Tag: Television

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Culture Media Politics

Day 1722 and The Remake of The People versus Larry Flynt Sucks

I have not watched Jimmy Kimmel in his current incarnation as broadcast late night variety show host. But I did watch some episodes of the Man Show so I’m not entirely unfamiliar with the man’s career.

This guy is into beer, boobs and being turned down by ABC

That one unremarkable but sort of likable dude can jump from hosting segments about girls on trampolines to a national broadcast host with political opinions is somewhat impressive and also bleak.

If I had to give mono-causal explainer as why millennial women seem split into two distinct political camps when it comes to modern American politics, absolutely over it or absolutely irate, I think the continued existence of Jimmy Kimmel’s career would be as fine an explanation as any other.

This guy gets promoted over and over for just being the worst and what do we get? We get scolded no matter what we do. Of course some women are screaming banshees and the rest are like mmm shrug. Who has freedom and who has responsibility has always been a polite fiction.

Being subjected to years of increasingly sexualized entertainment featuring bouncing boobies, mentally unstable underage pop stars and the men who were paid to ogle them professionally probably had some downstream influence on our current political climate and the shitty state of entertainment.

The backlash to the backlash to the backlash as it were has happened and we just don’t care anymore. I’ll fight for your right to be perverted but I won’t lie to you and say it hasn’t negatively affected me in anyway.

I’ve always been acutely aware of where popular culture derived a women’s value. Jimmy Kimmel had a career and Britney Spears had a breakdown. And now you want me to fight to keep this twerp on the air because of our proud democracy and its culture of promoting speech and expression? Fuck off.

I genuinely believe girls on trampolines has inherent entertainment and artistic value. Almost everyone has an appreciation for the female form.

I’m unclear if warmed over political takes on broadcast television delivered by a middling broadcaster at midnight is more or less valuable an art form or as political expression. Maybe the FCC needs an overhaul for this new era or maybe we get pirates wires.

I’m neither a satirist nor comedian. I watched the Man Show because I had a boyfriend in a fraternity but I am not watching Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue now and neither are you.

And that’s all that matters to the business of entertainment. Slapping speech and politics on it is a reach that now middle aged millennials can’t manage. Maybe if we spent more time on trampolines.

Elite competition skirmishes over who controls the airwaves of broadcast television are barely interesting except to the absolutely irate. And these days we are all too busy to remain irate unless we’ve got luxury signaling to do. Which I don’t need to do because no one is coming for my blog.

I don’t see how anyone can turn a microwaved soggy ready meal remake of the people versus Larry Flynt out of Jimmy Kimmel.

Who wants to fight for that? Hustler had some inherent entertainment value and Larry Flynt had “readers.” It was speech and it wasn’t on public airwaves with a boss in Washington DC. Maybe you didn’t like what he did but were you prepared to fight for it? Lots of people were. Who wants to fight for Kimmel?

Oliver Stone has always been kind of a shitlib

Jimmy Kimmel was never anything more than the guy who read cue cards between the dopamine hits of girls on trampolines. Stuffing your politics into his pie hole doesn’t really change that.

Bob Iger knows it. I know it. The guy had dwindling ratings, an expensive contract and not nearly enough common sense to keep his mouth shut if one of his staffers was out of touch. If I were in charge of Disney that would be my excuse and I’d dump that Jimmy for literally anything else. I bet a swearing parrot would test better. Hell I know it would.

That’s why it’s so damned exhausting to care about the free speech that literally nobody asked to be said. Does anyone who genuinely cares about free speech feel like they can rally the cause to a bobble head spouting opinions that aren’t even his own? Doubtful. I’d sooner fight for Illinois Nazis. Shame about the ACLU innit?

Americans would rally for boobs though. If someone wanted to get the FCC to allow the return of the Man Show and place it on ABC after dark maybe then we’d have a worthy sequel to Larry Flynt.

But nobody is going to bat for Jimmy Kimmel unless it’s backed up with boobies. And there isn’t a perky tit in sight. No one is going to make a political meal out of this. I doubt even the Swanson’s heir could heat this frozen turd.

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Media

Day 1701 and USS Enterprise (NCC 1701-D)

I have mentioned I’m a fan of Star Trek a few times. I am a genuine fan of the original series, the Next Generation and Deep Space 9 as well as many of the movies.

Gene Roddenberry pitched it as space cowboys but it’s become a template for entire generations for what competence in the face of the unknown should look like.

I’ll happily take either side in the Captain Picard versus Captain Kirk debates, because just as that fashion editor in Devil Wears Prada said about two superficially similar belts, “it’s hard as they are just so different!”

