Misali's profile picture.
"I'm jan Misali. the jan part is an honorific, pronounced kinda like 'yon'. you might know me as 'about the most superficial commentator on con-langues since the idiotic B. Gilson'."
—jan Misali, seximal.net
Mitch Halley, who goes by the username jan Misali, is an American content creator with an eclectic range of subjects. His most well-known and longest-running creation is Conlang Critic, a series where he reviews constructed languages. "Misali" derives from how "Mitch Halley" is written in the conlang Toki Pona, while "jan" is the word for person in the language, where proper names can only be adjectives modifying a base noun, so the full name roughly means "the person named Misali."
Among other subjects, Misali is a linguist, mathematician, and musician. He is a notable fan of the Rhythm Heaven franchise, and he has produced several videos based upon the series, such as comparisons and custom remixes. Other video subjects include deep dives into the numerology of the Super Mario Bros. series, the origins of the letters "w" and "c", a serious rules analysis of Hangman, and the storied history of the Caramelldansen Vid.
Most of their primary content can be found on their YouTube account, while their Bandcamp contains their original music (including songs written for videos on the channel).
The list that gets facts wrong about your favorite tropes:
- Affectionate Parody: The video "Toby Fox Has Written Hundreds of Unique Original Songs" has Misali reharmonize many songs composed by Toby Fox to the same chord progression as "Megalovania", meant to demonstrate how similar many of the motifs he's written are. Misali is an admitted fan of Toby's work regardless.
- all lowercase letters: Misali's preferred method of typing. Downplayed with how he writes his username—"jan" is in lowercase, but "Misali" itself is properly capitalized. This is because it's in Toki Pona; "jan" is actually just a word meaning "person", and the phrase "jan Misali" means "the person named Misali", which is necessary because of how Toki Pona treats names. It also doesn't apply to proper nouns or the word "I", and section titles are set in all caps.
- Alternate Character Reading: Proposes, in the video on PCUES, that ruby text be used to clarify irregular English spellings.
- Alternative Number System: Misali advocates for seximal, a numbering system in base six. It's described in detail in the video "a better way to count".
- Ambiguous Syntax: Discussed in "the /hj tone indicator is worse than useless," where they talk about their difficulty interpreting the "half joking" tone indicator because it serves to make the intent of the preceding statement less clear. An example is given with the statement "i'm going to buy an absurd amount of orange juice /hj", which can either be interpreted literally (buying a lot of orange juice), non-literally (not buying orange juice at all, the entire statement is a joke), or some combination of the two (buying a normal amount of orange juice and jokingly describing this amount as absurd). They admit that this is mostly due to them being autistic and unable to pick up on the intended syntax, but that means "/hj" fails at its intended purpose, since tone indicators are meant to make tone and syntax more accessible to neurodivergent people.
- Author Appeal: Linguistics, Rhythm Heaven, and mid-2000s Internet content are all frequent subjects in their videos.
- Bait-and-Switch: Several of their video titles seem like they'll lead to an obvious subject or answer, but really end up exploring an entirely different point (that still relates to the original title):
- "the original Mario Bros." seems at first that it will be about the arcade version of Mario Bros., but ends up going back even further than that to the Game & Watch version, and proceeds to analyze its content from a modern societal standpoint.
- "how many Super Mario games are there?" is less about the actual number of games (it even says in the thumbnail "there's like eighteen") and more about the ways different people categorize those games, and whether certain games should be counted as part of the Super Mario series or not.
- "who wrote Caramelldansen?" is less about who actually wrote "Caramelldansen"—it's revealed within the first minute of the video—and more about the history of the meme and how it came to its current state, as well as the mystery surrounding the "Caramella Girls", the virtual band who is attributed as the authors of the song.
- There's also "a", which to subscribers seemed like it would be yet another long video essay about the origins and history of a letter... only to be a short April Fools joke video. The kind of video one may have expected when watching "w" for the first time.jan Misali (in comments): pro tip the length of a video is visible in the thumbnail before you click it
- Bait-and-Switch Comparison: In the Caramelldansen video:"in March 2020, Caramelldansen made a comeback. this is the most important thing to have happened in March 2020, I think."
- Binary Suns: When Misali hears the lyric "Snow in the air and the stars will shine" in the Christmas cover of "Caramelldansen", he mishears it as "the suns will shine" and jokingly theorizes that the Caramelldansen universe has multiple suns.
- Breathless Non Sequitur: A common form of comedy with his commentary style. For example, in "the original Mario Bros.", Donkey Kong Jr. is described as "clearly a being capable of logical reasoning, as established in Donkey Kong Jr. Math," with no further elaboration.
