Frequently Asked Questions about Adam Moore

The Adam Moore FAQ v1.0b3

Initial Description

Born from the fires of a volcano centuries before recorded history, this document has the power to answer all your questions so long as you can only think of the questions contained below! No one knows how many years it sat unread, but scientists believe that language was developed first by a tribe that dreamed of being able to read this text. There are others who believe this FAQ was designed to create the false impression in website visitors that Adam was a very important person who not only got lots of visitors but also did not have time to answer the thousands of questions from those imaginary visitors individually.

Perhaps one day the doubting thomases will eat crow... But this FAQ was created well before there was even a remote possibility of 15 minutes of fame for this particular webmaster, so it fits nicely with the doctrine of preemptive war. Sadly, since there is nothing about Adam that was not already explicitly stated somewhere on the rest of this unvisited site, Adam appears to have felt it necessary to resort to old gags and stock jokes to fill up the space below this introduction (And most of this introduction as well!). So while you can take comfort in knowing that no animals were harmed in the making of this product, you are now dumber for having read this message. This FAQ will slowly be updated whenever the webmaster feels like it.

Reader Feedback:
(Leaving a comment is how to bring a question or error to my attention)

Version History

June 19, 2003 - 1.0b -

Eleven questions were written and answered by Adam Moore. Questions came out of thin air.
Questions were answered in the first person since Adam was the one creating the document and he did not want to look that crazy. Of course, he also wrote this, but wanted it to look official.
Many of the questions were asked for the first time here, meaning that frequently may mean zero.
The best joke appears to be the rejected question list, which allowed Adam to touch all sorts of pop culture references without really trying.
Product was rushed out the door to meet production deadline.
Created a comment system to potentially generate more questions without work on Adam's part.

June 21, 2003 - 1.0b2 -

Table of Contents added. Questions subdivided into three sections. Cocktail Party, Website, and In-depth Preferences
More questions created and answered (Website history, television shows)
Spell check was run once on the 1.0b answers.

June 29, 2003 - 1.0b3

Another question answered in the websection.

Table of Contents

Cocktail Party Questions (The introduction)

Who are you?
What do you want?
Come here often?

Questions about the website

How do I find my way around this site?
Why do you have this online journal then?
Why is it called Brilliant Retort?
When did you start designing web pages?
When did you make this website?
I guess I meant "When did you make THIS part of the website?
And one of your first acts was to make this FAQ?
Banners?
PGP Contact?
Where did you get that idea?
Why aren't you talking about your current job in the work section?
Why is the NYU Law Section so empty?
Why dotMac?
What are the 'various reasons' that made you less willing to change old pages?
Why did you put the website stuff before the stuff about you?

Questions about me (In depth)

So, what do you do with your time?
No, seriously. That can't be true.
I'm sorry.
Fine. Stolen any other tired, old routines like that to fill up space in your FAQ?
What was that about law school?
So, when do you graduate?
What is law school like?
And what do you want to do with your life?
Favorite musical groups?
Comedians?
Television shows?
Video Games?
What's going to be answered next?

Cocktail Party Questions

Who are you?

I put my vital stats on the left for those people who like lists more than paragraphs. Since I am not 'on the TV', you most likely found this site because you know me personally. If you happened to stumble across this site because you were looking for something on google, then you probably did not make it this far. You are back on google clicking on the next possible hit. Fare thee well!
What do you want?

From you? Probably nothing. You could leave a comment on one of my recent journal entries if you are really interested in making your mark. I haven't had anyone contribute an article in forever. It used to happen because I was one of the only people in my high school with a website, so when you got me to post something, other people read it and you felt proud. As it stands today, anyone who wants to post something can just as easily do it themselves or just email it to people.In general, I suppose I am looking to finish law school, pay off whatever debt I have by working, and then consider going to grad school. If work is enjoyable, I may put grad school off indefinitely. I am not currently stressed about very short term or very long term goals, I feel like everything I've listed in this paragraph is somehow going to resolve itself in 4 or 5 years. I will still be in my 20s when I make new goals.
Come here often?

