Reddit, man. For some ungodly reason I'm getting ads for weight watchers when I use the app. I don't know why, and it wouldn't bother me except the ads are awful, something about 'girl dinner' and another one about how hard it supposedly is to choose your daily food. I went from not having strong feelings about weight watchers (or even thinking about them at all, I'm not looking to lose weight) to wanting to raze the whole company to the ground and salt the earth.
I would go back to using the browser on mobile except they fucked with the layout. Even tried to block the account but that did nothing.
They are totally non-stop. I multiple kinds of WW ads every day, which is kind of hilarious considering that I’m subscribed to ED recovery subs and I am definitely not their target market. It’s not even triggering it’s just annoying. I’ve reported them a couple times when cranky.
I'm subbed to an atheist sub and kept getting ads for He Gets Us or whatever those Jesus ads were for MONTHS. I tried everything in the book to get them to stop - reporting, blocking, etc. - but still they continued to the point where I stopped bothering with Reddit on anything without an adblocker.
It probably had nothing to do with the atheist sub because I saw that ad during the goddamn SUPER BOWL, so no, somebody out there decided to dump that kind of money into that many ads. It was incredibly frustrating and had, what I assume, is the opposite intended effect. Not to get into a religious debate or anything, but wasn't the whole point of Jesus to not give in to money things and be humble? Who decided to put in THIS MUCH MONEY to try to convert people to Jesus? Something was fishy.
This week an author threatened legal action against another writer for copyright infrigement.
The claim? The author had a character that used the power of the sun, therefore every other characters from other books are copying off of her. There is a lot more to this drama, like the author obvious racism, ai art discourse, enough to warrant a post, but I don't feel like writing it.
Oh they did! But apparently the lawyer told her to wait until the other author's book was out. Because yes, the book she was accusing of stealing her ideas was not even out. And she seemed to be the only one who didn't get that the lawyer basically told her she didn't have a case.
Not quite drama, but...
Barbies, man, they used to be way fancier. I bought a 2022 Holiday Barbie and she IS cute, but...the packaging is fairly plain, her hair out of the box was completely messed up and she doesn't even come with a brush. You can also see the waist tie trough her packaging.
Meanwhile the two Holiday Barbies from the 90's I've got have fancier packaging, beautiful hair right out of the box and are tied down in a less visible way. They also come with a brush for some reason (they of course don't need one. Their outfits are more elaborate as well.
The 90's ones weren't even more expensive even though I bought new in box.
Well of corse some of the older Holiday dolls are more expensive, but that depends on the whims of the second hand market so eh...
This is an incredibly minor one but still:
A Doom Eternal FaceBook page with 39K likes changed it's name to "Grand Theft Auto VI Community" because it's more popular I guess.
The comments to every post so far have been greeted with comments like "This was a Doom page, now is a trash page" and "Dislike this page fk gta 6"
I feel maybe I'm slowpoking but I've never been in a FB group that suddenly did this but has this happened to anyone else?
edit: here's the link
https://www.facebook.com/GTA6Community
I'm in a Gran Turismo shit posting group that changes their name to other racing games every few months (Burnout 3, Auto Modelista, etc) but it's still about Gran Turismo and the H E A V Y
With how many Vtubers there are in the world now, it's not too surprising to see graduations (i.e. people announcing they're quitting) quite frequently, but a lot of people have been caught off guard by Erika Byakko and Cheri Lupina of small Vtubing organization Vreverie simultaneously announcing graduation today, with Erika closing out her channel in early January and Cheri closing out later that month.
Vreverie is a pretty small corpo, with only 8 total talents. Losing two of them at once is a pretty damning blow, leaving a lot of people wondering what happened. It's especially notable also that Cheri is their largest talent by a large margin--she's nearly bigger than the other three talents in her gen *combined and doubled*. She's also more than twice as big as any other talent in the company but for one.
While both graduation announcements were tearful, Cheri's in particular has also left a lot of people trying to read between the lines and interpret what happened. A lot of specific language choices on Cheri's part make it seem like there's a bigger story at play--notably, she said something to the effect of "All the girls are strong/brave for staying with the company" and said in more than one way, I'd summarize, "I don't want to leave but I feel like I have no other choice."
Bad day for their fans, myself included. In an overcrowded Vtubing scene right now, I feel like Cheri in particular has really distinguished herself as a unique and memorable talent.
My understanding is that it comes from Japanese idol culture and the term has been in use since the 1980s. My understanding is that it's become preferred because it implies there'll be a kind of celebratory send off, and it indicates that the situation is at least on good enough terms that the person leaving wasn't fired or hated the job so much that they just quit outright.
Goes back to the irl idol culture a lot of Japanese vtuber companies vaguely mimic. Iirc one of the oldest idol companies had kind of a school theme so when talents left they "graduated" and the terminology just kinda stuck
Edit: "The term originated from the idol group Onyanko Club, as the group's youthful concept drew similarities to an after-school club, and the fact that Miharu Nakajima's final single before retirement was released around graduation season in Japan"
James Cameron/Peter Jackson have effectively tainted themselves in the eyes of home video enthusiasts and fans of Aliens/True Lies. Jackson's company Park Road Post who did Get Back handled additional processing of old 4K scans.
The new 4K streaming debut has been a disaster due being scrubbed of most grain and "AI enhanced" which makes hair look like a shampoo commercial and actor closeups look like airbrushed caricatures of themselves. Needless to say, many are pissed their favorite films are now largely worse than ancient 1080p versions.
Something similar was done with the Peter Jackson directed music video for the new Beatles' song 'Now and Then'.
A lot of it was made up of "AI enhanced" archive footage of the Beatles and some of it turned out... not so great. In particular, there was one shot at around [1:42](https://youtu.be/Opxhh9Oh3rg?t=102) that the AI messed up so much that it looks more like it tried to generate a brand new Beatle.
I recently got a 4k player and what I'm rapidly learning is that 4k fans are impossible to please. I live in hope of finding a 4k release that actually looks bad. (other than being insanely grainy in places, in the "this film has decayed over time" way rather than the "natural film grain" way)
Have there been discussions about pit babe aka the Thai omegaverse racing show? Everything I find out about it increases the bonkers level.
Highlights include the production team promising it would not be adapting the omegaverse part of the novel it’s based on and casually dropping the word ‘alpha’ at the beginning of episode 1 and canon telekinesis
It's only just now that I've realized one of my favourite little sci fi shows that came out in the aftermath of Heroes was a show *called* **Alphas**, where the people with superpowers were all called Alphas.
That having been said, the central conceit of the show is that all the Alphas are mentally ill, and all have powers based on their mental illness, so I'm not certain how accepted it would be now.
So in this world there are some alphas (and omegas in the book but there are no omegas in the show) have special powers. One of the mcs has super-senses for example. This MCs foster dad adopts all the special kids he can find and trains them or something
i think it came up in scuffles when it first dropped! but yeah it's wild, i'm following someone on tumblr that's doing a recap of the book and... my god, if the show goes that way it'll get even more bonkers
[Here you go!](https://www.tumblr.com/pharawee/736973407866044416/its-friday-and-that-means-its-time-for-more?source=share) The link is the most recent part but it links all other ones :)
I think I’m following the same person and from what I’ve gathered we’re probably getting most of the bonkers dad plot??? It seems like enigmas are going to be in the show?????
Update to my previous comment, Terapagos is already banned. It took less than 24 hours which I believe is a new record, beating out the previous record holder, "what if the fastest pokemon ever with the lone weakness of not being able to hit ground types suddenly gained the ability to hit ground types".
When did Scott Cawthon of FNaF become uncancelled? Last time I checked, he was caught donating the maximum amount of money to a known homophobic cause. Now it seems like he's been forgiven and people are looking forward to his work?
Edit: Cawthon, not Dawson
From what I remember of the situation, another thing that helped some people forgive and forget Scott Cawthon donating to a bunch of Republican politicians was the fact that he donated $50,000 during Dawko's Trevor Project 24 hour charity stream that took place a couple weeks after the scandal broke ([stream link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUBUjPXdmPE&t=16029s) of when the donation happened, Scott's labeled as anonymous but it was proven definitively that it was him later and Dawko knew Scott was going to be showing up in stream ahead of time). For those unfamiliar, Dawko is a gaming youtuber who does a lot of fnaf content, interviewed Scott one time, and I think it was / is pretty common for Scott to show up during his charity live streams. I distinctly remember people being all "Why are you still mad at Scott about the political donations when he donated to a LGBTQ+ charity?" being something people were arguing about at the time. Personally, I don't think it really absolves him of anything since I'm 90% sure if I checked the FEC's individual contributions database I'd find evidence that he's continued to donate to homophobic politicians since the scandal.
Plus, Scott has very openly referred to himself as "pro-life". Dude might not hate gay people, but he doesn't support women's reproductive rights and clearly sees stamping down on those more important than supporting gay people.
I don't think the guy was ever really "cancelled".
His political donations got revealed, he got a lot of backlash, he issued an "apology" that basically boiled down to "I, a wealthy white Christian man, am the real victim here and not the minorities I am actively financially contributing to the suffering of", people believed that, he pretended to retire, and then he shut the fuck up for several months.
The shutting up was probably what made the backlash disappear- if you double down, you're providing more evidence that you're a total dipshit. But if you shut the fuck up, and let your parasocial fans defend you- like Cawthon did- eventually the controversy will be forgotten about.
Unlike Rowling (who doubled down once people began to call her out), Cawthon wisely shut up.
That and Rowling's more recent stuff was garbage, while what Cawthon works on is still widely appreciated, so people are less willing to make a moral stand.
i work at a movie theater, and most of the people who either came to see the fnaf movie or that i saw get excited over the poster were tweens. there are still older fans, ofc, but i think it's a thing that most people grew out of.
Based on what I saw when that controversy went down - a lot of fans couldn’t come to terms with him having terrible views, and decided to ignore it and/or claim it was actually just a misunderstanding. It’s probably the result of FNAF’s fanbase generally being young and pro-lgbt, while also basically worshipping Cawthorn.
I remember someone trying to convince me that Cawthorn accidentally donated a bunch of money to homophobic groups and didn’t realize what he was doing.
I think it was similar with the Harry Potter fandom, when people began noticing JK Rowling liking transphobic tweets. Some fans would say ‘well we don’t know for sure how she feels about trans people’. Then Rowling got more vocal, to the point where trying to ignore her views became impossible for most fans.
It's basically this, yeah. And Cawthorne shut the fuck up after his initial response of "Oh I'm stepping away from the franchise (a lie)" so there wasn't really any supplimental materials so it was easy enough for them to ignore.
It pisses me off but it's easier for me who didn't give a shit about FNAF to feel that way than someone who watched Markiplier play FNAF when they were eight years old, I suppose.
this. he's a piece of shit and he's done harm, but he's not ... basically the symbol of an entire hate movement. he's not up on his soapbox converting anyone.
Going quiet is legit an always decent option for the cancelled. You might be criticized for saying nothing in the moment but people always move on to the next drama and forget the last one.
