Despite never having my high-20's level restored, I've picked up a new guide, Katie and Orbie . I had written to the studio some weeks ago asking for an episode list, and the guy was nice enough to give me about two and a half seasons of synopses as well (which I re-wrote of course). The show, which ran for 6 seasons, never came out on DVD in this country (it only has in France and is now hard to find) but if it ever does I can pick it up and get the rest of the ep synopses.

After making several submissions, I have gone from 3 and 9%, where I was for a long time, down to 1 and 0%, now I'm at 5 and 35%. I hope I'm going to have my level 28-or-so restored at some point, even if I never get credited for the subs I've been making. I *really* hope they don't intend for me to work my way up now from level 5...

Okay well, I added as much as I could to my list on Filmspot. There were a lot of DVDs (and not even the foreign ones) that weren't in their database, such as Revenge of the Hideous Sun Demon, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas...I can't even remember half of them. There were a lot. So, that's the best I can do. I may make a seperate list for movies I have on VHS, as I do still have quite a few.

I'm trying to fill out my DVD Collection list on Filmspot but it SUCKS. When I was trying to add my Japan imports and they wouldn't come up I didn't have a problem with that. But now regular, American stuff will come up, then I search for it again and it won't. The system sucks. -_- So I don't know if I'll ever have anything like a complete list posted. Oh well, I tried.

So anyone know when CNET will have a site for books?

(Oh by the way, I can't tell, is there an editorship system on Filmspot?)

While it's nice not to be stuck at level one anymore, unable to submit contributions, I'm rather tired of being at level three. I should be in the high 20's somewhere. I don't remember where, I havent done the Blue Box thing in ages, but it'd be nice to have my true level reflected so people know I'm not a n00b. I've been here since before this place became TV.com, after all.

And that's my emo blog.

So...remember how we went on vacation in July? Yeah well I finally posted the photos.

Balboa Park

Comic-Con (click on the link on that page to see the Foster's Home-related stuff)

After a long while, I have finally picked up a new guide. Space Goofs was a weird cartoon by a French animation company and worked on by many of the people who worked on Ren and Stimpy. The voice acting is great and while many of the stories don't really go anywhere, I really enjoy the show a lot. When the guide was created here apparently the episodes were entered in as they were listed on the 5 DVDs that were released many years ago - in that order, and excluding the *other* episodes that didn't make it to DVD. So needless to say, the guide is JACKED up. I have to reorder everything and then plug in the missing eps. Its going to be a pain. I'll plug in the sysnopses as I go, at least for all the eps I can. I only own DVDs 1-4...which is actually a kind of weird story so I'll share it.

I found Vol. 1 in a Best Buy earlier this year and grabbed it up, all excited, because I remembered the show and I was glad to see it on DVD. Couldn't find the other four DVDs anywhere though so I finally went online, and ordered them through a company selling on eBay. About a month and a half later I asked them where my order was, and was informed that the discs were on backorder and they'd ship them out whenever they got them. -_- I asked for a refund. I *really* don't think people should sell things on eBay if they don't actually *have* them.

Well I kept looking and still couldn't find them anywhere (except from the same seller on eBey) and finally I found them from a *different* eBay seller so I ordered them. Then I found out it *was* the same seller using multiple accounts. Oh well, I really wanted them so I decided to wait.

So, like, two months later I emailed them asking where my order was. They tell me they'd shipped it a long time back, and to verify my address in case it went to the wrong place. So I did that and they emailed me back saying, Oh it came back here, and the package has been damaged. Vol 5 has been destroyed. We'll refund you for that one and send the others back out. So...they did, and that's why I only have Vols 1-4. It seems awfully suspicious that the package was "returned" to them damaged RIGHT when I contacted them, but oh well. I wonder if I'll *ever* find Vol 5...

Dear people:

Just because something was *said* in an episode doesn't mean it qualifies as a quote submission. It must be noteworthy, humorous, profound, or otherwise, I dunno, *interesting* to belong in the guide.

Thank you. -_-

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Am I wrong?? Is it wrong of me to think that

So-and-so: (entering room) I'm home.

should be rejected? Not being a repeated line, or an injoke, or anything, should that sort of submission really be accepted? If so, you'd better tell me now.

Okay folks, I will be away from the computer from tomorrow July 15 through July 24. Subs made during that time will have to wait.

We're leaving for San Diego in the morning. I'm dropping my siamese fighting fish off at a friend's on the way. The parrot's already at the boarders (poor Kiwibirdie). The snake's being left alone but barring a power outage depriving her of heat she probably won't even notice anything is amiss.

