DATE DATA: Milestones & Minutiae

milestone |noun|:

an important event in the development or history of something or in someone's life.

minutiae |noun|:

the small, precise, or trivial details of something.

I started a new project recently. A project that steers away from Sharpie markers on a wall-sized canvas. Let me tell you about it, and about how you can help build it out!

Last year, March 2020, I started making a simple list on my phone of the TV series, movies, and video games that I completed during COVID's recommended stay-at-home orders. Staying home and staying safe have been ongoing and that list grew long during a year when media consumption was at an all time high.

Subsequent to that list, I went a little deeper. I also started recording dates, spoken or observed, from those same films and series.

I think the first date I added to this new list was the Death of Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer RIP, btw) from Knives Out. November 8.

After that, I think I grabbed a date from Community, which I watched about ten times in the past twelve months.

Maybe it was May 23, 2013, the unbreakable date that Jeff Winger has for a table for one at Morty's Steakhouse to celebrate becoming a lawyer again. Maybe it was October 15, 2009, the date that Troy and Abed agreed that "friends don't lie to each other."

The Apocalypse from Netflix's final season of Dark: June 27, 2020.

The wedding loop day in Hulu's Palm Springs: November 9.

The date Tom Wambsgans sends Cousin Gregg an email with the subject "You Can't Make a Tomlette Without Breaking some Greggs" from Tom's deposition about his involvement in the Cruises cover-up in s2 of HBO's Succession: March 12.

Then we started watching Umbrella Academy:

"On the 12th hour of the first day of October 1989, 43 women around the world gave birth. This was unusual only in the fact that none of these women had been pregnant when the day first began."

Dates were coming up in so many things we were watching and I was having fun tracking them!

Then, for good measure, I started adding some of the most popular dates celebrated widely across the Internet:

Groundhog's Day. February 2.

The day April Ludgate schedules all of Ron Swanson's meetings for March 31 because she doesn't think March 31 existed.

Miss Congeniality's "The Perfect Date:" April 25.

McLovin's birthday on his fake ID: June 3.

Mean Girls Day: "On October 3rd he asked me what day it was." "It's October 3rd."

Back to the Future Day: October 21, 2015.

As of last week, I had approximately 60 dates on my list. That's only 16% of a completed calendar! Date input has slowed down, so I knew I had to crowd-source friends and family for input.

My humble request: Keep your eyes and ears peeled for dates in the stuff you're watching. That's it.

My intention for this project is twofold.

Secondarily, tracking a date from a show being watched by a friend is the data equivalent of tracking a night out with that same friend and marking it on a Philadelphia wall map. This is a project about the contributors almost as much as the dates themselves.

Primarily, in June 2020, I made a professional pivot from then-unhappy insurance paralegal to newly-reinvigorated sales associate and social media coordinator for a software company in Philadelphia that does data warehouse automation. Data warehousing is so complex and I'm fascinated by what I can barely comprehend. I am using this project as a vehicle to learn more about datasets, database organization, table creation, queries, etc. etc., a bunch of things.

Right now, I'm just collecting data. Growing the table.

I have a master spreadsheet tracking wayyyyyyyy more (fun!) data than simply "date," "year," and "what it is" and "what's it from."

It's my intention, once a bit more data has been gathered, to share with you all some fun correlations between the data and the people who provided it. How is the data similar, and how does it differ? Was it disastrous? Does it involve time travel? Was it the start of something? The end of something? Does it overlap an actual holiday? What's the delta between the oldest date and most future date? Stay tuned and find out.

I'll repeat my initial (and only) request: Keep your eyes and ears peeled for dates in the stuff you're watching. That's it.

Be sure to share it with me. Text, email, DM, blog comment. There is no unacceptable way to share a date with me.

Stay tuned for more updates on Date Data: Milestones & Minutiae!

Thanks for being a part of something creative and communal!