I'm enjoying Mr. Robot right now and I want to watch Blacklist next. I don't watch TV except when I'm doing dishes. Almost all of my passive entertainment is podcasts because I can listen while I swing a hammer or drive or weed the garden. I'll be building trusses on my greenhouse next week for a few hours. I'll surely be listening to a podcast by Scott Adams or Tim Pool or Michael Malice (who'll be on Jordan Peterson's show if he wasn't pulling my leg). Anyway, that's why it takes me forever to watch TV shows. Once the dishes are done, I can't stare at a rectangle anymore. 

Lately I've been writing messages, hitting post, and the message disappears. 

Anyhow - I don't generally consume passive entertainment except for when I'm driving. I forget to listen to music when I'm sitting at the PC. 

I could swear there were more messages in this room than this.  Huh.  Just finished How I Met Your Mother again, still watching The Mentalist, also starting JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

Click on "page 1" to view the old messages. Once a certain number of messages have been posted, it opens a new "page"... 

Sun May 09 2021 20:47:04 MST from TheDave

I could swear there were more messages in this room than this.  Huh.  Just finished How I Met Your Mother again, still watching The Mentalist, also starting JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

Just went down the weirdest rabbit hole on Youtube that started with C programming on the Amiga and ended up with Dom Deluise, Don Rickles and a country Western singer from the 70s on Carson. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8vZzP5yvJw

Johnny Carson, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin - 3 dead men who were at the top of their game at the perfect pinacle of society - who died right before it went to shit... 

Talking about how they came up respecting and admiring Bill Cosby. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jus-OaJV8E

Watching it - I realized exactly what "the living will envy the dead," really means. 

Fri May 14 2021 22:31:03 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

Johnny Carson, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin - 3 dead men who were at the top of their game at the perfect pinacle of society - who died right before it went to shit... 

Talking about how they came up respecting and admiring Bill Cosby. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jus-OaJV8E

Watching it - I realized exactly what "the living will envy the dead," really means. 

 

Carlin was a prophet.

Sun May 16 2021 23:12:26 MST from smashbot64

 

Fri May 14 2021 22:31:03 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

Johnny Carson, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin - 3 dead men who were at the top of their game at the perfect pinacle of society - who died right before it went to shit... 

Talking about how they came up respecting and admiring Bill Cosby. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jus-OaJV8E

Watching it - I realized exactly what "the living will envy the dead," really means. 

 

Carlin was a prophet.

So, we just started rewatching the last season of Arrested Development.

Over the last few seasons - as they introduced Ron Howard's family into the story line - I noticed an interesting phenomenon.

Howard kept telegraphing the "Hollywood is in on all the great conspiracies," messages in the plot line, throughout the series.

I haven't watched it from the beginning or put it all together yet... but he did it pretty bluntly at first - with his studio having the Lunar Lander and constant gags about how they filmed that on a Hollywood backlot.


So the cast think that Trump "stole" the ideas from the show:

https://popculture.com/streaming/news/arrested-development-cast-donald-trump-stole-border-wall-idea/

But we don't expect the *actors* to be in on the conspiracy. They're just people who pretend for a living.

In the meantime - the final season of the show also implies a Chinese connection with building a politically contentious and divisive border wall when they're really more interested in acquiring the means to censor the Internet through taking possession of a social media privacy suite called FAKEBLOCK.

Keep in mind, most of this started out *before* Trump was in office, before these things were real.

I know SouthPark, The Simpsons and Futurama all have a history of predicting wildly "implausible" things far before they happen...

But I frequently wonder how it is that Hollywood stories so often come to reflect the real world.

If you've ever seen World War Z - the thing that makes you immune from the zombie apocalypse is having a fatal disease. The Zombies ignore the terminally ill because the disease that motivates them to spread itself doesn't want to waste its time on a *diseased* host organism.

Covid-19 is deadly because it creates a hyper-immune response in people with very aggressive immune systems. At least in part. There has been a lot of speculation that things like smoking might make infection by Covid-19 less likely or less lethal because smokers have compromised immune systems. They naturally have a less aggressive response to the infection.

Weird, huh?

Mon Sep 06 2021 08:10:57 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

So, we just started rewatching the last season of Arrested Development.

Over the last few seasons - as they introduced Ron Howard's family into the story line - I noticed an interesting phenomenon.

Howard kept telegraphing the "Hollywood is in on all the great conspiracies," messages in the plot line, throughout the series.

I haven't watched it from the beginning or put it all together yet... but he did it pretty bluntly at first - with his studio having the Lunar Lander and constant gags about how they filmed that on a Hollywood backlot.


