Bots Master

New episode of "Saturday Morning Deathgrip" out today. We watched the pilot episode of the 1993 show Bots Master. I had never heard of it, and I still wish I hadn't. It is a collection of noise and flashing colors and nothing all that enjoyable.

This was the hardest episode thus far to come up with some kind art for. My original idea, based on the general experience of watching the show, was to do a picture of a bottle of Adderall. But instead I decide to celebrate a show that even I, someone who's very knowledgable with pop culture in general and cartoons in general, had never heard of by mashing it up with the original poster for a 75 year old silent movie- Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The original poster is an art deco masterpiece. I love art deco- architecture, graphic design, and typography.

So this was a slam dunk, once I had the idea.

A slam dunk that basically two people will appreciate. That'll help grow the podcast...

Tim writes stuff- An empirical look at baseball

Over at Stats in the Wild, I have a very long essay on performance enhancing drugs in baseball. My person take on PEDs is quite a bit different than most of what is out there on the internets. Please read, please enjoy.

Denver the Last Dinosaur

Episode 4 of Saturday Morning Deathgrip is live, in your face, and totally radical, just like the show we covered, Denver the Last Dinosaur!

In coming up with art for this sucker, it seemed pretty obvious- just make the main character realistic. Denver was officially a corythosaur. As you can see, the cartoon took some liberties with what a corythosaur probably looked like. I'm not the first to imagine a more realstic Denever, but I do appear to be the first do it in a non-sociopathic way.

The part that made me chuckle is that corythosaurs were 30 foot tall grazers (or possibly browsers) with no real teeth. They were likely, behaviorally at least, gigantic cows. The idea that this dinosaur would be preserved in the La Brea tar pits, come out fully functional in the late 80s, self-aware, able to vocalize in English and also love rocking a mean guitar is more hilarious to me when you realize that, if you could see them in the Cretaceous, they'd literally have done none of those things. Of course, you didn't need to read up on paleontology to know they'd literally have done none of those things.