What's your white whale? Post something you've been trying to find for ages

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > What's your white whale? Post something you've been trying to find for ages

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

I just finished reading (devouring) the whole thread. It was great! I loved puzzling over the mysteries (I can absolutely picture a Shel Silverstein sketch of the kid who turned into a gas pump, but I'm 99.999 percent sure my mind is messing with me) and the feeling of satisfaction when they were solved. I opened a few into new tabs when I thought I had a lead, but someone always beat me to the punch. :shobon:

Gotta love the goon hivemind.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2021 01:48

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 02:16

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Chumbawumba4ever97 posted:

I remember when I was really small seeing on the news that some family was somehow reunited because of the movie Twins. It had something to do with someone recognizing an extra in the background as a long lost relative or something like that.

It always popped into my mind now and then but I can't find anything on it. It was definitely like a legit news story. I remember it being in the media for a while but I can't find anything about it. I was too young to understand it and I'd love to know what the hell that backstory was.

I found this in the IMDb entry for "Twins":

IMDb Trivia posted:

Two real-life twins were reunited with their father after seeing him in the scene set in downtown Santa Fe.

Might be a start!

# ¿ Mar 9, 2021 17:26

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Yond Cassius posted:

As far as I can tell, Cafe Eblana's owner gave up in 1998 but left the hosting online through 2001 or so; some of the community migrated over to Livejournal and IRC but their footprints are... scarce.

Oh, wow! I was an earlyish member of Eblana, joining back in '90 or '91. It started on Prodigy. :corsair:

My name is mentioned in that horrible long texty site a few times, along with that of another guy I'm still in touch with a little and at least one other goon. I met a couple members in person back when the Internet was a nicer place to be. Back on Prodigy and, later, IRC, Eblana was mostly a bunch of people meeting virtually to bullshit. The guy I'm still in touch with recently invited me to their Discord, so the group (or a subset thereof) is still hanging on. :unsmith:

There was, of course, drama. Case in point: That "einexile" site seems to be some weird prose activity log of the group produced by the soi-disant owner/leader, e, who was a huge rear end in a top hat and would often leave for weeks or months in a fit of pique. Years later, he turned out to be a massive chud. Who knew?

Thanks for the blast from the past!

# ¿ May 9, 2021 15:18

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Pastry of the Year posted:

I think you are conflating some things, because I specifically remember those Usborne picture dictionaries and it was a little yellow duck hidden in every scene. The illustrator was Stephen Cartwright.

I have a couple of those dictionaries and can confirm. It was on the strength of those that we picked up a board book (something about farms or tractors) for my son when he was a baby that was also illustrated by Stephen Cartwright and also included a little yellow duck on every page. :3:

If you're sure about the "scenes of Europe" part, see what else Cartwright did. Maybe there's something in his portfolio that hits that spot. I'll check my books for that canal scene, too.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2021 16:37

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

huh posted:

You know those old Usborne books, 1000 first words in Spanish and that sort of thing?
[snip]
I think there was an illustration of a canal and a long boat going down it, for example. And the small dog was on it.

Sorry it took so long--I finally got a picture of the canal scene from that First 1000 Words in Spanish book. Imgur was choking on the file, so I put it on Postimage instead.

Does that jibe with your memories? There's a dog not too far from the long boat on the canal, hanging out with some cows, but it's too small to make out if it's spotted or anything. (The duck is way up in the nearest tree.)

# ¿ Jul 19, 2021 19:59

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

I just took a quick look at the book, my first real look, and the title looks like DECEPTION.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2021 03:08

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Dr_Amazing posted:

The first one is really close. It has pretty much exactly the right tone/presentation. But it's not it.

