MST Club Video Marathon 2017: Christmas In SPAAAACE

December 23, 2017 5:56 AM

This is MST Club announcing our 4^th annual "No Stress" Christmas Video Marathon! No Stress means it's pretty laid back as far as marathons go: feel free to have it going on in the background to cooking, sleeping, football or whatever, or exchange jokes with us in the chat window. The primary site of this thing is the MST Club Cytube page, with our Rabb.it room as a possible alternate if things go awry. The time is throughout December 24 and 25, from 6 AM Eastern/ 3 AM Pacific through to Midnight on the 25th. Come by with or without your favorite nog if you like! More details are in the extended description.

Previous threads: 2014 - 2015 - 2016

The MST Club Christmas Marathon is intended to be a destress hangout spot for MeFi members and people just wanting to relax and laugh a bit during the holidays. Marathon contents include:

• Riffing videos, including Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes (with an emphasis on Christmas fare), RiffTrax and Cinematic Titanic (paid-for copies of those).
• Christmas specials good, bad and just funny.
• Short Christmas-related, generally humorous material.
• Miscellaneous stuff, including some new material not seen in previous marathons that I'd like to keep as a surprise. Not everything is Christmas related, but currently most of it is. I'm testing the waters concerning how much non-Christmas material we should use.

Last year we tried a strict schedule kind of thing, but it chafed a bit, especially when technical issues prevented us from watching the thing scheduled for that moment. So this year we're keeping things flexible, and going with general themes for different times. Our room mods are free to choose what exactly is airing, from our library of yuletide wonderments and atrocities, or go their own way, or accept requests from the audience. (It helps if the video is on YouTube, Vimeo or Dailymotion, and if it's not blocked in many countries.)

The main advice for watching that I have to offer is to try to watch from a Flash-capable browser. Most of the stuff should be viewable from plain HTML, but in the past we've had issues with some sites, especially Vimeo and Dailymotion. Dailymotion in particular has a wealth of Christmas specials and related videos. If you're on a Mac using Firefox or Chrome should be good enough. I don't think there are good solutions for iPads and most Android, unfortunately, but give it a try even if that's your only opinion.

The alternate room, the Rabb.it one, won't see much use unless something drastic goes wrong with the cytu.be room, but there is one major thing watchable there that we can't at the moment see in the main room: the Christmas episode in MST3K Season 11. If we try to switch over to watch it there, it'll probably be towards the end on December 25.

Further details, updates and last-second corrections will appear in this thread. We'll be meeting in the cytube room this evening (on the 23rd that is) for preparations if you want to drop by a bit early and say hello.

posted by JHarris to MetaFilter-Related at 5:56 AM (16 comments total)

We like it very much!
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 11:01 AM on December 23, 2017

We put our faith in JHarris.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:25 AM on December 23, 2017

I'll be there, with bells on!
posted by Fizz at 11:35 AM on December 23, 2017

We put our faith in JHarris.
And rodneylives forever! (He's never explained, even privately, that alt-identity... I, on the other hand, have repeatedly told the story of the 'family joke' that if my father had had more to drink the night I was born, I would've been named Wendell instead of Craig... and when I started calling non-political radio talk shows, I chose to ID myself as Wendell because it was more memorable and 'wacky'... and it help me break into professional radio, as a DJ's 'wacky sidekick'... but I digress.)
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:34 PM on December 23, 2017 [1 favorite]

Heh, it's no big secret! I write sometimes about roguelike games. The object you're trying to obtain to escape with, in Rogue, Hack and Nethack, to win is called the Amulet of Yendor. "Rodney" is "Yendor" spelled backwards, a little joke by the originators of Rogue; Glenn Wichmann thought it was a funny name. Also, Rodney is the default player name in Rogue.

So, I view "Rodney Lives" as kind of a declaration about not settling for fate, a shout in the dark against the forces of entropy and randomness that doom our lives, both in roguelike games and in the real world. That's what human life and civilization is, in my opinion, a torch of order against chaos.

