FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10hr ago
But it seems any type of premediatated or planned operation is just super legal and easy to get?
Nobody does that. /thread
Seriously, I don't understand how you think this is a dunk on the hypothetical person you're mad at. Your argument actually makes the safety standards seem very reasonable: they restrict only those tools of crime that are actually commonly used to commit crimes, and not those that are not commonly used to commit crimes even though they could be. The restrictions target the minimum reduction of liberty necessary to secure a large reduction in crime.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11hr ago
It's a bit like that joke about how Maroon 5 signed a deal with the Devil whereby they would have numerous #1 singles, but no one would ever call them their favourite band. Have you ever met someone who said their favourite band was Maroon 5? By the same token, lots of people still watch The Simpsons, but I'd say you'd be hard pressed to find someone who says it's (still) their favourite show.
While it is a great joke and reflects something real going on underneath the surface, I think you are obviously incorrect about this. This is "How did Nixon win when nobody I know voted for him" level analysis, you and I are in a cultural bubble of people among whom a consensus exists that modern Simpsons sucks.
Quick calibration: how many people do you know who LOVE NCIS?
NCIS was THE top rated scripted tv show for six years, and remained in the top 5 or so for over a decade. It has zero long term cultural impact, but there were lots of people who loved it, who watched every episode, who quoted it at each other, who considered it great writing.
The FBI series, which I find unwatchably offensively bad when I run into it if my mother or my grandmother were watching it, draws like 8 million viewers an episode.
I'm not unfamiliar with hardcore fans being unhappy with the product, I'm a Philly sports fan! But TV is not primarily a rarefied niche, an artistic product that caters to the aesthete and the discriminating. It is primarily slop served up lukewarm to the masses, and masses of people like things that you and I might not. De gustibus, I suppose.
To return to Maroon 5, when I was maybe nine years old Train came out with the song Drops of Jupiter, and for whatever reason at nine years old I was OBSESSED with it. I bought the CD and played that song on repeat. Train is an unspeakably lame, mainstream, trend-following, Nissan-advertisement-rock, corporate slop level of band. But at nine, that was my taste. A Pitchfork reader might wonder who the hell likes Train enough to care about their output, and surely no one really likes them. But at nine, I derived immense enjoyment from them.
There exists a whole universe of media consumers who have little impact within the circle of critics and cognoscenti.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
So what defines Hardcore vs Casual here? It seems odd to say that the casual fans are the ones who enjoy all of the output, where the hardcore fans are the ones who only like the best output.
Certainly in baseball, the fans who only watch the playoffs, or only watch games featuring A+ opponents, or only watch in years where the team is good, or will watch a game if it's on but won't watch every game those are the casual fans. Where the fans who watch every inning of every game, the guy who use to insist on driving the dump truck at work for afternoon games so he could listen on the radio, the fans who watch two sub .500 teams in August throw out their fifth starters with first pitch at 10:05pm. Those are the hardcore sickos.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
The problem with TV is that unless you have an extremely hard headed creative at the head of the show saying "this is going to run precisely this number of seasons and at the end of that we're done" and they have full backing from the money men and full buy in from the cast, you don't know in advance when the last season is. The show might lose funding, or commitment from stars or writers who want to move on to other projects, or be riven by internal conflicts that make it unworkable. And then you have to wrap it up.
And at the same time different audiences have different appetites for more seasons, at different quality levels.
I went to see a high school play recently, a production of How to Succeed in Business without really trying and on a talent level it was SPECTACULAR. I kid you not when I say that (other than casting, particularly kids in old man parts) if I had paid $100 for a ticket to see a touring company do the show, I wouldn't have expected more. But it was entirely too long. It ran over three hours. They crammed in extra dance sequences and songs, and dragged them out. And I was tired of it by the two hour mark, but at three hours most of the crowd was still screaming and whooping with joy at the spectacle. Because they were there to watch their kids or their friends or their old program, not to see a tightly paced performance. They would have cheered for another hour!
TV is the same. A casual fan, and at some level we're all casual fans compared to someone, wants a show to wrap it up; a hardcore fan wants it to keep going, they love the characters and want more of them. I want to watch another season of Mad Men only if it's .9x as good as the others, but there exists an audience that would watch ten more mediocre seasons taking us to the Reagan years if it were only .5x as good because they'd prefer half of Mad Men to all of something else.
So typically a show gets dragged out until the latter audience is too small to keep it going. So to members of the former audience it looks like it dragged on too long. That's probably as it should be from a utilitarian perspective, the existence of more bad seasons hurts me less than it helps someone who enjoys them.
AI is going to make this a nightmare. We're going to have to completely rejigger our conception of what is Canon, and what is a head-Canon, to make sense of it all.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Note that an under-reported aspect of the Peter Magyar story in Hungary is that Fidesz put in all kinds of tricks to allow them to push through constitutional changes with a plurality vote share, getting huge majorities in parliament despite pulling mid-40s vote percentages. The flip side of this is that the "landslide" much lauded by global libs that pushed them out of office, came when Tisza got just over 50% of the vote.
With 97.35 percent of precincts counted, Magyar’s centre-right party secured 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament on 53.6 percent of the vote, while nationalist Orban’s Fidesz took just 55 seats with 37.8 percent, according to official results.
A gerrymander can quickly become a dummymander if things shift.
So all Republicans have to do to turn this into a huge Republican advantage is actually appeal to suburban VA voters again.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
You think that, and I think that, and it might even be true. Aristocrats of the time, true believers, did not think that was true. Aristocrats truly believed that they looked, thought, acted, simply were different at a biological breed level than their lessers. No matter how much you dressed a peasant up, the true nobles would see right through him. He could not imitate the nobility that comes from generations of breeding.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
For significant portions of Russian history, serfs were also understood as of a different blood and breed to the point of being practically speaking a different race.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Oh no offense taken, it was just very funny to me that I've mentioned Mrs. FiveHour enough that she's a recognizable side character.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Why is my wife catching strays?
Isn't this just the natural process for any slang term?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I don't think "transferred from owner to owner and not bound to real property" is actually a good map to "slavery" as a concept across multiple cultures, at least not in terms of "what are we talking about when we are talking about slavery." Other factors that seem relevant:
-- Are the children of slaves free or are they also enslaved?
-- Can the owner beat or otherwise corporally punish the slaves? How severely?
-- Does the owner have a legal right of sexual access to the slaves?
-- Do the slaves have the right to property or marriages that the owner must respect?
Classical Greece had a tradition of agricultural slavery, but functionally the slaves were simply peasant farmers who didn't have the right to move or leave their farms. There were no overseers, no whips, no chains. They had money, friends, marriages, families.
The legal regimes and the customary treatment given to slaves varies wildly. I constantly bring up the anecdote in Frederick Douglass' memoir of a young Freddy making white friends who taught him to read, something they were legally obligated to do at school, in exchange for bread, of which Freddy had an endless supply from his master's kitchen.
I don't think discussions of slavery are terribly valuable absent a discussion of the particulars.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
The problem becomes comparing different forms of slavery/sefdom/free labor which are incommensurate.
Though less striking given the decline in audience for any primetime tv show. Used to be that primetime shows often hit 20 million viewers an episode, now they hit 5 million if they are lucky. So it's more like maybe a halving of their audience share relative to the secular trend.
2,000,000 is a pretty good audience. If you could launch a show with The Simpson's budget and be assured of 2,000,000 viewers, you'd get a green light. If an artist knew that 2,000,000 people would enjoy their art, they would make it.
This article, basically, but for TV.
There's no reason to expect the showrunners to operate on the timeline of taste, rather than the timeline of money.
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