Sonic Boom:
Avicii and the Magic of Music:
It turns out that the phenomenon I described as a thinly-veiled excuse to listen to "Wake Me Up" three hundred times actually has a scientific name and cause. The technical term for it is Musical Frisson, and it is caused when the body releases dopamine to the brain's receptors; something that usually only happens due to direct stimuli such as food, sex or drugs. And the results of this release? Increased heart rate, skin conductance (chills), changes in breathing and temperature. Apparently I was doing complex biochemical science while replaying catchy pop songs. Try it on your friends!
Family Guy:
About a month ago I applauded Seth MacFarlane for boldly breaking status quo and letting a character die while at the same time bringing on a new dog in the form of Vinnie. I hereby retract the former half of that statement and would like to go on record that Mr. MacFarlane has no dick and I will not be partaking of anymore of his work in the foreseeable future. In what many are calling a Christmas Miracle but I'm calling a literary lump of coal, Brian was resurrected three days (well, episodes) after his death just in time for Christmas, thereby undoing MacFarlane's original stance that he'd been killed off for good. This annoys me on a few unique levels: For starters, as they used time travel it means the new Griffin dog, Vinnie, was never adopted and is implied to still be rotting in the pound. While Tony Sirico's contract still has three episodes on it, this implies that my new favorite Griffin (second only to Meg, that poor lost soul) will be phased out like the failed marketing ploy he was. Two, for an expressly atheist animal to the point of contempt of religious individuals solely on virtue of being religious, Brian's death and return is pretty... spiritual, don't you think? The waiting three episodes to return, on Christmas, when millions had seen him die and millions spent his posthumous time worshiping his name and praying for his return, it's almost like he's bigger than Jes-
Oh.
Mr. MacFarlane, you sir are an egotistical ass.
Finally, it's just bad writing, lazy at best and manipulative at worst. If he wanted to shake things up with a new character, why go to the trouble of offing a popular character only to bring them back? either he toyed with the idea of keeping Brian dead or used it as a ploy to bring in more ratings and stir up controversy. Had he killed of Meg and brought in a Japanese schoolgirl to take her place, would Meg have been invited back, I wonder? If I had to compare this to anything of any significance to the world, it would have to be the Benghazi scandal: we were fed a bullshit story, it got turned around on us and the fabricator of this story denies they did anything wrong and treated those who chose to believe like we're the idiots.
I believed you could still do great things, Seth. My faith in you was misplaced.
Final point:
I realize that last point was a bit ranty and a bit obnoxious, so I would like to end on some new and hopefully less soul-crushing: on December 19 of last year the European Space Agency launched an unmanned probe into space named Gaia, a fitting name for earth's newest eye into the cosmos. it is programmed to design a 3D catalogue of over a billion celestial bodies (including stars, moons, asteroids and at least 500,000 quasars) and hopefully prove Einstein's theory of relativity and observe the bending of space-time firsthand. If that doesn't make you excited for next year's update post, I don't know what will!