God I wish I had a laptop, or that Jim could borrow the one from his work. -_- I'm going to hate being completely without a computer for an entire week. Last vacation we came home in the middle for a day, but no such luck this time. Ah well. The email backlog alone when I get back is gonna be awful! I'm going to try to keep myself busy reading the vBulletin manual, lol.

Apparently that cupcake emblem thingie is for having been here for the first month of TV.com. Everyone knows I was here that first month. Did I not get it because I was a member of Gamespot *prior* to the conversion? My info says I've been a member here since Decemer 2004 - that's when I signed up with GS. Did only people who *signed up* with GS/TV.com/etc during TV.com's first month get a cupcake? I've been busting my chops on this site as long as the rest of the "first" members, what's up with this? Is it because I'm a diabetic?

Google's always there when you need it, you know?

Read all about it here.

...Because I *might* get a sub or two, I guess I should say on here that I will be gone from 3-23 to 3-25. Camping. In the mud, and rain. In medieval costumes! Yup. It's a tradition. Lol.

No boxie. I'm level 25 and 99%, yippee skip.

I found this neat website!

TV Credits Policy

It explains how to determine what sort of credit to give someone at the end of a TV show, so it could be useful for determining what the definitions of each type of credit is when filling out our guides here.

I got the guide for She-Ra: Princess of Power yesterday, and my subs for The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley just went through so I'll have that guide tomorrow, which is why I'm going ahead and including it in my Boxie.

She-Ra was my favorite show when I was a kid. Oh sure, He-Man was my favorite show *before* She-Ra came out, but I like chicks who kick ass so that took over as Favorite Show. Skeletor's still my favorite villain of all time though.

Ed Grimley...I make fun of the show but I'm actually very excited to have come across copies of the episodes recently, and I couldn't resist launching a fanpage for the show and the character, as there are *no* complete ep guides online and not much on Ed Grimley himself. I've even posted some Ed fanart on my deviantArt page.

Well, I've finally switched to Firefox, I got tired of using IE just for CNet's sites and Netscape for everything else. It's handy that Firefox uses the Netscape email program, so I didn't have to bother with saving a bunch of old emails or anything.

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Sparky's Stats: 3-01-06 wrote:

Rank : Coconut Phone Level : 25 Forum Posts: 1650 Percentage : 06% Guides Edited: 11 Submissions Reviews Accepted : 1455 Shows : 3 Pending : 0 Episodes : 50 Denied : 29 People : 0 Total : 1484 Total : 53 The Cult of the Blue Box!!

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~Sparky

I wrote up a Submission Guidelines entry I'd like to post and pin on each of my shows' forums, but I kinda want to wait until they give the editors forum powers first. Still, I was hoping you guys could look it over and let me know what you think of it, especially if I have anything totally wrong!

But before that - So, last night I finally went through my BJ guide and cleaned it up. The main thing I needed to do was move a lot of the Notes into Trivia, as they were things that happened on-screen. Why were they in Notes? Because that's where I submitted them back when I was trying to get the guide, and the staff accepted them. I suspect that the people working on the Queue at least at that time didn't know the difference between a Note and a Trivia any more than I did. *SO* I had to go through and delete them and resubmit them, and I got a buttload of points for it. It was so many in fact that I went up more than 100% from yesterday!! I haven't had a jump like that in a long time. It was like...necessary gaming of the system, if there's such a thing.

Here's my submisions guidelines:

Submission Guidelines - General

Following is a list of general guidelines for submitting to TV.com. These are in compliance with TV.com's official rules. I am posting this to aid anyone seeking to submit, specifically to my guides, in order to preserve consistancy. (If you see any subs in my guides that do not follow these rules or are formatted incorrectly or are in the wrong section, I must have missed it and anyone is free to correct them.)

Submission Types:

Summary
Please do not make these *too* long. A good summary is concise and fairly brief. Only relate the main plot and any subplots, and never ever give spoilers! Ever! Ideally a guide should have consistant summary lengths throughout; it is offputting to go from one epsiode with three rambling paragraphs to an episode with a single, information-packed sentance. If you submit a summary, try to make it more or less match the existing ones (and if the existing ones are currently inconsistant due to myself not yet rewriting them, and if you're willing and able, why not rewrite them all yourself? I'd welcome the help.).

Recap
These are meant to be detailed, and consistancy of recaps throughout a guide isn't really important as far as I'm concerned. Only include dialogue if it is *vital* to the recap, otherwise please restrict dialogue to the Quotes section (unless it is spoilery!). Recaps are meant to contain spoliers so don't try to be cryptic. Make this as long or as short as you wish, as long as you are dealing with every important event in the episode.

