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There’s an old joke. Two elderly women are at a restaurant. One of them says “The food here is terrible!” And the other replies, “And such small portions.”
In the Men’s Rights subreddit today, a guy asserts that “modern women aren’t … worth dating,” that they’re “loud, abrasive, and generally unpleasant to be around.”
And he complains that these apparently worthless–or at least worth-very-little–women don’t want to date men.
In a post on what he calls “the rising epidemic of sexless men in feminist society” a fellow called Wasteofoxyg3n lays out his, er, critique of modern dating.
“Something I’ve noticed is that with the rise of feminism, less and less men are in relationships,” he begins.
In the past, it seemed like every guy had a wife. You never heard of 30 year old permavirgins.
Actually, some 62 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 are married or living with a partner. And 30-year-old “permavirgins” are rare as well; only 9 percent of those in their 30s are virgins, and that drops to 6 percent in their forties.
All of that seemed to change with the rise of feminism. Every straight guy I’ve talked to seems to struggle with dating in some capacity.
First and foremost, women’s standards have increased drastically. in the past, women would just marry some guy from her village/town/whatever. Nowadays, they have BILLIONS of men to choose from. It’s no longer about choosing a guy in spite of his flaws, but choosing a guy WITHOUT any flaws.
Think of every guy you know who is married or has a girlfriend. How many of these men are absolutely flawless?
Second, most men are too afraid to approach women. In the past, men would buy women flowers and try to woo them. Nowadays, you can’t even say hi to a woman on the street without being called a “creep” accused of harassment.
Well, maybe you can’t say hi to a woman without being accused of harassment, but for most of us men that isn’t a problem.
How tf are you supposed to meet women anymore? You can’t approach them on the street, you can’t approach them at the gym, you can’t approach them at the library, you can’t approach them ANYWHERE. Unless you’re crazy attractive, most women will display a “get away from me!” attitude towards you. The only way left is through online dating, and we all know how well that goes for men. It’s almost as if men are being forced into a system where women have all the power.
Among online dating users, according to one survey, “83% of men have met in person with someone they first talked to online.” Women are actually less likely to have met with someone in person.
And now, after all this complaining about small portions, we get to the part about how the food sucks:
Last, but not least, modern women aren’t even worth dating. I’m probably going to get some flack for this, but it’s honestly true at this point. So many men are no longer bothering with dating and are instead choosing to focus on themselves, simply because it’s not worth it anymore.
So wait, who exactly is refusing to date whom here?
As a whole, modern women have been raised by feminism to hate and fear men. I don’t think I’ve ever met an old woman who was as loud, abrasive, and generally unpleasant to be around as the women from my generation. Modern women always ask what we have to offer but never wonder what THEY have to offer.
Feminism has completely ruined dating. It’s conditioned women to no longer view [men as] human beings. I don’t want to play the part of dancing monkey, bending over backwards just to impress some woman just so she can use me for a free meal, ghost me and then make a post on the TwoX subreddit about how many “red flags” I had.
Dude, posting this to the Men’s Rights subreddit is pretty much all the red flags you need.
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Hi @Yutolia, I am sorry your friend has changed in this way. I think you are right about the recent influence of her new partner. Previously she may have kept her views on disability/weakness etc more under wraps, but they may have always been close to the threshold of what would have been unacceptable for you, and this new man’s beliefs have supported and encouraged hers and thus edged her over that threshold.
If you met her now, as a potential new friend, it sounds like you wouldn’t get along and wouldn’t become close. The friend she was, is in the past now. You can still remember that friend with affection and appreciation, and do things for yourself to grieve that loss, but she (as she was) has gone. Be kind to yourself about this loss, you are not at fault in any way. Best wishes to you.
@Lizzie
thanks for saying that, I needed to hear/read it. I was feeling pretty low yesterday and wondering if I was being unfair but honestly I don’t want to and shouldn’t have to put up with ableist shit from someone who calls herself my friend. Of course nobody is perfect but this ableism was intentional at some level.
I agree that those thoughts were likely just below the surface and she may feel like she has permission to behave this way now. She’s been acting like I’m kind of a pathetic loser in general- I think she may feel like she’s better than me because she has a boyfriend now and I’m single. I’m single because I want to be but she clearly doesn’t believe me. She hated being single so I think she has trouble imagining that anyone could actually enjoy it.