I'm 100% sure they called it "shoeing"

I did a quick search of the thread and didn't immediately see this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyQYq6RUKdA

edit: More:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OUufWBhqps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac50zRik9Ks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMWc4HyVlyQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPpKxSAahQ4

# ¿ Oct 25, 2021 23:48

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Ichabod Sexbeast posted:

Long shot but -

- Some japanese cat videos with ASCII art, the style of the cats was similar to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3oYKqFUqYY

There was one that was a super intense music video, with some of the chorus being a row of cats drumming, but seen like you were in the row?
All of this was just done with ascii art

I haven't looked close enough to find that particular one, but searching YouTube for 絵文字もなー turns up quite a few, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCBS8-kh3e0
It seems like very few of them are fully animated.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2021 01:06

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Neukoln19 posted:

I got another one here - years back the museum of contemporary art here in Chicago did an exhibit called "sympathy for the devil" - they exhibited rock and roll stuff - one of the things they had was a collection of music videos. Maybe they were weird or artsy or made by a certain person, I forgot why they were being exhibited together.

One of the videos which I haven't been able to find looked like it was from the 80s. Either the band's name or the song's name was just one letter. Maybe it was "Z" or sthg. And the video was strange; don't remember much but one shot was some doll heads strung up together. The music was unremarkable but the vocals were just screaming.

I haven't been able to find this video since. Perhaps a combo of bad memory and not really looking too hard.

There's a ton of info out there if you Google "sympathy for the devil" "Chicago" "museum" "videos" or throw MCA in there. Maybe something here rings a bell?

https://macm.org/en/exhibitions/sympathy-for-the-devil/

e: There's also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(American_band)
The video itself may have been made exclusively for the museum exhibit, so it may be gone forever (unless you can get in touch with Dominic Molon, who put it together).

Hirayuki fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Dec 27, 2021

# ¿ Dec 27, 2021 23:33

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Dr. Quarex posted:

Wow, getting the quote wrong and then explaining what it means. Rude

Yeah, that was lovely. It's a shibboleth for a reason! :mad:

# ¿ Mar 15, 2022 21:39

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Coredump posted:

I'll add this one to the list. I'm gonna have a collection of funky scents at this rate.

I know it wasn't Lush--they're only sold in their own boutiques--but if you actually like grass perfume and aren't collecting it out of a strange sense of spite, they make a fragrance called (appropriately) Grass that's pretty pleasant.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2022 01:56

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Polish posted:

I am looking for a web comic which was a retelling of a kid sent to some sort of anti-gay or re-education school. I remember the author was kidnapped in the middle of the night by this camp and they weren't allowed to talk. The school ended up closing down I think sometime in the early 2000s or 90s.

Joe vs. Elan? I found out about it here--it's still updating pretty regularly.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2022 21:08

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Last Visible Dog posted:

Next goal, the chicken soup song!

Do you mean the Carole King song from the musical "Really Rosie," an adaptation of a handful of Maurice Sendak's books?

e: https://youtu.be/r9VvlI6sHJw

# ¿ Jul 1, 2022 21:16

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Dewgy posted:

(They’ve got the Alan Thicke version too, though there’s a fourth version that’s considered totally lost, which is a shame.)

Ooh, I grew up listening to The Point! on vinyl (plus a ton of other Harry Nilsson stuff, God rest his soul) and I know my folks taped the movie off TV to VHS. I think I still have the tape somewhere; I should see which version it is. (I know for sure I have the Ringo Starr version on a purchased videotape, and that he wasn't the same narrator as I'd gotten used to on the home-taped version.)

# ¿ Sep 14, 2022 00:54

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Back when Yugos were a thing in the States--I want to say the late '80s, maybe '90--there was a song, or a novelty song, or just one of those things a radio talk show would play to kill time or something, that I still think about and cannot place. The male "singers" had kind of generic Indian or Middle Eastern style accents, not too cartoonish, but enough that they registered as foreign. The only lyrics I really remember were "Pump up the [car name], pump up the Corvette, pump up the Yugo--no, YOU go!" This first part was sung in a - - - _ ` sing-song way. (Actually, the "pump up the" reference might place this in '89 or '90, given "Pump Up the Jam" came out in August '89.) Then it went into a kind of faster riff sung in a rat-a-tat monotone.

