There are a ton of references in the timeline mainly because with the inclusion of dates, I could slip a lot of fun stuff in there. Right off the bat, any time September 17th is mentioned, that’s a reference to the first movie because that’s the tarehe it came out.

First off, we have two fictional character birthdays, August 1st, and December 9th, which are the birthdays of The Joker and Oliver Queen (a.k.a The Green Arrow) respectively. inayofuata is March 15th, 1975 which is the siku that Terror of Mechagodzilla came out in Japan.

The inayofuata tarehe is another movie release date. Arnold’s birthday, May 25th, 1977, is when nyota Wars first opened in theaters. While the mwaka isn’t right on this inayofuata one, the tarehe of November 23rd is when the very first episode of Doctor Who premiered. Adam’s birthday, January 25th is the officially designated tarehe of Opposite Day.

This one’s pretty straightforward. August 12th is my birthday and September 12th is my sister’s birthday. 2003 is the mwaka I was born so there is an August 12th, 2003 in there as well. I also had the opening scene of the first movie take place on the exact siku it was released, September 17th, 2010.

This is a fun one because it was a complete accident. Kate and Humphrey get married on March 26th, which is the siku the first How to Train Your Dragon movie came out. I just picked a bila mpangilio tarehe in early spring for the first movie to start and the amount of time that passes in the movie landed their wedding on March 26th. June 28th is when the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie came out. March 29th, 2020 is a real-life application because in the story, COVID hits the zoo that Humphrey is at and in real life, that’s when quarantine started.

July 16th of the same mwaka is another real-life application because it was around that time that things were starting to settle down with COVID and that’s exactly what happens in the story. While it’s not on the calendar, this inayofuata one ended up being true kwa pure coincidence. In the story, I state that a mwaka after the zoo reopens in the summer of 2020, everything went back to the way it used to be, making it July of 2021 when things go back to normal at the zoo. And now, as of May 13th, 2021 as I’m uandishi this, we’re expected to be completely done masking and social distancing kwa July 1st, about a mwaka after things started settling down.

May 4th is of course nyota Wars day. June 12th is another fun one because that’s the siku when I came up with the idea to write these stories in the first place. Right at the end, there’s November 23rd, 2063 which will be the 100th anniversary of Doctor Who.

And while this reference showed up earlier on, I had to save it for last because it is my absolute inayopendelewa thing in the entire collection. The entry reads this:
“November 15th, 2019: Oscar’s sons, Mark and Ethan, are born.”

Now let me break this down. Mark and Ethan refers to Mark Fischbach and Ethan Nestor, two maarufu YouTubers better known as Markiplier and CrankGamePlays. On November 15th of 2019, they started a collaboration channel called Unus Annus, which is Latin for “one year”. The idea was to pakia one video every single siku for one mwaka and at the end of that one year, they would (and did) futa the entire channel and every video on it. The point of all this was to teach people about the inevitability of death and to cherish the time that wewe have while wewe still have it, because wewe can never go back, and wewe can never stop the clock from reaching zero.

But these weren’t just any old videos, no, they were far from it. Because the channel was getting deleted in one year, Mark and Ethan threw all of YouTube’s rules out the window and literally made video on whatever they wanted. For one entire year, they successfully put up one video every single siku and not one of them got taken down. And it was surprisingly sad when the siku came for the channel to get deleted. In some way, these characters of Unus and Annus that they had created had become real and now they were dying.

On November 14th, 2020, over 1.6 million people (myself included) stayed up for twelve hours straight and watched the final livestream that Mark and Ethan did. For twelve hours, they sat and reflected about the past year, watching different parts of their inayopendelewa video among other things. And once the clock hit zero, they hit the futa button. So this one tarehe is a reference to one huge mwaka of crazy that happened at the perfect time because of everything that was going on in the world. People had something positive to look mbele to every single siku during the worst mwaka of our lives. We had no idea what ridiculousness the inayofuata siku would bring, but we knew it was going to be good.

Looking back at all this, I realize it was a bit of a feat that I managed to make these stories as good as they turned out to be. I had to take this pretty silly kids’ movie and turn it into something dark and aged up with a cohesive story, and yet keep the spirit of the characters that the mashabiki upendo intact. Doing that really boiled down to the idea of making it darker. Here’s a character we all love. In what way can I cause them to get hurt? And that clearly happens a lot throughout these stories, mainly with Humphrey since he was my inayopendelewa character, although fira, viper may have taken that title now. But either way, I’m very proud and happy with how everything turned out.