March 17th, 2000

hanks to the internet, I now no longer have to watch nearly as much television anymore.   Which, considering my personal feelings regarding the quality of today's programming, is a good thing.

Recently, my good friend Nate Trier turned me on to a site called TVEyes (www.tveyes.com) which actually turns television shows into text files, and e-mails you when someone on a show mentions a specific keyword.  From the e-mail, you can click to a page that shows more of the text of the show's dialogue.

With this new virtual tool in my virtual hand, I did what most anyone would have predicted; I set it to alert me whenever anyone mentioned "Dungeons & Dragons" in a television show. 

Hah.  That'll show them.   Try to sneak a gaming reference past me in an episode pf "Jesse" or "Saturday Night Live" now, you hack sitcom writers!  Go ahead, Geraldo Rivera or Ed Bradley... do another hatchet job on D&D!  I'm watching you now!!!

Of course, since TVEyes doesn't alert you until the mention has already been made, such a gadget is useless to anyone searching the airwaves for comments about gaming, unless they happen to have a satellite dish that picks up broadcasts from another time zone. 

Which I do.  God bless these modern times.

So, in the last three months since I set TVEyes to watch for Dungeons & Dragons, I have collected the following:

- A rerun of the infamous "Jesse" episode.
- An episode of "Freaks and Geeks" in which one of the geeks tells one of the freaks that he would make a good Dungeon Master.
- Questions about D&D on both Jeopardy and the Maury Povich game show "Twenty One"
- A rerun of that X-Files episode where Langley plays D&D for money.
- An episode of "Just Shoot Me" in which an adult mentions being sent to D&D camp by his parents... and it is soon revealed that this happened a year previous. (How droll... it is to laugh!)

And here I was, expecting to see my mailbox flooded with news stories and sitcom scripts trashing gaming and accusing gamers of all types of nasty things.  Somehow, I feel let down.

Before I wrap this up, I have to give a belated word of thanks to the great people at the Gaming Outpost, (and especially Ed Healy) for their support and interest in The Escapist.  Thanks to them, the page is getting a lot of exposure, and it's a whole lot easier for me to publish!

Play nice,
wjw