I visit it once a day. There was a time where I didn't look at it for almost three years. If that happens again, you will be able to tell my looking at how long it has been since I updated my online journal. More on that later.

Questions about the Website

How do I find my way around this site?

Before answering, I assume you have glanced over at the tiny "Site Links" graphic that I have started placing on all new pages. I further assume that your problem is that you cannot understand the overall site philosphy (i.e. Is there a method to this madness?). First I will give you a pretty tame description of the seven sections that I deemed worthy to exist in their own direct subdirectory. Then after that, I will try and give you a broad reasoning that may help you nagivate the sight better in the future. So, as I was saying -- there are currently seven sections. They are pretty easy to list
- News/Journal Here you will find the website news, my online journal, the archives of both, my weekly contests, my FAQ, my contact information, and all of my CONTENTThe CONTENT Section is the big jewel of my page. Started sometime in the Spring of 2003, it is a dumping ground for all of the things that I do with my time. You want to read about a show I went to recently? I would have put my thoughts on the show there. It is a dumping ground really. There is even a section called Random. A dumping ground for the dumping ground. It goes there normally because it is not funny enough to be classified as humor. Which brings us to...
- Humor Jokes, Pardories, Photoshopped Images, very standard.
- NYU Law Anything related to my time at NYU Law specifically. If it is just about New York City or my adventures outside of the school, it is definitely going to be in Content, not here.
- UVA Same as NYU. There is a ton of content here because almost everything I did at UVA was related to the college. Charlottesville didn't have the kind of culture that would have required me to set up a seperate section. Every party I went to in college was with UVA people, etc.Second note about UVA and GSGIS, since I do not want to change the sections now that I have left those institutions, any future details about either place will probably end up in my CONTENT section within the news.
- GSGIS Same as NYU and UVa. There is a ton of content here because I had nothing better to do and secondly because other people gave me stories to post. Yes, all of it was written in high school. No I won't change it for you.
- Work Information about places I have worked. Nothing amazing.
- Past This is a dumping ground too. Basically, if I do not feel like something belongs in Content (it is TOO old, it won't look good in the framed look of my content section, it really isn't something I did or saw), then there is a chance it will go here. The other option would for be for me to mention it in my journal. I rarely want to do just that because I know that old journal entries will disappear where as direct links to well designed pages can get people to visit them for years.
This site is pretty easy for me to navigate since I built it. For your information, the GSGIS and UVA sections will never change, so you can just go at them. Click links and see where you end up inside of them. The Humor Section is slowly growing. About 6 months ago it was empty. Same for the Work and the Past sections. As such, those three are currently very easy to navigate (alright, except I goofed on the current Humor Section linking system, so that can be confusing) because there is nothing there. The NYU Law Section HAS a bunch of links, but they are all filler. I just have yet to be inspired to make a parody. Finally, there is the GIANT NEWS SECTION. An Online Journal, a catalog of rock shows and comedians I have seen, contests, banners, this FAQ! It just keeps growing. Why?

Because my life is becoming less and less associated with school. It is my real life, and it can't all just fit into a school. So, expect to see this section slowly take over. The Online Journal may get its own directory, the content may do the same. All of the schools may be pushed together, who knows? Maybe the work section will explode! Anyways, if you are trying to keep up with who I am...then the News section is all you need. If you also want to know who I was, all those other sections are good for surfing when you are bored. I'll probably repeat or clarify a lot of this information in subsequent questions, but this seems to be such a standard question that I wanted to address it multiple times! (otherwise, I may leave something out entirely)
Why do you have this online journal?

I actually have an entire website. The web journal is just the part that gets almost constant updates so I hype it a lot now. During high school, I had a lot of free time, so I did a lot with that section (it was the ONLY section) of this site. When I got to college, my big additions occurred over the summer of my first and second years. Then there were about three years of nothing. I actually had an online journal back in the summer of 2000, but it was hard for me to update because I had to do most of the code by hand and I wasn't sure that anyone wanted that useless information on the web (as you can see from my initial comment on June 15, 2000 if you care to dig through archives).