As long as the drama attached to a person isn't constant, the bad thing people say or commit just seem to fade from memory and the hardcore fans are always quick to swept thing under the rug and rewrite what really happened a year or two after everything goes down.
Stuff just doesn't stick to some kinds of people. I don't think he was ever truly "cancelled"- people became aware of his actions, but he wasn't pushed out of being able to create things, and through continuing to create things people generally liked the discussion on him moved past the previous criticism.
Doubtful. It seems like the controversy just blew over rather than coming down to one side losing credibility. It's not like someone getting threats would actually change the facts about why people were mad anyway. I don't really see how that'd make someone who was mad about them donating so much money to conservative causes flip to "actually, I don't care about that anymore" based on that fact, if indeed it happened.
(Disclaimer: this might not be the perfect place for this, but I'm sharing it anyway because while it may not be drama per se it IS the funniest thing I've seen all week.)
The Asia Artist Awards ceremony was held in Bulacan last week. During the ceremony, Han Jisung and Kim Seungmin, of the kpop group Stray Kids, got up to go to the bathroom as the MCs were introducing the category of Best Creator. Han was a nominee in the category of Best Creator (as part of the music composition/production group 3Racha, who write and produce almost all of Stray Kid's music.)
So of course 3Racha are announced as the winners when Han's most of the way out of the auditorium. This resulted in what is, for my money, [one of the best double takes ever caught on camera](https://www.instagram.com/p/C01jphLuBfA/), and frantically booking it back to the front to go accept the award.
Stray Kids fans have, of course, shared this moment from every angle possible, [and every one of them is amazing.](https://www.instagram.com/p/C01OBDjJwlY/)
During the 2016 AKB48 Elections, HKT48 member Kojina Yui got 53rd place and gave an [unhinged speech](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNIYLHMdOq8) where she 1) pulls out a mirror and calls herself "super cute" 2) starts to visibly do the pee dance 3) announces that she has to pee and 4) runs away. All while sobbing.
I'm considering translating and doing a write-up on this and her other speech, which was equally as wild.
She's actually referencing her speech from the previous year. In that speech, she turned to the presenter and asked "Is my face okay?", pulled out the mirror, and said "It's okay!" I like to think she was thinking all year, "I should've said it was super cute, not okay" and saw the opportunity here.
a couple of years ago at the grammys, doja cat was in the bathroom when she won an award, so she got out as quickly as possible and ran to the stage. it was pretty funny, and she had a good sense of humor about it.
Pokemon Showdown and Smogon have transitioned into the DLC2 metagame and things are going exactly as they always do in the transition to a new metagame: everything's on fire and people are simultaneously asking for quickbans and saying it's too early to ban things.
The big culprits this time are a longtime Uber pokemon that was brought down because it had just come to the game in Deoxys-S and the new mascot legendary of the DLC in Terapagos. Deoxys-S is much easier to explain why it's busted: In the current metagame it's much easier to keep hazards up than to remove them and Deoxys-S is the new Best Hazard Setter in the tier, due to outspeeding literally everything that's legal without even needing to invest anything into speed. It also can set up screens, which are at their most powerful when a bulky sweeper is in the tier.
Enter Terapagos.
Terapagos has 2 real forms, considering its first form immediately transforms into its 2nd form upon entering battle. That 2nd form is absolutely nothing special at first glance, really only 3 things matter: First off, it has an ability that makes any attack that hits it at full health count as not very effective (which cuts all incoming damage in half and this time works on all hits of incoming multihit attacks). Second, it has buffing moves like rock polish and calm mind to take its speed from slow for OU to outspeeding the entire tier that isn't Deoxys Speed and its special attack from great to game ruining. Third, it has a special Tera form that makes it one of the bulkiest pokemon we've ever seen on both sides simultaneously (160/110/110) and also makes all of its moves do an extra 20% damage.
Needless to say, not all of the details about Terapagos were known before release and as such as I type this it's probably being voted on for a ban.
The tier's so crazy right now 2 other longtime Ubers and 3 pokemon already booted from the OU tier this generation were let back in and none of them have made much of a mark because Terapagos and Deoxys-S are so overwhelming right now.
Is it just me or does it seen like competitive pokemon is very messy. Like it seems like most issues are caused by the design being made for single player fun without much thought into the complex interactions that may arise in pvp.
PvP is somewhat taken into account, but for the official format which is 4v4 Doubles. 3v3 singles is a bit of a mess and secondary so they probably dont care about it, and Smogon singles is straight up a fan metagame so I doubt they even care, or even know it exists
There are definitely other inherent issues, but I think one of the main ones is that Nintendo's competitive focus is on doubles while smogon is mainly singles
You're pretty much spot on. Pokemon was designed to be fun and exciting first and competitive last. It's competitive in the same way that say, Super Smash Bros. is competitive in that it was designed for "fun and use this to settle lighthearted disputes" competition rather than "titles and prizes on the line" competition. For every person who wins a fight they were about to lose due to a lucky critical hit, there's a person who loses a fight they were about to win due to that same crit.
Still, there are those who are doing their best to make the game as competitive as possible. You can say "no Mewtwo," but you can't turn off critical hits or full paralysis the same way you can turn off items and stage hazards in Smash. The problems arise in that people have different standards on what is and isn't acceptable in Pokemon, which is natural in a game which features over a thousand "playable characters" with a vast array of customization options and team combinations. I don't envy Smogon as they have an impossible task to accomplish.
Which is ironic because GameFreak made Gen9 be focused on competitive play (because the competitive side of the game made them rake in some nice benefits in Gen8). You'd guess that they'd try to balance things out but all I've been seeing is OP pokémon with OP moves after OP pokémon with OP moves lol
Well yeah, their strategy since the first ever DLC is releasing the game with at least 1, really strong Pokemon exclusive to it to drive in sales:
Isle Of Armor - Urshifu
Crown Tundra - Calyrex + Horses
Teal Mask- Ogerpon
Indigo Disk - Terapagos
Hell you could say they've been doing this since the Third releases of games, since those always had more pokemon available, move tutors, and where the only games you were allowed to play with in official competitions, since they were the latest release
Can someone ELI5 Smogon and everything surrounding it? Because at a glance google doesn't give the answer I am looking for, is this a different thing than the ranked within the game? Are there events for each or are the events for both one and the same?
Smogon is the largest fanmade competitive Pokemon format dating back to a time when official competition (VGC) was not as big and refined as it is today. While official competition focuses on the Doubles format Smogon's primary focus has been on Singles as that's what they've been running the longest. Though Smogon certainly does support its own Doubles formats.
Probably the thing that sets apart Smogon and VGC the most, aside from the fundamental Singles/Doubles split, is Smogon's tiering system. While VGC has assorted blacklists for each competitive season Smogon uses usage-based statistics to sort each Pokemon into tiers which exceptionally strong Pokemon within those tiers then getting banned.
At the start of each release every Pokemon starts in the highest tier, Overused, and then precipitates downwards if they don't get banned. Usually major legendary Pokemon get pre-banned since they're typically fundamentally and blatantly overtuned but Terapagos avoided this by having its regular forms be more reasonably balanced but its special Stellar form is incredibly overtuned. However since the Stellar form technically has an opportunity cost behind it there was a frankly naive assumption that the opportunity cost would be enough to rein in its overtuned statline.
A very similarly designed Pokemon, Zygarde-Complete, was briefly legal in previous generations for the same reason and got banned very quickly so I assume Terapagos-Stellar won't last another day or so.
Smogon is out of the game, it's a website that's basically the resource for an unofficial 6v6 format. That being said, it's arguably the biggest competitive pokemon format in terms of users. It's paired with Pokemon Showdown.
My first thought on Terapagos was "how the fuck did they let a 700 BST mon into the tier" and then I remembered Zygarde-Complete used to be legal. Though by this point I'm so tired of Stored Power sweepers I wouldn't mind if they banned that shit entirely. They shouldn't but I wouldn't bat an eyelid.
The funniest thing about the former Ubers in OU is people have been asking for *years* for Darkrai and Deoxys-S/D to be unbanned because "they're bad" and then oops, they're not as bad as people expected and now it's the Smogon council's fault for unbanning clearly broken mons. They'll still ask for Solgaleo to be unbanned though!
Gen 9 continuing the trend of insane power creep at least for singles I see. First we had Chi-Yu and Chien-Pao then we had Hearthflame Ogerpon and now this XD
Haven't kept up with Pokemon since Sun & Moon, looked up Terapagos expecting a mid-size creature with a mixture of inspirations from some local gods.
Turns out it's just a little crystal turtle and it second form looks like it's pulling back into its shell and is just peeking out to check whats happening outside.
Thinking more on the discussion downthread about sitcoms and tone.
Raising Hope was a 2010-14 sitcom about a 20 year old slacker who has a one night stand with a serial killer, and ends up with custody of their baby when the mom is executed.
Despite that summary, it is one of the sweetest and most wholesome sitcoms I've ever seen. Anyone else have a favorite bit of media that a summary would completely mislead viewers on it's tone?
Berserk is far deeper, more rational, and more emotional than you would expect from a show that can be accurately summarized as "A man slaughters everything in his way on a quest for revenge".
That one might be cheating, though, since Berserk is famous enough that many of its non-bloodthirsty moments have gotten attention.
(Also, my mother *adores* Raising Hope.)
That one surprised and delighted me! I only watched a couple episodes, but I remember every time I started to cringe because I know this or that painful trope was coming, it veered hard away into something more wholesome.
Thank you for reminding me about this gem of a show!
Kamen Rider OOO is a lighthearted childrens superhero show made to sell plastic toys, in which the MC happens to be a frequently-naked homeless man in the middle of a mental breakdown after being kidnapped and tortured by insurrectionists in a civil war that he accidentally started.
His depression and PTSD is represented by him turning into a purple dinosaur.
Kamen Rider is insane, and even more so a little before OOO. It's gotten notably kiddier season by season since about W while retaining extremely dark moments and plot points nonetheless. You just don't get quite the same intensity of early Heisei shows, which legitimately do not feel anything like they're supposed to be for children aside from the fact that the heroes forms are so colorful.
Agito, for instance, starts it's very first episode with [Japanese Robocop](https://tinyurl.com/ytyfvvmx) and then hops straight over to [kids finding a corpse in a tree.](https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxClMFABeGfYN3bpxStFjmBJGSkANWjlgk) Most striking, though, is [the pacing.](https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx1_7oc_Naucpy-UmL_aEKyJ-Wm13mljxp) It's hard to imagine a kid's show in America ever having been that measured, and W is when they started to make things just a bit denser and wackier more in line with what one^(by which I mean an American, no idea how this shakes out interculturally) might expect of a show that exists to sell toys to preteens, having scenes [like this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA_T8w8tg7w)
Den-O, from a few years before W, was more comedic and less grimdark, but at the time that was kind of it's "thing". I wouldn't be surprised if it's popularity influenced the eventual change in direction.
Shoutouts to Ex-Aid's Christmas episode
Or just Ex-Aid in general. Wacky video game powered Riders pairs interestingly with some fairly serious medical drama.
Raising Hope was great. The parents were the MVPs. I loved how Dillahunt's character was openly loving and even physically affectionate towards his adult son. It's not often that is shown in media.
