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galenanorth
May 19, 2016

thread from the creator of Infinity Train
https://twitter.com/oweeeeendennis/status/1348353058783154176?s=12

I am 30 and therefore underqualified for the "over 30" thread. I was nine when 9/11 happened. I remember the big TV being wheeled in on the morning 9/11 happened, but I remember the (lead-up to the) Iraq War as the first political event where a lot of kids were old enough to have a lot to say about it. They were all "why do you love Saddam Hussein" and asking every teacher what they thought about it, and I was the only Democrat there. We were studying the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and some kid pointed out that's the place we're going to bomb, and he seemed pretty happy about it.

I was watching the first season of Arrested Development a year ago or so. There's this teacher character who Michael dates, and then he finds out that she's a Saddam Hussein fan and bakes "I love Saddam Hussein" cupcakes. I kind of wonder if the creators of that show wrote that character to lambaste anti-war critics, like they thought "if Communists exist, then there's probably some loony leftist who likes Saddam Hussein, too", possibly in a both-sides kind of way which resulted in a strawman character

galenanorth fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Jan 11, 2021

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galenanorth
May 19, 2016

Ugly In The Morning posted:

What thread is that? Got a link? I love that kind of stuff.

https://twitter.com/itxaropena/status/1347951968325677064

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

The January 6 Capitol riot was the first time I've mainlined news for hours for an event other than an election since Hurricane Katrina. During landfall, I watched CNN for hours. I browsed SomethingAwful as a lurker and saw some SimCity disaster memes

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

laughed out loud at the last one

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

sticklefifer posted:

I like it OK, but the show spent so much time making Mariner annoying and lazy and having screaming arguments instead of writing actual jokes. There's a lot of potential comedy in "the least important crew members on the least important ship", but the show didn't even stick to that concept for 10 episodes, and went for heavy fanservice instead. The show brings up fun concepts like the division for transporter accidents, but I really want it to be better.

It's like they saw all the good TV shows and movies that have a pair loudly arguing in a way that's kind of funny, like in the most I watched most recently, The Cat Returns, and decided to make that half the dialog

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

muscles like this! posted:

I'm not sure if South Park has just given up on doing actual seasons or what but they have another hour long special coming March 10th titled "The Vaccination Special" and from the description sounds like it is going to be Q comes to South Park.

Is John de Lancie guest-starring ---- ooooh, right

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

https://twitter.com/OweeeeenDennis/status/1362526914733170688

galenanorth
May 19, 2016


:woop:

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

MiddleOne posted:

https://twitter.com/saeedtaji/status/1372949606204649483

Dean Norris continues his role as most cursed actor in TV.
It sounds like the exact same joke-telling cadence as Balky from Perfect Strangers, and I only watched like two episodes of that show because it was on Nick@Nite so late in the 90s/2000s

I think I'll put some episodes of Perfect Strangers on my tablet for next time the power goes out

galenanorth fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Mar 21, 2021

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

They start out with just a single facet of average boring every day life, but with

Big Mean Jerk posted:

That’s essentially what the shows are going for without saying it out loud, yeah. It’s disgusting and it’s pretty much SOP for CBS broadcast shows regardless of genre.

and go "Hey! Get a load of this! It's hilarious!" and act like it's as unusual a scenario as the premise of Three's Company

Imagine the "sitcom episode of a dramatic show" trope, but done in a mean and ridiculing way with your own life

galenanorth fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Mar 21, 2021

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

In this episode of Young Indiana Jones, someone gives him directions to "get on the next train to Sabella", and he misinterprets it to mean that the next train, about to leave, is the one which will take him to Sabella, rather than he should wait for the next train which is going to Sabella. That's more creative than most TV miscommunications

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

"Phantom Train of Doom" is a better Young Indiana Jones episode than the second and fourth Indiana Jones movies. It was fantastic. The second half was slower, but the whole concept of a hostage berating his captors on being incompetent and lecturing them the whole time on how to be better soldiers was great, and it had a good ending.

galenanorth fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Apr 2, 2021

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

Incidentally, the original MacGyver series has been remastered in 1080p. I couldn't even find a version better than 360p a few years ago, so I'm really glad for that. I watched a few episodes of it on TVLand in the sixth grade, and I don't remember much of it. I remember there was one episode where he was tied to a chair at a dinner table with a brass cupid centerpiece, holding back a cyanide-tipped arrow to be released when a candle finished burning through a rope

galenanorth
May 19, 2016


I keep seeing Jaleel White in random shows I'm watching like Drunk History and Ducktales, and I haven't even ever seen Family Matters, but it's always nice whenever he shows up

edit: also, he voiced Sonic, which I noticed while watching the first episode of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog on Netflix

galenanorth fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Apr 14, 2021

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

Oh, they've got Perfect Strangers and Cheers in 1080p now

not for The Golden Girls or Frasier S1-S9, though

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

Shageletic posted:

Jay Leno, vague memories of him being wrapped in that poo poo that got Lady Osbourne kicked off her show.

Or could have been some equally awful TV related imbroglio somewhere else, it all blurs together

Sharon Osbourne defended Piers Morgan saying something dumb about Meagan Markle and Prince Harry, like "What color is your baby going to be?" and got into an argument with a The View co-host over it that brought her to tears and might've ended a ten-year friendship, then the network "investigated" for like a month and decided to fire her

galenanorth fucked around with this message at 20:13 on May 6, 2021

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

I watched the first episode of Perfect Strangers and Family Matters. In Perfect Strangers, I laughed at the "increasingly frustrated at getting packaging open" joke and was thinking "Use scissors!" It has another payoff later when Balki gets it open instantly, which I didn't laugh at, but I appreciated it. It would have been better if, at some point, Larry dropped the snark and told Balki straight-up "Balki, all the sheep herding jobs in America are out in the country, if there are any left, and I live in the city." Anywhere but a sitcom, he'd have also said something like "You don't have to pretend, and it's okay to ask for help" the third time Balki said "Well, of course not; don't be ridiculous!" and pretended like he knew how to do something. Looking at the episode 2 synopsis

quote:

Larry gets tipped off that "Dolly Parton" (Ava Cadell) is in town committing adultery, so he decides to follow her until he can get a picture to sell to newspapers. Meanwhile, Balki will do favors for anyone who asks, so Larry tries to teach him to say "no" sometimes.

This is atypical for the series, but I don't know why you'd want to establish one of your two main characters as a scumbag like that. Maybe they acknowledge it or the paparazzi were less reviled back then

quote:

A rent strike Balki and Larry organize to force Twinkacetti to make needed repairs turns into a battle of wills when Twinkie shuts off the utilities.
heck yeah, I'll skip straight to that one

The Family Matters episode had the sincerity, but its plot where the dad's controlling mother moved in felt too rote. I liked that when the dad has the sit-down with his mom to talk about it, it's during sunset on the front porch. It's a visual way of saying that some moments last longer in our memories than others. The second episode synopsis, "Hariette loses her job to automation, forcing the family inso austerity measures while Carl stews over the family debts." is pretty uncommon except for Roseanne, but I think I'll skip ahead to Urkel's first appearance and watch some Urkel YouTube clips later.

galenanorth fucked around with this message at 13:17 on May 11, 2021

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

muscles like this! posted:

I mean, wasn't Harriette's job elevator operator? The family had to know that job was on its way out.

yeah, kept around as a personal favor and then fired after asking for a raise. It was a good episode. I can relate to the scene where Rachel and the two daughters have a factory line going where one folds a letter, the second stuffs it into the envelope, and the third seals the envelope, they get into a rhythm as a "well-oiled machine", and then notice that they were supposed to be stuffing two letters in each envelope so they have to unseal them all

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

I'm alternating between nature documentaries and archaeology/space documentaries on Disney+. I have to watch it using Microsoft Edge because I'm on a PC and that's the only one that does 1080p for it. Secrets of the Whales and The Lost Tomb of Alexander the Great were pretty good.

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

Wikipedia posted:

An enchantress disguised as a beggar woman offers a rose to a cruel and selfish prince in exchange for shelter from a storm. When he refuses, she reveals her identity and, for the prince's arrogance, she transforms him into a horrendous beast and his servants into household objects.

