Poll of the Day > Life After Geeks

(+) Yeah! (+)

Kingpin's "Samaritan" speech still sends chills down my spine and that last fight scene in s1 was perfect.

While I wish Disney would continue DD and some of the other shows, at least s3 had a solid ending. Offhand, I can't even remember them teasing anything for a next season, unlike IF2 which left a *lot* of plot threads and a set-up for season 3 and LC2 which also ended with a set-up for s3.


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Zeus posted...

As for the conscious use of his power, he made an effort to avoid using it and try to live normal. However, it's *very* hard for him to not use it because how he phrases a sentence changes something in an irresistible order. And there was that whole attempt to reform him, although Jess quickly realized that was never going to work when his first inclination was to order a gunman to kill himself.

The most humanizing thing about Kilgrave in that regard is that even if he were a vanilla human with no powers at all, he's still a sociopath when all is said and done. Giving him a power that would require self-awareness to control to any degree just makes him a loose cannon on the best of days.

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WhiskeyDisk posted...

The most humanizing thing about Kilgrave in that regard is that even if he were a vanilla human with no powers at all, he's still a sociopath when all is said and done. Giving him a power that would require self-awareness to control to any degree just makes him a loose cannon on the best of days.

idk, I suspect it's the powers that made him into a sociopath in the first place. That's the kind of ability that can fundamentally distort your worldview pretty quickly (as well as being something that would be very hard to resist abusing).

iirc, one of the earliest instances of him using it -- when he causes one of his parents to hurt themselves -- seems unintentional. I *think* after that they mention that they kept him at arm's length. So effectively you have a broken home, an inability to form normal friendships/relationships (between having to act very deliberately and a power like that rightly scaring the fuck out of people), etc, which reduces his ability to form empathy and cultivates sociopathy. And honestly, if not for Trish, Jess very well might have ended up a supervillain herself. Their relationship was one of the things that helped keep Jess grounded.

It's an absurdly powerful ability, but the inherent drawbacks are that it automatically taints relationships, is very hard not to use, is absolutely terrifying to anybody who discovers you have it, and has the power to quickly erode your moral compass.

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CyborgSage00x0 posted...

The only way that will ever make any sense is if we admit the PS2 is the biggest failure of all time, since the amount of shovel ware and barely playable garbage basically started the idea of mass producing low-energy games for whatever console happened to be selling the hottest. But that would be silly, because like the PS2, the sheer volume of Wii games means there's likely some between Nintendo and their 3rd parties that will be enough to appease most.

This goes all the way back to the Atari 2600 and the Crash of '83, IMO. Shovelware is an ancient curse that keeps coming back again and again, though a lot of it now seems to be digital.

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https://comicbook.com/comics/news/legendary-batman-writer-and-editor-dennis-oneil-passes-away/

RIP in peace

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Zeus posted...

idk, I suspect it's the powers that made him into a sociopath in the first place. That's the kind of ability that can fundamentally distort your worldview pretty quickly (as well as being something that would be very hard to resist abusing).

One doesn't just become a psyco/sociopath. You're either wired that way or you aren't.

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WhiskeyDisk posted...

One doesn't just become a psyco/sociopath. You're either wired that way or you aren't.

It's *heavily* influenced by your environment. While not everybody will react to things the same way, most sociopathic behaviors fall a lot more on the nurture side than the nature side of the debate.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3387315/

In a more stable environment, powered-Kilgrave might have ended up closer to Jess's end of the sociopathic spectrum. Without his powers, he might have been normal.

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Zeus posted...

Can't remember if we discussed this specifically, but MtG is removing cards from its catalog and banning them from tournaments because "racism"

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/depictions-racism-magic-2020-06-10

That sounds idiotic.
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If I could get away with it, without consequences I would probably be a serial killer. Here's a scenario...

Me: "Oh, you're a racist?"

Racist: "Yeah, and..."

Me: This (Shoots racist in knee cap)

Me: Oh, I'm sorry, did that hurt? So does racism. Now I need you to tell me who else you know that's a racist.

Racist: (Screaming) Go to Hell N word!

Me: I'll see your wife and little kid there first. Unless you give me the names.

Racist: (Begging) No, not Heather and Doug.

Me: Yes, especially Doug. Can't have him get revenge on me in a decade. Now how about those names?

Racist: Fine, but don't hurt my family. (Gives names)

Me: Thank you Racist. (Cuts off head with katana.) Now to take out the rest of your family and racist friends anyway. (Evil Laugh!)

Something like that, but that was a work of fiction. I would never use a katana to kill a racist. I would stick Confederate flags up their butts.

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The problem with killing racists is you'd have to kill just about everybody on the planet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RovF1zsDoeM

And before you think you'd just be killing all humans, keep in mind that even animals have exhibited racism. You'd really have to end all life to be safe.

Plus if you're killing anybody, you have to constantly keep going because otherwise somebody who knows them will come for revenge. Instead of relying on a gun, you'd be better off with a nuke.

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Yeah, but those cards are bad tho
Nobody's playing them.

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The kid would be innocent though.
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I'm not going to have "Little Doug" grow up to be "Big Doug" and kill me when I'm older and weaker. I have watched too many old Kung Fu movies to know better than that.

As for everyone being racist. I think we all have bias, but I don't hate Asian people, or white people, or middle Eastern people just because they simply exist. I'm talking about killing those KKK, White Supremacist, cross burning racist, and their lot. Even little Doug, who could grow up to be a racist himself, or just a problem for me and my family.

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shadowsword87 posted...

Yeah, but those cards are bad tho
Nobody's playing them.

Cleanse is probably decent in a sideboard?

The Wave Master posted...

I'm not going to have "Little Doug" grow up to be "Big Doug" and kill me when I'm older and weaker. I have watched too many old Kung Fu movies to know better than that.

Tough. That's the code of the warrior. Did Beatrix kill Vivian Green's daughter? No, she calmly explained the situation and said she was free to come after her for revenge when she was older, because that's how it's done.

Or take it from the Rictus, who killed a couple then told his henchmen to spare the child because it'd be interesting if he came after him someday.

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Zeus posted...

Cleanse is probably decent in a sideboard?

No?
You're only playing that in, what, legacy?

If you want a 4cmc sorcery wrath that hits.... I guess griseldaddy? Then you've lost because you let a griseldaddy sit around for an /entire turn/. Maybe their baleful strix in grixis pyromancer, but you're trading 1-for-1 with a card that drew a card, so it's a 1-for-2?
The only reasonable card that could be stopped is Bob, but even then, it goes back to the 1-for-2 (or worse) problem. But most decks aren't running bob anymore.

The metagame has just moved away from black creatures.

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Zeus posted...

Tough. That's the code of the warrior. Did Beatrix kill Vivian Green's daughter? No, she calmly explained the situation and said she was free to come after her for revenge when she was older, because that's how it's done.

This reminds me of an awesome quote from an awesome Amber DRPG game that used to have a quotes page on the Internet eons ago, but which has since vanished into the ether (and which was never trawled by the Wayback Machine or similar, because of the stupid robots.txt file).

The Amberite PC (named Logan) was deliberately hanging around in a place where people were prickly and honor duels were a thing, and he was mostly just insulting everyone he met because he wanted to have a sword fight to blow off some steam (because Amberites are genetically assholes, and don't really value human life because they can travel through infinite Shadow and visit endless worlds). But then something important came up, so he wanted to get the fight over with quickly. But Amberites are vastly superior to pretty much everyone else ever, so...

