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: 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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The Old Continuity

It's something I probably shouldn't be too concerned about, since I'm talking about my old MST3K fan series.

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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A While Longer

An update on a few things because it's already been a while on some of them.

Coffee Time: TV Odds and Ends

A new Coffee Time video I got put up last night.

A Foreward to the Digidefenders MiSTing Series, Part Two

 I'm having second thoughts about doing this now, but I also realize that if I wait until later or when I get what I've got of this series posted, it'll never get posted, assuming it ever gets written at all. With that in mind, I may as well just get this knocked out.

A Foreward to the Digidefenders MiSTing Series, Part One

 At first, I was just going to post something like this as a preface with the first part of the first “episode”, but then I thought there was enough need-to-know material to make a seperat post for, especially for readers here.

MiSTing: Franchise Opportunities

There's going to be a bit before the jump here folks, but I've got a little explaining to do before we get down to business here.

This is one of the things I was talking about in my first post of the year.  As you can tell by the title, , this is a MiSTing, a Mystery Science Theater fanfic.  I'm still kind of a fan, but I've only watched just shy of half the Netflix-exclusive episodes I know about.  Part of the reason for that is something I was telling my mom about when I was watching that first season.  This is part of a self-insert take on the basic premise, where a character based on the real me chooses to watch the movies or TV shows, or whatever was being presented.  The Netflix seasons reminded me a lot of my own work in that regard, even if what we were seeing on Netflix was funded by fans and headed up by Joel himself, who also had a small role in the series, outside the theater.  I've been meaning to get back to watching the new series again, and with any luck, I'll actually get to that before they come down from Netflix,

As to this actual post, I've got the older stuff I was talking about towards the beginning of the year, but before I get to posting that, I'm going to start with something much more recent, something that I actually finished back in December and have been meaning to get posted to various places.  Here and the newsgroup I mention at the end are the only ones I'm sure I'll be posting to.  I'll have to check the other site I mention at the end to see if they take one-offs and fan series like this before I go for that.

Anyway, here's the thing, below the obvious break here:

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Updates 'N' Stuff: December 10, 2019

Because it's time for a few brief notes about what I've got in that “pipeline” thing that all these “content creator” sorts like me like to talk about so much.

Old Work Revisited

Because I’ve been having trouble coming up with new ideas.

MST3K: TNG

Or: The Lesson of the JJ Abrams Star Trek Reboot.

J. Michael Shearer's Theater: Spams of Weirdness

It's been awhile since I've had a post this big to make here.  I'm really not sure how well it'll work out, but here we are, I guess.

I'd intended to have this done before my birthday, but due to life going on an other things, that didn't quite work out as expected.  Plus, it kind of left me feeling like I needed to rush the ending, which explains why it's kind of messed up.

There are a couple relevant links towards the very end.  They're not terribly critical, but they will make the experience a little better, I hope.  The actual finished product is below the jump:

Working On A MiSTing

It's been quite awhile since I've done this “for realzies”.

From The Old Files: Issue #07: "Episode Guide" for fan-MiSTing "Day In The Life Of Pizza Cats"

Back towards the end of the fan-MiSTing era, it was sort of the in thing to do so-called episode guides for what we'd written.  I only did this one that I can remember, but that's because I was terrible at it, at least in my own opinion, and it was essentially doubling the amount of work for an episode of one of these things.

See, the concept of these episode guides was to condense the whole what was pretty much a double-fan-fiction down to a few paragraphs, maybe a page at best, jokes and all, and provide further thoughts on it all.  I only ever did this one because not only was it more work than I wanted to do for these things, as I said before, but I think I may also have done the base fan fiction's author a real disservice by trying to make the episode guide funny in and of itself.  I don't recall any specific comments against it, but I have a feeling that there was a little discontent on her part as a result of this episode guide, which only added to my incentive to only do something like it one time.

With that in mind, let's have a look at one of the few things I actually do kind of regret having written: the episode guide for the MiSTed version of "A Day In The Life Of The Pizza Cats".  It's better than the Sonic reviews I posed before, but also more regrettable, at least in my mind.

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From The Old Floppies: Issue #3: Unfinished MiSTing of "Adventure of Jesse and Nick"

Here's something else I'm going to have to explain a little bit before I put in a jump and the actual item.

As quite a few readers may know, I'm a fan of a show called Mystery Science Theater 3000, or MST3K for short.  I didn't really get into it until college, but I'd seen the show on a few occasions in high school.  I didn't really "get it" until my local FOX affiliate picked up the syndicated "Mystery Science Theater Hour" version of the show, which ran slightly abridged episodes as two-parters instead of one, two-hour long block, with special bumpers at the start and end of each hour.

During my last year or so of full-time undergraduate study and the few years immediately after, I wrote quite a few fan fiction pieces based on the series.  In general, these were referred to as "MiSTings"  At first, I wrote using the characters from the last three seasons of the show, the Sci-Fi Channel era, as that was what I was most familiar with, having watched those first-run while in college.  Later on, I started a self-insertion series along the lines MST3K.  Eventually, I had to stop altogether as a result of the combination of lack of time, the fact that subjectively good material to work with had become exceedingly difficult to find, as of 2004, more or less, and, at about the same time, the most major archive for this genre of fanfiction went dark.

The general format of these fan fiction pieces has a lot of what is known as "script style" writing for the host segments, where the characters making fun of a particular item are interacting outside of the item itself.  Within the material being joked about, the character jokes will be in script style and the source material, usually prose of some sort, will have ">" at the start of each new line.  I'll say right now, this is one of the more complex types of writing I've ever done, and I'm sure it takes some time to get used to reading as well.  What I'm about to present will certainly be more of a challenge to read, as I hadn't yet developed a more practical way of setting things up.

What you are about to see, in this case, is an unfinished version of one of the last "true" MiSTings I ever wrote before I transitioned from using the characters from the TV show to using myself and whatever seemed like funny guests for me to have on a particular piece.  This is Mike Nelson and the season ten cast riffing on a story I originally wrote for a language arts class in ninth grade called "The Adventure of Jesse and Nick".

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VHS Video Collection

I'd have done this one as a Junk And Stuff entry, but it's not all junk.

Moving On: Minerva Mink

Well, this is kind of a weird thing to be writing about.

Twelve Years On The Web

I've personally been here longer. This is an observation about other things I've noticed around the web.