Anyways, I was and still am paying about four dollars a month for my email/web hosting, so I was always reminded that I had this site but it wasn't doing anything for me. Then along comes a upstart program called iblog that promises to do everything I ever wanted. It will do all the coding and database management for me. It will create a single page that people can bookmark and also allow me to update that page with the push of a button. This is why the online journal gets daily updates and my 'news' page only gets an update once a week. It is just so much easier. I type it like I am typing a document, then click a button, and it does all the rest. As you probably saw from my brilliant retort homepage, I have learned to customize the side bar quite a bit...enough to inspire me to do the same thing on this page (and possible future pages in the news section)
Why is it called Brilliant Retort?

First I am brilliant, second because I was planning on posting my reactions to events and such. I basically wanted something that was not "Adam Moore's Journal" nor "The place of awesome stuff", and I thought that given my past history with debate, most people who knew me would be likely to think it was a good fit. I also wanted people to possibly begin associating the word brilliant with my life, or at least be fearful about arguing with me. Also, I just like the way the letters look in big bold white on blue. If I had it to do over again, I probably wouldn't change it...but I might not think of this name.Also, I kept out 'the' because I noticed that Hollywood seems less and less likely to want to use 'the' to begin a movie. (i.e. Titanic instead of The Titanic).
When did you start designing webpages?

I designed my first website in tenth grade with almost no understanding of HTML. This website was hosted on a University of Missouri student account because my friend Andy Lo had a cousin named Stanley Chan there. (He was a criminology major, and as of 06/2003 he resides in Hong Kong). I gave Andy the files somehow, and he got them up onto the server. I believe that I was using one of the earliest WYSIWYG editors for the Macintosh (I had a Quadra 605 at the time). It was probably Arachnid (built by the University of Iowa's Second Look Software for the Power Macintosh) because I remember it had a spider theme. Anyways, Besides a big picture of the "Don't Panic" planet, I eventually put up a death list. Not exactly the greatest site in the world, but at least people knew when they annoyed me. The site was created without any knowledge of the underlying code.
When did you make this website?

This was, in a sense, the second site I ever made. I say that because I have never discarded the code and started over, I have just rearranged and added more as I have grown. So perhaps we should begin at the beginning.Time passed after putting that first site up at Missouri. I became an 11th grader. I spent time learning the actual code. Some of my friends advanced in HTML at a faster rate than me, but we were still only doing the most basic stuff. They could see tables in their mind, they knew the codes for particular colors. I was, and remain to this day, willing to borrow good code if I saw it. So I would borrow color codes or tables if they fit my needs. Of course, most of my pages were text, so I did still have mostly original content on my site.

Everybody was editing pages on geocities and loving it. Sometime during this school year (1996-97), I realized that I had an untapped resource. AOL provided FTP access and member websites. http://members.aol.com/atommoore had 5 megs of space and no annoying advertisements! So I quickly took my poor geocities page (the Michigan page had been completely lost), and moved it onto a respectable server. AOL allowed me to put up a counter (that was artificially inflated by my good friend Lyle) and create cgi-bin scripts that would allow people to submit feedback to me. I designed a survey that allowed people to email me their answers by clicking a button. It doesn't work anymore, but that is probably for the best.As that Survey link proves, the code that I put on that server still exists exactly as it did when I graduated high school. Well, except for two minor details. In college I went back and added tables (since I understood them) to contain the text and then in law school I went back and added new image maps to the bottom so that someone in the GSGIS section can navigate to all the sections that grew up around it.

Don't believe me? Check out of GSGIS Section and tell me that isn't the work of a 17 year old in 1996. It was entirely done by hand. I would have to upload the page to AOL to see how my code looked because I was using hardlinks for the pictures and I didn't understand that a webbrowser could view local pages. I did not have netscape navigator on the computer, and AOL for Mac at the time did not render html when you opened a html page on your own site. So there.
I guess I meant "when did you make THIS part of the website?"