GM: "Okay, so, the signal to begin the duel is given. How are you going to handle things? Start out defensive, go a bit more aggressive, give him a few false openings, etc?"

Logan: "I just try to get the fight over with as quickly as possible."

GM: "Okay, so, the fight starts, and six seconds later, you thrust your blade straight through his heart, and he slumps to the ground. You look over towards the crowd, and you see a young child, maybe 8 years old, clearly looking completely horrified. Based on a vague resemblance, you're pretty sure this is the son of the man you just killed."

Logan: ~picks up the dead man's sword, walks over to the boy, and tosses the sword at his feet~ "I'll be back in 20 years. Practice."
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Zeus posted...

It's *heavily* influenced by your environment. While not everybody will react to things the same way, most sociopathic behaviors fall a lot more on the nurture side than the nature side of the debate.

One theory is similar to how I tend to see alcoholism. The final outcome is a hybrid of nature and nurture, because environmental triggers influence genetic tendencies.

Basically, someone can be born with a predisposition to alcoholism, yet never manifest it if they go through life never taking a single drink. And even people with that predisposition can potentially drink in moderation if they learn controlled behaviors early on. But if someone with that genetic makeup is exposed to negative pressure situations or self-destructive behaviors (which often happens because alcoholism can run in families, so the child of an alcoholic is going to learn negative behaviors and world-view assumptions from their parent), then their own behavior can exacerbate their genetic predisposition.

If nature and nurture are pulling in opposite directions they can tend to cancel each other out to some degree, but if they're both pulling in the same negative direction, you're going to wind up with a much worse outcome than otherwise.



Zeus posted...

In a more stable environment, powered-Kilgrave might have ended up closer to Jess's end of the sociopathic spectrum. Without his powers, he might have been normal.

Even with his powers, he arguably might have. In the comics, his daughter (who has identical powers) became a superhero (she joined Alpha Flight). But the key for her was that she was raised by a loving mother, and when he powers manifested, she accidentally ran into Northstar shortly after, so she was guided down the moral path. A worse childhood or more time to really start acclimatizing to her powers and growing desensitized to the suffering they cause probably would have swung her the other way eventually.

(She was like an early case of what eventually became the core concept of the later Avengers Academy - where they explicitly recruited kids whose powers made them much more likely to become villains, and tried to teach them to be heroes instead. As one of the kids says when they discover this, "We're not here 'cause they think we have what it takes to be the next Captain America. We're here 'cause they're worried we'll be the next Red Skull. They're afraid of us.")

The problem is that Killgrave was already an amoral killer when he gained his powers, so he wasn't likely to feel too many moral compunctions about using his powers for evil. And mental powers in general tend to be very ripe for that sort of corrupting influence on personalities. But if he'd had a stronger moral grounding beforehand (*cough*PeterParkerUncleBen*cough*), or had been given reasons to be good even after he acquired his powers, he might not have gone down as dark a path as he did.

(Arguably, this is the exact same reason why someone like Peter Parker can gain spider-powers and become one of the most self-sacrificing heroes in the entire Marvel universe, while people like Crusher Creel or Titania gained powers and immediately and instinctively used them for selfish evil. The powers themselves were almost immaterial to who they were before the powers.)

Though if you want more of an argument along those lines, Jessica herself is explicitly only the way she is based on her life experiences. The comic version of her character was radically different before she met Killgrave than she was after she escaped him. Amazingly, apparently having your entire family die, gaining super powers, and then becoming someone's mind-controlled slave all in the span of about a year can kind of break a person.

The Punisher's another case along those lines, though it depends on the writer. Some writers fully play up the idea that Frank prior to Central Park was actually pretty well-adjusted and generally a good man (he even studied to be a priest at one point), and that his family being killed utterly destroyed the man he was and left him the empty shell he became. Though some writers tend to imply he was already dealing with underlying psychotic tendencies before he became a soldier, let alone before his family was murdered (though I've always thought that kind of weakens the concept of his character overall).
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

One theory is similar to how I tend to see alcoholism. The final outcome is a hybrid of nature and nurture, because environmental triggers influence genetic tendencies.

Basically, someone can be born with a predisposition to alcoholism, yet never manifest it if they go through life never taking a single drink. And even people with that predisposition can potentially drink in moderation if they learn controlled behaviors early on. But if someone with that genetic makeup is exposed to negative pressure situations or self-destructive behaviors (which often happens because alcoholism can run in families, so the child of an alcoholic is going to learn negative behaviors and world-view assumptions from their parent), then their own behavior can exacerbate their genetic predisposition.

If nature and nurture are pulling in opposite directions they can tend to cancel each other out to some degree, but if they're both pulling in the same negative direction, you're going to wind up with a much worse outcome than otherwise.

The way I see alcoholism is that anybody can become an alcoholic under the right circumstances. Some people might succumb to it a lot easier than others, but anybody could fall prey to it. Nobody is immune, unless their body just straight-up can't process alcohol or some similar fluke. Likewise, anybody can be turned into a killer. Some have a lot less to go than others (maybe it just takes one bad day), but part of military training involves desensitizing participants to induce sociopathy to overcome a reluctance to kill.

Which isn't to say that "nature" doesn't exist, but that humans are highly malleable because they're social animals.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The problem is that Killgrave was already an amoral killer when he gained his powers, so he wasn't likely to feel too many moral compunctions about using his powers for evil.

I'm assuming you're talking about comics Kilgrave, since the NFMCU one was still a kid when he got his powers and, afaik, hadn't killed anybody up until that point.

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Zeus posted...

I'm assuming you're talking about comics Kilgrave, since the NFMCU one was still a kid when he got his powers and, afaik, hadn't killed anybody up until that point.

I'm assuming TV Killgrave doesn't have a daughter, either. And there's no such thing as Alpha Flight. So it's pretty obvious I'm talking about the comics version.

I've never actually watched any of the Netflix shows. I was mostly just comparing the context of the comic version.

Getting your powers as a very young child makes it even more likely that you'll wind up evil, though. Sort of like the "It's a Good Life" episode of The Twilight Zone, you can't really discipline or socialize a child who can control your actions or magically unmake you, so they never really learn to be anything other than selfish amoral bastards. But if you can establish a moral foundation before the powers kick in, you can potentially offset the inevitable corrupting influence of those types of powers later.
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That getting your powers young or older question is interesting, and will come up later.

I'm thinking of buying, Cosmic Star Heroine on The Switch for 15 bucks. It's not a lot of money, and I have a few extra bucks laying around, but have any of you Geeks played it or heard bad or good things? It looks like a love letter to Chrono Trigger, which isn't a bad thing.

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Finally saw images of the ps5. wtf?

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/why-sony-is-releasing-a-discfree-ps5/1100-6478354/

That might be the ugliest console I can recall seeing. And it looks terrible whether it's vertical or horizontal.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I've never actually watched any of the Netflix shows.

What the what?

The Wave Master posted...

That getting your powers young or older question is interesting, and will come up later.

I'm thinking of buying, Cosmic Star Heroine on The Switch for 15 bucks. It's not a lot of money, and I have a few extra bucks laying around, but have any of you Geeks played it or heard bad or good things? It looks like a love letter to Chrono Trigger, which isn't a bad thing.

Apparently it's only $1.49 on Steam, which makes it tempting. Kind of a shame that Steam doesn't have an associated handheld console.

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Proof that Sony has finally quacked!

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Am I the only person that likes the design of the PS5?