Does this ring any bells with anybody else? This would have been in metro Detroit, if that helps at all.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2022 21:46

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

I AM GRANDO posted:

Here�s a recent one. I saw a woman last week in a blue sweatshirt with an illustration of an anthropomorphic frog in a shirt and pants reclining on a mushroom and facing the viewer, with one leg bent at the knee so as to create a triangle shape. The frog had either a wizard hat or a big floppy circular hat and was holding either a pipe or a magic wand raised in one hand. A single word in white text appeared behind the frog, I don�t remember the word, but it was something like �pleasurable� or �splendor.� The whole image had a kind of 60s counterculture feel, like with round loose lines. It wouldn�t look out of place airbrushed onto a van.

I�ve searched Urban Outfitters and don�t know where else to look for ironic women�s clothing. How could I find this image again?

You can search for "frog mushroom tee" or similar and get pretty close, I think. This ticks a lot of your boxes, but not enough to be what you saw.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2022 02:19

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

I AM GRANDO posted:

Upon further inspection, it appears to be some kind of makeup or perfume brand by Harry Styles. Very weird.

Not at all what I expected, but okay! I'm glad you found it.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2022 03:19

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

HolHorsejob posted:

A while back, I saw this pic on Tumblr of like a Japanese magazine ad for various goofy things, and one of them was a hat that functioned like window blinds, and the dude pulling it down over his face. Does anyone know this image?

It might be from one of several chindogu books:

101 Unuseless Japanese Inventions: The Art of Chindogu https://a.co/d/5tXNI6R

I have this one; I'll go check it for that particular image.

e: No luck, but some cursory Googling found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/bdwycs/i_like_to_design_stupid_products_for_fun_so_i/

Hirayuki fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Dec 20, 2022

# ¿ Dec 20, 2022 00:21

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Arsenic Lupin posted:

The tumbler on the right has a story. On our honeymoon in 1981, we dropped by the first Dansk outlet we'd ever seen. It had these plastic tumblers 9cm/3.5in high. They came in one of two colors, a deep blue-purple or clear. You can see that they have facets pressed into them. We went back to that outlet about once a year, and we bought more and more. Then Dansk stopped carrying them/making them. What with time passing, we have only one that's still usable. Can anybody figure out the search terms to find it?

I have good news and bad news...

https://tenondesign.com/products/four-vintage-dansk-skal-lowball-glasses-by-gunnar-cyren

# ¿ Jan 2, 2023 02:40

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Arsenic Lupin posted:

Good find! I would actually have paid that, the glasses are so drat good. I've set up "Dansk lowball glass" as a saved search on ebay, thank you for the link.

"Skal" and "Gunnar Cyren" might help, too. Good luck--they're very nice!

# ¿ Jan 2, 2023 02:52

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Milo and POTUS posted:

A famous (I'm pretty sure actually named) mid-century modern house that I think was the primary residence of its designer. It had a grass roof and a seperate workshop/studio. Dark wood. It wasn't Wright, Lautner, etc for sure. Someone I'd never heard of

e: it was't phil johnson either, that nazi

Eames and Dow were also homes for the architects who designed them.

e: also Gropius

# ¿ Jan 19, 2023 21:35

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Killingyouguy! posted:

If there's a like 'find me an SA thread' thread maybe this would be better for that but in some thread there was a goon who ?knew? a guy who had this very strict idea of what the perfect mens suit "should" be
and posted photos of the finished product and it was like this tall lanky white guy with long blonde hair in a mao-collared suit of a garish red and gold brocade fabric
he may or may not have been wearing combat boots with it

I Googled this poo poo out of this last night and didn't get anywhere. I can picture it absolutely 100% clearly in my mind, too. If anybody else manages to find it, please don't just share the photos/thread, but also the search terms you used to find them!