We are facing quite a bit of the unknown right now. Old hierarchies and expectations have changed. Or at least been revealed for what they are. We must ask what we owe each other and how we should expect ourselves to commit to a common cause.

I find myself considering the incredible competence both personally and professionally of the crews. I named this post NCC-1701-D for Picard’s Enterprise as that crew is famously a collaborative and high trust crew. Each one well developed with expertises professionally but also everyone was always trying new things and exploring new skills.

One of my friends accused me of having nerd “stolen valor” as I couldn’t have suffered for my affection for interests like Star Trek. Maybe it’s true girls don’t experience it the same way. Maybe I didn’t notice. I don’t think I cared. I’ll always be someone who sees 1701 and thinks “that’s the Enterprise!”

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Politics

Day 1689 and Drumhead or Not Rushing To Judge What We Don’t Know

I wonder how much of the moral education of Americans comes thanks to Gene Roddenberry. Star Trek is a very American show. It was pitched to Desilu Studios (owned by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball of I Love Lucy fame) as a space western.

The cowboy frontier spirit of Captain Kirk has an honor code based on the worthiness of exploration. When the millenials got a reboot in the Next Generation, Captain Picard added the gravitas of excellence through the pursuit of the truth.

It’s hard to think of a show that embraces an anglosphere manifest destiny with more vigor and it is grounded in the enlightenment values of science and moral philosophy. It’s a very American show.

I was watching a fairly minor TNG episode while eating today The Drumhead. An ambassador starts a witch hunt insinuating treason. Apparent drumhead courts were a military summary judgement court.

A legal drama ensues where Picard quotes the ambassador’s father famous words about the dangers of denying basic rights to even one man in the name of protection of society makes us all less free.

Feeling rather on the nose for the moment right? Picard reminds Worf as it wraps up the witch hunt being proven a lie, that those who cloak their misdeeds with the pretense of serving a greater good are often the most difficult. Spreading fear and mistrust in the name of righteousness must be guarded against.

“Vigilance, Mr. Worf. That is the price we have to continually pay.”

We have a chance at preserving and expanding the enlightenment values that brought our species to this moment, an American moment, by enabling more of us. We can educate ourselves and access the world and the many virtues to which humanity has aspired to by working hard to master them ourselves. This is the empowerment of compute.

We have tools available to us to be vigilant in what is the great good of civilization we wish to protect in an open, decentralized and networked internet.

That we can at scale train a new inference search capacity for the sum of our knowledge and reality is a utopian reality even Gene Roddenberry didn’t dream we’d have.

Don’t rush to summary judgement in fear over the future we can build with protocols and networks that can be encrypted and decentralized. That we can model them with artificial intelligence, and by asking questions well, get back information, code and even machine and biological diagnostics is a huge achievement for our species.

To push the fear of the greater good over its consequence can go from legitimate concerns to a drumhead summary judgement quickly. Risking the freedom to use something that is both just emerging and even in that infancy so promising. That it is helpful in the now seems to showcase both western traditions and enlightenment values.

It’s an American ideal that we must all be free to think and speak the truth, search for the truth and can calculate and provide a mathematical proof of truth that needs no trust because it can be know. We have a right to compute.

Artificial intelligence solves problems now. It’s better than humans now at many types of tasks even as it still a new tool and unrefined and even brittle in its capacities still. It’s took only as good as its craftsman’s understanding of it and we are still learning how to build it.

Artificial intelligence can give us the internet we deserve. I support the right to repair movement because I believe we should know and seek the freedom to own things we have purchased and modify them.

Right now AI helps humans can solve immediate problems from tractor repair to wound care. Maybe machines get better as we get better at using them because we do it with them. We figure things out by building.

Don’t let your worldview be constrained. You can know the freedom of living in a society that values your rights. And the right to compute weaves together many of your most sacred rights. And if we infringe on it for some of us it infringes us on us.

Categories
Media

Day 1671 and Warenästhetik

I have a favorite book store in San Francisco is called City Lights. It’s an old Beat bookstore that carried the city through its left wing era.

They have a section called commodity aesthetics from which I treat myself to a fresh book from every time I visit San Francisco. I’ve got quite a collection from the habit.

Having spent the requisite time with the western cannon, I enjoy dabbling in critical theory and its decedents like commodity aesthetics as an adult.

The Frankfurt School has direct line from Horkheimer to the founder of commodity aesthetics Wolfgang Fritz Haug. Warenästhetik, in German, is the process of aestheticising products we make and consume.

Marxists go on about the seduction and manipulation of consumers in order to reinforce capitalist systems but it’s hard to ignore the impact of the field on what we make, use, and sell.

