To tie in with this old 2009 post on X-E in the spirit of the holiday season… I recently enjoyed this Holiday theme post recreation of Mickey D’s Holiday Chicken McNuggets spawned from a heartwarming, toasty commercial X-E Matt posted

In 1987, the sauce got sweeter. Sensing that they were on the cusp of making Chicken McNuggets the official food of Christmastime, McDonald’s went all-in and just dared the rest of us to call. That year, we got Holiday Chicken McNuggets.

Here’s the commercial:

You watched it, right? Please watch it. Nothing I’m going to say beyond here will make any sense if you don’t watch it. Be a Scrooge on another site. One I don’t like. Typically, the ads starred fancily dressed adults palling around in hoity-toity dining rooms, with only a sloppy box of fried chicken to betray their base normality. I grew up believing that successful people had Christmas parties full of cocktail dresses and Chicken McNuggets, and I so couldn’t wait to be a part of that.

…

The commercial was utter perfection. Notice how they show the McNuggets in all different settings? A fancy party, at the office – there’s even a shot of McNuggets in what seems to be a fancy party at an office. Which would be an office party. An office’s Christmas party, featuring Chicken McNuggets and long red fingernails. The world I thought I was inheriting was so much different than the one I got.

Read the rest where he tries to recreate the chicken McNugs from 80′s yore.

It seemed easy enough. Especially because I could just tell you they tasted good, even if they didn’t.

For the cranberry sauce, I used…cranberry sauce. Plus an orange, for its orangey zest.

For the apple sauce, I used, I don’t know, some weird can of apple stuff that would appear to be the start-point for homemade apple pie. Plus cinnamon, from our thousand-year-old container of it. Back then, Egyptians were batshit for cinnamon.

You know, they actually came out good! Nothing beats McDonald’s fancy ketchup on a McNugget, but if you want to turn golden fried chicken parts into the mistress of Father Christmas, I can think of no better flavors.

X-E Matt, quite a specialty chef (compared to this last guy I saw in a reddit img post earlier today). I used to read X-E all the time in 1999-2003.  It was the pinnacle of comedy on the internet. All the written posts had a way of making you repeatedly burst out laughing just thinking about what was written. That and Somethingawful Forums and Newgrounds flash animations before video and YouTube came to play. And it looks like X-E Matt lives… here he is on camera as of 3 months ago.

Youtube comment: I love you Matt and I’ve waited over a decade to hear your voice. It’s as creepy as I made it sound and you should feel a certain level of unsettlement over what I wrote you.

At first I thought he had some kind of vocal damage from chronic smoking (I remember all of his low-res 2000-era pictures would have him smoking in festive 80s hair-color fashion and a black shirt… and well, he still looks the same to this day). But I think he’s doing some voice for some character he made up. Watch him open netting for this durian fruit.

To go along with the Mario prodigy post, I think I saw this somewhere else once (maybe diggnation) but this 2009 60Minutes story was brought back into discussion on a recent Joe Rogan podcast episode watch P1&2 below:

p1 (full)

p2 (full)

full 60minutes interview

Interesting part about having a good upbringing to cultivate his gift @11min30sec in P1 (reminds me of the last post on that mario comic), and peaking early in P2 (reminds me of this NPR story on myelenation @15min and learning languages in adolescence). The kid’s personality kind of reminds me of the genius that is RonaldJenkees.

I wonder if anything more fruitful will come to be in 20 years, or if he will just be … ♪ we are, we are… the youth of a nation ♫

sobering old 2001 music video from POD single I watched recently… video also reminds me of the the most disturbing movie ever: KIDS

I was searching around and found this 60Minutes interview of another prodigy, but in 1987:

1987 Profile

On campus, A.D. De Mello resembled somebody’s little brother who had come to visit and lost his way.

But this fellow was a full-fledged sophomore at Cabrillo College, a two-year community college in Santa Cruz, Calif. He took a much heavier workload than most college students – 21 hours a week in physics, political science, calculus, astronomy and meteorology.

“I like doing the things they have in college, like finding – doing calculus formulas and finding out how the weather works, finding out what the real raindrop looks like,” he said, adding about the raindrop that “Instead of being a nice circle, it’s – instead, it’s a big, bulgy blob.”

A.D.’s life was orchestrated by his father, Agustin De Mello, who took on his son’s life as a full-time career. His main income, he said, was a settlement from an auto accident. They lived quite modestly, but the father had big plans.

