It doesn’t take ridiculous amount of time to consume enough media—normal amount of entertainment time would do just fine. Over the years, little things accumulate. I’ve probably consumed 100 kg of cheese in the last 10 years, but that doesn’t make me a cheese-swallowing python.
Sure; but Eliezer isn’t that old! And don’t forget, these aren’t the only ones who he consumed, but the ones he consumed, remembered, and chose to put into the fic.
If we (or more realistically, he, since I’m not sure whether any of the LW readers can identify every ref he used) toted up all the refs and got, say, 120, how much could we infer he has consumed? Surely several many times that, possibly an order of magnitude or 2 more.
And some of the works are very extensive (Evangelion TV, 26 eps at 30 minutes a piece = 13 hours + 3 hours of movies; Oh My Goddess, 39 volumes (20 minutes apiece?), 5 OVAs (half an hour), a movie (2 hours), 50 TV episodes (half an hour) = 42.5 hours). And there’s only so much waking time.
And then there’s the recency of most of these works. If we make some reasonable assumptions about when Eliezer’s most mentally productive period would be, mirroring those for mathematics, he’s through a decent fraction of it.
You can just read about them instead of actually reading or watching the entire series. I know a bit about Ah My Goddess, but haven’t actually watched any of it.
Incidentally, I recently plowed through the entire Eva TV series, watching one DVD a night, on six non-consecutive nights, and just finished watching End of Evangelion now.
As for the sheer quantity of references, I could probably duplicate them myself by looking through my book collection… by the time I finished high school, I had enough paperback novels to fill several bookshelves.
It doesn’t take ridiculous amount of time to consume enough media—normal amount of entertainment time would do just fine. Over the years, little things accumulate. I’ve probably consumed 100 kg of cheese in the last 10 years, but that doesn’t make me a cheese-swallowing python.
Sure; but Eliezer isn’t that old! And don’t forget, these aren’t the only ones who he consumed, but the ones he consumed, remembered, and chose to put into the fic.
If we (or more realistically, he, since I’m not sure whether any of the LW readers can identify every ref he used) toted up all the refs and got, say, 120, how much could we infer he has consumed? Surely several many times that, possibly an order of magnitude or 2 more.
And some of the works are very extensive (Evangelion TV, 26 eps at 30 minutes a piece = 13 hours + 3 hours of movies; Oh My Goddess, 39 volumes (20 minutes apiece?), 5 OVAs (half an hour), a movie (2 hours), 50 TV episodes (half an hour) = 42.5 hours). And there’s only so much waking time.
And then there’s the recency of most of these works. If we make some reasonable assumptions about when Eliezer’s most mentally productive period would be, mirroring those for mathematics, he’s through a decent fraction of it.
You can just read about them instead of actually reading or watching the entire series. I know a bit about Ah My Goddess, but haven’t actually watched any of it.
Incidentally, I recently plowed through the entire Eva TV series, watching one DVD a night, on six non-consecutive nights, and just finished watching End of Evangelion now.
As for the sheer quantity of references, I could probably duplicate them myself by looking through my book collection… by the time I finished high school, I had enough paperback novels to fill several bookshelves.