@Yutolia the Laissez-Fairy Pronoun Boner:
I agree that those thoughts were likely just below the surface and she may feel like she has permission to behave this way now. She’s been acting like I’m kind of a pathetic loser in general- I think she may feel like she’s better than me because she has a boyfriend now and I’m single. I’m single because I want to be but she clearly doesn’t believe me. She hated being single so I think she has trouble imagining that anyone could actually enjoy it.
She sounds like an adherent of the Life Begins At Man school of thought, and now she’s got hers, and screw you NYAH-NYAH-NYAH-NYAH-NYAH! That boyfriend is the validating proof that she’s hot property. It’s also her duty to be tofu to absorb her man’s colors and flavors, so whether or not she had ableist beliefs before, she does now.
(Which raises a question: should she suffer a disabling injury, is that sort of boyfriend with that sort of attitude going to stand by her?)
And it’s an attitude that denies the validity of your needs and preferences, and that you (along with, oh, about 7,999,999,999 other people) aren’t her.
@ yutolia
I’m so sorry you had to lose a friend; but you did the right thing. Ironically though, that was one of the strongest things you could do. Weakness would have been just putting up with their dismissal through politeness or capitulation.
@Yutolia: Good on you for severing ties. That shit is hard and takes strength. And to do it directly like that, good job. I’ll admit I’m more likely to ghost someone completely rather that seek out the confrontation. It takes strength, and hopefully your life will be better for it, even if it hurts for now.
@Yutolia
She didn’t uaed to act like rhat, but if she’s happy to date a conservative she was never your friend on any meaningful level, or indeed a friend to anyone not white, abled, and cishet. Nor has she anything that resembles principles or moral fibre. In short, while it hurts now, what you’re mourning is the loss of the illusion of a decent person. All my sympathies on that, but you’re better off without that kind of shithead in your life. (Also, it was probably always going to end this way, or run aground on some other unexamined bigotry that she prefers to cling to than address.)
@Full Metal Ox
There’s no question there, the answer is no.
@Ox: I totally agree with that, and I like that “Life Begins at Man” phrase.
@Alan: thank you for saying that. I agree, and I started to realize her version of “strength” is sitting quietly and putting up with shit. That’s what abusers want people to think strength is, but it’s not. It’s standing up for yourself, which is what I did. I feel much better about it today.
@Battering Lamb: thank you for saying that. I really appreciate it.
@Dalillama: you know, I noticed recently she has no friends of color, and I was her only non-hetero friend. She was raised in a strict Catholic family that puts a lot of worth on being married and having kids. I’ve known quite a few people who’ve broken free of that but apparently she really hasn’t. I think mainly she wants acceptance from her family, and people that are different be damned. She also really can’t put herself in other people’s shoes. For example, I started a meet up for people with social anxiety in my town, and it’s gone really well. And of course, on the day of the event, some people cancel because of various reasons. I don’t take it personally. Once when I made the mistake of telling her about an event that only one person showed up to, though… she really tried to shame me for NOT taking it personally. I tried to explain to her that that happens when you plan events for things like meetup, and also when people have social anxiety, sometimes leaving the house is just too difficult for some people. As a person with social anxiety myself, I get that, but she had no empathy for that. In fact she accused me of being too nice to them and taking care of them when I don’t have to, and why don’t I just tell them to get therapy. I mentioned to her many of the group members are autistic or otherwise neurodivergent (like me) and getting out into the world can be extremely difficult when people treat you like garbage and there’s a danger you could be targeted by police for “being weird”. Then she went on a rant about how she’s so relieved that covid is “over” (as we here know, it’s not, but moving on!) and she would do anything to get out and why don’t they bla bla bla. It was honestly very enlightening and it was the start of this recent episode. And things have just gone downhill from there.
But yeah, I think she’s someone who just doesn’t say what she thinks and then when I’m gone she has probably told her friends “guess what my crazy leftie friend Yutolia said today!!”
thanks for your observations!
@Yutolia:
From one neurodivergent person to another, my condolences.
Just out of curiosity, where did you get the money to set up those meetups?
Most of TV is terrible these days, and the portions are so small.