So the cast think that Trump "stole" the ideas from the show:

https://popculture.com/streaming/news/arrested-development-cast-donald-trump-stole-border-wall-idea/

 

But we don't expect the *actors* to be in on the conspiracy. They're just people who pretend for a living.

In the meantime - the final season of the show also implies a Chinese connection with building a politically contentious and divisive border wall when they're really more interested in acquiring the means to censor the Internet through taking possession of a social media privacy suite called FAKEBLOCK.

 

Keep in mind, most of this started out *before* Trump was in office, before these things were real.

I know SouthPark, The Simpsons and Futurama all have a history of predicting wildly "implausible" things far before they happen...

But I frequently wonder how it is that Hollywood stories so often come to reflect the real world.

If you've ever seen World War Z - the thing that makes you immune from the zombie apocalypse is having a fatal disease. The Zombies ignore the terminally ill because the disease that motivates them to spread itself doesn't want to waste its time on a *diseased* host organism.

Covid-19 is deadly because it creates a hyper-immune response in people with very aggressive immune systems. At least in part. There has been a lot of speculation that things like smoking might make infection by Covid-19 less likely or less lethal because smokers have compromised immune systems. They naturally have a less aggressive response to the infection.

Weird, huh?

Ron Howard has spent his whole life in Hollywood, but also still seems like a decent guy.  I bet if he could have been any more flagrant without getting Epsteined, he would have.

And while all of the cast is strongly Democrat and outspokenly Anti-Trump...


Howard seems to call out the Left more frequently and more savagely than the Right. He just does it in a way that is very subtle and embraces all of the bullet points you have to hit to be considered part of the Left.

Except for homosexuality - I'm surprised he hasn't been called out as a homophobe yet. There isn't a gay joke Howard doesn't beat into the ground.

But he even does that with a "We're not making fun of gays, we're actually celebrating their culture," sort of way.

Wed Sep 22 2021 02:30:08 MST from TheDave

 

Ron Howard has spent his whole life in Hollywood, but also still seems like a decent guy.  I bet if he could have been any more flagrant without getting Epsteined, he would have.

I just got it... why I named this The Boob Panel. I was being witty. They're not made out of tubes, anymore. They're flat... panels. 

I wonder if I was drunk when I made this room. Magic 8 Ball says, "prospects look likely." 

I spent the last several weeks at home alone, while my daughter is away at school in Chicago, and my wife spends most weeks in L.A. at work... 

Doing this helpdesk job... which I love. It is easy, it passes the time, the customers fucking LOVE me... and I'm helping them. It pays for shit, but the hours are super flexible... so... yeah... 

And then at night I've been watching Bojack Horseman. I was an avid watcher during the early seasons, then I got my daughter into it... and... she ran with it... and that robbed it from me. I'm not sure why... 

But it turns out I was just loaning it to her. I think she needed it in her life right then - and the great thing about the series is that the supporting cast, they were protagonists of particular sub-story lines too - that made it appeal to so many different people. She found a couple of characters she identified with strongly. And they were not characters I was fond of. Rather than fight about it, I just gave it up. 

But... I came back to it... and the last season is brutal. The last couple of seasons.. really start ramping it up... but the last season is just ... not fun. 

I'm not sure how I feel about it. 

Anyhow, I'm in this place where that last post was a tremendous effort, and I have trouble even making it half way through my own BBS. 

Which is not... not normal for me. Most people claim they literally don't have a single fuck left to give. 

I still have some... but today several people challenged me on Reddit and I looked at the notification and just went, "fuck that person. Fuck the people who would agree with him. I don't have any energy for that shit." 

Most people would claim that is healthy. I'm not certain that it is, in my case. 

BoJack is absolutely brutal at the end.  I think that's what I loved about it.  It doesn't pull punches, it doesn't apologize for telling a story that hurts you.  It's painful.  It's beautiful.  I'm not going to do that to myself again, but if there's a new season I'll watch it.

It's perfectly fine to hit a place in your life where you just disconnect from your normal and go find something else to do for a while.  Maybe you create a new self.  Maybe you just recuperate your energy and go back to the things you like.  Maybe part of you is just done doing those things forever and you can develop new/different habits.  As long as you're not in danger of complete ennui shutdown, I think it's fine.  I've been going through that sort of thing lately too.  I think it's probably healthy.

Alec Baldwin *did* give me a bit of inspiration to create: 

I love the power Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop give me - and using it for the cause of pissing off celebrities. I posted this on Twitter and tagged @AlecBaldwin's blue check account. He had no comment. 

Sat Dec 04 2021 07:17:45 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

Alec Baldwin *did* give me a bit of inspiration to create: