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We have to be tv hosts and don't even get to be president for the trouble...

Kramer was prescient

Television aired 1/wk and its programmers knew an audience would be done and another would log on; creators are incentivized to make works that engender satiety and viewing habits Compare to modern mediums where the creator's moral hazard is to encourage an endless orgy of "binge content"

It being slightly ahead of its time also means everyone looks over their shoulder before criticizing it. “Am I just old and out of touch”

The total ubiquity of both production and consumption, cooking brains.

I mean, a key reason Tate is so evil is because he does prey on the minds of pretty innocent little boys just like Calvin.

Don’t have to imagine! He wrote a new book recently called “the mysteries” that’s short and very good and particularly subtle

I would imagine he's far, far more disdainful of generative AI than even its biggest critics

Bill Watterson’s essays about media and the decline of comics in the 10th Anniversary Calvin and Hobbes book made a BIG impression on me when I read them as an 8 year old. they may also have helped doom me to growing up to respond to our current cultural horrors in a very similar way.

Every household has 8+ screens and every screen is full of advertisements and information, devoid of knowledge and culture. Content made to make money and further content to make even more money.

Watterson made bank and then backed the fuck away from it all. Wish I could do the same. Sadly, I didn't create one of the greatest comic strips of all time.

I was genuinely impressed with his ability to draw beautifully accurate fighter aircraft Oh and Tracer Bullet, Private Eye

Yes! I’ve also reflected recently on the gripes against TV that I vaguely remember from the 80s and 90s from Cranky Old People and realized, ooop! They knew what was up. TV show hosts running the country. People streaming their lives for 12 hours a day, everything is a “take” etc

Hopefully at least in part satisfied with his legacy of a mix of insight and whimsey being part of multiple generations of culture.

Oh, he always seemed like a profound humanist and fierce art purist. He spends his days chewing through concrete in a blind rage, I imagine.

Butlerian Jihad with Calvin & Hobbes as sacred texts when?

I mean, I’m speaking about the social anxieties around TV during that era, not the content of the TV shows themselves

I know a lot of problematic stuff about him came out subsequently but David Foster Wallace’s essays on media and TV really left an impression on me when I first read them.

Don't miss @rubenbolling.bsky.social's Flowers for Trinitron:

People known for simply being known are a plague

I really need to read it but admit I’ve been putting it off because it’ll probably depress me even more

This frame in particular feels very influencer like.

The question is though if we're on an endless slope of things getting worse and worse or now we've reached the age of going, "Kids these days?" I'm thinking... both?

Turns out a small(ish) minority of people will sit down & watch enough TV to rot their brains. Just about everyone will rot their brains given the opportunity to *be* TV.

I am slowly making my way through Amusing Ourselves to Death and find it’s still relevant and enlightening. It’s more than a bit sad that we’ve gone from “there’s nothing on” to algos feeding you exactly what you’re interested in as content creators scramble to fit into the correct shaped holes.

same, but "The Machine Stops" and now I shall deliver my lecture on Music of the Australian Period to several thousand people acikders.ankara.edu.tr/pluginfile.p...

You do realize, of course, that this could be read as "the freakout over the brain-destroying slop I grew up with was overblown, the freakout over the brain-destroying slop today's kids get is totally justified", right?

Can get their video capture of “the whole company forced to fake smile” while crammed in like sardines and wondering which respiratory virus they’re all going to get this month.

I don't think this is true any more than a man needs to be >6ft to be successful at dating but it's believed without question like "men need to be above >6ft to be successful at dating" and the source of the belief is the same.

And here I thought anyone wanting to be a "content creator" for a living was a fool for competing in such a saturated market. No, it turns out content creator is the only job now

I am trying to leave marketing for this exact reason. Not everyone is a content creator! You don't need a therapist or a software provider who also make funny viral videos! In fact I think itd be better if they and most people on earth DID NOT spend their time that way!!!

Watching this now, with a newly-minted D1 athlete in the family. Gah. (lol will probably have to delete this, so as not to sully their Brand™️)

I suspect the immigrant trades workers here aren’t unionized but for the rest of NYC, unionization makes a huge difference. I honestly wonder how much we could solve by: 1) more unionization 2) higher taxes on the rich 3) building more houses

Very much so ya. It's harder if it's your main job or if you have addiction issues. Its important to have the separations for the same reason why being a workaholic or having only one social group is bad.

My job doesn't require that of me at all. But, to be fair, I spent my last 20 years working in an industry that half of Bluesky thinks shouldn't exist (PBM). Came to it by accident, couldn't find a different job in the years when job market was still alive and I was young enough, and now here I am

And at the same time, a truly weird development: our local ABC news station just fired their anchors and a bunch of staff. The local news will now be pre-filmed video segments, no hosts. And this is a major city in our state! (Baltimore)

I can handle online stuff because I'm pretty comfortable with being disliked (I see it as a thing that will exist) and my ego isn't important in the grand scheme of things. Many people, understandably, don't have this and will get hurt for it. That's messed up.

This I'm pretty sure is why I can only manage part time work from another time zone. I really can't sustain the level of performance required for video calls.

Have some ethnography about exactly this thing: anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Tv host, writer, and editor. I’m on TikTok (not for money, thank god) and I use so many skills putting videos together plus the science knowledge I already have. Idk how anyone puts out multiple videos a week. I’ve got one every week or two in me.