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I think it doesn't look as bad when standing. Kinda reminds me of the edgy PC designs that were popular a few years ago.

It's very different though. Not sure what they were going for there.

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The Wave Master posted...

That getting your powers young or older question is interesting, and will come up later.

I'm thinking of buying, Cosmic Star Heroine on The Switch for 15 bucks. It's not a lot of money, and I have a few extra bucks laying around, but have any of you Geeks played it or heard bad or good things? It looks like a love letter to Chrono Trigger, which isn't a bad thing.

I have it on Steam but haven't played it yet. Isn't Cross Code the Chrono Trigger game?
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The Wave Master posted...

Am I the only person that likes the design of the PS5?

Yes, in the entire world. The only person who ever lived or ever will live who likes the design.


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The Wave Master posted...

Am I the only person that likes the design of the PS5?

Actually, I don't mind it. Their consoles have always looked like ugly bricks (actually, the PS4 in most cases looks slick), so I don't mind them hamming it up and making it look like a loud space-age thing. And you know me and my indifference to the Playstation over the years.

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Zeus posted...

What the what?

I don't have Netflix, never have.

And Marvel/Netflix fucked up, by releasing season 2 of Daredevil and all the other shows (I think) on regular DVD, but only releasing Daredevil season 1 on Blu-Ray in the US. Which means I'll never watch Daredevil season one, which in turn means I'll never watch any of the later seasons of Daredevil either, which means I'll also never watch Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, or Iron Fist. Which then means I also won't watch The Defenders or The Punisher.

I'm not overly concerned when a stupid decision on the part of a distributor or content producer leads me to skip watching it, because we live in a world where there's so much media, there's never enough time to watch all the shows/movies, play all the games, or read all the books worth reading anyway. There's plenty of "must see" shows that people can't stop jerking over that I've never seen and have no real desire to see.
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You don't own a Blu-Ray player of some sorts?
DD is kinda must-see TV. The rest less so.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

I don't have Netflix, never have.

And you can't just use a friend or relative's account? I use my brother's NF, D+, and Hulu.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

which means I'll also never watch Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, or Iron Fist. Which then means I also won't watch The Defenders or The Punisher.

JJ1 has no connection to anything else. LC1 requires seeing JJ1 first and has a supporting character from DD1 (. JJ2 has maybe one reference to the Defenders, JJ3 has none, and LC2 has little connection to the Defenders.

IF1 has a supporting character from JJ1 and uses some characters from DD1&2.Then Punisher has his origin story in DD2, although P1 & P2 are largely disconnected from any other show.

I can understand not watching the shit related to DD1 just in case you do wind up watching DD1, but half the NFMCU is unrelated to it.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'm not overly concerned when a stupid decision on the part of a distributor or content producer leads me to skip watching it, because we live in a world where there's so much media, there's never enough time to watch all the shows/movies, play all the games, or read all the books worth reading anyway. There's plenty of "must see" shows that people can't stop jerking over that I've never seen and have no real desire to see.

Not all shit is created equal. I will probably never watch the Sopranos, The Wire, or Oz. I might never see Breaking Bad or Six Feet Under. But if it's a superhero or horror show, I'm probably going to check it out at some point or another.


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I have my PS4, but I don't like using my console for watching movies (Blu-Ray or DVD).

But it's more the point that I just don't want to buy Blu-Ray period. If something isn't released on DVD, I will never own it, period.

I might change my stance if/when DVDs are phased out entirely (no matter how annoyed I am by the change), but at this point we're more likely to shift to an all-digital future (which I will loathe) than we are one where Blu-Ray becomes the dominant format over all.
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Persona 4 on Steam but it has Denuvo.
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Zeus posted...

Not all shit is created equal. I will probably never watch the Sopranos, The Wire, or Oz. I might never see Breaking Bad or Six Feet Under. But if it's a superhero or horror show, I'm probably going to check it out at some point or another.

Pretty sure PO and myself can still remember a time when TV's had antennas, and it was ABC, NBC, and CBS. Oh yeah, and 2 PBS channels. It was a big deal in the NY tri-state when Fox and WPIX11 and whatever channel 9 was before it became UPN back in the day started broadcasting.

Cable hadn't been fully adopted yet, and that was 36 channels with a wired remote, 3 rows of 12 channels with individual buttons and lever on a dial that flipped between rows. There was always terrestrial radio and books, but 40 years later we've gone from having your ass on the sofa at a specific time to catch one of 3 shows in a time slot to many hundreds of channels on cable and well over a dozen streaming services of note, plus VOD services. There aren't enough hours in a day to watch the things worth watching, let alone everyone's guilty pleasure.

I have a Kindle. I have a laptop I mostly game on. I have a Chromebook hooked up to a projector for streaming shows and movies, and I still have a massive backlog on all 3 with new shit thrown on the pile weekly.

Even if they remade the classic "Time Enough at Last" episode of Twilight Zone, the big finish would ring hollow because there wouldn't be enough time to catch up on everything in modern media. I have to wonder how the business model is sustainable because I find it hard to believe there's enough eyeballs on most of it.

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WhiskeyDisk posted...

There aren't enough hours in a day to watch the things worth watching, let alone everyone's guilty pleasure.

That's largely untrue in the long run since not enough truly great stuff comes out each year. Even in an amazing year for entertainment, it's rare to have 10 great shows at once; and many years all that's available are guilty pleasures.

WhiskeyDisk posted...

Even if they remade the classic "Time Enough at Last" episode of Twilight Zone, the big finish would ring hollow because there wouldn't be enough time to catch up on everything in modern media.

Personally, I've been furloughed for about a month and a half and I'm burning through my tv queue at an alarming rate despite letting that queue build up for years and doing more than just watching tv. When it comes to TV, "Time Enough at Last" would be far too much time.

Where it comes to books, though, even in the 1960s there were far more truly outstanding books than there are TV shows today. Even back then, books could have kept Burgess's character entertained for several life times.

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WhiskeyDisk posted...

Pretty sure PO and myself can still remember a time when TV's had antennas, and it was ABC, NBC, and CBS. Oh yeah, and 2 PBS channels.

Technically, it's easy for me to remember a time when TVs had antennas, because two of my friends currently have TVs with digital antennas for local channels.

But just in terms of playing the "holy shit I'm old" game, I had a semi-portable black and white TV when I was a kid (in addition to the main color TV in my living room). Standard 12 channels (2-13) plus UHF. Pull-out straight antenna. Screw-in plug jacks in the back for rabbit ears. With an attached separate adapter to run coaxial into it for cable.

http://img.joomcdn.net/d951d34f4c87724ea39669773dbb1ad7473bbb07_original.jpeg

My big upgrade as a kid was when I figured out how to run my cable via my VCR and composite cables into an Apple IIe monitor (but I still had to run the audio through the black and white TV, because the Apple monitor didn't have speakers).

As for PBS, I remember more than 2, because a lot of what I watched as a kid was British stuff (Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Monty Python, 'Allo 'Allo, Blackadder, etc), and the only place to find it was PBS. Channel 13 was the main one (and was usually the go-to for Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers), but it tended to cater to more high-end content and less British stuff. There were a few down in the UHF bands that were more my speed - WLIW (TV 21) was (and kind of still is) the main one for me, but the New Jersey Network was another major one (which had multiple channels - WNJT and WNJB being the Central NJ ones (channel 8 and channel 52).

I still remember WLIW used to have a bumper set to this song, with clips from various shows on the network:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OIkw9kJ0u4



WhiskeyDisk posted...