Rodney may be dead tomorrow, but for today, he's alive!
posted by JHarris at 1:57 PM on December 23, 2017 [1 favorite]

Ah, so rodneylives is symbolic in a way like oneswellfoop. I picked up that a couple ways, partly from the obvious spoonerism from "one fell swoop", partly from an ex-girlfriend who had previously hooked up with a motocross rider. He was part of a team that was most famous for their frequent injuries and gained the unofficial group name "Team Swolen"... I told her she'd gone from Swolen to Swell. (She kept in contact with the team; she was a motocross fan; and gave me a "Team Swolen" t-shirt which is my third-most sentimentally loved shirt. Anyway, when I decided to start blogging and researched domain names, everything with "wendell" was taken, but "oneswellfoop.com" was available. A few months later, when I made my first FPP at MeFi, even though I was using 'wendell' here as a nick, mathowie himself made a comment on the punnish post "good one, foop".
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:57 PM on December 23, 2017 [1 favorite]

We're putting things together in the room right now, but mostly we're just showing some yule logs if people want some background right now. (1:18 AM ET Dec 24)
posted by JHarris at 10:18 PM on December 23, 2017

And we're underway! As always, we're here if you want something to watch, or need to unwind wth friends, or anything. Here's hoping for a nice and stress-free holidays for everyone.
posted by JHarris at 3:44 AM on December 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is fabulous, thank you.
posted by Nelson at 12:41 PM on December 24, 2017

8 hours left, and most of the remainder is riffing of one thing or another. Come by if you can, and want to!
posted by JHarris at 12:50 PM on December 25, 2017

Thanks again for making it to the show, everyone! Although we had much less thread commentary this year, it still ended up being about the same in terns of attendance, actually slightly better, with 17 being the high-water mark regarding concurrency, but with 13+ being most common at popular times. As usual, once it started, there tended to be a couple of lurkers in at all times,, who I presume used the marathon as background, which of course is fine by us.

I think the lack of a solid schedule was a little bit of an issue, but constructing one is such a hassle that I'm still reluctant to use one next year.

This year, I tried to adhere to a pattern: about one or two hours of longer things (usually just one or two), followed by a short "Station ID" video I made that explained the marathon in text form, then two or three short (less than 10 minutes) things, for variety and to give people a chance to change out or use the bathroom or such.

Some new things brought in this year:
- Episodes of Would I Lie To You (WILTY), from YouTube, which proved to be very popular.
- Tracks from the Star Wars Christmas Album, Christmas In The Stars, which wasn't quite as cringe-inducing as the infamous Holiday Special, but was still pretty bad, and served as an example of the same kind of thinking that produced the Special, unthinkable today.
- We focused on reducing repeats this year. For longer items, only the Rifftrax Christmas Circus with Whizzo the Clown repeated, and only because its first showing was in the early hours when it was just the hosts.

BTW, the Marathon usually doesn't pick up non-host viewers until around 9 or 10 AM or so. It might be a good idea to adjust its start time accordingly next year. Also, the MeFi mods put the marathon in the sidebar, which helped a lot.

Thanks again to everyone who helped, and people who made it to the show! If you couldn't make it, of course we have our weekly MST Club showings (which really *are* taking a break this week, but will resume in the new year with 908 THE TOUCH OF SATAN). Next year is another election year, as well, so we may do something for that.

We keep playing with the format, trying to make something that will please as many people as possible. If you have ideas, suggestions or complains with this year's show, feel free to chime in with them here.
posted by JHarris at 6:24 AM on December 26, 2017

I wasn't around as much as I thought I would be, but I really enjoyed what I saw. And thanks for introducing me to Would I Lie To You!!
posted by JanetLand at 7:18 AM on December 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

Thanks to the hosts for doing such great work! biogeo and/or I had a great time popping in and watching with ya'll.
posted by cui bono at 7:22 AM on December 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

It was definitely fun to stop in for a while!
posted by limeonaire at 1:21 PM on December 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

I only got to stop in a few times, but since this year I was working over the holidays, having a place to joke around and be (not) social, was much appreciated. I'll try to catch a few of the upcoming MST Club events in the near future.
posted by 1f2frfbf at 2:31 PM on December 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Well just to remind everyone this Thursday MST Club is taking off (and I mean it this time). If foop, valkane and/or Snake want to do something there they're welcome to it, but I won't be showing 908 THE TOUCH OF SATAN until next week.
posted by JHarris at 4:12 AM on December 27, 2017