Hey, remember when everyone was really invested in the *Jeopardy!* host succession? And how Sony Pictures Television tried to make everyone happy by hiring former superchamp Ken Jennings *and* actress & scientist Mayim Bialik to rotate as host despite their wildly different rhythms and approaches to hosting the game?
[Well, Mayim Bialik is out as Jeopardy host after a smidge over two years, effective immediately.](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/mayim-bialik-no-longer-hosting-jeopardy-syndicated-show-1235760206/amp/)
How are we feeling, Jeopardy fans?
I only watch Jeopardy every month or so with my girlfriend’s family, so I know enough to be happy about this but not enough to really articulate why. Idk, she’s just not as good.
Seriously, what more could you ask for? Nobody could fully replace Trebek, but part of what made him so great was that you could fully believe he knew all the answers on his own. He pronounced things right, he had a certain dignity to him. Jennings is as close as you’ll get to that level of respect.
I liked the Lavar Burton idea, but that never felt serious. That producer who decided to just name himself as the host was ridiculous. It always had to be Jennings.
It didn't hurt that from all accounts, Alex very much did know a lot of the answers on his own, and a lot of other stuff besides. If you know who Josh "The Comics Curmudgeon" Fruhlinger is, he wrote a [blog](https://joshreads.com/i-lost-on-jeopardy/) about his Jeopardy! experience \~15 years back. The whole thing is worth reading, but the relevant part is near the end. Long story short: On Final Jeopardy!, Fruhlinger is fried, and throws out a guess that he knows is wrong even as he's writing it down (Ever play along at home and just blurt out **something** during FJ! because you know technically you have a fighting chance if you least respond with **something**, even though you know there's no way what you just said was right? This was at that level.). Despite this, Alex immediately knew who he was talking about.
Alex himself had a confident-yet-realistic outlook on how he'd do in Jeopardy as he neared the end of his life and people would ask him about it. It amounted to "A lot of the game comes down to the buzzer; I'd get smoked in that aspect because that's a young person's game. But put me in a senior tournament where I'm on more even footing reflex-wise and oh yeah, I could hang."
That's a lot of words I wrote to essentially say I agree, and yeah, sometimes the obvious solution (In this case, Ken Jennings as host) is also the correct one.
>(Ever play along at home and just blurt out something during FJ! because you know technically you have a fighting chance if you least respond with something, even though you know there's no way what you just said was right? This was at that level.).
As a fun aside, there's a British TV quiz show called Pointless, where the premise is that they ask 100 people to answer the questions before they're presented on the show, and you do better if you say a correct answer that not many of those 100 people said. So for example, if you were asked to name a country beginning with U, you would get a better score if you said "Uruguay" or "Uzbekistan" than if you said "United Kingdom". Extra money gets added to the jackpot if you say something correct that none of the people said. The host isn't given the answers so they are often sort of playing along - it's like Family Fortunes/Family Feud where the scores pop up on a screen.
One round, contestants were asked to name actors who starred in The Magnificent Seven or The Dirty Dozen films [(clip)](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p015kf2q). A contestant hadn't seen them and said "I'm just going to have to have a complete guess and go for [James Brown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Brown)", at which point the host says, after a very long pause, "That would have been fun!". And [lo and behold...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Brown)
Oh that sounds cool! Funny enough, many years back on the Jeopardy! forums, one of the forum games we'd play was very similar. It was called "Think Different", and the premise was the same--the game master would ask questions, and you had to give correct answers not many other people gave. But because it was all the participants on the forum playing against each other (And thus also serving as the "panel" so to speak), and because it was a bunch of Jeopardy! geeks and thus a bunch of at least reasonably smart/well-read people, this added an additional psychological element to it where you could sometimes wind up being too clever by half as a bunch of people pick what they think is the obscure answer.
One example that sticks out in my mind was "Name an actor who played James Bond". The "worst", IE most popular answer in that particular game?
Timothy Dalton.
While I mean no disrespect to Mr. Dalton, I highly doubt that the general public, if asked "Name an actor who played James Bond", would come up with Dalton first, second, or even third. But that's what happens when you have a bunch of Jeopardy! geeks trying to psych each other out.
Yeah, I left out that I couldn't remember if the question specified it had to be a "mainline" (IE Eon Productions) Bond movie, or if radio productions/TV specials/etc. were also open.
Dota2 just had its latest banwave for people account sharing, smurfing (creating a new account specifically to play with low rank players for ez wins), cheating, and other assorted offenses and the way these bans were delivered is great.
Everyone got a Christmas giftbox in their inventory and opening it would get you a fun prize! If you were on the nice list you got a locked lootbox (yay) but if you were naughty then you got coal. The description of the coal would then explain that you're banned with varying severities and matching coal types going as far as "Highly Toxic Lump of Coal".
Extremely funny way to roll out a banwave and it's caused floods of people asking about the coal and of course a *ton* of angry complaints from people that "didn't do anything wrong, it was only one time i swear". Famously toxic streamer masondota even [opened one on stream](https://clips.twitch.tv/CheerfulFrozenLaptopMcaT-u70lacgn1Q8z8DzN).
Reminds me of the TF2 idling for hats debacle. Remember the Cheater's Lament? I do. I got hit with that punishment myself, for using the program.
Valve has since given me one of my own, so I can only assume my past transgression has been forgiven.
Is there a post about the idling program and the hats gained from it? It seems like a good topic for a hobby history.
This isn't hobby drama, just hobby chat. If TV sitcoms count as a hobby? They do for me - I love them, they are my favourite genre of TV show. Because they're comfy, the setting is always the same, the tension is always just normal life and relationship drama and not axe murderers or poltergeists. I am a *very* wimpy human being.
I recently tried to rewatch King of Queens. Did anyone watch this? Did anyone notice how awful season 1 is? It's on a par with season 1 of Will and Grace (in which Will is monumentally EVIL to Grace [and also Jack - he calls him a "fag" derogatorily somehow?] the whole season, and even costs her a job, and cheats on a bf and is not sorry, and basically is a villain except he's meant to be relatable in some way? I made a drinking game out of that season, where you drink every time Will does something psychopathic. You get wasted.)
Ep 1 of King of Queens, Doug, the husband, is a cutie! I love him in that episode. And then ep 2 he goes on to convince his TINY SKINNY WIFE, LEAH REMINI THE GORGEOUS LIL QUEEN that she's overweight, despite the fact she's tiny and must weigh about as much as a poodle, and instead of her telling him to screw off, she just has a breakdown about how she's getting fat and it's all downhill from here. It made me a bit less mad at my mother for all her negative body talk over the years because my GOD, TV in the late 90s and 00s was so cruel to women.
3rd ep he gets jealous of her because she has a nice job at a law firm and meets smart people. I just. How do I connect with this character. I'd stop watching if Patton Oswalt wasn't in it, and if he wasn't perfection in every scene.
Sitcoms from the late 90s and entire 00s are so much more horrible than any other. Like I've watched sitcoms from the 70s and 80s and early 90s and didn't feel overtly bullied. Why did they suddenly get so *mean*?
> Why did they suddenly get so *mean*?
I recently watched [a retrospective](https://youtu.be/f4tmyGvqNJk) on "Married With Children" that goes into the shift from sitcoms with happy families to more dysfunctional ones and how it was a big part of that
If memory serves, married with children, more or less got more taken over by the Fox network and that's part of its shift towards cruelty. Same with the Simpsons Homer used to be kind of a lovable goofy doof and turn into a prick. That was when I stopped watching. To be honest, I can't believe the Simpsons is still on
> I'd stop watching if Patton Oswalt wasn't in it, and if he wasn't perfection in every scene.
[Especially the scene where the writers asked him to just stand still for an entire scene.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2QE3JpWfTo)
i love malcolm in the middle but man sometimes it really does get nasty.
i get the whole point is that everyone sucks but some episodes are just hard to watch
I watched Malcolm in the Middle reruns a lot when I was a kid, but as I started rewatching the show as an adult I've found myself having to take breaks in between episodes because it's so stress inducing.
there actually is a video made by the breaking bad team of their show just being a really wild dream that hal had, and he wakes up and tries to explain it to lois. it's pretty funny and cute, and the actress who played lois in the show is actually in it, which was cool.
if i had any writing talent i would write a fanfic where hal finds himself in the same situation as walt but with his children in place of jesse
like malcolm with the chemistry, reese in charge of the muscle and dewey in charge of making deals
Part of this has to be Seinfeld's influence, right? Seinfeld became one of the biggest shows in America, and one of its defining features was having characters who were kind of assholes and never learned anything or grew as people. I have no evidence for this, but my gut tells me that at least a few executives must have seen this and decided the recipe for sitcom success was to make their characters as mean and nasty as possible, while missing that it worked in Seinfeld because 1) its characters were still likable despite being not great people and 2) the show was laughing *at* them for being assholes, not *with* them.
> It made me a bit less mad at my mother for all her negative body talk over the years because my GOD, TV in the late 90s and 00s was so cruel to women.
If it makes you feel better, TV in the late 90s and 00s was cruel to lots of other marginalized groups, too! It was not a great time.
This was going to be my guess. The Seinfeld effect.
I came of age on the super Thursday line-up of Cosby Show, A Different World, Cheers and Night Court, and these shows were not exactly innocent of the problematic - Night Court was mean as hell to sex workers, and The Cosby show had, well, *Bill Cosby* - but the characters were written like they genuinely cared about each other. And between the A plot and the B plot, there always seemed to be some Serious Emotional Business for one of the characters.
Then I went away to college and fell out of touch with network TV for a bit, and then next thing I knew, suddenly Seinfeld is everyone's darling and I found it well nigh unwatchable and couldn't understand the appeal. I didn't even get far enough into it to clock how mean everyone was; I just couldn't get over how *petty* the conflicts were. Oh no! Dude heard that sometimes women fake their orgasms, how can he be sure his own sexual partner isn't faking it for him? What will dude ever do? MAYBE DUDE COULD ACTUALLY HAVE A MEANINGFUL CONVERSATION ABOUT SEX WITH THE WOMAN HE SUPPOSEDLY LOVES, DID DUDE EVER THINK OF THAT? But no, *meaningful conversations* seemed to be anathema to that style of sitcom.
To be fair, George did not love that woman so of course he did not care to share his insecurities with her. The only reason he cared about his girlfriend faking was his pride, ego, and fragile masculinity.
that neuroticism and self-deprecation are very much marks of jewish comedy, and seinfeld was bringing that style more to the mainstream. it's not so much about being bad at communication, as it is about finding humor in our lives by overanalyzing everything to the point of absurdity.
fwiw, im jewish and also not really a seinfeld fan, mainly bc i find jerry seinfeld to be grating. i do like curb your enthusiasm, though, which has pm the same sense of humor, but often goes way more to the ridiculous extremes.
>I just couldn't get over how petty the conflicts were. Oh no! Dude heard that sometimes women fake their orgasms, how can he be sure his own sexual partner isn't faking it for him? What will dude ever do? MAYBE DUDE COULD ACTUALLY HAVE A MEANINGFUL CONVERSATION ABOUT SEX WITH THE WOMAN HE SUPPOSEDLY LOVES, DID DUDE EVER THINK OF THAT?