It was a big deal in the NY tri-state when Fox and WPIX11 and whatever channel 9 was before it became UPN back in the day started broadcasting.

I definitely remember when Fox started and it was a big thing (it basically took over the local station WNYW on channel 5, but it was only technically Fox on weekend nights, with the rest of the time being just syndicated shows). Is why I usually mention how I may be one of the few people left on Earth who remember shows like Werewolf, Duets, and Second Chance were ever a thing.

As for channel 9, it's WWOR out of Secaucus. It's actually part of the same Fox group that runs WNYW, but it stayed a local station when WNYW became the official Fox station in the NYC/Central NJ area. Later it became UPN (around the same time that WPIX became The WB), and when UPN and WB merged into The CW, WWOR was kind of left screwed over. At which point they rebranded as MyTV (which is also locally affilated with the Heroes & Icons and Buzzr channels on cable).

Basically, a large chunk of my childhood was spent watching the syndicated kids shows on WNYW, WWOR, WPIX, and WTXF (TV 29 - the Fox station from out of Philly). I still have a VHS copy of Transformers: the Movie I taped off of Fox 29 one weekend (you can still see some of the station IDs from where I didn't cut a commercial perfectly) in storage somewhere.

That, the CBS/NBC/ABS Saturday Morning blocks, the oldschool throwback cartoons on the USA Cartoon Express, some stuff from Nickelodeon, and a lot of PBS, and you can accurately reproduce my entire childhood.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

Cable hadn't been fully adopted yet, and that was 36 channels with a wired remote, 3 rows of 12 channels with individual buttons and lever on a dial that flipped between rows.

http://i.pinimg.com/originals/b0/36/85/b03685aa661066785e7fa2ad868c83a2.jpg

The saddest part is that I found that picture because I remembered that the brand name was Jerrold.

For a short time, I also had a TV with a remote that looked like this:

http://metvcdn.metv.com/yRnqJ-1447781707-547-blog-REMOTE_main_1200.jpg

Those two are basically why to this day I still occasionally refer to remotes as "the clicker".

(later versions, of course, being known as "the zapper" instead)



WhiskeyDisk posted...

There was always terrestrial radio

So much of my childhood taste of music (and to be honest, my adult taste in music) was probably shaped by the fact that I used to listen to Z100 every night when I was going to bed.

OUT-Q: YOUR CLUB AND CONCERT CALENDAR!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brz5K6I36-U&t=0m14s

So, so many of my brain-cells are dedicated to so much useless crap. This is why I never cured cancer.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

but 40 years later we've gone from having your ass on the sofa at a specific time to catch one of 3 shows in a time slot to many hundreds of channels on cable and well over a dozen streaming services of note, plus VOD services.

This is essentially what killed Saturday Morning cartoons.

People always ask, "Why did those go away? I always loved them as a kid!" But the main REASON why we loved it so much was because 95% of all other TV was aimed at adults. Apart from a narrow window just before and after school on syndicated channels (which had a HARD cut-off around 5pm), there was nothing on TV for kids at all. So having an entire morning dedicated to you - where you could literally pick and choose which shows you wanted to watch on which channels (along with the agonizing choice of which to pick if two shows you wanted to watch were on at the same time) - just made the whole thing seem like paradise.

But then channels like USA and Nick started broadcasting endless kid content, the The Disney Channel came into being (and I literally still remember the moment it started broadcasting), the proliferation of cable channels meant more 24/7-365 content, VHS and DVD meant kids could watch stuff whenever they wanted, and now streaming services and stuff like YouTube mean that kids will literally never have a sense of deprivation or want when it comes to content... which in turn means they'll never really appreciate what they do have.

A glass of water may be the most appealing thing ever to someone dying of thirst in the desert, but it doesn't mean much to someone drowning in the middle of the ocean.

And now this post has too many characters in it, so I'll just end with this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icwT0VlAkeU
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

the big finish would ring hollow because there wouldn't be enough time to catch up on everything in modern media.

I always love when you hear statistics like how more content is uploaded to YouTube in a single minute than any human being could watch in their entire lifetime.

Sure, most of that content is nothing you'd ever want to watch, but it really does underline just how much content IS being produced, across multiple media, that become almost overwhelming to sort through or make time for.

It's part of why I've questioned whether or not we're even going to HAVE pop culture as a concept in the future. Pop culture is essentially the shared experiences of given generations of people. Shout "And now I know!" at any 80's kid (at least ones from the US), and they're almost certainly going to come back at you with "And knowing is half the battle", because literally everyone watched GI Joe. Nearly everyone (at least of a certain age) knows about Luke's dad, or who Homer Simpson is, while a slightly older generation remembers when more people watched the MASH finale than have ever watched the Super Bowl. Since the 1950s, kids have been growing up with this shared universe of fiction, where you can make references or metacontextual jokes about movies or shows or songs and assume anyone listening will understand what you're talking about.

But if a generation of kids grow up watching radically different shows, and with some not watching TV at all and just watching YouTube videos of other people playing Minecraft, will they really ever have media in common? If everyone is narrow-casting only the shows they want to watch, are you ever going to have a single concept or show that crosses all barriers and become a shared "language" between members of a given generational cohort? Or are we basically going to be reduced to a scenario where individuals might occasionally share one or two things in common, but there's no overriding universal constant that a majority can relate to?

And considering just how much of our media over the last 20-30 years has relied heavily on pop culture references, how would a lack of pop culture reshape things?

Ironically, we can't even assume that shared experience would have to default back to news/global events/historical moments, because the glut of media means that the average person isn't even seeing the world in the same way - narrow-casting news sources that cater to people's pre-existing biases present world events in entirely different ways (assuming they bother to report them at all). Is someone who gets their news exclusively from MSNBC even living in the same world as someone who only watches Fox News? And will they remember events the same way, allowing them to somehow integrate those world-views 20 years later?

It's probably doomsaying to imagine a world where every human is effectively culturally isolated from everyone else, and social interaction becomes almost entirely digitally-dependent and superficially shallow at best, but sometimes the implications of technology can be kind of worrisome.

Now I'm starting to wonder if I should have paid more attention in college, in my class about the sociological aspects of information technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly
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Zeus posted...

And you can't just use a friend or relative's account? I use my brother's NF, D+, and Hulu.

That would require me to give enough of a shit to bother. Which I do not.

But also, I'm not really keen on the idea of shared accounts for anything. My one friend always used to offer to let me use his Netflix password for stuff but I never did.



Zeus posted...

JJ1 has no connection to anything else. LC1 requires seeing JJ1 first and has a supporting character from DD1 (JJ2 has maybe one reference to the Defenders, JJ3 has none, and LC2 has little connection to the Defenders.

The connections are technically there, though.

It doesn't really matter if you don't NEED to watch one thing to watch others things. To my brain, if something is connected, then I have to follow the connections. Jessica Jones will eventually lead to Defenders, the Defenders includes DD, LC, and IF, therefore I need to watch those shows. If I can't watch DD season 1, then I can't watch DD, which means I can't watch The Defenders, which means I can't watch JJ, LC, or IF. The entire Netflix universe is closed to me.

It doesn't have to make sense to YOU, it just has to make sense to ME. And that's how my brain has always worked. It ties into my completionist OCD.