The following four categories are known as "blurbs":

Allusion
allude, verb, "to refer indirectly." An Allusion is a reference to something else, whether it be a person, an event, a form of entertainment, anything. It can be a title made to sound like the title of something else (aka the Darkwing Duck episode "Dry Hard" is an allusion to the film "Die Hard"). It is not however a reference to other events, persons, or episodes in the same series. Do not submit "When Bobby mentions his Aunt Flossie in the airport he is referring to episode #46 Bobby Goes To Florida.." That wouldn't be an allusion, but could be submitted as a trivia. Please try to avoid using the word "obvious" in an allusion, such as "The character of Nigel is an obvious parody of Iggy Pop." It may seem like that would be obvious to everyone, but it isn't to everyone in the whole world and to state that it's obvious when it may not be is a bit presumtuous.

Note
A Note is anything relating to the episode that does not have anything to do with anything that happens on-screen. That is to say, "Director John Francowitz stated in an interview that this was his favorite episode" is a Note. "A video game was based off of this episode in particular" is a Note. (Please ignore the mistake TV.com made in the Notes submission page where it gives the same definition for Note as it does for Allusion. That's a mistake. They should fix it.)

Trivia
A completely misleading title, this means anything that happens on-screen in the episode. I know that "trivia" generally means "interesting fact," such as the director's favorite episode as mentioned above, but according to TV.com Trivia is where you put anything that happens on-screen. This includes goofs that made it to production, such as an animated character's clothes being colored the wrong color for a noticable amount of time, or someone's mouth not matching up with their dialogue (unless that's the norm for that show!). Recurring events, like commercials or musical numbers that are actually part of the show, or morals given at the end of the episodes, should be in Trivia. If it happened on-screen, it belongs in Trivia.

Quotes
Are quotes said by characters, that occurred within the episode itself (and not elsewhere, such as in a commercial for the episode for example). Submitted Quotes ought to be amusing, or compelling, or at least interesting, but never contain spoilers! Correct formatting for quotes is as follows: Bold tags should surround the character's name, followed by a colon, followed by the dialogue without quotation marks (do not bold the colon!). Actions should be within parentheses and the action, parentheses included, should be within itallics tags. If the action specifies the character who had just spoken (or is about to speak), the action should be on that same line. Only when an action refers to something not specific to any of the characters speaking should it be on its own line. If you wish to specify that the quote is a Repeated Line you may do so by putting *Repeated Line* in itallics before the quote itself (there is no official rule for repeated lines on TV.com, I am providing this guideline for the sake of consistancy within my guides). Examples:

Lydia: Beetlejuice, don't ever change.
Beetlejuice: (sniffs suit) Okay, I won't!

or

*Repeated Line*
Casper: I hate my afterlife.

or

Derek: Relax, dork! What could possibly happen?
(A crash followed by Roger yelping)
Bobby: Well, the fence could fall over and crush Roger...

Remember that the Preview funtion *still* isn't working on TV.com, so your submissions will show up without carriage returns when you hit submit and you get to the Verify Submission screen. You do not need to add in paragraph or break tags, the subs will go *through* correctly, they just don't preview right.

If you are submitting to an episode that has multiple sub-episodes within it: For blurbs, please make sure you put the title of the sub-episode the sub is for at the top of the submission, within itallics tags. For summaries/recaps, please put the titles in bold, followed by a space, followed by a carriage return, then start the text. The reason for the space before the carriage return is really more for summaries, and it keeps the guide looking neat because the carriage returns don't show up on the guides' front pages. This really only affects the first/last episodes but for consistancy sake I'd like them all the same. If you are submitting to a guide like this, please look at existing entries to see how they were done. You can click on the edit links for existing entries to see the actual tags and everything.

All of *that* being said: please do remember that I have a degree in writing and am very good at copy-editing. I am here to *edit* submissions. If you make a spelling or punctuation error I will *fix* it, don't worry. All I am asking is that everyone try to follow the guidelines for the types of submissions they are making. I am still the editor and will edit what I need to. However also remember that as of now TV.com does not have a feature that allows us to move a submission from one category to another. If you submit a blurb to Notes and it belongs in Trivia I cannot move it for you. I will quote your sub back to you in the Comments and ask you to resubmit it in the proper category. I will not resubmit it for you.

I encourage all submission types, but please have a reason for removing or rewriting something major such as an episode summary. If it is plagiarized, that's a good reason, but remember that I run fansites for many of the shows I have guides for, and I often reuse summaries that I wrote myself. Plus *other* sites frequently copy off of my websites. If you aren't sure if the summaries here were written by myself ask me; I won't lie. Some of them were here before I got here and I don't claim them as my own.

