Alas, I'm on the side of simply finding this story annoying, the whole punk ethos just tends to make me groan, the writing of the story and the narration were fantastic though. It captures punk fairly well, in my opinion, and I don't know that if its parody or not matters, because it really wouldn't be punk to take punk too seriously. Yes, I called it, metapunk.
I'm pretty sure the essay including Firefly was in this episode, if I'm wrong, this will just look silly!
I'm also in a minority amongst geeks in that I just didn't like Firefly, I think I'm the only person I know for who that is true, and I quite enjoy the space-cowboy genre. Maybe I should watch the first two episodes again just to check if maybe my mood was off when I tried it.
Its sort of sad that its takes thought to log in here because I accidently spelled my username wrong when I first made the account... it is possible to spell your name wrong.