This is honestly one of the larger things that keeps me from watching the CW/DC shows (the other thing preventing me from getting into any of the CW/DC shows being that the acting/writing is kind of terrible). I missed the start of Arrow because I was in the middle of switching over from cable to FiOS (and then I lost TV for a couple weeks because of Hurricane Sandy), so I missed the entire first half of the first season. Which meant I wouldn't watch the second half. Which meant I wouldn't watch season 2. Which discouraged me from watching The Flash when it started. And so on.

This is also the thing that may lock me permanently out of the MCU in the future. I have zero interest in Disney+, which means I'm not going to watch any of the TV shows there. It seems like they want to tie them into the movies (at least moreso than they did Agents of SHIELD), and if they do, it means I'm not going to want to watch the movies either (especially since I'm already kind of meh on the future of the MCU anyway at this point). The only real hope I have is that the TV/film crossover is mostly one-way (ie, once you wind up in a Disney+ show you're never seen in the main films again), or that they eventually release the shows on DVD (where/when I will probably buy them, unless they completely suck). Otherwise I'll probably drift away for good.



Zeus posted...

Not all shit is created equal. I will probably never watch the Sopranos, The Wire, or Oz. I might never see Breaking Bad or Six Feet Under. But if it's a superhero or horror show, I'm probably going to check it out at some point or another.

A lot of people would argue that you're skipping the shows that are actually worth watching in favor of the crap.

Which is sort of my point, honestly. People could gush over how awesome Game of Thrones was all they wanted (at least until season 8), but that doesn't really change the fact that I lost interest somewhere around the point where the show kind of left the books behind in season 4 (I read the writing on the wall long before the normies caught on... mwu-ha-ha!). As much as I love the 80s, Stranger Things does absolutely nothing for me as a concept (possibly because the 80s vibe it's trying to recreate is a vibe I didn't even like IN the 1980s). I've never really cared about Breaking Bad. Six Foot Under did nothing for me based on the premise (and wasn't helped by the fact that it was on HBO at a time when I didn't have HBO - which is the same boat Oz and The Wire falls into).

My one friend absolutely loved the Sopranos, but I never cared about it (in fact, I kind of actively hated it for perpetuating Jersey stereotypes I've always disliked because I've almost never actually SEEN them in Central NJ - they're almost always either North Jersey or even Long Islander stereotypes that people just apply to the whole state because they're too ignorant to know better). So in spite of the fact that he was buying every season on DVD and I could easily have borrowed them from him, I didn't.

If anything, most of the "critical darling" shows of the last 20 years I didn't even remotely have interest in. Which makes it kind of hard to care about whatever show is getting praised by a lot of people, because I have no real expectation that what other people like is ever going to be something I like. Sure, sometimes there's overlap (people liked the MCU and so do I, for instance), but I almost never take people's recommendations over just checking out what the concept/premise of a show is (this is also part of why I stopped caring about what film critics think about 30 years ago), and seeing if it appeals to me on its own. If it does, I'll tend to at least give it a chance.

Not that a chance necessarily helps all that much - I gave Westworld a chance and then I decided it didn't really do anything for me - and then I let my HBO lapse again, so now I couldn't watch it if I wanted to. And the massive glut of media means that I rarely have the time, patience, or interest to give a damn about any given show (especially when half of them are on streaming services I don't have anyway). The occasional movie can still grab my interest, but for the most part, the vast majority of my media intake these days is either reading, gaming, or online video content of one sort or another.

The only reason I still have cable at all is because my girlfriend still watches stuff, and she'd probably murder me in my sleep if I dropped it. And because I'll occasionally check out the Weather Channel, or watch old reruns of game shows from the 1980s.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Technically, it's easy for me to remember a time when TVs had antennas, because two of my friends currently have TVs with digital antennas for local channels.

Eh, bought one of those myself but never bothered setting it up. Like so many other things, it's still in a box somewhere.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But just in terms of playing the "holy shit I'm old" game, I had a semi-portable black and white TV when I was a kid (in addition to the main color TV in my living room). Standard 12 channels (2-13) plus UHF. Pull-out straight antenna. Screw-in plug jacks in the back for rabbit ears. With an attached separate adapter to run coaxial into it for cable.

They were still selling those in the 90s so it's not that old; or, at least, certainly not an indication of how old something is or isn't.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

This is essentially what killed Saturday Morning cartoons.

People always ask, "Why did those go away? I always loved them as a kid!" But the main REASON why we loved it so much was because 95% of all other TV was aimed at adults. Apart from a narrow window just before and after school on syndicated channels (which had a HARD cut-off around 5pm), there was nothing on TV for kids at all. So having an entire morning dedicated to you - where you could literally pick and choose which shows you wanted to watch on which channels (along with the agonizing choice of which to pick if two shows you wanted to watch were on at the same time) - just made the whole thing seem like paradise.

Surprised to hear that they're gone entirely? I thought there was at least something left.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I always love when you hear statistics like how more content is uploaded to YouTube in a single minute than any human being could watch in their entire lifetime.

Sure, most of that content is nothing you'd ever want to watch, but it really does underline just how much content IS being produced, across multiple media, that become almost overwhelming to sort through or make time for.

I always doubt those claims and, more importantly, a lot of the stuff being uploaded at any given moment is duplicate.

Otherwise it underscores how far the ball for "content" has fallen, although I'm sure that throughout human history much of that same "content" has been produced, but it just wasn't in a centralized space. Now some of the things that might have only reached a handful of people might hit an audience of 0 -- since not every video gets views -- so, on some level, not much has changed. And, when it comes right down to it, every post in this topic is a form of content in very much the same way every video on YT is (and the posts probably get more views than a lot of YT videos).

Otherwise one-season shows on major networks tend to be better known than the best-known youtuber. Not all content is created equal.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's part of why I've questioned whether or not we're even going to HAVE pop culture as a concept in the future. Pop culture is essentially the shared experiences of given generations of people. Shout "And now I know!" at any 80's kid (at least ones from the US), and they're almost certainly going to come back at you with "And knowing is half the battle", because literally everyone watched GI Joe. Nearly everyone (at least of a certain age) knows about Luke's dad, or who Homer Simpson is, while a slightly older generation remembers when more people watched the MASH finale than have ever watched the Super Bowl. Since the 1950s, kids have been growing up with this shared universe of fiction, where you can make references or metacontextual jokes about movies or shows or songs and assume anyone listening will understand what you're talking about.

Considering how big viral memes go and how many are still referenced to this day, I think the answer is a loud, resounding, "Duh!" A large part of it is because there are limits to what can be done by small content producers. Big studios will always exist because people want high budget productions. If anything, the big budget films do better today than any time in history. Even when adjusting for inflation, *two* of the top 10 highest grossing films of all time have come out in the last five years. And the second-highest was Avatar, which came out 11 years ago.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

And considering just how much of our media over the last 20-30 years has relied heavily on pop culture references, how would a lack of pop culture reshape things?

Do you honestly believe that half of Family Guy fans "get" most of the show's pop culture references? And yet FG -- a show that heavily exploits pop culture -- still pulls in surprisingly strong numbers. And those numbers are why in 20 years shows will be making Family Guy references which not everybody will get.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But if a generation of kids grow up watching radically different shows, and with some not watching TV at all and just watching YouTube videos of other people playing Minecraft, will they really ever have media in common?

That's always been true. SW:ANH is one of the biggest drawing films of all time yet there were a lot of people in their teens when it came out who never saw it. You're hung on this idea of shared experience across the population, but you're remembering a world that never really existed.