“He can probably earn doctorates…in several areas – physics, astrophysics and science education,” said his father, Agustin De Mello. “And probably by the time he’s 16 or so, start teaching.”
“He’s just always reeling off facts,…little obscure facts that’s he’s picked up and just remembered,” said Professor Richard Nolthenius, who taught A.D. astronomy. “He remembers everything, which tells me that he’s very concentrated.”

“At that moment that he’s on that idea, his mind is completely there. And that’s why he absorbs it. That’s why it stays,” Nolthenius added.
…

2000 Update

No, he didn’t win a Nobel Prize by age 23.

“It didn’t quite work out that way,” says A.D. “A lot of the dreams that people heard about, of winning a Nobel Prize and going to doctorate school, is mostly my father….It wasn’t something I cared about doing.”

In fact, it was never his idea, he says.

What he is doing today is his idea: training to be an estimator for a commercial painting company. There are no Nobel Prizes in this line of work – no sure pathways to the cover of Time magazine.

His job does demand a certain accuracy so his degree in mathematics from the University of California at Santa Cruz, gained when he was only 11, does come in handy.

But was he really a genius or was he just a collector of information?

“Genius?…I don’t thinso,” A.D. says. “Later on in life I realized that a lot of other kids put in the same situation probably could have done the same thing. And – so I don’t think that makes me a genius.”

And this reminds me of those people in 60minutes who remember everything. Everything remarkable reminds me of something else remarkable.

To go along with the last mario themed post… saw this disturbing mario comic on reddit (click pic below to see full comic… wanna make sure the original site gets its due hits)

We all get lost now and then. Some stay lost forever… — I promise to make movies out of my best comics if I get rich one day. But now I am dirt poor so comics it is —   Be Sociable, Share!

-

That was some heavy sh*t…

Just in time for the holidays    Check out his other comics too… reminds me of extended versions of PBFcomics or something from SaladFinger’s DavidFirth.

Edit: Check out this comic too

To go along with the last post on video game easter eggs: What happens when you give a Mario piano score to someone who’s never heard it in his life? Awesomeness.

Tom Brier: the skills of a programmer and musician (hyper logical with just the right amount of hum and twang)

If you’ve ever owned Super Mario World, how can you not smile to these tunes.  Gets intense in the final 60 seconds of the level.

The entire last third of that video, when he was playing quickly, I was like “Oh sh*t, I’m running out of time! Got to get to the giant hurdle!”

<-Yoshi one @2min50s when they start to orchestrate their own makeshift flute and tuba trio

Love them ragtime soda shop tunes ♪ hello my baby, hello my darlin’ ♫

What a brilliant, mind-blowing time to be there (for the guy recording all of this): these people bringing-to-life a completely oblivious Nintendo experience never had… all of them diligently mastering the midi-based tunes 

Youtube and reddit comments:
@ 1:29 he’s like AWWWWWWWWW YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH THIS IS AWESOMEEEEE

—

Tom Brier is my background music at work while programming. Always.

reply: As Tom is a programmer too, I suppose he is his background music also! I’ve heard him say that he has written music down during breaks at work, actually, so I guess it is true.

—

I don’t understand. So he’s NEVER played these video games before/never heard the tunes? I don’t understand how that’s possible.
-
reply: I think most of us who were in the Atari/Intellivision/Colecovisi­on/Vectrex era never got into the Nintendo/Sega era that came along later because we had all graduated to computers.

—

Is the piano tuned a certain way to give it that ragtime sound, or is it just the notes that are being played?
-
bit of both.

the ‘ragtime’ sound is basically just the sound of a piano that hasn’t been tuned properly in a while.

Although this guy’s piano hasn’t been modified in this way, the sound you’re probably thinking of is actually a ‘tack piano’ – a piano where the felt hammers that hit the strings have had a piece of metal put on them – usually a tack or a nail, so that instead of felt hitting the metal strings, you’ve got metal on metal.

Makes it louder and ‘tinnier’, so it can cut through the sound of a room full of people shouting over drinks.

SFII: Sheng Long
Zelda 64 [would you dare 'crook-ed cartridge' a golden copy]
Mario 64: Luigi on the castle roof
GTA San Andreas PS2: Bigfoot [ctrl+f 'Sasquatch']
Goldeneye 64: Beta tower (fun no clip mode)
Sonic 2: Hidden zones (Sega Genesis was surreal and ahead of its time)
Banjo Kazooie: Hidden ice key (Rare made some real creepy games too)