Boxie!

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Sparky's Stats: 2-24-06 wrote:

Rank : Golden Girl Level : 24 Forum Posts: 1618 Percentage : 24% Guides Edited: 9 Submissions Reviews Accepted : 1351 Shows : 2 Pending : 90 Episodes : 50 Denied : 29 People : 0 Total : 1470 Total : 52 The Cult of the Blue Box!!

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~Sparky

Got the editorship for Bobby's World - if you remember it it's the one where Howie Mandel does liveaction bits at the beginning and end and voices the title character (and its where the title of this blog comes from). I don't have copies of all of these episodes yet, but I'm working on it. I have 90 subs pending for another show, once those go through I will have that editorship unless the person who has 79 points right now sends something in. I just got ahold of copies of another series with an empty guide which I will provide summaries for as soon as I can. I had ordered the official DVDs of another cartoon in January but they haven't shown up; if I ever get those I will work on that guide, which is severely screwed up. (Sorry for not naming the shows but I kinda believe that's bad luck! )

Boxie time!

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Sparky's Stats: 2-23-06 wrote:

Rank : Close Talker Level : 23 Forum Posts: 1615 Percentage : 3% Guides Edited: 9 Submissions Reviews Accepted : 1218 Shows : 2 Pending : 90 Episodes : 50 Denied : 29 People : 0 Total : 1337 Total : 52 The Cult of the Blue Box!!

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~Sparky

I just got an email from somebody asking me to move all of my Foster's screengrabs into nonprotected folders.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAHAAA*snort*AHAHAHAHHAA!!!

Um...no.

(Btw, I do know that some TV.com'ers were hotlinking my Boxie icons, especially the dumpster one. And I know *who* because I can track all image requests from my site. Shame. )

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Sparky's Stats: 2-15-06 wrote:

Rank : Freak and Geek Level : 22 Forum Posts: 1578 Percentage : 68% Guides Edited: 8 Submissions Reviews Accepted : 1175 Shows : 2 Pending : 0 Episodes : 50 Denied : 29 People : 0 Total : 1203 Total : 52 The Cult of the Blue Box!!

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~Sparky

I know I haven't blogged in ages...Yeah well when you don't have anything to report there isn't much sense in blogging. I'm still out of work, and I had to report for jury duty last week. It took two days for them to select the jury and alternates, and I managed to escape being called up at all. I normally wouldn't mind serving as a juror but I haven't been feeling so hot lately so it's good that I didn't get called.

Well I got the editorship of The New Casper Cartoon Show and have submitted more than enough to get Casper and the Angels - I figured I may as well collect the whole set. I've submitted a request for a guide for the classic Famous studios Casper cartoons; I figured if Popeye and Betty Boop, also theatrical cartoons, could have guides, then the classic Caspers could too. But I'm not holding my breath.

Speaking of Betty Boop does anyone know if jroberthaga is still around? I may want to try my hand at becoming his trusted for Betty after all, since I do have all of the Boop cartoons on DVD, and his guide needs some cleaning up. If I'm gonna be out of work I may as well be useful.

Oh yeah, as for the title of this blog. So I moved my site to another server that allows scripting, such as with PHP, and I finally have things set up the way I want. Check it out what happens when I try to hotlink something from my site:



Denied!! I originally simply had a broken image show up but the problem with that is a hotlinker has of course already viewed an image they are linking so they have it cached so it shows up for *them* so they don't *know* it's broken and so they leave the broken link there, and continue to hotlink. This way, although the image will show up initially, it reverts to the "stolen" image after only one page refresh (and its likely enough someone else will point out the problem), so the hotlinker becomes aware that it won't work and will knock it off. But here is the twist, where the PHP comes in handy. Say someone wanted to simply link to one of my images. Normally the hotlink protection would foil that, and clicking a link to an image would result in a server error. I *want* people to make clickable links to my pictures. So, try clicking this:

Click me!

It's the same picture as before, and now, it's linkable. Cool huh? My brother helped me merge together the scripts for the replacement image and the redirect page, as they would not work in conjunction before he fixed it - I could only have one or the other, but I wanted both.

Here's my "boxie"!

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Sparky's Stats: 1-5-06 wrote:

Rank : Freak and Geek Level : 22 Forum Posts: 1541 Percentage : 38% Guides Edited: 7 Submissions Reviews Accepted : 1146 Shows : 2 Pending : 12 Episodes : 50 Denied : 29 People : 0 Total : 1187 Total : 52 The Cult of the Blue Box!!

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~Sparky

I'm tired of all these blogs! Just go read my blog over at TV.com, 'kay?