Back in 1999 when I was hitting my sushi loving stride (having started to eat it only a few years earlier) and starting my website at the same time, I decided to create a site that matched pictures of sushi with a Mortal Kombat style voice over / description feature – basically an interactive menu that one could use to make sense of this strange and foreign culinary world that I was in. The site was to be like the paper menus that one sees in sushi restaurants, the ones with the photos of the fish and rolls along with their phonetic Japanese name and English name, except again with that booming voice over. For instance, you might see a crab stick fly into the frame and then hear, “Kani! Crab! Delicious!” I decided to name it “Sushiactive.”
Like so many of my great ideas, this one never went anywhere, aside from living as a flash trailer of sushi flying around that I developed and which then lived on my site for the past decade, that is before the Sevensquared to Keymaster Productions move when I took it down. My friends would ask me about it from time to time and while I would always say, “it’s in development” that wasn’t true. I gave up on developing the idea years ago.
Like so many ideas that were spawned during Web 1.0, this one was ahead of its time, a little over a solid decade to be exact. With the rise of mobile computing via “phones that are really mini-computers that happen to also make phone calls,” this idea was one that many people had. “Order Sushi Like a Native, and Know What You’re Eating” published back on 6/8/11 reviews phone applications that all mimic my idea. The last one mentioned, SushiGuru, is also the only one uses my VO idea. From the article:

Unlike many other competing apps, SushiGuru also has audio pronunciations. If you ever opted for a California roll simply because it was easier to say than Aburasokomutsu, a kind of mackerel, this is a worthwhile feature.

I like being ahead of my time but at the same time I am wistful and rueful that others have implemented it. I’ll need to review what other ideas I’ve had that I’m not acting on. I think it’s time to revisit my nascent “Little Classics” publishing model.