The wider world of why and what commodify is ever changing even as it recycles the same archetypes and patterns over and over again. See the Sydney Sweeney’s “good jeans” remake of Brooke Shields infamous Calvin Klein advertisement.

It’s amusing to me that the Marxist have put in more effort to understanding the nuts and bolts of making and selling desirable goods than capitalists do. Maybe that’s what they mean by praxis? The criticism and the practice come together in one bookshelf in a basement of a bookstore in North Beach.

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Chronic Disease Medical Travel

Day 1657 and The Boredom of Summer Surgery

It sounds a little ungrateful to say I’m bored, as I sit comfortably in a nice hotel bed with books, Netflix, room service, and a nice view but I am bored and a little miserable.

Antibiotics, discomfort and surrealism are a challenging combination for existential stability as it turns out.

I can’t do much beyond sitting still and getting up once an hour to walk a couple hundred steps. I have been instructed not to sweat so I can’t go outside much. Even in the evening with a breeze, it’s still hot enough to break a sweat and this is an infection risk.

Beyond sweating, you can’t disturb you wound healing in anyway so I can’t exercise. At best, I can do some light yoga and stretching. Short walks indoors are OK so I can’t walk the hallways but that makes staff nervous. I keep to myself mostly.

Most tragically for me as we don’t have a bathtub at home is that I can’t take a bath or submerge myself in water for weeks. So the gorgeous bathtub is simply taunting me. I love a good tub and this is a great tub.

No submersion in water for two weeks minimum

It’s even worse when I stare out at the beautiful pool. That is obviously an infection risk as well. No splashing around in Norma Kamali pretending at social aspirations. Oh yes Istanbul is the new Florence in July haven’t you heard?

At least the nearby Bosphorus is packed with cargo ships, I have no temptation when seeing the beach to have a dip in the water. I doubt diesel fuel is good for healing.

The highlight of my day is the hotel lounge’s breakfast where there are charming varieties of very Instagram friendly food. It is still in a hotel lounge but it’s a beautiful novelty.

Tea, pomegranate juice and rose honey yogurt

I’ve been annoyed by the variety of influencers who are also healing around me. There are any number of different plastic surgery and aesthetic patients in the guest mix.

If you think a week of blogging about an emergency sepsis slice job on some indelicate bits, imagine how weird it is to see an entire family getting plastic surgery and their daughter (I think?) is live-streaming most of it.

I’ve seen more puffy lips than I have fish on this trip and that’s my fault. I don’t have the strength dress up or walk to the Michelin starred seafood restaurant. Maybe that’s more for the elective surgery types and the emergency infection girlies have just enjoy the tiny yogurts.

That’s almost a bagel and lox set up right?
Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1554 and Complex Coordination

I’ve never been much for listening to music while I do work. I’ve always found it distracting if not downright annoying. I don’t really believe I’m capable of multitasking. If a task requires my focus and coordination it will get the sum of it.

I’m not convinced anyone is particularly good at it if the studies on focus and multitasking are to be believed. Task switching costs, reduced cognitive efficiency and mental fatigue are typical indicators of the distraction of multitasking.

I was given a reminder of the strain of complex coordination as I was relaxing last night. I enjoy Star Trek: The Next Generation and found myself rewatching Data’s Day,” Season 4, Episode 11 in which Dr Crusher teaches Commander Data how to dance before a wedding.

Being an android, Data is able to easily mimic the doctor’s movement after being shown them. But as he learns to the nuances involved in waltzing with the partner he tells doctor (paraphrasing)

“This is complex set of variables to coordinate”

“Try to act like you are enjoying it!”

As Data tries to integrate the dance moves, their joint body language, the changing direction, and variable speeds you get a visceral sense of why embodied compute requires more processing than intelligence tasks. The final challenge? Smiling while coordinating it all.

Resting Android face? Data tries to smile while waltzing via Memory Alpha
Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1527 and Wayback Machine

I just finished watching the 8th season of Netflix’s mega reality TV hit Love is Blind.

It feels as if they produce a new America version every quarter but if that’s not enough content for you there are spinoffs in Sweden, Japan, Mexico, the United Kingdom and Argentina.

They shoot them roughly a year ahead of time. Which, in any other era in my lifetime, would have been fast turn around time. You could figure basic values would hold from year to year. But culture changes very rapidly now.

So reality tv that was shot even a year ago now makes for some very odd viewing as America’s politics and “current thing” are in constant flux.

February and March of 2024 did not have the vibe shift we are in now. I won’t spoiler it should you be considering the show but I will say it’s fascinating to see how much politics played into the women’s decisions.

