Spill Origins: Pat Ghostal

For the past few days, I've been thinking of how long I've been here on Spill.com. Just as other social networking sites, such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have become integral parts of many people's lives in the past half-decade, Spill's become a part of mine. I genuinely enjoy every animated and audio review that The Spill Crew releases every so often, even though I occasionally disagree with them. I also look forward to the weekly podcasts hosted on this site: A Couple of Cold Ones (ACOCO) Let's Do This!!! (LDT) and League of Extremely Ordinary Gentlemen (LEOG), they always provide some insight into whatever aspect of entertainment they are discussing at the moment plus they mix in some down-to-earth humor in there.

Before this turns into a an all out Spill Crew-ass-kissing blog post (too late for that, ain't it?), thinking about how important Spill.com has been to me lead to thinking: What was it like before I discovered Spill.com? What the hell was I doing on the internet before that? And, most importantly, how did I discover Spill.com?

The first two questions I really can't come up with a concrete answer with. But remembering how I stumbled upon and joined the Spill community is something I can at least try to piece together with the help of some of the archives on this website.

So, this blog is going to be a little like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, telling you the origins of Mr. Pat Ghostal. It'll be just as useless, but it'll have less random yelling and terrible special effects.

I stumbled upon Spill.com completely by accident. I saw re-run of an episode of The Boondocks on Adult Swim titled Return of the King, the premise of which is that, in an alternate universe, Martin Luther King, Jr. survives the assassination attempt. He is sent into a coma, and doesn't wake up until the year 2000.

It was one of the most memorable and hilarious episodes of The Boondocks I had seen to date, and I wanted to share the episode with a friend or two. Unable to find this particular episode on YouTube, I went on Google and looked it up. One of the first links to come up was this site, Spill.com. I clicked on the link and it took me to the episode in the video section of the site. I really hope I don't get this site or the person who uploaded that episode in trouble...

Immediately, I sent the link to a friend of mine I was in an IM conversation with. Initially, I thought Spill was a second-rate video hosting website, in the vain of DailyMotion or Revver. This friend of mine, however, went to the homepage and said "Hey, this site is cool, they have a review of Burn After Reading which I just saw."

So I checked out the front page, and saw that the site had several animated movie reviews posted. The other animated review that sticks out in my head was Righteous Kill. At the time I was a bit excited for the movie, considering Robert de Niro and Al Pacino were the lead actors for it. Unfortunately, Korey and Leon's review that described Righteous Kill as a barely-above-average cop movie, convinced me to wait for the DVD, despite their rating of Matinee (I still haven't rented and seen this movie by the way).

This is where it gets a little fuzzy. Maybe I made a deal with Mephisto around this time, or I was shot in the temple with an adamantium bullet (it surprises me how geeky I am sometimes), because I don't really remember visiting the website for about two months. Maybe I was just unimpressed with the site and said "this sucks!" and left. But somewhere along the way, I found myself back on the site. Like I said, I don't remember much from this time period so I don't know what prompted my return. Maybe to watch that Boondocks episode again.

Thanks to Meksicano's popular audio archive group The Lost Audio Reviews, I am able to at least guesstimate the date of my return. One of the first ACOCO podcasts that I remember listening to had Korey and Carlyle arguing over the credibility and merits of the vampires as depicted in the Twilight film, which was on 11/23/2008. It was a very heated debate, prompted by the comments left on on the Twilight film's movie review. It's one of the top arguments between Spill Crew members that sticks out in my head, second only to the "They Can't Make a good Punisher film vs. They Can" arguement (which was also on ACOCO between Korey and Carlyle. See a pattern here?)

I signed up and was welcomed by the ever-so-famous Spill member RENEGADE on December 8th, 2008. And that's just how it is, you're really not an official Spill member until RENEGADE welcomes you.

I know the animated reviews are the main draw for this site, but personally, I came back for more because of the podcasts. I started visiting the site more often, waiting for and listening to the subsequent podcasts including the Let's Do This!!! that introduced the new beverage, Good Shit Beer.

The first LEOG I listened to was the Batman episode, which I can't find right now since most of the groups' front pages recently got obliterated for no reason, including The League Lounge. I'm guessing it was 18th issue of the first volume (if someone can correct me on this, please leave a comment). At the time of listening to the podcast, I wasn't really into comic books, but I was fascinated by Leon's telling the rest of the League what Grant Morrison wrote for the recent Batman story-arc Batman R.I.P., which introduced "weapons-grade crystal meth", and Bruce Wayne being dumb enough to reveal to his then-girlfriend Jezebel Jet his identity. Despite having the impression that the comics were much wackier than the recent "Nolanverse" films, I became interested in what the deal was with comic books. This lead to me buying a few trade paperbacks here and there, including things like Batman: Year One, The Dark Knight Returns, and a couple of JLA graphic novels written by...Grant Morrison. I decided to get into current continuity books a month or two after that. I'd have to say that The League has a large part in my current interest in comics, and I've really got to thank them for that.

So there you have it, a somewhat lengthy recounting the infancy-stages of me being a Spill Member/Spillo/Spilldo. I'd actually appreciate if some people told their story of how they discovered Spill and what made them decide to stay, either in the comment section of this blog or by writing a similar blog themselves.

Thanks for reading and adios bros.