The Page 69 Test

Things have kinda been messy for the past week. This meant that my mood was too horrible for me to do anything else than stay in front of my PC and listen to music/play WoW all day, but look on the bright side: My character has epixx purpleness now.

The situation I was in is sorta better now, though not yet solved. On the real bright side of things, it means I may have to finally leave Greece. Definitely no bad thing.

And since I'm whining, I'd like to say this: Reading through the post I made exactly one year, at this time there was Die Hard on TV. This year, there's a guy with a bad English accent butchering Sinatra songs. God hates us!

*ahem*

Anyway, I did pick up a few things worth noting these days, for example, ever heard of the Page 69 Test? It's an idea put forth by literary critic and media theorist Marshall McLuhan. The gist of it is, if you read through page 69 of a random book and you like it, you'll end up liking the book itself and we should buy it. I guess he chose 69 because it's such a catchy number, not to mention that the plot will have probably started rolling by then. There's also a blog dedicated to this theory.

I'm not too sure about this, as for example when it comes to the first part of the Song of Ice and Fire series, A Game of Thrones, 150 pages seem to be the magic number for most people. Usually no-one is impressed until that point, but when you reach page 150 it becomes too hard to put the book down. In my case, it took me like two months to read through the first 150 pages, and after that I read 150 more in one day. True story.

Still, it's an interesting theory, and worth looking into it. I'll do the test on American Gods and some other of my favorite books.

And speaking of the ASoIaF series, I came across a hilarious video combining both the series and the famous Leeroy Jenkins WoW fan-made character and video. In order to understand what's going on you have to be really familiar with both the ASoIaF series and the Leeroy video, and as such it has a limited target group, but I thought it was hilarious so that's all that matters. Here's the video itself: