Something in the air feels different about my New Year’s resolutions this year. I feel like I may actually keep to them and enact a positive change in my life. I suppose it’s because 2008 is an election year, and so I must be on my best behavior. “But Dan,” you might say. “You’re not running for public office. Why are you trying to appear so respectable?” In my opinion, shameless brown-nosing is something that every American should participate in. It’s a very important part of our electoral process and I want to make an informed decision in November.
I kid of course. I think the timing simply works out well this year. I’m returning to Purdue in a day or two to resume my proper education. With a new major, new apartment, and new outlook on things, I’ve got a great jumping-off point to start on the right foot. I want to start waking up earlier, working out regularly, and developing my culinary skills. Those are the big three. Blogging is a natural enemy to all of these, keeping me up late writing, sitting in front of the computer, and encouraging a diet of frozen pizza. But with this insurmountable obstacle of time-management, it makes victory that much sweeter. And what good is positive change if you can’t gloat about it?
Just because I feel like sharing the odd moments of my life, here is a video clip from my New Year’s festivities!
I’d now like to talk about something far more disturbing than Jeffery’s chest. That is, the cable networks of MTV and VH1. I looked at the Nielsen ratings for the past week, and do you know what the top rated shows on Cable are? Brace yourselves kids, this might hurt:
- NFL Football: Bears/Vikings (ESPN)
- A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila (MTV)
- I Love New York 2 (VH1)
One day, VH1 decided to stop making entertaining pop-culture shows and wanted to make a reality show. But it wouldn’t be an original, innovative, or even fresh sort of a show. It had to be formulaic, low-budget, and completely full of itself. So they looked for somebody with a lot of MySpace friends and found Tila Tequila: a bisexual, Asian Playboy model with a troubled past. Then they rounded up 32 suckers to do stupid human tricks and go on dates with her and they taped it all. Once the show started filming, MTV looked at it and said “My God, VH1, what are you doing? That show has no cultural value whatsoever! It belongs on OUR channel, not yours!” And so it moved to MTV. I’ve actually watched episodes of this show. The characters have the emotional depth of a wet tile floor. The drama and tension make “General Hospital” sound like Casablanca. However, you have a Playboy model who is usually wearing a swimsuit or a tight dress. And because she’s bisexual (not that there’s anything wrong with that) you get all the warm fuzzies associated with being tolerant of “the gays.” Plus, if you were too busy staring at her tits to remember what was going on, they have a RECAP SHOW every week so you don’t look like the idiot at the nail salon tomorrow. I count at least 8 clichés that the series is founded on. Try to spot them all!
But MTV truly cares about its viewers, so they aren’t going to suck out your soul with a show that awful and leave you hanging. They recently announced that they will be creating a spin-off of this show, where they took one of the more likeable suckers and gave him his own show, which is actually exactly the same as the show he was just on. However this show will not have a Playboy model making out with other girls, so it is doomed to fail.
Because it is a “dating” show, I should be able to take comfort that it can only last one season. She eventually narrows them down and picks The One, right? I now direct your attention to “I Love New York 2.” This show is a sequel to a spin-off of a rehash of a different reality show whose formula was invented in 1965. I cannot properly express my hatred for this show. The main character in this series is New York, an ugly, outspoken black woman who is so annoying that even someone as abrasive as Flavor Flav could not stand to have her in his house, and is so spineless that we are now able to classify jellyfish next to the Hoover Dam. But nonetheless, at the end of her first season, some poor soul proposed marriage to her. Now either she was scared off by the prospect of living with a well-adjusted person, or VH1 gave her a shitton of money to divorce him and do another season. Either way, her show is an atrocity. It’s the same mindless drivel that you see with Tila Tequila, except there are no attractive people that you want to watch. So really, you can never count on these shows actually ending. There’s no real finality to anything, and so there’s no dramatic progression. The “contestants” are coached so heavily that any unique aspects of their character are obliterated. The only suspense is created by a commercial break in the middle of someone’s sentence.
And yet these shows, these atrocities against creativity, are the most popular regular programming on cable. I hold on to the hope that people only watch them because they are terrible, and humans are naturally inclined to watch disasters happen. I also pray that their high ratings are due to the writers’ strike, and there being no other new programming on TV. I like to think I have a little more faith in humanity than that.
In the Web 1.0 world, if your page had something missing, or a feature didn’t work right, webmasters used an “Under Construction” graphic. There were only about 25 different .gif files permitted for this use, 24 of which were animated .gifs. The practice was widely adopted as a throwback to the then-endangered brick-and-mortar world. However, soon webmasters became far too clever for their own good, and the Under Construction images fell into a pit of wordplay and irony that they have not escaped from even today.
With the invention of Web 2.0, the Under Construction image was replaced by a much simpler tag: “Beta.” The Beta tag didn’t simply indicate a missing feature as the Construction tags did, but additionally carried a sweeping forgiveness for any and all errors encountered during the entire browsing experience. If a designer was unsure of the site’s completeness but didn’t know how to indicate it, he or she could simply add a small starburst to the site’s headmast that said Beta, and the users would have no right to complain about poor performance or lack of functionality.
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