Posts by giovanni tiso
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Like I said: it's a very difficult conversation to have. I think it would be important to have it, nonetheless.
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I'm thinking about the fact that "entertainment" (ie the showbiz type, not the seeing-people-slip-over-on-muddy-grass type) is, mostly, capital-I Industry. Make no mistake; the creators of content inject the psychological equivalent of whatever it is that Griffins put in Chocolate Chippes that makes you unabled to stop eating them.
It's an important point, but it's really hard to make - which is why I link almost obsessively to Postman's book in discussions of this kind; he nailed his argument and it has stayed nailed ever since, indeed it still applies in the age of the Internet - is anybody willing to argue that the information-action ratio has meaningfully improved?
Also: Postman was a snob. Sometimes lamentably so. He might have railed against reality television in the way that Brickley does, which is hardly helpful, because it buys into the polarised argument that Craig justly excoriates: it's not a matter of this or that television show rotting your brain. You really could say that of anything, including Mahler, and of course we've learned to be wonderfully disenchanted about the content that we consume. It's the co-dependent logic between the spectator and the media, whereby you demand to be entertained, and the culture in turn demands that you be entertained and nothing else.
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When did our days become soooo careworn, that "entertainment" became what we craved?
Some time before 1985, obviously.
And yeah, the content is FREE! FREE I tells ya! FREEEE! So MySky is totally out of the question, especially since I choose to transgress the national obsession with 15 a side.
Oh I think you could find a way to stream rugby fine. My problem is that I'm obsessed with 11 a side - which ties me to Sky for the foreseeable future. Otherwise I would have gone Freeview all the way for sure.
(Okay, there are a multiple 11 a side sports: it's cricket.)
Oh, and +1 on wanting clarification on how you play scrabble/sex. This thread is throwing up more questions than answers.
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That Calvin cartoon reminds me of a picture researcher on a magazine I used to work for, who asked in all seriousness if a Renaissance painting she was sourcing for us was supposed to be in colour or black-and-white.
There are a number of Renaissance paintings that were destroyed during WWII and survive only as black and white photographs. She meant that, right? Right?
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If television is meant to be intellectually unengaging, then maybe I'm doing it wrong.
Clearly.
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Boarder Patrol
I am off to pitch this show - it's going to be great! Just think about it.
Some quality trolling there Brickley, by the way, I take my hat off to you.
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And by the way that's something I shall never be able to share with you guys (I think?) and that speaks to what Russell was saying earlier about a less monocultural future. We didn't use to have English soaps when I was a lad, but Brazilian soaps - did we ever. Some of them were absolutely sensational.
I only watched them to keep company to my gran, you understand. Ahem.
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Am I allowed to get vaguely GRAR about that? No? Dammit.
You so are. I was timing you, getting concerned.
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A lot easier to hide a USB TV card than a CRT television set.
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I still remember the guy who came to our house snooping around for the TV. What a waste of his time - and ours.
In Italy there's still the tax (which made sense at the time of his inception, incidentally, when not everyone had a television) and there are incredibly byzantine rules about its enforcement. Including that if you want to suspend payment without destroying or otherwise getting rid of your TV set, they come and put seals on it.