Fair. So, in college I made the UVa Section. I realized that I wanted to keep the GSGIS part, so I created a single index and two distinct subdirectories. I named the index "Adam's Fortress" for some forgotten reason, and I've kept the name ever sense. Having compartmentalized my school life, I got the bright idea to add a Work Section and a Past Section. The Work Section was going to be where I described my past and future jobs, and the Past section was going to hold anything that belonged in the GS section but was created post graduation. For 'various reasons' I had sworn to myself that I would try not to ever touch the code contained in the GS section. It was a part of me, and I did not want to engage in revisionist history -- i.e. making my old self look exactly like my new self or something. I grew, and deleting the things that no longer gelled with who I was would have been the easy way out. Sorry for the strange attitude here, but my website is my past. I don't keep old tests, I throw out notes from classes, so other than pictures, this is how I remember that things happened. I promise to be more light hearted after this.

The UVa section was created on my Power Mac G3 with Adobe Go Live 3.0. It blew me away. This was how I learned to use tables, basic, java script, and almost everything else I have ever learned about HTML. Combining it with photoshop, I was able to make all those funny graphics and view the page without having to upload it first. I also made the shift from AOL to UVa's server. UVA did not allow cgi-bin, but it offered more space, a better ftp interface (I could use any program I wanted), and people at UVA were more likely to remember the address. I tried to get everyone in the suite excited about making a webpage, but they were interested in other things. The Work and Past sections never got anything. I tried to excite myself by making a news section while living at home the summer after my second year. Finally, the enitre site even stalled after that summer of 2000. I found other things to do with my time. When I transferred the old files off my desktop, I realized how substandard the code really was. I had produced a website by cobbling together a random set of tables and colors. Still I took no action, I was busy preping for law school.

Important to this story are four things that would combine to create a revival. My news section had been a basic web journal, as previously mentioned, but the advent of cheap and easy weblogging seemed to hit UVA's campus my senior year. Next, I began paying four dollars a month for an email address that also came with webspace at http://homepage.mac.com/atommoore. I was paying to host a site that hadn't been useful in 3 years!

Enter the new Powerbook G4 in this blog heavy world and finally law school grades from my first semester. The new computer could run newer versions of web-editing software. It could manage the whole site easily, alerting me to dead links, and dynamically updating all other pages if I changed the position or name of a file. A piecemeal website could instantly become interlinked. I could synchronize colors with ease, alter lots of pages quickly, and upload anywhere from within the program itself. Finally, like I said, law school grades. They are pretty random. I realized this after my first semester, which cleared up A TON of my time. I was now sitting around and watching television and surfing the web a lot in the spring.

One fateful Tuesday night in March (March 11th, 2003), I sat down and started playing around with my website. After about 5 hours of developing a new look and feel for my news secton, I downloaded a free trial of a program called iBlog which claimed to be able to publish to a dotMac account with a single click. This was what I had been waiting for! Instant content. I thought that it could replace my news section, but quickly decided I wanted to have a less frequently updated "news about the website section" anyways. So, here I was at the dawn of a new age. I could type a sentence on my laptop during class, hit a button three hours later, and it would get posted on my website. As you could see from my first three posts from that time period, I was excited by the possibilities, even though it was already technically Wednesday morning when I got the first post working).
And one of your first acts was to make this FAQ?

Actually, beyond setting up the online journal, my first substantial act was to create a "Life's Content" section where I would catalogue my activities. But before that, we should go back to March 11th, 2003. The order of events in the website renovation was this. First, after three years of doing nothing, I started making a parody NYU Law introduction page. Pretty easy, given my experience with the UVA parody. Second, I wrote up a simple "things to do, things done" list because I felt like I was doing so much without taking pictures that I might forget that I had even done certain things.The list was good, but it is just a list. I wanted to include little tidbits.So, with the help of frames and a scanner, I was able to create the Adam's Content Section. I believe that I got all of my concerts, comedy shows, etc. Since there was no way for me to write about all 700+ movies I have seen over the years, I am just doing movies as of Winter 2002-03. Slowly, I am going back and creating pages about old trips. But, that is an ongoing project.