- Call-Back: In "the /hj tone indicator is worse than useless," they describe the act of implying that something is both funny and unfunny at the same time as a type 5 paradox, referring back to "the five kinds of paradox", where the fifth kind of paradox was "someone getting very confused".
- Cold Opening: Most of his videos start out with a brief overview of the subject before the proper "I'm jan Misali, and..." introduction.
- Content Warnings: When discussing Schrödinger's Cat in "the five kinds of paradox", the segment opens with a subtitle "cw: quantum superposition of animal death/nondeath".
- Cut-and-Paste Note: In "revolutionizing English orthography (poorly)", the aesthetic of the PCUES phonetic transcription system is likened to this.
- Deadpan Snarker: To the point that some viewers find it hard to tell if Misali is joking sometimes, with clarifications made in at least one follow-up video on the channel.jan Misali: and even though it does fail to be completely un-sexist, that's not really any worse than Lojban failing to treat all country names the same way, or aUI failing to make sense, or Vötgil failing to have any redeeming qualities whatsoever.
- Dissimile: The Caramella Girls are compared to the Theseus' Ship Paradox, if the ship was completely dismantled and then became popular after it was dismantled, but the owner of the ship (who is not Theseus) decided to build a new ship to capitalize on the success of Theseus' ship, and then retroactively claimed he built Theseus' ship.
- Double Standard: "how many Super Mario games are there?" discusses the topic quite a bit, as some of the responses he got to his survey showed a fair amount of cognitive dissonance. In particular, opinions on the status of Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island vary wildly despite being fundamentally identical cases (a sequel to a regular Super Mario game that starred a secondary character and ended up launching its own series), to the point that some tried to use Wario Land's existence as proof that the Super Mario Land games are not part of the "main" series, a reasoning that nobody would use against Super Mario World.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
- Videos like "w" and "hangman is a weird game" are exactly about the subjects described in their titles.
- Special mention goes to "a video about homestuck," which specifically mentions that it's not about:
- the Homestuck fandom
- any of the people who made Homestuck
- any works of fiction in the Homestuck "franchise" other than Homestuck (2009-2016) itself
- Vriska
- Foregone Conclusion: Believes that English spelling reforms are doomed to fail, due to the language lacking a regulatory body, convincing the global English speaking community to adopt the new spelling system being a tall order, and the perceived quality of most reforms. This is expressed in "most english spelling reforms are bad" and "revolutionizing English orthography (poorly)".
- Genre Shift: When Conlang Critic started up, it was initially the channel's sole focus, but later videos began to cover more diverse topics, eventually resulting in the channel being renamed from "Conlang Critic" to "jan Misali". This was further bolstered by the unexpected success of "hangman is a weird game", resulting in more videos that take deep dives into strange subjects.
- The Internet Is for Cats: In "o ku: introducing the Toki Pona Dictionary", when discussing that the dictionary demonstrates how English words can be rendered into Toki Pona in multiple ways, Misali mentions offhand that their personal translation for "computer" is "ilo pi sitelen soweli", a phrase which can be understood as approximately "device for cat pictures".
- Joke and Receive: In "the five kinds of paradox", when discussing the St. Petersburg paradox, Misali notes that "casinos don't have infinite money", and jokingly puts a [citation needed] banner on this statement in the on-screen caption. He then notes that he checked, and the Wikipedia article on the paradox really does have a citation for this claim.
- Mondegreen Gag: Discussed in the Caramelldansen video, which mentions how a major part of Caramelldansen's popularity boost in Japan was due to the ability to easily misinterpret its lyrics. In particular, the opening line of the chorus can be heard as Barusamikosu (Balsamic vinegar), a particularly famous mondegreen. An English example is demonstrated with The Clash's "Rock the Casbah", which can be misheard as "Lock the Taskbar".
- "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: In "who wrote Caramelldansen?", when showing off Sven from Sweden's "ANIME LOL!" flash that was part of the song's path to becoming an internet meme, a caption pops up when the song loops assuring the viewer that, despite how awkward it sounds, "yes, that's really where it loops".
- One-Letter Title: "w" and "c". Granted, that's exactly what those videos are about.
- Orwellian Retcon: Also discussed in the Caramelldansen video. The Caramella Girls have been retroactively attributed as the creators of "Caramelldansen", even though it's fairly obvious to most that Caramell is the original artist.
- Overly Long Gag: In the Caramelldansen video, Misali's reading of the title for the original Flash loop that kickstarted the meme: "ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL! ANIME LOL!" Later mentions of the name abridge it to a single "ANIME LOL!" for the sake of brevity.
- Overly Pre-Prepared Gag:
- The "w" video, after spending much time discussing the history of seemingly-unrelated scripts that developed into the modern Latin alphabet, finally lands on discussing the third letter derived from the Greek wāw: "so that's Y". Complete with a lengthy Beat to help it sink in. The video keeps going after this, however.