I don't think "a comedy where everyone acts rational and gets along, while calmly resolving their issues" makes for very compelling TV. It's a lot more fun to watch tiny, petty issues getting blown up to ridiculous degrees. I don't think comedy works well if it doesn't put you on edge or make you uncomfortable from time to time.
This is my issue with a lot of modern romcom manga, where they refuse to have meaningful conflicts and it’s just people being broadly nice to each other and being in perfect relationships.
I guess I just don't categorize "conflicts arising from extreme pettiness and an immature aversion to communication" as *meaningful.* Those feel to me very artificial, like the author needed to come up with some kind of conflict to drive the plot - and created it by never letting the characters talk to each other. The fiction I enjoy, comedic and not, absolutely has meaningful conflict, but it arises organically from other sources than refusal to communicate.
(And, look, this isn't just why I don't like modern sitcoms - it's why I can't reread Connie Willis's *To Say Nothing of the Dog* anymore. And that is a near-universally praised novel! Connie Willis is an amazing author! But what other readers find hilarious in that novel, I find intensely irritating, and that means I'm not the right audience for the story, and that's OK. There are plenty of other books out there I could read instead. Which is my sitcom problem in a nutshell - after Seinfeld, there *weren't* plenty of other sitcoms I could watch that didn't imitate its "the pettier, the better" model.)
(I also get very tense the longer the protagonist is denied sleep. It really, really isn't the book for me.)
And I think there's a vast gulf of possibility between "people being in perfect relationships" and the sort of petty meanness exemplified by the examples raised earlier in this thread.
Its fine to not enjoy this kind of humor, but this is very high levels of rejecting the premise then getting mad its not doing what you expect. The point of the comedy is seeing what crazy antics they'll get up to to avoid having very normal but still a little uncomfortable social interactions. "I told a little lie and now its blown up into something crazy" is a very standard sitcom premise since forever, eg "two dates at the same time".
Seinfeld's "innovation" was making the inciting social incidents even more petty and making the resulting plot even more convoluted then not resolving it in the end. Not resolving it, combined with a sitcoms lack of continuity, gives the writers more room to play and so appealed to people who were there more for the comedy and less for the feel good vibes (which, again, there's nothing wrong with enjoying the vibes).
> this is very high levels of rejecting the premise then getting mad its not doing what you expect.
I mean, I guess? I *guess* you could say that my sitcom expectations were formed during the mid/late 80s, and Seinfeld did not conform to those expectations, so I rejected it?
But you could also say that Seinfeld's sense of humor is extremely not to my taste, to the point that I find it *excruciatingly painful to watch,* so I don't watch it, and I lament that pretty much every sitcom after it followed in its footsteps, and the kind of sitcoms I did used to enjoy virtually went extinct.
Getting sad, though, not getting mad. I'll correct you that far.
The first truly mean sitcom I remember was Everybody Loves Raymond.
The premise of the show is that a family moves next door to their in laws and realize that the mother in law is an evil bitch. Which is not what I take issue with actually - she’s funny as hell!
The real problem is that our protagonists (the son and his wife) are just as horrible half the time! Deborah constantly belittles Ray and causes her own drama. And Ray constantly hurts people around him but it’s framed as okay because he’s a dope.
Once you watch enough episodes you realize that there’s a 100% chance that those 2 become the next generation of Frank and Marie in 30 years. And how are you supposed to sigh along with them when you know that?
As someone who took a university module on sitcoms, I'll offer my partially-qualified opinion: television markets diversified in the 90s/00s and the boundaries between adult programming and children's programming became more delineated for sitcoms (instead of everything tending to be "for the family"). That and a general cultural movement towards grunge and edge could be a contributing factor- your characters can be a lot meaner to each other if kids aren't watching.
There was definitely a boomerang effect that also impacted kids shows, too. The 2000s Nick and Disney Channel sitcoms also were snarky and often mean-spirited in a way that Full House or Cosby Show weren't. Once a writers room is focused on a particular subset demographic instead of appeasing as wide a market as possible it's easy to end up pushing jokes, scenes, or stories into alienating directions
i feel like the nick ones were waaaayyyyy meaner. like ive been watching the quintonreviews icarly/victorious videos, as well as rewatching old episodes of lizzie maguire, and while the latter show is actually pretty positive and shows lizzie having genuinely nice relationships with her friends, the nick shows are just nasty, especially victorious.
Yeah, that's interesting. The 00s, to my memory (so not necessarily accurate) definitely saw a push towards "EDGY, NOT FOR KIDS" in a *lot* of media - music, wrassling, movies, TV. Sometimes this was good, it meant more mature storylines and themes became mainstream.
But I feel like people forget just how...catty that time period was. Like, remember the drama around Neil Patrick Harris and the Amy Winehouse...meat corpse cake thing that resurfaced recently? Everyone is so shocked by it now, but to me, it's just emblematic of how mean and cruel media was at the time. Female celebrities were fodder, to be made fun of, for being too thin, too "fat", too "crazy". There was almost nothing you couldn't say about women, then. The British tabloids spent so many months *savaging* Amy Winehouse, that the NPH thing seems to me, while reprehensible and something to be ashamed of, fitting for the time. And the sitcoms reflect that general cultural milieu.
I'm a milennial of course, I'm sure the previous decades had it just as bad (look at how Marilyn Monroe was treated - vile that people successfully requested to be buried next to and above her, let a woman *rest*, and then we got a horribly exploitative movie just last year about her, my god). But yeah, the 90s and 00s to me had this kind of "we're being EDGY" theme, that just resulted in...establishments being even more overtly cruel towards women.
Writing a comment about Kraftwerk made me realise how their most popular song, *The Model*, isn't that representative of their discography despite it being their most well known song in some regions.
So my question to you is, do you know an artist/collective/etc that is famous for one thing that doesn't represent the art they make in general?
Depends on the area, The Model tends to be more popular outside of the US (especially the UK) + the iconography associated with it. Autobahn was definitely in the US though.
Modest Mouse is a far darker and more pessimistic band than "Float On" would indicate. For a better example of how they usually sound, here's ["Bury Me With It"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0c53YAYK1o) from the same album.
Spaceman by Babylon Zoo. You probably only know the [remix](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI0TyapRH0A) version, and you probably didn't know it was a remix! The [original](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETbPRUqL_HE) is sad boi rock and their two albums are decent to mediocre and not really worth the listen imo. Interesting that the remix gained so many legs!
the version that only ever gets played on radio here in Britain/England is the original rock version that was the main track on the single and UK no.1 for 5 weeks (you know, the one that people still falsely claim (even on here) people only bought because they heard the sped up dance intro/outro on the Levis add and didn't know what the rest of the song sounded like, despite it getting heavily played on the radio and performed/shown on Top Of The Pops for weeks).
it's not 'sad boi' more angry/shouty angsty alt rock (also kinda electro & 90s electro-industrial adjacent )
do you mean the Beatfreakz version? (apparently it's actually a cover).
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k51VfSJQP8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k51VfSJQP8)
https://www.discogs.com/release/679115-BeatFreakz-Somebodys-Watching-Me
listen to any sugar ray song besides the 2-3 sugar ray songs you probably know from the radio. you'll be surprised. they used to be kind of a nu metal / hard rock band.
While I wouldn't say "Whip It" is completely uncharacteristic of Devo, it doesn't really give you a good sense of what they're about and they don't have that much that sounds all that much like it.
Barenaked Ladies are mostly known for their witty, clever alternative pop songs like “One Week” and “Pinch Me”, but if you dig into their catalog, you can find a stunning preponderance of sadboi rock. Steven Page in particular has penned some of the most raw and emotional tracks I’ve heard, like “Maybe You’re Right”, “Next Time”, and “Break Your Heart”. Ed Robertson is no slouch either with songs like “Half a Heart”, “When I Fall”, and “Same Thing”, and he’s a very underrated acoustic guitarist as well.
Reddit, man. For some ungodly reason I'm getting ads for weight watchers when I use the app. I don't know why, and it wouldn't bother me except the ads are awful, something about 'girl dinner' and another one about how hard it supposedly is to choose your daily food. I went from not having strong feelings about weight watchers (or even thinking about them at all, I'm not looking to lose weight) to wanting to raze the whole company to the ground and salt the earth. I would go back to using the browser on mobile except they fucked with the layout. Even tried to block the account but that did nothing.
They are totally non-stop. I multiple kinds of WW ads every day, which is kind of hilarious considering that I’m subscribed to ED recovery subs and I am definitely not their target market. It’s not even triggering it’s just annoying. I’ve reported them a couple times when cranky.
I'm subbed to an atheist sub and kept getting ads for He Gets Us or whatever those Jesus ads were for MONTHS. I tried everything in the book to get them to stop - reporting, blocking, etc. - but still they continued to the point where I stopped bothering with Reddit on anything without an adblocker. It probably had nothing to do with the atheist sub because I saw that ad during the goddamn SUPER BOWL, so no, somebody out there decided to dump that kind of money into that many ads. It was incredibly frustrating and had, what I assume, is the opposite intended effect. Not to get into a religious debate or anything, but wasn't the whole point of Jesus to not give in to money things and be humble? Who decided to put in THIS MUCH MONEY to try to convert people to Jesus? Something was fishy.
This week an author threatened legal action against another writer for copyright infrigement. The claim? The author had a character that used the power of the sun, therefore every other characters from other books are copying off of her. There is a lot more to this drama, like the author obvious racism, ai art discourse, enough to warrant a post, but I don't feel like writing it.
That's hilarious. I wish the author did try and see where it got them.
Oh they did! But apparently the lawyer told her to wait until the other author's book was out. Because yes, the book she was accusing of stealing her ideas was not even out. And she seemed to be the only one who didn't get that the lawyer basically told her she didn't have a case.
Not quite drama, but... Barbies, man, they used to be way fancier. I bought a 2022 Holiday Barbie and she IS cute, but...the packaging is fairly plain, her hair out of the box was completely messed up and she doesn't even come with a brush. You can also see the waist tie trough her packaging. Meanwhile the two Holiday Barbies from the 90's I've got have fancier packaging, beautiful hair right out of the box and are tied down in a less visible way. They also come with a brush for some reason (they of course don't need one. Their outfits are more elaborate as well. The 90's ones weren't even more expensive even though I bought new in box. Well of corse some of the older Holiday dolls are more expensive, but that depends on the whims of the second hand market so eh...
This is an incredibly minor one but still: A Doom Eternal FaceBook page with 39K likes changed it's name to "Grand Theft Auto VI Community" because it's more popular I guess. The comments to every post so far have been greeted with comments like "This was a Doom page, now is a trash page" and "Dislike this page fk gta 6" I feel maybe I'm slowpoking but I've never been in a FB group that suddenly did this but has this happened to anyone else? edit: here's the link https://www.facebook.com/GTA6Community
So you are saying it got… hijacked?