# ¿ Feb 18, 2023 15:05

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Zathril posted:

Nice, for the other person asking I searched the site for mandarin collar and it came up.

Aw, I got to the point where I was searching for the Chinese names for that...garment, but clearly I was overthinking it. Thanks!

CommonShore posted:

Buddy looks like Marilyn Manson tried to climb the curtains

...and my first search was for "Marilyn Manson custom red silk qipao combat boots," based on my memory of the photo alone.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2023 16:21

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Polsy posted:

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3519501

Holy poo poo, this Christmas advice thread! :kimchi:

times infinity~

# ¿ Feb 20, 2023 22:28

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Last Visible Dog posted:

I made some beepbox transcribings to help. They're to the best of my memory, so please excuse if they're a little shoddy:

Those are pretty detailed renditions if you were going strictly off memory! :stare:

# ¿ May 24, 2023 13:31

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

An old DOS program for learning Japanese kana (definitely katakana, probably also hiragana). It had a review portion, where helpful mnemonics were introduced for each character, and then a multiple-choice quiz portion. It was all DOS text, with hand-drawn kana (i.e., not drawn from any double-byte character bank). One mnemonic I remember clearly involved telling シ (shi) apart from ツ (tsu): "She is equal" (because the two top strokes of "shi" are more horizontal than in "tsu"). This would have been the first half of the '90s. I swear I had it on a floppy, and I swear I copied all my floppies to my archive disk, and yet.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2023 16:04

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

JediTalentAgent posted:

Neither of these are likely, but I'll toss them out there since they are in the window of time and content:

Thanks for digging! I know for sure this was a tiny program on a single floppy (with a bunch of other programs, in my case) and also freeware (or shareware that no one ever paid for). Probably something a fellow learner with some programming talent had whipped up and released to help others. It was extremely basic. I don't know where I could have even found it at the time. I'll check my archives more closely.

I did have a subscription to Mangajin for a while there! It was great.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2023 12:57

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Rooney McNibnug posted:

Shot in the dark, but possibly this?: https://archive.org/details/japanese-for-business-and-travel

Its funny, I'm trying to learn Japanese atm so this has been a nice search for me

Ooh! No, that's not it either, but I thought for a hot second there that Kana Sensei, also on that site, might have been it. It's not, but I relished the sense that I was getting closer (and I enjoyed seeing things like the very first J-capable word processor I'd ever used). Thanks!

# ¿ Sep 26, 2023 23:34

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Wow, thanks for this! There's at least one program that looks promising--I'll check it out once I'm off my phone and report back.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2023 03:49

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

JediTalentAgent posted:

I did a bit more digging because and you mentioned it might have been shareware.

I haven't gotten very deep into that archive site (because holy poo poo there is a LOT of stuff there), but these (and the ones mentioned in Mangajin) all feel a lot more developed/professional than what I had. I'm thinking QBasic, even. I did find some floppies archived to CD, including a lot of BASIC stuff I did in my computer class in 1993, which was very encouraging! A couple Japanese-related things in there that I had made, but not this one. I wish I knew where the hell I could have found it in an era when I was barely online.

It may very well be lost forever. Or it may be buried in these archives! Thanks again for giving me another place to look.

eta: That reminded me of one very specific Japanese software archive that's been around forever and is still around today--with software going back to MS-DOS times, some of which are kana practice titles. I have two I'm looking to try out, one for DOS, one for Win3.1. Now to find a way to run them.

Hirayuki fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Sep 28, 2023

# ¿ Sep 28, 2023 18:45

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

This should get you started: https://www.onesnladay.com/2019/12/17/
(sorry, phone posting)

# ¿ Feb 11, 2024 02:21

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 02:16

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

Can confirm Carnivàle is a great show. I'm ready to watch it again. Clancy motherfucking Brown!

# ¿ Apr 13, 2024 04:01

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