It’s not even just the excessive advertising, which increasingly intrudes during the action and not just in the breaks where it belongs. Or the weird timings. 10 years ago everything started ending at x:59 or y:01 for no good reason, making shows that should have been back-to-back sometimes overlap if they were on different stations … and this has been getting worse ever since. 03, 05, and 07 end/start times sometimes, and most recently the sci fi channel here often gets out of whack by 10 or 20 minutes. It seems they pad some of the more major new episode airings with extra ads to where they run over their time — Star Trek: Picard has been a particular culprit recently, often running 70 or so minutes and making everything else for the rest of the night start ten or more minutes late. It used to be that only happened on stations that aired sports, if a game ran longer than expected. Now channels with nothing but scripted stuff routinely have overruns, somehow, despite lacking any plausible excuse.
On the terrible side, there’s the seemingly unstoppable proliferation of “pink slime”: Ice Road Truckers, Border Security, American Idol, Survivor, ten billion variations on the theme of The Bachelor, and so on and so forth, cheap to produce, allegedly unscripted, and of course by classifying them as game shows and the actors as contestants they don’t have to pay the actors, or at least can use non-unionized ones. Since it’s cheap it’s more profitable than good, proper shows even if the latter draw a much larger audience, and since it’s more profitable it spreads like kudzu across the primetime grid and strangles everything else.
On the small portions side, one has to suspect that even as they are cramming so many ads into some shows that they are running well over the 60 minute mark, the actual minutes of show are shrinking. Some hourlong shows seem to have only about 40 minutes, if that, of actual content nowadays, down from 52 back in the mid 20th.
Then there are quality issues that seem to be “art” choices rather than either unintentional errors or the intruding of the profit motive and its Midas touch that turns everything into gold-generating ads and kudzu. Most notably this trend that everything has to be dark. No, I don’t mean “dark” as in “dark and edgy”, I mean “dark” as in “did Starfleet lay off all those yeomen and ensigns who used to do minor maintenance such as changing the lightbulbs?”
Compare any recent episode of any Star Trek other than Strange New Worlds (which, by the way, has yet to have its 2022-2023 season premiere, and it’s almost May) with either that or any older Trek: original, Next Gen, Voyager, or even DS9 or Ent. It’s (literally) night and day. The older Treks have nicely brightly lit sets, you can actually see the people and the architecture, etc.; every set in, say, Picard has lighting reminiscent of a nightclub, with localized brighter lighting around certain key things around the periphery of the room (exits, shelves with stuff on them, etc.) and everything else super-dim. You can barely see anything half the time, and when there’s a fight, between the crappy lighting and the directors these days all being hyperactive and hopped up on crystal meth, what with jump cuts every 0.2 seconds or so, you can’t generally tell either who’s who or who’s winning.
It’s by no means exclusive to the Star Trek franchise either. Compare new Quantum Leap’s indoor sets and old, or, really, just about anything.
Important text (on in-world objects or subtitles and such) tends to be tiny too. They seem to assume everyone has a giant 1080p plasma screen four feet in front of their face, rather than, say, watching a regular old television (or even a newer, high def one) of reasonable size from across the room.
And everything is getting glitchier and glitchier. Set top boxes that freeze up at inopportune times and need rebooting. Sound cutting out inexplicably and needing to change the channel and then change it back to fix it. Recently I’ve had mine randomly going into a picture-in-picture mode with a column of thumbnails of other shows on the right, which is not its normal channel-guide interface (which puts a big textual list of channels on the bottom, a much smaller P-in-P at top right, and an info box at top left) and which doesn’t dismiss by hitting the remote’s cancel button, at least not just once rather than hammering on it for several seconds. I don’t know where that came from — buggy software update? Beta-trial of some new interface? — but it keeps happening when I’m trying to watch movies on Showcase, in particular. Remember when you just turned on the TV, turned on the cable box, and everything just worked? As Scotty famously put it, “the more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain”.