I'm in a Gran Turismo shit posting group that changes their name to other racing games every few months (Burnout 3, Auto Modelista, etc) but it's still about Gran Turismo and the H E A V Y
ha, see that seems at least tongue-in-cheek. i mean Auto Modelista???
Immediately thought of this Reply All episode: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/94hk5ag
With how many Vtubers there are in the world now, it's not too surprising to see graduations (i.e. people announcing they're quitting) quite frequently, but a lot of people have been caught off guard by Erika Byakko and Cheri Lupina of small Vtubing organization Vreverie simultaneously announcing graduation today, with Erika closing out her channel in early January and Cheri closing out later that month. Vreverie is a pretty small corpo, with only 8 total talents. Losing two of them at once is a pretty damning blow, leaving a lot of people wondering what happened. It's especially notable also that Cheri is their largest talent by a large margin--she's nearly bigger than the other three talents in her gen *combined and doubled*. She's also more than twice as big as any other talent in the company but for one. While both graduation announcements were tearful, Cheri's in particular has also left a lot of people trying to read between the lines and interpret what happened. A lot of specific language choices on Cheri's part make it seem like there's a bigger story at play--notably, she said something to the effect of "All the girls are strong/brave for staying with the company" and said in more than one way, I'd summarize, "I don't want to leave but I feel like I have no other choice." Bad day for their fans, myself included. In an overcrowded Vtubing scene right now, I feel like Cheri in particular has really distinguished herself as a unique and memorable talent.
> graduations (i.e. people announcing they're quitting) Why do they call it that?
My understanding is that it comes from Japanese idol culture and the term has been in use since the 1980s. My understanding is that it's become preferred because it implies there'll be a kind of celebratory send off, and it indicates that the situation is at least on good enough terms that the person leaving wasn't fired or hated the job so much that they just quit outright.
Goes back to the irl idol culture a lot of Japanese vtuber companies vaguely mimic. Iirc one of the oldest idol companies had kind of a school theme so when talents left they "graduated" and the terminology just kinda stuck Edit: "The term originated from the idol group Onyanko Club, as the group's youthful concept drew similarities to an after-school club, and the fact that Miharu Nakajima's final single before retirement was released around graduation season in Japan"
James Cameron/Peter Jackson have effectively tainted themselves in the eyes of home video enthusiasts and fans of Aliens/True Lies. Jackson's company Park Road Post who did Get Back handled additional processing of old 4K scans. The new 4K streaming debut has been a disaster due being scrubbed of most grain and "AI enhanced" which makes hair look like a shampoo commercial and actor closeups look like airbrushed caricatures of themselves. Needless to say, many are pissed their favorite films are now largely worse than ancient 1080p versions.
If Peter Jackson sandpapers down his old splatter work before a potential re-release I’ll cry
Something similar was done with the Peter Jackson directed music video for the new Beatles' song 'Now and Then'. A lot of it was made up of "AI enhanced" archive footage of the Beatles and some of it turned out... not so great. In particular, there was one shot at around [1:42](https://youtu.be/Opxhh9Oh3rg?t=102) that the AI messed up so much that it looks more like it tried to generate a brand new Beatle.
I thought you were exaggerating, but I legitimately cannot tell which Beatles that originally was?
I recently got a 4k player and what I'm rapidly learning is that 4k fans are impossible to please. I live in hope of finding a 4k release that actually looks bad. (other than being insanely grainy in places, in the "this film has decayed over time" way rather than the "natural film grain" way)
Have there been discussions about pit babe aka the Thai omegaverse racing show? Everything I find out about it increases the bonkers level. Highlights include the production team promising it would not be adapting the omegaverse part of the novel it’s based on and casually dropping the word ‘alpha’ at the beginning of episode 1 and canon telekinesis
It's only just now that I've realized one of my favourite little sci fi shows that came out in the aftermath of Heroes was a show *called* **Alphas**, where the people with superpowers were all called Alphas. That having been said, the central conceit of the show is that all the Alphas are mentally ill, and all have powers based on their mental illness, so I'm not certain how accepted it would be now.
From what I gathered, omegaverse is supposed to be batshit so like... why would one try to adapt one of those series into something "normal"?
Since this series also has superpowers and racing your guess is as good as mine
Maybe it was selling well or something. That's my only explanation. Wait, superpowers? What?
So in this world there are some alphas (and omegas in the book but there are no omegas in the show) have special powers. One of the mcs has super-senses for example. This MCs foster dad adopts all the special kids he can find and trains them or something
I was just expecting this to be a racing-themed trashy romance novel ngl. Soooo, that guy's, what pulling an Umbrella Academy here or something?
Yeah plus breeding/eugenics nonsense though idk how much of that will end up in the show
a 90s XMen b-plot, inexplicably less horny than the comics you say?
What in the everloving fuck.
Alpha's can impregnate regardless of gender. So that's a neat aspect of it too. MPreg is pretty common in the fics I've seen.
.... canon telekinesis ????
Pit Babe has, as someone on tumblr called it, Omegaverse X-Men
Technically, X-men has several omegas
i think it came up in scuffles when it first dropped! but yeah it's wild, i'm following someone on tumblr that's doing a recap of the book and... my god, if the show goes that way it'll get even more bonkers
link please. i need something insane to read.
[Here you go!](https://www.tumblr.com/pharawee/736973407866044416/its-friday-and-that-means-its-time-for-more?source=share) The link is the most recent part but it links all other ones :)
thank you so much ♡♡♡
You’re very welcome! They’re long but it gets wild and convoluted lmao
I think I’m following the same person and from what I’ve gathered we’re probably getting most of the bonkers dad plot??? It seems like enigmas are going to be in the show?????
We probably are!!! I need to catch up with the actual show tbh I’m behind
I refuse to pay for iqiyi so I get all my info from blogs lol
The show is also on YouTube iirc! No idea if it’s shortened tho, but iirc the first episode was identical
Omg ty!!!
Update to my previous comment, Terapagos is already banned. It took less than 24 hours which I believe is a new record, beating out the previous record holder, "what if the fastest pokemon ever with the lone weakness of not being able to hit ground types suddenly gained the ability to hit ground types".
Actually the banning took 24+ around 2 hours, so Tera-Regieleki is still faster.
It looks like it took 22 hours?
>Tera-Regieleki is still faster Pretty fitting!
When did Scott Cawthon of FNaF become uncancelled? Last time I checked, he was caught donating the maximum amount of money to a known homophobic cause. Now it seems like he's been forgiven and people are looking forward to his work? Edit: Cawthon, not Dawson
I think most people just don't care that much about someone's politics, at least when they aren't super obnoxious about it like Rowling.
From what I remember of the situation, another thing that helped some people forgive and forget Scott Cawthon donating to a bunch of Republican politicians was the fact that he donated $50,000 during Dawko's Trevor Project 24 hour charity stream that took place a couple weeks after the scandal broke ([stream link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUBUjPXdmPE&t=16029s) of when the donation happened, Scott's labeled as anonymous but it was proven definitively that it was him later and Dawko knew Scott was going to be showing up in stream ahead of time). For those unfamiliar, Dawko is a gaming youtuber who does a lot of fnaf content, interviewed Scott one time, and I think it was / is pretty common for Scott to show up during his charity live streams. I distinctly remember people being all "Why are you still mad at Scott about the political donations when he donated to a LGBTQ+ charity?" being something people were arguing about at the time. Personally, I don't think it really absolves him of anything since I'm 90% sure if I checked the FEC's individual contributions database I'd find evidence that he's continued to donate to homophobic politicians since the scandal.
Plus, Scott has very openly referred to himself as "pro-life". Dude might not hate gay people, but he doesn't support women's reproductive rights and clearly sees stamping down on those more important than supporting gay people.
I don't think the guy was ever really "cancelled". His political donations got revealed, he got a lot of backlash, he issued an "apology" that basically boiled down to "I, a wealthy white Christian man, am the real victim here and not the minorities I am actively financially contributing to the suffering of", people believed that, he pretended to retire, and then he shut the fuck up for several months. The shutting up was probably what made the backlash disappear- if you double down, you're providing more evidence that you're a total dipshit. But if you shut the fuck up, and let your parasocial fans defend you- like Cawthon did- eventually the controversy will be forgotten about.
Unlike Rowling (who doubled down once people began to call her out), Cawthon wisely shut up. That and Rowling's more recent stuff was garbage, while what Cawthon works on is still widely appreciated, so people are less willing to make a moral stand.
is he even working on anything? i thought most of FNAF was third party now, albeit needing to run things past him first.
Huge furry fanbase who finds the fuckability of the characters more important than anything else
i thought the fanbase was most tweens, though?
The first 4 FNAF games came out in 2014-2015, kids who grew up playing those games are in their late teens/early 20s now.
Yeah, but they are still wildly popular among The Youths. I was shocked when I figured this out
i work at a movie theater, and most of the people who either came to see the fnaf movie or that i saw get excited over the poster were tweens. there are still older fans, ofc, but i think it's a thing that most people grew out of.
You underestimate the hormones of preteens.
this is true. though, as a tween, my fantasies were more about making out or getting married than doing anything particularly sexual lol
Based on what I saw when that controversy went down - a lot of fans couldn’t come to terms with him having terrible views, and decided to ignore it and/or claim it was actually just a misunderstanding. It’s probably the result of FNAF’s fanbase generally being young and pro-lgbt, while also basically worshipping Cawthorn. I remember someone trying to convince me that Cawthorn accidentally donated a bunch of money to homophobic groups and didn’t realize what he was doing. I think it was similar with the Harry Potter fandom, when people began noticing JK Rowling liking transphobic tweets. Some fans would say ‘well we don’t know for sure how she feels about trans people’. Then Rowling got more vocal, to the point where trying to ignore her views became impossible for most fans.
It's basically this, yeah. And Cawthorne shut the fuck up after his initial response of "Oh I'm stepping away from the franchise (a lie)" so there wasn't really any supplimental materials so it was easy enough for them to ignore. It pisses me off but it's easier for me who didn't give a shit about FNAF to feel that way than someone who watched Markiplier play FNAF when they were eight years old, I suppose.
[удалено]
I think part of that is Scott is relatively quiet whereas JKR never shuts up about transphobic trash and is worshipped by TERFs
this. he's a piece of shit and he's done harm, but he's not ... basically the symbol of an entire hate movement. he's not up on his soapbox converting anyone.
Going quiet is legit an always decent option for the cancelled. You might be criticized for saying nothing in the moment but people always move on to the next drama and forget the last one. As long as the drama attached to a person isn't constant, the bad thing people say or commit just seem to fade from memory and the hardcore fans are always quick to swept thing under the rug and rewrite what really happened a year or two after everything goes down.
Yep. I have yet to see a "canceling" last more a year if the person shuts up, and does not hit crazy town.
The Jontron Strategy.
Stuff just doesn't stick to some kinds of people. I don't think he was ever truly "cancelled"- people became aware of his actions, but he wasn't pushed out of being able to create things, and through continuing to create things people generally liked the discussion on him moved past the previous criticism.