So, to answer your question. First Act was base for possible NYU Parody (currently stalled), Online Journal (Going strong), Content (slowly growing), and now this FAQ and other minor news pages (Banners, PGP Contact), and then I actually added things to the Past and Work Sections. The name of the game is "spillover" -- as long as the journal keeps me thinking about the webpage, I seem to do something new every so often.
Banners?

Yeap. Go get one for your website here. They are incase I ever hit it big. When I get big, I don't want to have to spend weeks making banners
PGP Contact?

Pretty Good Privacy. It is a way you can encode a message sent to me that insures other people will probably never be able read it. It is encryption that makes a message sent from you to me basically impossible to crack without some long term commitments. Since our information is probably not that valuable, it is an encryption that makes cracking it too expensive an investment with such low return. Explaining it is beyond the purpose of this FAQ. There is a link to a better side on the contact page and you are welcome to learn more about it. Send me a message using my key. Then I'll know that I need to try and get your key so that we can exchange messages like dorks.
Where did you get that idea?

I got the idea for the FAQ, the Banners, and the PGP Contact from Wil Wheaton's blog..I support all people who ever played small roles on Star Trek. Actually, I have been poking around other online journals for ideas. I don't want someone to come to this site and then go away because there wasn't something they were expecting to find. So, I added comments. I added all these other things, I added links to other places, basically, it is a period where anything that looks doable gets done. So I am still searching for more ideas. Good ideas from anywhere will be considered and probably implimented.
Why aren't you talking about your current job in the work section?

I think it is a good policy that I not write about ongoing employment situations. Since I am currently only involved in a summer job, you can expect to someday get a page dedicated to it.
Why is the NYU Law Section so empty?

I haven't had any insights into what to make fun of yet. Well, I have, but I haven't wanted to turn any into a website. Sorry. There may never be much there.
Why dotMac?

It is really easy for me, I didn't want people to adapt to my NYU address for three years and then change again, and it was only four dollars a month for the first year. It also gives me an email address and a lot of features that do not have anything to do with this website. Someday in the future I may register atommoore.net or something, but for now, I will stick with just this.
What are the 'various reasons' that made you less willing to change the GSGIS section?

Good question. Maybe I'll write an answer later.
Why did you put the website stuff before the stuff about you?

I figured the opposite order would cause most people to quit reading after they got the juicy tidbits about my preference set. This way, some people will not even make it that far, some people will learn more about my webpage than they ever thought possible, and I will bore other people to death. I want to make it easy for people to find out about me, but I also want to tell people the stories that I want to tell. And when I made this FAQ, I really wanted to tell the story of the webpage.

Questions about Adam Moore

So, what do you do with your time?

Well, nine months of the year are spent following an academic calendar. During the summer I work around 40 hours a week and then just do things in the evening. It is like your standard beer commercial, except with my friends instead of paid actors. Man, I wish I could pay people to be my friend,Anyways, the majority is school time. That means that I spend about fifteen hours a week sitting in a classroom, some amount of time reading or studying, and the rest is leisure. Usually that involves watching television, poking around the internet, or hanging out. When I hang out, I play video games, watch movies, or go out to eat. Nothing amazing. I am currently living in NYC, but I don't like the bars that much. I usually do very little during the week other than eat food and watch TV. Going to rock and comedy shows is about as wild and crazy as I currently get.
No, seriously. That can't be true.

It is. I have entire sections of my webpage devoted to documenting those activities (except video games and eating). Also, if I were doing more, I would have a bigger debt to pay off in 2005, which would shift some of my 5 year goals into something like 10 year goals. I do more than other people, or at least, because I catalogue it, I can convince myself that I am doing a lot.
I'm sorry.