That applies to browsers and computers, too. The bit that annoys me most is how about 10 years ago all the major browser makers decided to fold the “stop” and “reload” buttons into one, and shortly after that web site designers went hog-wild adding embeds of every description, often big things (video especially). So now when you want to stop a page load, the button you want to hit keeps flapping back and forth between “stop” and “reload” for several minutes instead of just being “stop”. It does it also if you reach it by “back” navigation, so if you hit “back” and then want to promptly reload to get the current version of the page rather than whatever it was back then (say, it’s a blog page that might have new comments), again you can’t just immediately “reload” as the button spends a while flickering between that and “stop”. I think they should just make them separate again, or at least make it stay as a “stop” button until every single thing on the page is done loading. Many sites break these even further, along with the throbber. Click a link at Facebook and watch the throbber not throb and the reload button not become a stop button (so, notably, you can’t change your mind and abort the link follow short of hitting “reload” and then “stop”, and that’s likely to clobber what you were trying to preserve since it will load all new news-feed items because you hit “reload”). Add in Firefox’s, at least, bad habit of lurching forward a bit and then stopping when you hit stop — I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve clicked a link, stared at the page for several seconds while nothing happened, decided it had gotten stuck for whatever reason, and hit “stop” intending to then click the link again for a second attempt, only for it to not simply stop, staying where it is on the page with the link, but first load a small part of the new page (finally) and then stop, usually leaving me looking at a blank page or one with just a header above a blank body or something, and having to hit “reload” (or even “back” and then click the link again). Browser ergonomics have definitely taken a backward step or two since, oh, sometime around late NCSA Mosaic to early Netscape Navigator. Those had separate reload buttons and would stop on a dime. They also didn’t fill the task list with 30-40 processes each weighing in at several hundred megs … though some of the blame surely lies with greedy web businesses loading pages with enormous amounts of tracking and advertising cruft, plus more stuff to purposely punish people who disable scripts or use adblockers, with the most usual being to prevent images from loading if scripts are disabled. All of this stuff must bloat up the browser process(es) and slow them down … which makes a lot of the problems share a common source with the TV problems, to wit, advertising-focused greed.
The web has its own version of pink slime kudzu, too: any web search with poor results, you’ll often find that the last few at least just go to pages with seemingly random snippets of text interspersed with ads. At least the search engines are smart enough to downrank crap like that so you mostly don’t see it on searches with plenty of good, relevant results. Too bad the viewing public isn’t, by and large, smart enough to downrank the TV pink slime by never tuning it in, or at least never admitting to having done so when Nielsen comes knocking. Otherwise it would have swiftly died out.
The other good thing about the web kudzu is that it isn’t, that I’ve noticed, fascist at all; just incoherent stream-of-consciousness ramblings, probably machine-generated. In contrast, the TV pink slime contains some very jackbooty things, including the aforementioned Border Security, which makes Cops look liberal. I’ve had the misfortune to be stuck with both, at various times, at the insistence of other TV users in multi-person situations (usually while visiting somewhere and thus also bereft of my PC and most of my other gear, so with little to do but watch TV). The Cops show can, actually, be a bit of an eye-opener as you see them demonstrate ACAB for a full hour by mercilessly harassing victimless “criminals” and, fairly often, people who likely are themselves victims. Sex workers, for instance. When it’s not that it’s shaking down people for money for having some minor malfunction on the road like a broken taillight. The most serious actual crime I ever saw them “investigate” on that show was a shoplifting, and shoplifting, though actually non-victimless for once, is (especially in this economy) punching up, not down. What does that make the cops? What the show didn’t show was the cops gunning down a shoplifter (or kneeling on one’s neck for 9 minutes). I guess they edit things like that out. It still didn’t enamor me much of cops. Maybe people who see sex workers and random poor people as the scum of the earth and as deserving punishment have a different experience with this show, though?
Border Security is far, far worse. It seems to have started during the height of post-9/11 paranoia and warmongering and the general theme is “be afraid! Brown people are tireless in their attempts to penetrate our nation with drugs and bombs and terror! Also expired vegetables that didn’t go through some special quarantining and stuff”. When it’s not scary foreign people with dark skin, funny accents, and different clothing and religious beliefs trying to sneak a knife past the X-ray, it’s more Cops-style zero-tolerance toward minor, mostly unwitting infractions committed by travelers who are just trying to go about their business, or perhaps their vacation. It comes off as a mix of harassment and xenophobic propaganda, but may do a better job of making people genuinely fearful of the “barbarians at the gates” than Cops does of making people genuinely fearful of domestic criminals. Well, except maybe for making shopkeepers a bit more afraid of teenagers running out the door with a candy bar without paying for it first. Oooh, that driver has an expired plate! So terrifying! Our streets will not be safe until he gets a little, way-too-expensive sticker on it saying “2023”! I’m locking the door and staying within arm’s reach of my gun-safe until that sticker is safely on there! (Note: I do not actually have a gun-safe; that’s mostly an American thing, I’m given to understand.)