Now maybe it’s because it’s the Minnesota season they felt they had to address certain topics in race relations after the summer of 2020.

But they also went to places on queer issues, religion and national politics that did absolutely nothing to make any situation better.

Looking back on one’s previous view of the world is not always pleasant. That we have a way back thanks to media makes for a strange continuity of views that probably do little to do with stuff of a happy love filled life. Perhaps a good reminder to not look too much to the past to decide your future. Or a reminder to focus on what never changes.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1498 and Reformation

When things get noisy on our global commons it’s good to step back. I live in elder millennial neighborhood that is American Twitter which is a bustling place. I still manage that “by hand” as it were.

I spend time on forums and Discords but increasingly my interactions within the commons has some kind of artificial intelligence layer between me and “the noise” as the slop drowns out. What to believe and how to keep it updated to reality?

An informational reformation is part of what you could see as a wider political elite power struggle. The uni-party of Washington Consensus and prestige media are not containing the rebel information hordes at bay. Consensus is at risk. Zoomers are learning the Treasury doesn’t control the Fed. Welcome to the audit kids.

The centralized narrative window of a top editorial page or an interview on Bloomberg remains the bounds of propriety for now.

But it’s going to get weirder. Many a teenage hacker with fighting words on Discord servers is likely to be sacrificed in this war of elites as permanent Washington fends off the populist revolt. It just happens to be that some hackers under the banner of Musk are in this coalition. Crusades probably always involve baroque racism.

With all of that as background I started watching Wolf Hall which is a BBC Drama with Damien Lewis as Henry VIII and Claire Foy as Ann Boleyn. What could be more relevant than a time when an elite decided he should decide his own fate and not the Holy Roman Emperor.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1431 and Faking It

I’ve heard this multiple times across enough demographics in the wider “startup” ecosystem that I’m afraid I’ll have to accept it is happening. People are faking being weird. In some cases they are faking being autistic.

I find this to be an almost laughably unlikely thing to want to imitate. And yet I’ve heard it three times in the last week. The new poser is faking being a neurodivergent weirdo.

We regularly joke that at chaotic.capital a part of our deal sourcing relies on “Julie being professionally weird on the internet.” My pinned tweet from three years ago is a ramble on this ethos as it’s been true for decades. Unique fixations often undergird problem solving.

Being weird, or more specifically autistic, has now taken on a specific connotation of an intelligent but socially strange or oblivious character who sees the world differently. This means you are special somehow and can be forgiven for being a dick (that’s a lie be nice).

It was probably a source of pain for many millennial kids who were awkward the more oblivious you are the less it bothers you. Marching to the beat of your own drum. We’ve got a whole set of social tropes around smart nerds in popular media and most of them were negatively coded.

Despite this history, revenge of the nerds occurred. The power and dominance of technology (and its cousin nerd) culture means the spergy truth telling autist has cachet. We live in a post Sheldon Cooper world. Once something involves capital it collects social capital as well.

I have clearly underestimated how much this affects Zoomer behavior and incentives. Millennials experienced this archetype negatively but in a softer “everyone is special” culture your quirks can lead you to money and prestige. So there is now an incentive to act like a weird asshole to fake being weird and a little socially anxious.

If autism can have stolen valor then we might be in that era. It seems to greatly annoy the actually autistic (a tag on social media used by many poorly socialized entirely normal people) to have the symptoms of autism faked.

Authenticity is actually quite hard to fake and anyone with a decent social radar can usually spot it. Whether all autists have that capacity to read social cues is up for debate. It’s probably why anyone tries to fake being a genuine weirdo.

I’m inclined to say skills issue as the internet has made class, manners, and social cues much more accessible to everyone. And good news being every social class values being chill, real, and passionate. So there is no need to fake anything. Just vibe. Be cool.

Categories
Politics

Day 1351 and Overstimulated

Recently I have the misfortune of paying too much attention the American election season. I feel overstimulated.

I remember the 2020 campaign being stressful. I was naive during 2016. Now I find myself shunning information on polling and discourse on Twitter.

Americans have jobs, families and the problems of real life during our elections. And yet we spend billions and unleash a torrent of information, some of it propaganda, across all our public information spaces.

Every newspaper and Twitter feed and Subreddit is ready to stoke that anxiety that perfectly targets your worst and basest fears.

It’s natural to feel overstimulated by the deluge of noise. There is little signal to be found. I’ve written twenty times about propaganda because we are in a chaotic age. No one knows what’s going on. Together we piece together what we can and find reality together. Help someone make sense of the reality and maybe they pass it on. We can find out more together.