And honestly, everybody at every point in history thinks that their world is unique and special because they want to feel unique and special. Yes, things change, but tv catching on in peoples' homes and then everybody having a computer isn't the world-changing paradigm you think it is. We're just links in a great chain.


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Ironically, we can't even assume that shared experience would have to default back to news/global events/historical moments, because the glut of media means that the average person isn't even seeing the world in the same way - narrow-casting news sources that cater to people's pre-existing biases present world events in entirely different ways (assuming they bother to report them at all). Is someone who gets their news exclusively from MSNBC even living in the same world as someone who only watches Fox News? And will they remember events the same way, allowing them to somehow integrate those world-views 20 years later?

People have always had wildly different interpretation of events. While people like to think that life was more uniform, keep in mind that the US has always had competing press and the lack of regulation in the news has ensured multiple narratives exist. And while you can argue that having more news options has created silos, keep in mind that people always got their news from a variety of sources and traditional media has been distrusted by... well, most people, but especially anybody who feels disenfranchised.

And while you might have different takes on major events, it's kinda hard not to acknowledge the events themselves whether it's terrorists knocking down skyscrapers or a months-long quarantine. And how somebody remembers an event isn't even necessarily tied to the news anyway, it's usually going to be more personal.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Ironically, we can't even assume that shared experience would have to default back to news/global events/historical moments, because the glut of media means that the average person isn't even seeing the world in the same way - narrow-casting news sources that cater to people's pre-existing biases present world events in entirely different ways (assuming they bother to report them at all). Is someone who gets their news exclusively from MSNBC even living in the same world as someone who only watches Fox News? And will they remember events the same way, allowing them to somehow integrate those world-views 20 years later?

People have always had wildly different interpretation of events. While people like to think that life was more uniform, keep in mind that the US has always had competing press and the lack of regulation in the news has ensured multiple narratives exist. And while you can argue that having more news options has created silos, keep in mind that people always got their news from a variety of sources and traditional media has been distrusted by... well, most people, but especially anybody who feels disenfranchised.

And while you might have different takes on major events, it's kinda hard not to acknowledge the events themselves whether it's terrorists knocking down skyscrapers or a months-long quarantine. And how somebody remembers an event isn't even necessarily tied to the news anyway, it's usually going to be more personal.


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

The connections are technically there, though.

JJ1 doesn't have any connections that I remember. Even Turk doesn't show up and he cameos in pretty much *every* NFMCU show. (Just looked it up and apparently the only things he's not in are JJ1, JJ3, and IF1.)

JJ3 is an issue since it references spoilers from LC1 and then LC2 has an IF cameo.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

That would require me to give enough of a shit to bother. Which I do not.

But also, I'm not really keen on the idea of shared accounts for anything. My one friend always used to offer to let me use his Netflix password for stuff but I never did.

Well, sharing is caring. >_>

ParanoidObsessive posted...

A lot of people would argue that you're skipping the shows that are actually worth watching in favor of the crap.

If it's the same people who praised Lost, they lost their right to an opinion >_>

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Which is sort of my point, honestly. People could gush over how awesome Game of Thrones was all they wanted (at least until season 8), but that doesn't really change the fact that I lost interest somewhere around the point where the show kind of left the books behind in season 4 (I read the writing on the wall long before the normies caught on... mwu-ha-ha!). As much as I love the 80s, Stranger Things does absolutely nothing for me as a concept (possibly because the 80s vibe it's trying to recreate is a vibe I didn't even like IN the 1980s). I've never really cared about Breaking Bad. Six Foot Under did nothing for me based on the premise (and wasn't helped by the fact that it was on HBO at a time when I didn't have HBO - which is the same boat Oz and The Wire falls into).

Oh right, I still have Stranger Things... oh wait, that still has more seasons. I guess I'll just finally watch Hemlock Grove once I'm done with AHS.

And GoT is interesting because I like a lot of the show, but I can't get into the books. While film/tv and books always have some differences (a *lot* of differences, in the case of Stephen King works -- and I'm not just talking about The Running Man), most things I've enjoyed watching I've liked reading as well. The books kinda suck, though.


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On the subject of streaming, I hate Hulu's non-resizable viewer. I'm honestly not sure why NF is the only one to really get that aspect right... although Hulu and D+ both use center buttons which make more sense than side buttons. NF gets most other things right, though.

It's semi-unavoidable atm, though, unless I want to wait for AHS: 1984 to hit NF... and I don't, I really don't.

...guess that's also on the subject of the 80s. And who doesn't love the 80s?! Because it's the 80s! And if you forget it's the 80s (and ignore the hairstyles, clothing, etc), you can hear "Cruel Summer" playing in the background. The 80s! Yeah!

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I am also old enough to remember having a big TV antenna on the house ... that hooked up to a TV that looked like a big wooden cabinet with a screen on it. That TV sucked. I spent more time watching the little black-and-white one that was hooked up in the kitchen. Clear memories of catching the beginning of Johnny Carson before I had to go to bed.

Cable happened to my family relatively early, though, and I was a long-time passenger on the USA Cartoon Express. That was a good time. And I remember catching Disney cartoons on Friday afternoon, back when those were good (e.g. Ducktales).

By odd coincidence, I have been rewatching the old Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. Mill Creek Entertainment did me a big solid by rereleasing that so cheaply on DVD (alas, minus the cool extras of the old Rhino release).

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Zeus posted...

Surprised to hear that they're gone entirely? I thought there was at least something left.

There's about an hour or so on any given channel, at 6am in what is essentially useless time for the channels, with content that's usually cheaply produced and aimed at preschoolers, that feels more throwaway than anything (and is mostly only there to fulfill what's left of the Educational/Informative network requirements in the least worthwhile way possible).

The era of large swaths of time aimed specifically at kids, and promoted as a major thing (to the point of taking out ads in comic books to make sure kids knew what time any given show was going to be on) are long since gone.

It's basically gone from being like six hours of entertainment (and borderline toy-commercial) content per channel to being about an hour of cheap afterthought educational shows (more than half of which are just borderline public access level live-action).



Zeus posted...

I always doubt those claims and, more importantly, a lot of the stuff being uploaded at any given moment is duplicate.

I'm not saying the numbers are exact, as much as it's very much indicative of just how much content IS being produced - and thus has to be sorted through to at least some degree even to find the things worth watching (or playing, or reading, or...).

I think the actual confirmed amount is something like 80 years worth of content a day. And even if it isn't really exact, I still find it incredibly easy to believe that the actual amount isn't all that far off. When you're dealing with millions and millions of users (both professional and personal) constantly loading content (whether videos that are only a minute or two or larger files that are a half-hour or longer), it all adds up.

Sure, the average person is never going to watch 99.9999% of any of that, and search features and algorithm personalization mean you're going to have the things you might like funneled to you while the rest just sort exists outside of your awareness, but it still means more content is being produced than any other point in the sum total of human history.

When I was a kid, I had 36 channels worth of content (more or less), when my mother was a kid she had 3, when her mother was a kid TV didn't exist and radio wasn't yet used for entertainment purposes. Go back a few hundred more years to the creation of the printing press, and suddenly books become the purview of the rich.

Human entertainment content production has pretty much been a logarithmic curve that started to rise somewhere around the 1500s, spiked hard in the 20th century, and exploded off the charts so far in the 21st.



Zeus posted...

Otherwise it underscores how far the ball for "content" has fallen, although I'm sure that throughout human history much of that same "content" has been produced, but it just wasn't in a centralized space.