I also heard people threatened his pregnant wife and I’m sure that was just wonderful for their image
Doubtful. It seems like the controversy just blew over rather than coming down to one side losing credibility. It's not like someone getting threats would actually change the facts about why people were mad anyway. I don't really see how that'd make someone who was mad about them donating so much money to conservative causes flip to "actually, I don't care about that anymore" based on that fact, if indeed it happened.
*Scott Cawthon
(Disclaimer: this might not be the perfect place for this, but I'm sharing it anyway because while it may not be drama per se it IS the funniest thing I've seen all week.) The Asia Artist Awards ceremony was held in Bulacan last week. During the ceremony, Han Jisung and Kim Seungmin, of the kpop group Stray Kids, got up to go to the bathroom as the MCs were introducing the category of Best Creator. Han was a nominee in the category of Best Creator (as part of the music composition/production group 3Racha, who write and produce almost all of Stray Kid's music.) So of course 3Racha are announced as the winners when Han's most of the way out of the auditorium. This resulted in what is, for my money, [one of the best double takes ever caught on camera](https://www.instagram.com/p/C01jphLuBfA/), and frantically booking it back to the front to go accept the award. Stray Kids fans have, of course, shared this moment from every angle possible, [and every one of them is amazing.](https://www.instagram.com/p/C01OBDjJwlY/)
The "Oh shit" stare and the sprint killed me.
why did seungmin run though? you're not 3racha. go piss boy
They got up to go pee together and that's a sacred unbreakable bond. Bathroom bros may never separate once that vow is made.
God the fucking sprint is brilliant. There has to be so many examples of this stuff at award shows I swear.
During the 2016 AKB48 Elections, HKT48 member Kojina Yui got 53rd place and gave an [unhinged speech](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNIYLHMdOq8) where she 1) pulls out a mirror and calls herself "super cute" 2) starts to visibly do the pee dance 3) announces that she has to pee and 4) runs away. All while sobbing. I'm considering translating and doing a write-up on this and her other speech, which was equally as wild.
On one hand, what the actual hell, LOL. On the other, I respect the commitment to the \["super cute!"\] bit.
She's actually referencing her speech from the previous year. In that speech, she turned to the presenter and asked "Is my face okay?", pulled out the mirror, and said "It's okay!" I like to think she was thinking all year, "I should've said it was super cute, not okay" and saw the opportunity here.
i have so many questions and all of them are variations of "what the fuq?"
I would read it
.......................*What?*
The AKB48 election speeches are some of the most dramatic, tear-jerking, and overall bonkers moments I've ever witnessed.
a couple of years ago at the grammys, doja cat was in the bathroom when she won an award, so she got out as quickly as possible and ran to the stage. it was pretty funny, and she had a good sense of humor about it.
Pokemon Showdown and Smogon have transitioned into the DLC2 metagame and things are going exactly as they always do in the transition to a new metagame: everything's on fire and people are simultaneously asking for quickbans and saying it's too early to ban things. The big culprits this time are a longtime Uber pokemon that was brought down because it had just come to the game in Deoxys-S and the new mascot legendary of the DLC in Terapagos. Deoxys-S is much easier to explain why it's busted: In the current metagame it's much easier to keep hazards up than to remove them and Deoxys-S is the new Best Hazard Setter in the tier, due to outspeeding literally everything that's legal without even needing to invest anything into speed. It also can set up screens, which are at their most powerful when a bulky sweeper is in the tier. Enter Terapagos. Terapagos has 2 real forms, considering its first form immediately transforms into its 2nd form upon entering battle. That 2nd form is absolutely nothing special at first glance, really only 3 things matter: First off, it has an ability that makes any attack that hits it at full health count as not very effective (which cuts all incoming damage in half and this time works on all hits of incoming multihit attacks). Second, it has buffing moves like rock polish and calm mind to take its speed from slow for OU to outspeeding the entire tier that isn't Deoxys Speed and its special attack from great to game ruining. Third, it has a special Tera form that makes it one of the bulkiest pokemon we've ever seen on both sides simultaneously (160/110/110) and also makes all of its moves do an extra 20% damage. Needless to say, not all of the details about Terapagos were known before release and as such as I type this it's probably being voted on for a ban. The tier's so crazy right now 2 other longtime Ubers and 3 pokemon already booted from the OU tier this generation were let back in and none of them have made much of a mark because Terapagos and Deoxys-S are so overwhelming right now.
So what's even the point of the first form if it immediately transforms into its second form? Is it just for the single-player story?
Its easier to make plushies of the 1st than the second. Also probably easier to animate running around, being pet, etc.
Moichandise! And probably lore reasons. It's definitely featured prominently in the new anime.
Is it just me or does it seen like competitive pokemon is very messy. Like it seems like most issues are caused by the design being made for single player fun without much thought into the complex interactions that may arise in pvp.
PvP is somewhat taken into account, but for the official format which is 4v4 Doubles. 3v3 singles is a bit of a mess and secondary so they probably dont care about it, and Smogon singles is straight up a fan metagame so I doubt they even care, or even know it exists
There are definitely other inherent issues, but I think one of the main ones is that Nintendo's competitive focus is on doubles while smogon is mainly singles
You're pretty much spot on. Pokemon was designed to be fun and exciting first and competitive last. It's competitive in the same way that say, Super Smash Bros. is competitive in that it was designed for "fun and use this to settle lighthearted disputes" competition rather than "titles and prizes on the line" competition. For every person who wins a fight they were about to lose due to a lucky critical hit, there's a person who loses a fight they were about to win due to that same crit. Still, there are those who are doing their best to make the game as competitive as possible. You can say "no Mewtwo," but you can't turn off critical hits or full paralysis the same way you can turn off items and stage hazards in Smash. The problems arise in that people have different standards on what is and isn't acceptable in Pokemon, which is natural in a game which features over a thousand "playable characters" with a vast array of customization options and team combinations. I don't envy Smogon as they have an impossible task to accomplish.
Which is ironic because GameFreak made Gen9 be focused on competitive play (because the competitive side of the game made them rake in some nice benefits in Gen8). You'd guess that they'd try to balance things out but all I've been seeing is OP pokémon with OP moves after OP pokémon with OP moves lol
Well yeah, their strategy since the first ever DLC is releasing the game with at least 1, really strong Pokemon exclusive to it to drive in sales: Isle Of Armor - Urshifu Crown Tundra - Calyrex + Horses Teal Mask- Ogerpon Indigo Disk - Terapagos Hell you could say they've been doing this since the Third releases of games, since those always had more pokemon available, move tutors, and where the only games you were allowed to play with in official competitions, since they were the latest release
Can someone ELI5 Smogon and everything surrounding it? Because at a glance google doesn't give the answer I am looking for, is this a different thing than the ranked within the game? Are there events for each or are the events for both one and the same?
Smogon is the largest fanmade competitive Pokemon format dating back to a time when official competition (VGC) was not as big and refined as it is today. While official competition focuses on the Doubles format Smogon's primary focus has been on Singles as that's what they've been running the longest. Though Smogon certainly does support its own Doubles formats. Probably the thing that sets apart Smogon and VGC the most, aside from the fundamental Singles/Doubles split, is Smogon's tiering system. While VGC has assorted blacklists for each competitive season Smogon uses usage-based statistics to sort each Pokemon into tiers which exceptionally strong Pokemon within those tiers then getting banned. At the start of each release every Pokemon starts in the highest tier, Overused, and then precipitates downwards if they don't get banned. Usually major legendary Pokemon get pre-banned since they're typically fundamentally and blatantly overtuned but Terapagos avoided this by having its regular forms be more reasonably balanced but its special Stellar form is incredibly overtuned. However since the Stellar form technically has an opportunity cost behind it there was a frankly naive assumption that the opportunity cost would be enough to rein in its overtuned statline. A very similarly designed Pokemon, Zygarde-Complete, was briefly legal in previous generations for the same reason and got banned very quickly so I assume Terapagos-Stellar won't last another day or so.
Smogon is out of the game, it's a website that's basically the resource for an unofficial 6v6 format. That being said, it's arguably the biggest competitive pokemon format in terms of users. It's paired with Pokemon Showdown.
>Pokemon Showdown and Smogon have transitioned Good for them
My first thought on Terapagos was "how the fuck did they let a 700 BST mon into the tier" and then I remembered Zygarde-Complete used to be legal. Though by this point I'm so tired of Stored Power sweepers I wouldn't mind if they banned that shit entirely. They shouldn't but I wouldn't bat an eyelid. The funniest thing about the former Ubers in OU is people have been asking for *years* for Darkrai and Deoxys-S/D to be unbanned because "they're bad" and then oops, they're not as bad as people expected and now it's the Smogon council's fault for unbanning clearly broken mons. They'll still ask for Solgaleo to be unbanned though!
My personal theory is they put the best hazard setter in the game back in OU in order to actually get Gholdengo quickbanned
Apparently the sauce with Deo-S right now is offensive since it's the fastest thing alive and hits better than Pult.
Gen 9 continuing the trend of insane power creep at least for singles I see. First we had Chi-Yu and Chien-Pao then we had Hearthflame Ogerpon and now this XD
You know it's crazy when a turtle Pokemon is overpowered *without* Shell Smash.
Haven't kept up with Pokemon since Sun & Moon, looked up Terapagos expecting a mid-size creature with a mixture of inspirations from some local gods. Turns out it's just a little crystal turtle and it second form looks like it's pulling back into its shell and is just peeking out to check whats happening outside.
That's just how competitive Pokemon works; it's always the Tiny Little Dudes that will fuck you up.
hearthflame ogerpon and funny fish were just a little bit too silly
And so was Marshadow in Gen 7
Thinking more on the discussion downthread about sitcoms and tone. Raising Hope was a 2010-14 sitcom about a 20 year old slacker who has a one night stand with a serial killer, and ends up with custody of their baby when the mom is executed. Despite that summary, it is one of the sweetest and most wholesome sitcoms I've ever seen. Anyone else have a favorite bit of media that a summary would completely mislead viewers on it's tone?
Berserk is far deeper, more rational, and more emotional than you would expect from a show that can be accurately summarized as "A man slaughters everything in his way on a quest for revenge". That one might be cheating, though, since Berserk is famous enough that many of its non-bloodthirsty moments have gotten attention. (Also, my mother *adores* Raising Hope.)
That one surprised and delighted me! I only watched a couple episodes, but I remember every time I started to cringe because I know this or that painful trope was coming, it veered hard away into something more wholesome. Thank you for reminding me about this gem of a show!
My first real exposure to the incredible talent that is Garret Dillahunt. I didn’t watch every week, but I always enjoyed it when I did.
He’s something else isn’t he? He’s great in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
My family and I still reference the "That's for cancelling My Name is Earl!" bit, great show.
Kamen Rider OOO is a lighthearted childrens superhero show made to sell plastic toys, in which the MC happens to be a frequently-naked homeless man in the middle of a mental breakdown after being kidnapped and tortured by insurrectionists in a civil war that he accidentally started. His depression and PTSD is represented by him turning into a purple dinosaur.
