Archive for April, 2009

12 Things I’ve Learned from Watching Television

Friday, April 24th, 2009

I have not made  a post in almost a year now, but I promised Hikago that I would before the end of this school term. Don’t worry though, since I used my extra time to focus on the more important things in life … like watching television.

  1. Any TV shows must use one of the following settings – cops, doctors, federal agent, criminal, or mundane life.
  2. The main character is a loose cannon who only like to play by his own rules, at the chagrin of his by-the-book boss (played by Lance Reddick).
  3. The ultimate bad guy must make an appearance within five episodes of the season. If  not, it only means the bad guy is actually the friend of the main character, and will ultimately reveal himself to be the antagonist.  (Unless the show you’re watching is produced by J.J.Abrams, in which case you will never, ever find out who, or what is going on, ever)
  4. No one important ever dies, unless it’s in the movie version of the TV franchise, then an important character will most certainly perish. If someone does end up dying, they’ll come back in a later episode as a ghost/time traveler/albino clone/hallucination/robot or mysterious resurrected (only to disappear again in the failtastic finale).
  5. If the hero is in an intimate and loving relationship at the start of the show, something terrible is going to happen to either the hero, or the partner.
  6. If the hero is not in an intimate and loving relationship, he/she will be by the end of the series.
  7. When someone falls off a high rise building, he always lands on a car.
  8. When an explosion occurs on a city street, all the car alarms in the block will go off.
  9. If a scene starts with two people in bed, one of them (the important one) will get a phone call.
  10. If a scene ends with two people in bed, they’re not going to be sleeping.
  11. The biggest asshole on the show is also the one the viewers like best.
  12. No fat chicks.
  13. Any show that attempts to break the rules above will surely be canceled before the end of its first season.

Listens per day

Friday, April 24th, 2009

Seeing this post, I realized that listens per day might be a better metric, and went about rewriting a mIRC addon for iTunes I was using to output this data.

Unfortunately I was predicting a switch to foobar2000 or Songbird in the near future, so the addon is still in beta and is not 100% functional (although it does the bare minimum of outputting the song, artist, total listens, LPD, etc.). A more in-depth discussion after the jump. (more…)