@ surplus
I’m far too pretentious to have a television set. That doesn’t of course stop me watching things online.
You might like this channel. It’s free and no ads. There’s some good niche stuff on there people might like.
https://www.arte.tv/en/
I wholeheartedly agree. This is corruption, and moreover, it is American-style corruption! Under Canadian Content rules, 60% or more of all government corruption in Canada must be our homegrown variety, which means ministers nepotistically appointing their own close family to cushy white-collar jobs in the public service! Not this American business-lobbyist-revolving-door crap! We won’t stand for the growth of this flagrantly unCanadian form of corruption! By accepting this telco lobbying job instead of appointing his son to the board of the CBC or something instead, Bains has violated Canadian Content rules and must be punished!
The hardest part about doing crime in Canada is for every English bank you rob, you have to rob a French one too.
@Alan Robertshaw: I doubt very much that I’m in its reception footprint … wherever that is.
Meanwhile I continue to be baffled by people who think peak TV is now, or very recent. As far as I can tell peak TV was the late 90s. Most stations still weren’t watermarking every frame of everything that wasn’t ads; shows had proper opening and closing title sequences and the networks didn’t cut the latter off and replace it with more advertising; advertising was properly confined to the break periods; and soooo many good shows were on. Multiple Star Treks, the original Quantum Leap, Stargate just getting started, Babylon 5, no kudzu, well-lit sets, the main characters of everything but kid’s-adventure shows were professional, competent adults rather than hyperactive teens or adults acting like hyperactive teens, and weren’t so over the top even when they were teens (e.g. BTVS), and you actually got 22 episodes in a season, not one 22-hour-long episode whose plot crawls at the speed of molasses on Pluto and has barely advanced before bam, hyper-abbreviated end credits (or even just the executive-producer credit, singular) and time to wait 167 hours again … and to make that 22-hour-long episode not drag quite as much the main cast are continually embroiled in suspiciously soap-opera-like interpersonal-drama subplots that cause one to zone out and then miss it when a real, actual plot development in the real, actual plot finally happens.
(Arc-based shows can be done right. Babylon 5 showed them the way. All there’s been since then, though, have been cargo-cult attempts at copying its superficial features, at best.)
Pacing was actually a thing. The plot advanced in a steady drip, drip, drip, rather than nothing at all important happening during most of an episode and everythinghappeningallatonce! during each of the remaining five individually-scattered minutes.
I blame that big writer’s strike. The writing has been terrible ever after and I think that’s also what started the kudzu invasion, as the networks scrambled to slap something, anything, on the air even without any writers available to script it … Everything after that has been one giant retaliatory capital strike as they refuse to hire writers at all for most of their shows and hire the cheapest, crappiest ones they can find for the rest (and based on their output, that apparently means the ones who got fired from the writing pools of things like The Young and the Restless and Days of our Lives).
@Surplus: thanks for your condolences, I really appreciate it! As for the meetups, it’s all free or extremely low cost.. I only do the free version of meetup and we only do free or very low cost events. I am on Medicaid and get housing assistance and currently don’t make much money so we either do low-key walks (for example, we did a tour of the city‘s downtown murals last year) or we meet for coffee or outdoor picnics or we do game nights at a member’s house where we bring along any games we happen to have. If someone doesn’t have any to bring, that’s fine too! We’ve done free days at the local art and history museums. My intention is keep it free/very low cost for everyone so we’re all included, and there isn’t a cost barrier. The point is getting out and spending time with people, not spending money. We arrange carpooling and/or meeting near a bus stop for people who don’t have cars or can’t drive.
I know I’m lucky to live in an area where we have these things. There are plenty of places in the US and probably even Canada that don’t have those options, but we do so I take advantage of it when planning events.
@ yutolia
I love stuff like that. Quite a few towns here have ‘trails’ that you can follow. Sometimes it’s artworks, but it can be anything interesting really. Lots of mining heritage ones in Cornwall.
My fave walk though is London Wall. As the name suggests, it follows the route of the Roman wall around the City of London. Quite a bit of the wall is still standing. Although I like to nerdily point out which bits are from the later medieval wall (you can tell by the bricks). But there’s like 2,000 years of history along it.
@Alan: that sounds so fun!
