s something I haven’t done it awhile. I’m reposting an old MiSTing I found in the archived files from Web Site Number Nine. Unfortunately, it’s not the Digimon stuff I’d been doing before, but it is one I could have sworn I had put up here before. Thought I had it in my other files, but I guess not.

I think this may have been one of the ones that inspired me to start using a partner character for my own main, as well as the “bandwidth wasters” theme based on the Turner Classic Movies One Reel Wonders theme. This was a short one trying to “sell” supposedly legal alternatives to various sorts of uppers without saying what exactly they were selling, instead relying more on stoner lingo and slang than anything to make sales.

The host segments were meant as something of a parody of a parody of the commercials for International Correspondence School that Sally Struthers was famous for in the mid- to late 1980s. It’s one of those things that stuck with those of us who saw them as kids and teens back then.

I’m doing this as one big piece because it’s too short to break up.

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MiSTing: Ten Science Thingamajiggers

This is another one of these things that I found in that old archive I mentioned in the one of these I posted back in September. This is also the one I was saying had all the artifacts from it being done on what is, by now, a decidedly ancient word processing program. I'll be leaving them in because this is a fair bit longer than “Make Good Money At Home”. I'll also be posting it all at once, even if it is a bit longer than I'd prefer for that, simply because there are no good places to break it up.

There's a nod to a bit of continuity I'm not entirely sure is my own or something from the actual show. Right at the beginning, there's a line where Pearl threatens to send Observer into the theater again, and I cand't recall if I did that or if Best Brains did it. After all, it's been the better part of twenty years since it was something important enough for me to remember.

I'm sure the things I used as a base for this come from at least one technical article, but it's hard to piece together, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have understood any of it even if it had been possible.

Since this is going to be a longer one, I'm just going to wrap the intro up now and give a brief endcap after the main event.

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MiSTing: Clearing The Queue

As I was considering this introduction, I came to realize that it was for what is likely to be the last wholly new Mystery Science Theater treatment I write for quite a long time, at the very least. I'm not going to say I'm completely done with this style and/or format forever. It's difficult to say what I'm going to find out there on the Web, after all. There's always the potential for more, of course, and I'm always on the lookout for it.

At the same time, the Internet is a very different place now, relative to what it was when Misties like myself started writing these things. Thanks to the modern accessability to the online world we enjoy, the selection of material is far greater than I could have imagined even fifteen years ago, when I moved into my own apartment. Generally speaking, at least in my way of thinking, that's a good thing, especially when it comes to works of fiction of various sorts. The down side is that there seems to be a substantially lesser amount of material that I'm comfortable working with and able to use, relative to what there was in, for example, 2003.

There's a riff towards the end of this one where the in-universe “me” character comments on having read a lot of fan fiction that has a lot of the same sort of errors seen in the junk mail being presented here. When questioned as to why the spam is being presented instead of the stories, the response is that the assumption is that the folks doing the stories are trying their best and not just trying to get into my bank account. That's a bit of the real-world me slipping in, because I really have seen some bits of fiction that might have been pretty good, had it not been for awkward formatting and/or spelling and grammar peculiarities that could just as easily be the result of English being a second language for the author. On top of that, I've also read some things that were way better than I had expected at first. There's a real chance that reccomendations will come at a later date.

For now, though, I'd best get on with the feature presentation. This is, as I've mentioned, a pair of junk emails I found to work with at the end of last year and have finally gotten something done with. It's going to be a chonker of a post, but there's a good reason for that. While this is going to be longer than I'd ordinarily like, it's not long enough to split up, either. With that in mind, here's the actual thing:

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MiSTing: Make Good Money At Home

Earlier this week, I made a post about coming across an archive that had a fairly substantial number of my old Mystery Science Theater fan fiction and how it brought back a lot of good old memories. I also said I'd at least consider going through a few of them and maybe repost a few. Since one of the ones I happened to have handy is a relatively short one that I've already had a chance to read, I'm gonna get it up and ready to go.

As the title suggests, this is a junk email I got to what was my AOL email address, I believe, since I still had one of those in the early 2000s. This was a relatively early piece in my career doing MST3k stuff, as I was still using the Sci Fi Channel era cast of the show, although only Mike, Pearl and Observer actually show up here. This was kind of an experimental thing, because I do believe I was considering switching to using my own character for this sort of thing, which is what we've been seeing in the DigiDefenders episodes I've been putting up.

An interesting side note here is that I do believe I actually wrote this on the very first Internet-enabled PC my family ever had. By then, I had sort of “inherited” the unit because my folks had upgraded to a newer for the time machine running Windows 98, rather than the one I was using, which still had Win95 on it. Part of that meant using a productivity suite called MS Works, which is definitely old school by today's standards. As a result, there are artifacts caused by a difference in the way single and double quote marks were encoded in plain text files. Since this is a relatively short one, I'll try to take care of as much of that as I can. There's another, longer one I may put up as well that has the same issue, but I may not be as enthusiastic about correcting it, mostly due to length.

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MiSTing: Greetings From Canada

This is really just a quick one-off sort of thing, meant mostly as kind of a break from the full-on video game stuff I've been doing.  There won't be much of a description or an endcap for this because I've already said most of what I need to about this one in the post that came out at my normal "press time" today.

Beyond that, the main subject matter here is a take on the classic bank scam sort of thing, only using the crypto thing that's all the rage right now.  I've also worked a little Animal Crossing and Radio Dead Air into the host segments because I've been spending my time on that instead, and getting more out of it, I think.

With that said, here's the main event.

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I Unfollowed Someone On Twitter! You'll Never Guess Why!

Find Out Below The Jump!

JMShearer's Dinnertime Show, Episode #1

This will probably prove to be a rather foolish idea on my part, but it's worth a shot anyway, I think.

From The Old Floppies: Issue #08: MiSTing of "Banned CD" spam

Back towards the end of my MiSTing career, I used to do a lot of email spam, in part because I would get a lot of it to work with, and saving it in a form that I could do so was much easier.  I still get the same volume, but it's nowhere near what it used to be, in terms of funny content or ease of saving to work with.

This is one of the later so-called "live action" ones I did of a piece called "!Banned CD!Banned CD!" that I used simply because I had claimed it on the Web Site Number Nine Dibs List and felt I had to do something with it.  It's a relatively bad piece, even for me.  I think I threw it together in like one afternoon on a day off, and it shows.  But hey, judging by the last few of these, maybe it'll be worth something here, just for what little entertainment value there may be here.

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