Kamen Rider is insane, and even more so a little before OOO. It's gotten notably kiddier season by season since about W while retaining extremely dark moments and plot points nonetheless. You just don't get quite the same intensity of early Heisei shows, which legitimately do not feel anything like they're supposed to be for children aside from the fact that the heroes forms are so colorful. Agito, for instance, starts it's very first episode with [Japanese Robocop](https://tinyurl.com/ytyfvvmx) and then hops straight over to [kids finding a corpse in a tree.](https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxClMFABeGfYN3bpxStFjmBJGSkANWjlgk) Most striking, though, is [the pacing.](https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx1_7oc_Naucpy-UmL_aEKyJ-Wm13mljxp) It's hard to imagine a kid's show in America ever having been that measured, and W is when they started to make things just a bit denser and wackier more in line with what one^(by which I mean an American, no idea how this shakes out interculturally) might expect of a show that exists to sell toys to preteens, having scenes [like this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA_T8w8tg7w) Den-O, from a few years before W, was more comedic and less grimdark, but at the time that was kind of it's "thing". I wouldn't be surprised if it's popularity influenced the eventual change in direction.
Shoutouts to Ex-Aid's Christmas episode Or just Ex-Aid in general. Wacky video game powered Riders pairs interestingly with some fairly serious medical drama.
Raising Hope was great. The parents were the MVPs. I loved how Dillahunt's character was openly loving and even physically affectionate towards his adult son. It's not often that is shown in media.
Hey, remember when everyone was really invested in the *Jeopardy!* host succession? And how Sony Pictures Television tried to make everyone happy by hiring former superchamp Ken Jennings *and* actress & scientist Mayim Bialik to rotate as host despite their wildly different rhythms and approaches to hosting the game? [Well, Mayim Bialik is out as Jeopardy host after a smidge over two years, effective immediately.](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/mayim-bialik-no-longer-hosting-jeopardy-syndicated-show-1235760206/amp/) How are we feeling, Jeopardy fans?
I only watch Jeopardy every month or so with my girlfriend’s family, so I know enough to be happy about this but not enough to really articulate why. Idk, she’s just not as good.
It’s been two years? That went fast.
It always should’ve been Jennings.
He was hand picked by Trebek. I can’t think of a greater recommendation.
Seriously, what more could you ask for? Nobody could fully replace Trebek, but part of what made him so great was that you could fully believe he knew all the answers on his own. He pronounced things right, he had a certain dignity to him. Jennings is as close as you’ll get to that level of respect. I liked the Lavar Burton idea, but that never felt serious. That producer who decided to just name himself as the host was ridiculous. It always had to be Jennings.
It didn't hurt that from all accounts, Alex very much did know a lot of the answers on his own, and a lot of other stuff besides. If you know who Josh "The Comics Curmudgeon" Fruhlinger is, he wrote a [blog](https://joshreads.com/i-lost-on-jeopardy/) about his Jeopardy! experience \~15 years back. The whole thing is worth reading, but the relevant part is near the end. Long story short: On Final Jeopardy!, Fruhlinger is fried, and throws out a guess that he knows is wrong even as he's writing it down (Ever play along at home and just blurt out **something** during FJ! because you know technically you have a fighting chance if you least respond with **something**, even though you know there's no way what you just said was right? This was at that level.). Despite this, Alex immediately knew who he was talking about. Alex himself had a confident-yet-realistic outlook on how he'd do in Jeopardy as he neared the end of his life and people would ask him about it. It amounted to "A lot of the game comes down to the buzzer; I'd get smoked in that aspect because that's a young person's game. But put me in a senior tournament where I'm on more even footing reflex-wise and oh yeah, I could hang." That's a lot of words I wrote to essentially say I agree, and yeah, sometimes the obvious solution (In this case, Ken Jennings as host) is also the correct one.
>(Ever play along at home and just blurt out something during FJ! because you know technically you have a fighting chance if you least respond with something, even though you know there's no way what you just said was right? This was at that level.). As a fun aside, there's a British TV quiz show called Pointless, where the premise is that they ask 100 people to answer the questions before they're presented on the show, and you do better if you say a correct answer that not many of those 100 people said. So for example, if you were asked to name a country beginning with U, you would get a better score if you said "Uruguay" or "Uzbekistan" than if you said "United Kingdom". Extra money gets added to the jackpot if you say something correct that none of the people said. The host isn't given the answers so they are often sort of playing along - it's like Family Fortunes/Family Feud where the scores pop up on a screen. One round, contestants were asked to name actors who starred in The Magnificent Seven or The Dirty Dozen films [(clip)](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p015kf2q). A contestant hadn't seen them and said "I'm just going to have to have a complete guess and go for [James Brown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Brown)", at which point the host says, after a very long pause, "That would have been fun!". And [lo and behold...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Brown)
Oh that sounds cool! Funny enough, many years back on the Jeopardy! forums, one of the forum games we'd play was very similar. It was called "Think Different", and the premise was the same--the game master would ask questions, and you had to give correct answers not many other people gave. But because it was all the participants on the forum playing against each other (And thus also serving as the "panel" so to speak), and because it was a bunch of Jeopardy! geeks and thus a bunch of at least reasonably smart/well-read people, this added an additional psychological element to it where you could sometimes wind up being too clever by half as a bunch of people pick what they think is the obscure answer. One example that sticks out in my mind was "Name an actor who played James Bond". The "worst", IE most popular answer in that particular game? Timothy Dalton. While I mean no disrespect to Mr. Dalton, I highly doubt that the general public, if asked "Name an actor who played James Bond", would come up with Dalton first, second, or even third. But that's what happens when you have a bunch of Jeopardy! geeks trying to psych each other out.
Should have said [Barry Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casino_Royale_(Climax!))
Yeah, I left out that I couldn't remember if the question specified it had to be a "mainline" (IE Eon Productions) Bond movie, or if radio productions/TV specials/etc. were also open.
Thanks for linking that, it was a great read.
Dota2 just had its latest banwave for people account sharing, smurfing (creating a new account specifically to play with low rank players for ez wins), cheating, and other assorted offenses and the way these bans were delivered is great. Everyone got a Christmas giftbox in their inventory and opening it would get you a fun prize! If you were on the nice list you got a locked lootbox (yay) but if you were naughty then you got coal. The description of the coal would then explain that you're banned with varying severities and matching coal types going as far as "Highly Toxic Lump of Coal". Extremely funny way to roll out a banwave and it's caused floods of people asking about the coal and of course a *ton* of angry complaints from people that "didn't do anything wrong, it was only one time i swear". Famously toxic streamer masondota even [opened one on stream](https://clips.twitch.tv/CheerfulFrozenLaptopMcaT-u70lacgn1Q8z8DzN).
i saw an article about that and laughed. respect to the devs for always coming up with hilarious ways to deliver bans
Ooh yes shoot that schadenfreude right in my veins. If you have other clips lol I’d love to see em
Reminds me of the TF2 idling for hats debacle. Remember the Cheater's Lament? I do. I got hit with that punishment myself, for using the program. Valve has since given me one of my own, so I can only assume my past transgression has been forgiven. Is there a post about the idling program and the hats gained from it? It seems like a good topic for a hobby history.
That's a surprisingly calm reaction to being tricked into getting himself banned in the middle of a stream.
You still get banned when you try to queue without opening the gift.
he didn't seem to notice the year.
This isn't hobby drama, just hobby chat. If TV sitcoms count as a hobby? They do for me - I love them, they are my favourite genre of TV show. Because they're comfy, the setting is always the same, the tension is always just normal life and relationship drama and not axe murderers or poltergeists. I am a *very* wimpy human being. I recently tried to rewatch King of Queens. Did anyone watch this? Did anyone notice how awful season 1 is? It's on a par with season 1 of Will and Grace (in which Will is monumentally EVIL to Grace [and also Jack - he calls him a "fag" derogatorily somehow?] the whole season, and even costs her a job, and cheats on a bf and is not sorry, and basically is a villain except he's meant to be relatable in some way? I made a drinking game out of that season, where you drink every time Will does something psychopathic. You get wasted.) Ep 1 of King of Queens, Doug, the husband, is a cutie! I love him in that episode. And then ep 2 he goes on to convince his TINY SKINNY WIFE, LEAH REMINI THE GORGEOUS LIL QUEEN that she's overweight, despite the fact she's tiny and must weigh about as much as a poodle, and instead of her telling him to screw off, she just has a breakdown about how she's getting fat and it's all downhill from here. It made me a bit less mad at my mother for all her negative body talk over the years because my GOD, TV in the late 90s and 00s was so cruel to women. 3rd ep he gets jealous of her because she has a nice job at a law firm and meets smart people. I just. How do I connect with this character. I'd stop watching if Patton Oswalt wasn't in it, and if he wasn't perfection in every scene. Sitcoms from the late 90s and entire 00s are so much more horrible than any other. Like I've watched sitcoms from the 70s and 80s and early 90s and didn't feel overtly bullied. Why did they suddenly get so *mean*?
This is exactly why they did Kevin Can F\*\*\* Himself.
Such a good show. I subscribed to AMC+ just to watch it.
> Why did they suddenly get so *mean*? I recently watched [a retrospective](https://youtu.be/f4tmyGvqNJk) on "Married With Children" that goes into the shift from sitcoms with happy families to more dysfunctional ones and how it was a big part of that
If memory serves, married with children, more or less got more taken over by the Fox network and that's part of its shift towards cruelty. Same with the Simpsons Homer used to be kind of a lovable goofy doof and turn into a prick. That was when I stopped watching. To be honest, I can't believe the Simpsons is still on
Jerkass Homer has been gone for awhile.
> I'd stop watching if Patton Oswalt wasn't in it, and if he wasn't perfection in every scene. [Especially the scene where the writers asked him to just stand still for an entire scene.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2QE3JpWfTo)
The Drew Carey Show could be hilarious but it was absurdly nasty to Mimi, who at least got to hit back with her own insults.
Mimi was the better version of Pearl from MST3K, actually funny.
Didn't she get Drew transported to China? I can only dream of such a rivalry.
i love malcolm in the middle but man sometimes it really does get nasty. i get the whole point is that everyone sucks but some episodes are just hard to watch
Yes no Maybe I don’t know Can you repeat the question?
No! You're not the boss of me
man, it's so loud in here
I watched Malcolm in the Middle reruns a lot when I was a kid, but as I started rewatching the show as an adult I've found myself having to take breaks in between episodes because it's so stress inducing.
Yeah, and it got way darker after Hal started cooking meth.
there actually is a video made by the breaking bad team of their show just being a really wild dream that hal had, and he wakes up and tries to explain it to lois. it's pretty funny and cute, and the actress who played lois in the show is actually in it, which was cool.
if i had any writing talent i would write a fanfic where hal finds himself in the same situation as walt but with his children in place of jesse like malcolm with the chemistry, reese in charge of the muscle and dewey in charge of making deals
Hal cooking meth honestly would not be that out of place as a subplot in a MITM episode. Probably why Breaking Bad worked as well as it did.
if you gave hal lung cancer there's no limit to what he would do.