I'd argue though most of human history "content" was barely a thing, because most people were illiterate, and too worried about not dying of starvation, plague, or being murdered by their neighbors to give a shit about the 2nd century equivalent of silly cat videos.

Sure, theater has been a thing for thousands of years, and there's always been been music in one form or another, but for most of human history your options were extremely limited.

Like I said above, "entertainment media" as a concept really only started snowballing once the printing press was invented and books became more and more available. The proliferation of technology for disseminating content has sort of coincided with labor-saving devices that create leisure time to actually consume entertainment content, and the rise of a consumer class with expendable income made the professional production of said content financially worthwhile.

Arguably, the Industrial Revolution opened the door to mass-produced entertainment content, while the Technological Revolution magnified it exponentially.



Zeus posted...

And, when it comes right down to it, every post in this topic is a form of content in very much the same way every video on YT is (and the posts probably get more views than a lot of YT videos).

I'd agree 100%.

And in that sense, THIS content is also competing with all the other content for my attention. Every minute I spend writing a post like this one is a minute I won't be spending watching video content, playing games, or reading. Maybe if these topics had never existed, and I could have all of the spare time I spent posting here back, I might have been more open to watching shows I didn't watch or playing games I didn't play or reading books I didn't read.

Which is my original point - there are so many things a person can focus their attention on now, the overall focus of the population as a whole is far more dispersed.

This is why best-selling comics today are selling in numbers that would have gotten them cancelled 30 years ago. The most popular network shows pull numbers that would have been abject failure in the 1990s. Look at the sales numbers for Game of the Year candidates that are near universally praised, and you'll see almost none of them ever break 10 million in sales (in a marketplace where there are hundreds of millions of consoles in the wild, and even then gamers are still only a small segment of global demographics).



Zeus posted...

Otherwise one-season shows on major networks tend to be better known than the best-known youtuber. Not all content is created equal.

That's honestly a hard argument to make, though. The best-known YouTuber has about 100 times the number of subscribers as even slightly successful one-season shows manage to pull in viewer ratings.

Those numbers aren't necessarily comparable (in terms of things like Q-ratings), but I'd argue there are FAR more people in the world today who know who PewDiePie is than people who remember that Kevin (Probably) Saves the World was a show.

Hell, -I- didn't even know that Kevin (Probably) Saves the World was a show - I basically had to look on Wikipedia for one-season network shows. And that's a show that pulled 4 million viewers (which is above average for cancelled single season shows).



Zeus posted...

Considering how big viral memes go and how many are still referenced to this day

Yeah, but that's misleading. For one thing, how many people remember any given meme a few years later? And moreover, I'd argue that memes don't really spawn or perpetuate as effectively now as they used to. Aside from cultural slang, it doesn't really build a generational pop culture identity.

And added to that, there's the more significant issue that WE tend to recognize those sorts of things because we kind of live our lives in the Internet sphere (which is why we're here), but more casual Internet users can go for years without ever seeing most memes (let alone understanding them). And as hard as it is for people to believe, there's still a lot of people out there who aren't online all that often at all, at least not engaging in social media.
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Zeus posted...

Do you honestly believe that half of Family Guy fans "get" most of the show's pop culture references?

Depends on the fan and on which season of the show you're talking about.

But even then, Family Guy references are shallow at best, and often either don't really require you to "get" the reference, or are there and gone fast enough to not really impact your perception of the show even if you don't get them.



Zeus posted...

And yet FG -- a show that heavily exploits pop culture -- still pulls in surprisingly strong numbers.

It's also worth noting that most of the references Family Guy does make are from years ago. So it's still drawing on a period of time when shared culture was a stronger thing, and appeals to an older audience who still remember those things.

Show me Family Guy episodes from 2040 that are exclusively referencing things from the next 20 years worth of pop culture, and if the ratings are still as strong, I'd be more inclined to agree with you.

Though at this point we're getting into the problem The Simpsons has - at a certain point, people aren't watching the show because of the content of the show. The show itself has essentially become the nostalgia that is being exploited. People who watch The Simpsons today really only do so because they kind of remember that it used to be funny once. And because it's a comforting, familiar thing.

Family Guy has been on the air for more than 20 years. And, much like the Simpsons, I'd argue that it stopped being worth watching years ago. At this point I strongly suspect people watch Family Guy more because it IS Family Guy than they do because of any aspect of the actual content. Which makes any arguments about ratings translating into quality or appreciation of the content to be somewhat specious.



Zeus posted...

That's always been true. SW:ANH is one of the biggest drawing films of all time yet there were a lot of people in their teens when it came out who never saw it

That's somewhat disingenuous.

It pulled in hundreds of millions at a time when that wasn't common. It was rereleased multiple times, so even people who didn't see it during its first theatrical release were able to see it later. Many theaters shows the preceding films when a new film was released (this is how I saw it, in 1983, when my local theater showed Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back two weekends before Return of the Jedi came out), opening them to an entirely new swath of the audience. The advent of cable in the 1980s meant that tons of people were able to watch the films on TV. The rise of the home video market means that people who had no chance of seeing it in a theater or on TV could still see it.

It's not really a stretch to say that a HUGE percentage of the overall population (at least in the West) saw it. Which is WHY it became a pop culture touchstone, in ways that "Damnation Alley" (released in the same year) never really did. How many people even know Damnation Alley exists? Do you even know what Damnation Alley is?

(I do, because it was based on a story by Roger Zelazny, and Roger Zelazny is an awesome author. But most people today don't know who Roger Zelazny even is, which is one of the many, many reasons why I will continue to hate our species forever.)

In contrast, I'd argue that, regardless of the critical popularity of Avengers: Endgame, and for all the money it pulled in (way more than "A New Hope" in 1977), vastly fewer people have ultimately seen it (or will likely ever see it). It ultimately is not - and will almost certainly never be the pop culture touchstone Star Wars/New Hope was.

And I will continue to argue that, in the future, film successes like we've seen with the MCU (or even Star Wars) will slowly become fewer and farther between, while home media content will continue to disperse. Which will in turn absolutely diminish shared culture.



Zeus posted...

And honestly, everybody at every point in history thinks that their world is unique and special because they want to feel unique and special.

To be fair, I think you're vastly overestimating the significance I attach to the phenomenon I'm discussing. For most of human history, we didn't even HAVE anything resembling shared pop culture. So if it does go away in the future, it won't be a huge world-shaking shift. Nor am I really arguing that pop culture somehow makes us superior to everyone else, while I decry the ignorant savages of the past or bemoan the social bankruptcy of the future.

But it's absolutely a facet of our current cultural paradigm that is absolutely different from most other eras of the past. And it's not really ethnocentrism or to actually acknowledge that.

And it's not really all that ridiculous to look at things sociologically and extrapolate out how things might shift based on current trends and future developments. There are people who get paid to do that as their entire career.

The shifts may be relatively minor or unimportant overall, and we can debate the "value" of said shifts, but social culture today is objectively different from what it was in 2000, which in turn was objectively different than it was in 1980, and it will almost certainly be objectively different again in 2040. Plenty of underlying facets may be the same (and those may have still been the same 500 years ago, a thousand years ago, or even ten-thousand years ago), but lots of cultural facets have shifted as well. That's just life.



Zeus posted...

Yes, things change, but tv catching on in peoples' homes and then everybody having a computer isn't the world-changing paradigm you think it is. We're just links in a great chain.

You're absolutely out of your mind if you think the last 200 years of human history aren't qualitatively different than most of the rest of human history, though. So that's not really a valid argument.