It seems to me, too, that there’s a certain type of show that is going extinct, and which is hard to describe. But a number of shows used their main characters not primarily to tell stories about the main characters themselves, but about other people, and places. Mystery shows weren’t about the detective, but the crimes, the criminals and their victims, and the motives; the true main character was very often the city where the detective worked. Star Trek’s main character wasn’t Kirk, or Picard, or Janeway, but space itself and all the weird and varied critters and civilizations that might be out there, and the plot of a typical episode was about one or a few of these, and their conflicts and foibles. Why did the society of Landru stagnate? Who ate all the planets in sector 7? What became of the Iconians, and did the Yamato run afoul of them … or were they destroyed by a rival investigating team of Romulans? How to resolve conflicts between Onara and Breccia, or Eminiar and Vendikar? Again, the ship and crew usually were a vehicle to tell stories about other people and cultures; the focus wasn’t on their own internal dramas, though neither were they blank ciphers.
Most of the shows I mentioned before (though not B5, notably) had this quality, and very few shows these days do — even those that are heirs to some of these franchises. Stargate: Atlantis retained this quality but Stargate: Universe did not, focusing much more on internal drama among the main cast, and notably it flopped. Star Trek: Discovery went the same route as SGU, apparently with the same results (it seems to be the first Trek to not get a season 4 since the original series, though it still managed to eke out one more than SGU did). The new Quantum Leap has much more plot that takes the form of internal politics and issues among the team in the future, and much less time devoted to the story-of-the-week in the past. (The original, by contrast, is basically Star-Trek-in-time-instead-of-space, with a dose of “the past is a different country”. You almost never saw the actual Quantum Leap facility’s sets! Bring that back, minus Al’s problematic skirt-chasing-style misogyny or at least with him constantly getting called out for it and using it as teachable moments.) The recent CSI revival has gone a combination of the Stargate: Universe route and the “one 22-hour episode” route, much like the recent non-Strange-New-Worlds Treks, and is far less interesting than early episodes that focused on a case (or two) of the week and on the actual forensic mystery-solving. The main character used to be Vegas and now it’s the season-arc villain, if it’s anyone at all.
I’ll bet the same thing has been happening to other franchises, in genres I’ve not generally paid attention to, as well.
The refreshing exceptions have both been fairly true-to-the-original Trek revivals, albeit one with the serial numbers filed off, and both also went missing very quickly. Strange New Worlds is very much like ST:TOS … and has disappeared without explanation this year (last I’d heard it had been renewed but … almost May and no season premiere yet, nor advertising for it). And a few years back was the two-season run of The Orville, which was basically ST:TNG with the decals painted over. Episodic, the ship a vehicle to tell stories mostly about places other than the ship … and properly-lit sets, which I find to be an interesting correlation, albeit with only two data points thus far.
That the “good ones” in recent years have also not been surviving past their first couple of seasons doesn’t bode well. I think that, far from us being at “peak TV”, TV might be dying. It’s been a decade or more since a long-running show (defined as surviving through season 5) has debuted that wasn’t either pink slime or some other non-scripted-drama thing, a continuation that only counts if you count the original version (e.g. CSI), or a CW “Arrowverse” DC-comics-based show (and all of those suffered the 22-hour-episode-full-of-soap-operatics syndrome to ever-increasing degrees with each successive season). And the latter are all gone now except for the Superman and Lois revival, which if you don’t count the 1990s original episodes has only as of yet reached season 3.
My prognosis is grim: I would not be surprised if, in ten more years or so, TV won’t exist anymore. There will undoubtedly be some paywalled TV-like things on websites that are effectively unavailable to the bottom 90% of the income distribution, and there might still be broadcast/cable/satellite services overrun with kudzu if they are heavily enough subsidized (perhaps to keep the likes of PBS, BBC, and CBC available), but the hourlong scripted drama as we knew it will be dead, at least outside of those paywalled rich-people sites and the torrents, and the hourlong scripted episodic drama that mostly uses its cast as a vehicle to tell stories about others will probably be dead even if you make six figures and can afford to live somewhere with fiber to the home and pay for things online with credit cards.
OK, I’ve probably rambled enough on this topic for one day. Has there been a mass shooting in the US since the Dadeville one yet? :/
12 and counting according to this site: https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting
But the casualties are too small to make national news.
@Surplus: I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened at least to some degree. Things seem to be headed in that direction. It’s unfortunate, especially since it used to be mainly free.