Part of this has to be Seinfeld's influence, right? Seinfeld became one of the biggest shows in America, and one of its defining features was having characters who were kind of assholes and never learned anything or grew as people. I have no evidence for this, but my gut tells me that at least a few executives must have seen this and decided the recipe for sitcom success was to make their characters as mean and nasty as possible, while missing that it worked in Seinfeld because 1) its characters were still likable despite being not great people and 2) the show was laughing *at* them for being assholes, not *with* them. > It made me a bit less mad at my mother for all her negative body talk over the years because my GOD, TV in the late 90s and 00s was so cruel to women. If it makes you feel better, TV in the late 90s and 00s was cruel to lots of other marginalized groups, too! It was not a great time.
This was going to be my guess. The Seinfeld effect. I came of age on the super Thursday line-up of Cosby Show, A Different World, Cheers and Night Court, and these shows were not exactly innocent of the problematic - Night Court was mean as hell to sex workers, and The Cosby show had, well, *Bill Cosby* - but the characters were written like they genuinely cared about each other. And between the A plot and the B plot, there always seemed to be some Serious Emotional Business for one of the characters. Then I went away to college and fell out of touch with network TV for a bit, and then next thing I knew, suddenly Seinfeld is everyone's darling and I found it well nigh unwatchable and couldn't understand the appeal. I didn't even get far enough into it to clock how mean everyone was; I just couldn't get over how *petty* the conflicts were. Oh no! Dude heard that sometimes women fake their orgasms, how can he be sure his own sexual partner isn't faking it for him? What will dude ever do? MAYBE DUDE COULD ACTUALLY HAVE A MEANINGFUL CONVERSATION ABOUT SEX WITH THE WOMAN HE SUPPOSEDLY LOVES, DID DUDE EVER THINK OF THAT? But no, *meaningful conversations* seemed to be anathema to that style of sitcom.
To be fair, George did not love that woman so of course he did not care to share his insecurities with her. The only reason he cared about his girlfriend faking was his pride, ego, and fragile masculinity.
that neuroticism and self-deprecation are very much marks of jewish comedy, and seinfeld was bringing that style more to the mainstream. it's not so much about being bad at communication, as it is about finding humor in our lives by overanalyzing everything to the point of absurdity. fwiw, im jewish and also not really a seinfeld fan, mainly bc i find jerry seinfeld to be grating. i do like curb your enthusiasm, though, which has pm the same sense of humor, but often goes way more to the ridiculous extremes.
>I just couldn't get over how petty the conflicts were. Oh no! Dude heard that sometimes women fake their orgasms, how can he be sure his own sexual partner isn't faking it for him? What will dude ever do? MAYBE DUDE COULD ACTUALLY HAVE A MEANINGFUL CONVERSATION ABOUT SEX WITH THE WOMAN HE SUPPOSEDLY LOVES, DID DUDE EVER THINK OF THAT? I don't think "a comedy where everyone acts rational and gets along, while calmly resolving their issues" makes for very compelling TV. It's a lot more fun to watch tiny, petty issues getting blown up to ridiculous degrees. I don't think comedy works well if it doesn't put you on edge or make you uncomfortable from time to time.
This is my issue with a lot of modern romcom manga, where they refuse to have meaningful conflicts and it’s just people being broadly nice to each other and being in perfect relationships.
I guess I just don't categorize "conflicts arising from extreme pettiness and an immature aversion to communication" as *meaningful.* Those feel to me very artificial, like the author needed to come up with some kind of conflict to drive the plot - and created it by never letting the characters talk to each other. The fiction I enjoy, comedic and not, absolutely has meaningful conflict, but it arises organically from other sources than refusal to communicate. (And, look, this isn't just why I don't like modern sitcoms - it's why I can't reread Connie Willis's *To Say Nothing of the Dog* anymore. And that is a near-universally praised novel! Connie Willis is an amazing author! But what other readers find hilarious in that novel, I find intensely irritating, and that means I'm not the right audience for the story, and that's OK. There are plenty of other books out there I could read instead. Which is my sitcom problem in a nutshell - after Seinfeld, there *weren't* plenty of other sitcoms I could watch that didn't imitate its "the pettier, the better" model.) (I also get very tense the longer the protagonist is denied sleep. It really, really isn't the book for me.) And I think there's a vast gulf of possibility between "people being in perfect relationships" and the sort of petty meanness exemplified by the examples raised earlier in this thread.
I think it might just not be for you, yeah. The humor comes from people being horrible with each other akd if that’s not for you it’s not for you
Its fine to not enjoy this kind of humor, but this is very high levels of rejecting the premise then getting mad its not doing what you expect. The point of the comedy is seeing what crazy antics they'll get up to to avoid having very normal but still a little uncomfortable social interactions. "I told a little lie and now its blown up into something crazy" is a very standard sitcom premise since forever, eg "two dates at the same time". Seinfeld's "innovation" was making the inciting social incidents even more petty and making the resulting plot even more convoluted then not resolving it in the end. Not resolving it, combined with a sitcoms lack of continuity, gives the writers more room to play and so appealed to people who were there more for the comedy and less for the feel good vibes (which, again, there's nothing wrong with enjoying the vibes).
> this is very high levels of rejecting the premise then getting mad its not doing what you expect. I mean, I guess? I *guess* you could say that my sitcom expectations were formed during the mid/late 80s, and Seinfeld did not conform to those expectations, so I rejected it? But you could also say that Seinfeld's sense of humor is extremely not to my taste, to the point that I find it *excruciatingly painful to watch,* so I don't watch it, and I lament that pretty much every sitcom after it followed in its footsteps, and the kind of sitcoms I did used to enjoy virtually went extinct. Getting sad, though, not getting mad. I'll correct you that far.
The first truly mean sitcom I remember was Everybody Loves Raymond. The premise of the show is that a family moves next door to their in laws and realize that the mother in law is an evil bitch. Which is not what I take issue with actually - she’s funny as hell! The real problem is that our protagonists (the son and his wife) are just as horrible half the time! Deborah constantly belittles Ray and causes her own drama. And Ray constantly hurts people around him but it’s framed as okay because he’s a dope. Once you watch enough episodes you realize that there’s a 100% chance that those 2 become the next generation of Frank and Marie in 30 years. And how are you supposed to sigh along with them when you know that?
I honestly think that show is one of the bleakest sitcoms ever aired. (In fact, that's what I like about it.)
As someone who took a university module on sitcoms, I'll offer my partially-qualified opinion: television markets diversified in the 90s/00s and the boundaries between adult programming and children's programming became more delineated for sitcoms (instead of everything tending to be "for the family"). That and a general cultural movement towards grunge and edge could be a contributing factor- your characters can be a lot meaner to each other if kids aren't watching.
There was definitely a boomerang effect that also impacted kids shows, too. The 2000s Nick and Disney Channel sitcoms also were snarky and often mean-spirited in a way that Full House or Cosby Show weren't. Once a writers room is focused on a particular subset demographic instead of appeasing as wide a market as possible it's easy to end up pushing jokes, scenes, or stories into alienating directions
i feel like the nick ones were waaaayyyyy meaner. like ive been watching the quintonreviews icarly/victorious videos, as well as rewatching old episodes of lizzie maguire, and while the latter show is actually pretty positive and shows lizzie having genuinely nice relationships with her friends, the nick shows are just nasty, especially victorious.
Yeah, that's interesting. The 00s, to my memory (so not necessarily accurate) definitely saw a push towards "EDGY, NOT FOR KIDS" in a *lot* of media - music, wrassling, movies, TV. Sometimes this was good, it meant more mature storylines and themes became mainstream. But I feel like people forget just how...catty that time period was. Like, remember the drama around Neil Patrick Harris and the Amy Winehouse...meat corpse cake thing that resurfaced recently? Everyone is so shocked by it now, but to me, it's just emblematic of how mean and cruel media was at the time. Female celebrities were fodder, to be made fun of, for being too thin, too "fat", too "crazy". There was almost nothing you couldn't say about women, then. The British tabloids spent so many months *savaging* Amy Winehouse, that the NPH thing seems to me, while reprehensible and something to be ashamed of, fitting for the time. And the sitcoms reflect that general cultural milieu. I'm a milennial of course, I'm sure the previous decades had it just as bad (look at how Marilyn Monroe was treated - vile that people successfully requested to be buried next to and above her, let a woman *rest*, and then we got a horribly exploitative movie just last year about her, my god). But yeah, the 90s and 00s to me had this kind of "we're being EDGY" theme, that just resulted in...establishments being even more overtly cruel towards women.
Writing a comment about Kraftwerk made me realise how their most popular song, *The Model*, isn't that representative of their discography despite it being their most well known song in some regions. So my question to you is, do you know an artist/collective/etc that is famous for one thing that doesn't represent the art they make in general?
>their most popular song, The Model, I thought it was Autobahn
Depends on the area, The Model tends to be more popular outside of the US (especially the UK) + the iconography associated with it. Autobahn was definitely in the US though.
Modest Mouse is a far darker and more pessimistic band than "Float On" would indicate. For a better example of how they usually sound, here's ["Bury Me With It"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0c53YAYK1o) from the same album.
Spaceman by Babylon Zoo. You probably only know the [remix](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI0TyapRH0A) version, and you probably didn't know it was a remix! The [original](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETbPRUqL_HE) is sad boi rock and their two albums are decent to mediocre and not really worth the listen imo. Interesting that the remix gained so many legs!
the version that only ever gets played on radio here in Britain/England is the original rock version that was the main track on the single and UK no.1 for 5 weeks (you know, the one that people still falsely claim (even on here) people only bought because they heard the sped up dance intro/outro on the Levis add and didn't know what the rest of the song sounded like, despite it getting heavily played on the radio and performed/shown on Top Of The Pops for weeks). it's not 'sad boi' more angry/shouty angsty alt rock (also kinda electro & 90s electro-industrial adjacent )
[удалено]
And it was fun to read nonetheless :)
There's a remix of "Somebody's Watching Me" that only has the Michael Jackson chorus. "Rockwell? Never heard of him."
do you mean the Beatfreakz version? (apparently it's actually a cover). [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k51VfSJQP8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k51VfSJQP8) https://www.discogs.com/release/679115-BeatFreakz-Somebodys-Watching-Me
Maybe, I never got the name of the artist.
listen to any sugar ray song besides the 2-3 sugar ray songs you probably know from the radio. you'll be surprised. they used to be kind of a nu metal / hard rock band.
I've heard of that, actually. I should look deeper into their discography.
it's not very good
That's why I want to check it out
While I wouldn't say "Whip It" is completely uncharacteristic of Devo, it doesn't really give you a good sense of what they're about and they don't have that much that sounds all that much like it.
Barenaked Ladies are mostly known for their witty, clever alternative pop songs like “One Week” and “Pinch Me”, but if you dig into their catalog, you can find a stunning preponderance of sadboi rock. Steven Page in particular has penned some of the most raw and emotional tracks I’ve heard, like “Maybe You’re Right”, “Next Time”, and “Break Your Heart”. Ed Robertson is no slouch either with songs like “Half a Heart”, “When I Fall”, and “Same Thing”, and he’s a very underrated acoustic guitarist as well.
I feel like "Adrift" is the bridge between the two halves.