That's not to say that human nature as a whole has changed (I'd argue it hasn't, and that's the root of a lot of our problems), nor that there are elements that have strong continuity for most of human history, or even that modern culture is inherently superior (that's just basic ethnocentrism), but you can't really radically change nearly every facet of how humans live and experience the world and not see qualitative changes in behavior and culture.

Like it or not, technology HAS changed us in a lot of ways. We're different from the humans of the prior 8000 or so years in the same way they were different from the humans of 50000 years prior, and so on.
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Zeus posted...

People have always had wildly different interpretation of events. While people like to think that life was more uniform, keep in mind that the US has always had competing press and the lack of regulation in the news has ensured multiple narratives exist.

Yes, but I'd argue that in the past, different perspectives tended to be linked to ethnic/political distinctions (ie, the Spanish Empire saw the New World and what happened there in very different terms than the French or English, for instance). In shared cultural spheres (like the lesser US or the greater Western cultural sphere in general), you tend to have slow consensus formed through interaction. The only real limit you'd have for most of human history was physical distance.

Today we've kind of functionally eliminated physical distance as a limiting factor, though political and social sphere distinctions are still extant (ie, the Chinese are going to tend to see the world very differently than a teenager in Iowa). But we've simultaneously made it easier than ever before in human history to ONLY interact with people who already agree with everything you already personally believe (the echo box scenario), so people can essentially create their own sociocultural bubbles by consciously seeking out like-minded people, regardless of location.

50 years ago I'd generally have the same sociocultural outlook as my neighbors, because we'd mostly be exposed to the same information sources, hone and disseminate opinions via interaction with similar people, be molded by similar cultural expectations and assumptions, and so on. That's still a factor (and likely will always be), but now I can also deliberately seek out others to interact with to reinforce my existing philosophy while locking out anyone who disagrees or attempts to make me question my world-view.

Even here, I could easily have just clicked ignore on your account and safely hid from everything you said rather than attempt to engage with you. If I was a less conflict-driven personality (from a long line of argumentative assholes), I might have done so. By doing so, I'd prevent you from ever altering my views (or even simply forcing me to confront and explore/expound on them them via the need to defend them).

I'm not saying people in the past couldn't be closed-minded (that's likely been a human trait at least since the theoretical "Neurological Revolution" ~50000 years ago), but we've created uniquely effective ways to exacerbate that problem that have never really been possible before.
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Doctor Sleep

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Zeus posted...

JJ1 doesn't have any connections that I remember. Even Turk doesn't show up and he cameos in pretty much *every* NFMCU show. (Just looked it up and apparently the only things he's not in are JJ1, JJ3, and IF1.)

You're not seeing the connections because you're looking in the wrong direction.

The character of Jessica Jones (as in, the specific character canonical to her Netflix show, as opposed to just the character in general) appears in The Defenders. I am aware of this. Therefore, in my brain, Jessica Jones is inextricably linked to The Defenders. Regardless of whether or not the link is really mentioned or explored in her own show, the link is there. The Defenders, in turn, links back into the shows of the characters who are in The Defenders - meaning that Daredevil and Jessica Jones are linked even if neither of them ever mention anything from the other show, no characters of any kind cross over, no shared events occur, and the two shows are otherwise seemingly separate.

Knowing that all of those shows exist in a shared universe itself is the link that tends to push me into an all-or-nothing mentality. And then goes hand-in-hand with the idea that, if I can't access all, then I will access none.

No amount of logic or attempts to justify why they're not connected will ever really change that, because I acknowledge it's not a rational or logical viewpoint. But that also doesn't matter, because humans in general aren't entirely rational or logical creatures, and tons of our preferences, biases, or behaviors are fully predicated on illogical, impulsive, emotional triggers.

And to pull all of this back around to where this started, if we lived in a universe where content was rare and I felt like I was missing a major cultural milestone or felt a void of worthwhile content in my life because of not watching it, I might deliberately behave counter to my instincts and watch the show anyway, and just try to ignore the niggling sensation in the back of my brain annoyed that I'm watching Jessica Jones without watching Daredevil, judging the show on its own merits and discounting its shared universe context.

But while drowning in a sea of endless content, where I don't have the time to experience half the worthwhile things I DO want to experience, where there always seems to be more to see and do than there is time to see and do it, I don't feel particularly motivated to bother. So content that other people praise as being "incredible" or "must see" becomes an afterthought to me, because instead of watching two episodes of Jessica Jones, I just spent 2 hours writing posts on PotD.

I don't even really have the social pressure to do it, because very few of my friends in real life watch/enjoy all of the same sort of stuff I do anyway. So it's not like I constantly have my best friend calling me up because he wants to talk about how awesome the latest episode of [insert Netflix show here] is, or wanting to play [insert popular multiplayer game here]. There will likely never be a show again where I feel "compelled" to watch just because I know everyone "will be talking about it around the water cooler on Monday".

It's not like I'm sitting in a dark room staring at a wall in silence, brooding. I'm constantly consuming media (and usually multitasking to boot). I've probably experienced more entertainment media on the whole in the last 10 years than my grandparents did in their entire lives. So while from one perspective it's easy to say I'm "missing" a ton of "must see" content, from my internal perspective I don't really feel like I'm missing anything at all.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'd argue though most of human history "content" was barely a thing, because most people were illiterate,

Most of them still are, but that doesn't stop them from making videos! At any rate, things like storytelling are a form of content (and even before writing was adopted, there were a tremendous amount of stories that had been passed down through oral tradition -- probably more than a person could listen to in many lifetimes) and illiteracy rates have been greatly embellished throughout history due to common misconceptions.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Sure, the average person is never going to watch 99.9999% of any of that,

I imagine 80% of it is watched by no one.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

And in that sense, THIS content is also competing with all the other content for my attention. Every minute I spend writing a post like this one is a minute I won't be spending watching video content, playing games, or reading. Maybe if these topics had never existed, and I could have all of the spare time I spent posting here back, I might have been more open to watching shows I didn't watch or playing games I didn't play or reading books I didn't read.

Which is my original point - there are so many things a person can focus their attention on now, the overall focus of the population as a whole is far more dispersed.

I believe in multitasking. I post, watch something, and often have something like Pokemon Go going at the same time.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

That's honestly a hard argument to make, though. The best-known YouTuber has about 100 times the number of subscribers as even slightly successful one-season shows manage to pull in viewer ratings.

You'd want to compare views to views, not subs to... well, you can't subscribe to tv shows afaik.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Those numbers aren't necessarily comparable (in terms of things like Q-ratings), but I'd argue there are FAR more people in the world today who know who PewDiePie is than people who remember that Kevin (Probably) Saves the World was a show.

Only because he was on South Park. If Kevin (Probably) Saves the World was on South Park, everybody would know that, too.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Yeah, but that's misleading. For one thing, how many people remember any given meme a few years later? And moreover, I'd argue that memes don't really spawn or perpetuate as effectively now as they used to. Aside from cultural slang, it doesn't really build a generational pop culture identity.

And added to that, there's the more significant issue that WE tend to recognize those sorts of things because we kind of live our lives in the Internet sphere (which is why we're here), but more casual Internet users can go for years without ever seeing most memes (let alone understanding them). And as hard as it is for people to believe, there's still a lot of people out there who aren't online all that often at all, at least not engaging in social media.

You say that, but people are still rickrolling at weddings. Not every meme goes truly viral, but the ones that do are universal events. At this point, rickrolls are probably better known across the world than 9/11.

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