- In the "c" video, after discussing the letter that the second letter to be derived from the Greek gamma replaced, Misali tells us "but that's zed" ("but, that said, ..."). Complete with another lengthy beat!
- The "c" video ends on a similar pun: after concluding that the Latin alphabet is sloppily designed, but said sloppy design makes it more interesting, Misali admits that "you might not agree with me on that, and that's fine. but maybe one day, you'll C."
- [Popular Saying], But...: When pointing out in "revolutionizing English orthography (poorly)" how PCUES fails to account for the fact that some words have more than one pronunciation, Misali says "I say tomato, no reason to bother checking if anyone else says it a different way".
- Rainbow Speak: PCUES uses font color and weight to distinguish phonemes, making it difficult for jan Misali to highlight examples of this. He settled on highlighting a gray "o" with a colored arrow labeled "this one".
- Riddle for the Ages: Discussed in "the five kinds of paradox" — the second kind of paradox, which Misali dubs "normal impossible questions", are questions which have multiple different answers, all of which are logically coherent, but no possible way of figuring out which one is the answer. Theseus' Ship Paradox and Schrödinger's Cat are cited as members of this category. Questions with a single objectively correct answer which is a secret (such as "what have I got in my pocket?") are brought up as a contrast; while these are equally unanswerable, there's no paradoxical reason for it.
- Rule of Three: In "how many Super Mario games are there?", Temple Run, Subway Surfers, and Jetpack Joyride are listed as three examples of the Endless Running Game genre, contrasting them with Celeste, Sonic Mania, and "a third example of a 2D platformer".
- Sarcasm Mode: He spends the entire Cold Opening of the "a better way to count" video sarcastically praising dozenal, a base twelve counting system, while highlighting its glaring flaws. He eventually breaks character to point out dozenal's obvious issue in counting fifths.
- Shaped Like Itself: jan Misali's remarks on the Miiverse symbol in the "rating every Smash Bros. series symbol" video are the exact same as his description for what it is; it is/looks like the app icon to a defunct Social Media platform that was made in 2012.
- Shout-Out:
- Misali likes to use fhqwhgads as a filler word, such as when demonstrating "unguessable" words in the Hangman video. The Caramella Girls' first single, "Boogie Bam Dance", is directly compared to "Let's Fhqwhgads Again", Strong Bad's attempt at a one-hit wonder follow-up.
- In the "c" video, "chimera" as an example of the "ch" phoneme is followed by "mother" and "three" as examples of the "th" phonemes.
- In "the five kinds of paradox", Misali talks about the question of what happens if a sword sharp enough to cut anything met a shield strong enough to block anything. To illustrate this, they use drawings clearly representing the Buster Sword and the Hylian Shield. When they point out that the two things can't exist simultaneously, the word "Objection!" flashes on screen, referencing this paradox being explored in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney's fifth case.
- Signing-Off Catchphrase: "I've been jan Misali, and (something related to the topic of the video)." He lampshaded it in "a better way to count", where he ended the video with "I've been jan Misali, and I don't have a sign off for my videos that aren't about conlanging."
- Special Guest:
- Webcomic artist and Love Lab expert Jasmine Wright is featured as a secondary commentator on the Rhythm Heaven iceberg video. Patricia Taxxon, a musician Misali frequently collaborates with, also shows up to explain the mechanics behind Tap Troupe and Love Rap.
- The Caramelldansen video features a remix of the song by Patricia Taxxon, with vocals by Jules.
- Super Title 64 Advance: Lampshaded in the "how many Super Mario games are there?" video, where Misali deliberately stresses the unnatural titles of New Super Mario Bros. U and New Super Luigi U, ending with a description of New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe — three adjectives, the suffix for a console the game isn't for, Mario's name, and the word "Bros."
- Take That!: In "how do we know what's mainline?", Misali sings "they're New but they're the same!" when going over New Super Mario Bros.. This refers to the common complaint of the games being Mission Pack Sequels with the same world themings and basic gameplay, with the only differences being the level layouts themselves and one or two powerups.
- Translated Cover Version: jan Misali has written Toki Pona versions of several songs, such as kalama musi pi jan Asuli, based on Ashley's Theme.
- Visual Pun: "revolutionizing English orthography (poorly)" has a moment where Misali says "here's the thing," followed by an image of The Thing.
- We Didn't Start the Billy Joel Parodies: "how do we know what's mainline?" is one listing off almost all Mario games in an attempt to figure out which ones fall under the Super Mario Bros. series. It was made by Misali for a then-unreleased updated version of their Super Mario video, based on an anonymous comment left on their survey.