Hey! Aren't you supposed to be asking questions?
Fine. Stolen any other tired, old routines like that to fill up space in your FAQ?

Nope.
What was that about law school?

Glad to see you were paying attention. I am a rising second year law student at New York University. I originally had my heart set on going to Michigan, but I was waitlisted there, and NYU comforted me in their own special way. Living in NYC has been a great unexpected benefit. I was very busy with work this past year (actually, I probably studied more my first year of law school than I did my entire sophmore-senior years at the University of Virginia) and I was also living on a self-imposed budget that prevented me from going to all the comedy shows that I would have liked to go to, but since I went to less than 2 a year at UVa, going to 5 a semester is a real pleasure.But the people at the law school are just like people in college. Perhaps there are more overachievers, but people may be working harder because they are footing the bill themselves. College creates less pressure if mom and dad foot the bill, I think. You don't feel like you have to succeed right away. Also, there are more people with kids. I imagine that you have more incentive to work if you know that you can pretty quickly provide a better life for them with a plum job in 2005. Finally, it is sad, but it is pretty easy to make horrible lawyer-esque jokes about torts and contracts in social settings. I have this small fear that it will warp my ability to related to your average intelligent person. The lesson here - try not to marry a lawyer.

So, to summarize. I enjoy it. I like academia better than the real world. I am sometimes sad that bringing up psychology or other theories of behavior would sidetrack the class (and I don't want a hundred people rolling there eyes and playing solitare to spite me!), but I am glad that at least there are things to debate and mull over in other aspects of my life. Luckily, something about the school has inspired me to update this webpage often. College had the opposite effect for years, as you can see.
So, when do you graduate?

May 2005. Law school is a three year adventure. Some people take time off in the middle, but that is pretty rare unless they know they can make money. Big loans mean big interest.
What is Law School like?

The quick and dirty summary of law school. First year is pre-determined. You have the same 3-4 classes as every other student. You even have the same 90-100 kids in each of those classes. You are probably graded on an unbendable curve where some small portion of the over achievers get the very high grades. Grades are all determined by a single test. Since it is on a curve, the professor reads all 100 and then puts them in order from best to worst. The top 7 may get an A, the bottom 7 may get a B-. Everyone else gets something inbetween. Hopefully, you understand that the grade is arbitrary since you may just not write in a style the professor likes and you picked up on an issue this professor things is unimportant. Anyways, most people at NYU graduate with a 3.2 or something close to that.

So, during that first year, you do a job search. I sent letters to public and private institutions. I also got a grant to do public interest law, which made me more attactive to places that would not have been able to offer me any money. Your first year summer job is a key piece of your future. Those arbitrary grades and any past experience in law are two more. The final piece of the puzzle is making a journal. At the end of your first year, you write a short article to compete for a spot on the law review. If you make it, that is one more thing for the resume.So, come August before your second year, you are armed with 6-8 grades, summer work experience in the law, future membership on a journal (maybe), and your resume. It is then that big law firms want to talk to you and offer you jobs for the NEXT summer. Most of the time, the summer job results in a permanent placement, or at least an offer from that firm. So, 12 months after you started law school, you may know exactly what you are doing in two years.
And what do you want to do with your life?

