In possibly our first useful primer, I'm going to outline how to write a recap episode. It's possible you noticed one of these recently (a Recap Episode, not a primer), and can look under "Recap Episodes" on the sidebar to read it. So what is a recap episode? Well, a Recap Episode has a number of properties:
- It's listed in the sidebar
- It's about a topic
- It references all posts about that topic
- It has a story or at least some sort of continuum to it
- The continuum or story makes no sense, and one must actually read the posts to find out what's really going on.
- Most importantly, you must use, and reference, words that do not exist.
So now that we know what it is, how do we write one? This actually isn't very difficult. The first thing you'll need is a topic. I started searching for mine by going to our
very first post and seeing whether it involved any themes that would recur throughout the blog. The post was mainly nathan talking shit, and I figured "talking shit" wasn't exactly a topic, so I looked elsewhere, namely our
second post, ever!Actually, now that I look at it, the first post talks about Hapkido, and Hapkido is a pretty often recurring topic on this blog, so I could've used that. See how easy it is to come up with a topic? The second step is to search for whenever we've used the word "Hapkido". If the topic isn't based on a particular word, then you may have to search for a bunch of things that are related. You can use
technorati for searching but it doesn't contain some of the older posts. I use Blogger's search, by logging in, clicking on Edit posts, then typing stuff in the "Search" field. Once you have a list of links that relate to your topic, cut and paste the links into your post, oldest first.
Now write the post. It's probably best to actually read what the links are about before talking about them and linking to them. Then again, actually reading stuff takes time, and you could always, you know,
not read the posts, and pretend you know what they're talking about. As you go, remember to use lots of non-existant words, and reference them using an online dictionary like
dictionary.com or
everything2 so we can verify that they, in fact, do not exist. Just to make things interesting, try and use words that seem like they're real, but aren't, or words that seem like they're made up, but are in fact real. Such literary abstrucities, as I have previously stated, will maintain all our verbosities, so you're doing everyone a favour.
Now that you've got all the links gathered up and your post written, time to think of a witty title. Maybe something like "There's something about Hapkido". Signed, sealed, and delivered, by clicking the publish button, you may believe that you have finished, but you have one final task. You must use the
trackbackermajigger to send a ping to all the posts with the URL of the Recap Episode. This way, people reading your old posts can then have a quick reference to the Recap Episode, which they can then use to follow up the topic. At this point, you're done. All you need to do is add the post to the list of Recap Episodes using
del.icio.us. Even if you don't, however, I'll probably go add it after having seen the post. Any questions?