It was dumb for her to punish his servants for trying to make a living

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

Mars: One Day on the Red Planet is an absolutely beautiful documentary. I think for most people who have the impression they've been keeping up enough with all the Mars news, it'll still contain a lot of information that's incredibly surprising. Like they discovered these primitive bacteria in Ethiopian highly acidic brine pools that are 20 times smaller than any previously known bacteria in the 2010s, the same size as in the 1996 Martian meteorite which NASA jumped the gun as saying was evidence of life

The whole "One Day" theme was some marketing gimmick, more like "A Tour of the Red Planet" and they just arbitrarily assigned hours to each destination

galenanorth fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Jun 17, 2021

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

National Geographic's Mega Hammerhead documentary delivered on its promise of showing entertaining hammerhead facts and conservation. The only annoying thing is that it was clearly made for TV, not streaming, because they keep coming back from a commercial break and reviewing for people who just flipped the channel, and half the time they do, they play this misleading "It's headed right for you! Get out of the water!" clip, and later when they get to it in the actual show, it's about swimmers who were nearby when a hammerhead was hunting a stingray, and it was curving away and back to its prey, not toward the diver, though it was still pretty important they get out of the water with one that close.

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

Wild Hawaii, a 90 minute documentary in two parts (land and undersea life), was pretty fun to watch

featured: fireproof plant life, sea turtles, i'iwi (Hawaiian honeycreeper), pueos (Hawaiian Short-eared Owls), 'ios (Hawaiian hawks), gobies, invasive coqui frogs, invasive centipedes and cockroaches, Jaws (one of the world's biggest regularly occurring waves)

There's a chase scene between a tiger shark and a juvenile albatross that hasn't learned to fly well yet. Tiger sharks are some of the only sharks in the world that eat birds, and they regularly migrate to the breeding grounds and eat 1 in 10 juveniles.

Gregory fish (farms algae), Hawaiian mantis shrimp, Hawaiian octopus, garden eels, manta rays in the deep, humpback whales

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

I started watching a National Geographic documentary about Egyptian archaeology. The first episode about King Tut was good. All the known artifacts related to King Tut across Egypt were being transferred to a museum in Cairo, intended to be united forever in a single exhibit, so one part of it followed a security convoy transferring those artifacts. Another part of it followed someone excavating a mine where Egypt was getting the gold for its pyramids. The foreman was a teenager like Tut, buried with a model boat (related to Egyptian belief in a boat which sails toward the afterlife). The third part of it followed a team using drones for an aerial survey of the Valley of the Kings, the location where Egyptian pharaohs started being buried in cliffsides after Egyptians stopped building pyramids.

However, I can tell the rest of this six-part series is going to be hard to follow, because the editors insisted on switching back and forth between three teams in each episode, and I'm probably not going to remember all the names associated and who's doing what. That style of storytelling works for most shows, but I don't think it works when all three stories are in the same location and following a dozen people each to whom you were just introduced.

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

I've heard several times that the second and third seasons of American Gods weren't as good as the first one. If I watch only the first season, is it fairly self-contained?

galenanorth
May 19, 2016


S02E18 "Bart Gets Hit by a Car"


I'm the roped one

eventually the "I'm so old" memes are going to fade out into "you know, 60 is the new 50 [even though life expectancy is falling for anyone that isn't rich]" water cooler talk

galenanorth fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Jul 12, 2021

galenanorth
May 19, 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIHekYpkJO0

this is a very good documentary, lots of squirrel science. They buried some food with trackers to prove squirrels generally remember where they bury their acorns, and laid out some food dishes in a grid to make a topographical map of backyard squirrel preferences -- they ate the most from the dishes within 3 feet of a tree and near the front porch, while those near a fence with a guard dog were avoided. The video discusses competition between grey squirrels and fox squirrels in Chicago and grey squirrels and red squirrels in the UK. Fox squirrels are more prevalent in areas without leash laws because they taunt predators instead of running from them. They interview a professor who made a robot squirrel with which other squirrels communicated by tail flicking. I saw two squirrels communicating like that on my walk home, one adult on a low tree branch and one juvenile squirrel on a very high tree branch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh1HnMFolgw

galenanorth fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Dec 20, 2021

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galenanorth
May 19, 2016

Looten Plunder posted:

My favourite squirrel related video is the one Mark Rober did.
https://youtu.be/DTvS9lvRxZ8

That's incredible. The squirrels in the video really seem to have personalities

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