I tell myself that I need to earn money fast, so I need to get a high paying job. Since I am going to be trained as a lawyer, doing that makes the most sense.I do not really know what kind of law I want to work on, but that barely matters at this point. Anyways, I may want to go back to grad school in 2008 or something.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I mean, I might as well say that "I want to go to the moon" -- since that technically is something I would want to do, but have no way to work towards such a goal at this point. Since summer after my first year is as far as I have gotten, I will just have to stop here. Everything else might be speculation on my part. In August I will know a lot more about my immediate future, and that will probably shape what I want to do after that..
Hmm. Favorite musical groups? In a semi-particular order then (as of June 2003)
1. Weezer
2. Wilco, Uncle Tupelo
3. Pixies
4. Neutral Milk Hotel
5. Ben Folds (Five)
6. Less Than Jake
7. Rhett Miller / Old 97s
8. Magnetic Fields, Modest Mouse, Dan Bern
9. Flaming Lips, Nada Surf, Gin Blossoms, Fountains of Wayne, Cake
10. Poe, Radiohead, Coldplay
11. Garbage, Goldfinger, Goo Goo Dolls
12. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Foo Fighters
13. Green Day, Sum 41, Flogging Molly
14. Dead Milkmen, Weird Al Yankovic, TMBG, Tenacious D
15. R.E.M., Johnny Cash, Grandaddy
I basically fall into the modern rock category with almost no indie street cred. I've always had friends that loved classic rock, but it does not speak to me. I'd write more, but it isn't important WHY you like something.Here are some local to Richmond bands that I enjoy: The Devil's Workshop, The Gaskets
What about comedians?

Sure. I do have opinions about those as well. I enjoy edgy material, but sketch comedy is another way to win me over. You will notice that SNL is not on the list. I felt that putting it there might make people think that I liked it in its current form. This way, you have to think about it.
1. David Cross, Bob Odenkirk & Mr. Show
2. Janeane Garofalo
3. Steve Martin (Earlier Years, of course)
4. David Wain, Mike Showalter, Mike Ian Black & The State
5. Upright Citizens Brigade
6. Triumph the Insult Comic
7. Jon Stewart
8. Sarah Silverman
9. Mitch Hedberg
10. Norm MacDonald and other old SNL people like Chris Rock and Spade
11. Jim Gaffigan
12. Weird Al
13. Seinfeld, that guy who smashes fruit, etc
Hope that solves that mystery.
Television shows?

I like television just as much as the next guy who was raised on it. I haven't seen lots of shows, but I figure that you realize that I am picking the best of things I have seen myself for all of these lists. Also, don't expect one of those "Man, we're the Shirt Tales awesome?" Lists. I am making a list of shows that, as of today, I could sit down and watch an episode and enjoy it
1. Family Guy
2. Babylon 5
3. Futurama
4. Tick (Cartoon)
5. Simpsons
6. X-Files
7. 24
8. Millenium, Space: Above and Beyond,
9. Seinfeld
10. The Daily Show
11. Profitt
12. MacGyver
13. Quantum Leap
14. The State
15. Mr. Show
16. Clerks: TAS
17. The Adventures of Pete and Pete
18. Dangermouse (I know, I just broke the rule twice)
19. Iron Chef
20. Samuari Jack
And the shows I watched a lot but only because I am a horrible person
1. Saved by the Bell
2. Buffy
3. Ed
4. Southpark
5. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
6. Sliders
7. 3-2-1 Contact, all those PBS shows
8. Captain Nintendo Power or whatever
9. Murder She Wrote
10. MASH
11. Hey Dude, Salute your Shorts
12. Ameircan Gladitors
13. My So Called Life
14. The Anime that comes on following the good shows on Cartoon Network
Bam!
Video Games?

I have played so many, each new generation tends to leave old ones behind. Here are the ones I return to on a semi-regular basis or had a substantial period of my life dominated by
1. Warcraft Series
2. Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament, Earlier ones (Wolf3d, DoomII), etc
3. Toy Commander
4. Halo
5. Football Games
6. Tetris
7. Street Fighter and Soul Calibur
8. Monkey Island Series and many other SCUMM games
9. Metal Slug
10. Pang! (Buster Bros)
11. Lethal Enforcers and Area 51
12. 007
13. Contra
14. Hardball! and Karataka
15. Duke Nukem
16. SimCity, SimTower, SimAnt, etc
17. Legend of Zelda, Mario, Dr Mario,
18. Risk, Colonization
Yeap.
What's Going to be Answered Next? Got any other lists?

I will eventually tell you other things if I can motivate myself. Also, I will answer questions about undegrad life or about my various trips if anyone really wants to know.