i learned that STAR WARS released a Christmas music album in 1980 and the producers wanted a better lead singer for the track “R2-D2 We Wish You a Merry Christmas” so they asked the 17 year old kid who was sweeping floors at the studio, and he nailed it. His name was Jon Bon Jovi (x)
I actually have this one. Well, I have the MP3s I ripped from my copy-of-a-copy a friend gave me, before it was stolen.
Webcomic sites where the comic images are large enough to necessitate scrolling, but that don’t have First-Previous-Next-Latest navigation links at both top and bottom. So if you’re just reading page-by-page, and the links are at the top, you have to scroll up to go to the next page once you’re done reading the current one. But, if you’re just rapidly paging through looking for a particular page, and the links are at the bottom, you have to scroll down to do so.
On the subject of webcomic navigation, sites that don’t have their archives with the individual pages listed by date, but by the name of the page.
YouTube videos that don’t have a real outro, so if you prefer to let a video finish before you comment, and (as I often do) have a bunch of videos cued up in a playlist and , you have to skip back to the video you actually want to comment on, as it immediately starts playing the next video. Especially annoying if, as is often the case, a pre-video ad starts playing, so you have to wait for that to end or be skippable before the actual next video starts playing so you can jump back.
Tumblr recommending posts from blogs that you already follow, “based on your likes!”
People on Tumblr using tags that don’t seem to have anything to do with the actual content of the post, apparently just to end up on the dashboards of people who follow those tags.
Websites with comment sections that don’t let you edit your comments, or give you a ridiculously small amount of time to do so.
Websites with comment sections that don’t give you any way to go back through your old comments.
Idea: Someone is granted a wish, but the results of the wish don’t turn out the way the wisher was expecting. Not because the wish is being granted by a Jackass Genie or a Literal Genie, but because the wisher phrased the wish so as to make the results contingent on something else, and that “something else” wasn’t what the wisher thought it was. Examples:
Wishing to be as financially successful as a particular person, not knowing that that person is going into deep debt keeping up appearances, and it’s about to come crashing down around them.
Wishing to be successful in their grandfather’s field of business (and phrasing it that way, i.e. “my grandfather’s field of business”), not knowing that the business was just a front for the grandfather’s organized crime ring. (Alternatively, not knowing that their parents lied to them about what he did for a living, not wanting them to know that their grandfather was a criminal.)
Wishing to be another person’s ideal lover, not knowing that the person isn’t straight. Gender-bending is the obvious outcome there, but if their crush is asexual and aromantic, they might just disappear, as they just wished to be something that can’t exist.
Going with the idea of wishing oneself out of existence, wishing that a particular historical tragedy hadn’t happened, not knowing that one pair of their ancestors only met because of that tragedy.
So were your parents on the anti D&D train? Because the idea that it would lead to devil worshipping was already tenuous, but did they ever buy into the idea that it would let you learn real magic? Because that seems like it would be an advertisement for the game. Besides, if you're obsessed with monotheism, just avoid playing a warlock or a cleric and you'll be fine.
I was absolutely raised in an anti-D&D home. I don’t recall if my parents believed it was about real magic or not. It probably depended on which 700 Club segment my mom watched last.
Even though I’m an atheist now and don’t believe any of that rubbish, I still have a general psychological aversion to magical stuff. Which is fine, because it means I never got into Harry Potter.
I was raised in a strongly Christian home, with a mother who didn’t like any fiction that had magic in it. In fact, I’m pretty sure she made my brother and me stop watching a show because magic showed up in it. Now, I quite enjoy fantasy. Possibly the fact that I never went full atheist, but consider myself agnostic now, may explain the difference between you and me. I actually started reading the Harry Potter books to see if there was anything to what the naysayers were saying, didn’t find anything I considered objectionable, and now am quite fond of the series, although not of the transphobic opinions that I’ve heard Rowling espouses.. I played D&D regularly before my stroke, although I didn’t actually start playing it until years after I’d left home. (Not because of any kind of aversion, it just wasn’t something I was looking to get into until I was in a gaming store, saw a poster advertising a local gaming group, and having read some webcomics which had the characters roleplaying, thought, “You know what? I think I’ll give this thing a try.”) Back in the ‘80s, Mom and Dad had a book about the supposed evils of D&D. I actually sort of wish they still had it, so I could go through it and see how much they got wrong. Even though its author(s) would have been working from an edition I never played, I’m sure I’d still find plenty to nitpick.
I haven’t done one of these in a while, as most of my Transformers have been in storage since my stroke three and a half years ago, but here’s one I did before that: Transformers wielding themselves #5: Flywheels/Skytread.