I mainly do audiobooks. I don’t read well – I understand what the words mean but I have trouble absorbing them. But audio works just fine, and I have always liked reading more than watching. That’s not a value judgment anybody who’d rather watch TV, I know we all have our preferences. Audiobooks haven’t gone the way TV and digital music have but I’m terrified they will. At this point I own all my audiobooks but what if the companies get new ownership and terms of service change? It freaks me out.
@Surplus to Requirements:
To the degree that any of that might be true (I have no idea, I haven’t watched TV since like 2005 or so) it might be partially an audience shift; a lot of people have dropped out of watching pop-culture entertainment mostly or entirely (myself included) resulting in a change in audience expectations among those who remain. Of course that’s probably not the whole story, but that might have some effect.
Regarding TV:
I think it is very much an issue of platforms and audiences.
I can think of any number of phenomenal TV shows from, the last few years, but then I realized that nearly all of them are produced by streaming services or cable networks. The last TV show on broadcast TV that I watched faithfully was Hannibal, and it ended in 2015.
And should streaming shows really be considered “TV shows?” The business model is completely different, especially the lack of commercials and the audience directly paying for it instead. That’s not even getting into the different production models.
@Yutolia:
They can have my 8TB external HDD full of unencrypted epubs, mp3s, and mkvs when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
@Allandrel:
No. A TV show, by definition, is a show you can watch by sitting on your couch, poking at a remote control a couple of times, and then staring at that boxy thing with antennas sticking out sitting on the stand at the opposite corner of the room. If you have to have a zippy expensive urban internet connection, not just cable, a satellite dish, or an antenna, and you need a computer to watch it, then, as Scotty (again) might put it: “What in blazes is this? Laddie, I was watching the telly 100 years before you were born and I can tell you whatever this is, it is definitely not TV.”
And on the topic of TV shows whose characters are mainly storytelling vehicles for other places and people, it strikes me that this might be connected with the “Wuxia” that was recently mentioned in another thread here. Specifically, that would seem to be a subset of a broader category of “wandering troubleshooter” fiction that would also include “wandering gunslinger” type Westerns, but also shows like Quantum Leap and the original MacGyver. Those in turn fit into a somewhat broader category still where the wandering troubleshooter becomes a group or even a vessel and its crew, and that wider category now includes most of the Treks and Stargate.Then there’s the variation where the troubleshooters stay put but at a nexus of trade routes or similarly important location and the action comes to them, but the stories are still more about these others than about the regular cast. That variation includes Deep Space 9, Babylon 5 (to a lesser extent as there’s a fairly big focus on B5 and its denizens themselves), and a lot of the older mystery/cop/hospital shows. ER would be a classic non-sf example.
Perhaps the most bizarre thing is that nobody’s bothered to set one of these in the Star Wars universe, despite the obvious possibilities, particularly during the gap between the prequel and original trilogies. A wandering Han Solo, living by his wits and the trusty blaster at his side, post-“Solo: a Star Wars story” and pre-ANH, smuggling arms to the rebels and dodging Imperial battlecruisers, say, or a wandering Kenobi freeing slaves and fixing problems caused by the Hutts and their ilk in the Outer Rim while on the run from the Empire post-Order-66.
What did we actually get? The movies, the 80s Droids and Ewoks cartoons, and a short animated series set between Episode 2 and Episode 3 that just vanished off the air after the first season or so. Lately I’ve been seeing trailers for something called The Mandalorian, but they never give a theatrical release date nor a “coming to this channel this fall” sort of deal. I’m not even sure whether it’s a movie or not. The ads all mention streaming services but not where and when it’s supposed to debut in traditional outlets (aka those accessible to people who can’t afford to be spending several thousand bucks a month just on rent or mortgage payments alone).
@Surplus
I would argue that The Mandalorian is very much one of those shows, being essentially Lone Wolf and Cub in Star Wars, with a heavy helping of the Western “wandering gunslinger” archetype.
There’s actually been some complaint about the latest season not focusing on Din, which actually strengthens that reading.
Yutolia
Been away at a funeral so late to say “well done you!” I did the same a few years ago with someone I went to college with in the 1980s, my final straw was a couple of weeks after I’d had a colonoscopy – which I did mention to her – she said “I’m sure the pain would all be fixed if you would just clean everything out, empty your intestines right out, it would re-set everything and you’d be fine!”. Quite how she thought the colonoscopy guy managed to stick a camera up my clearly still-full-of-shit ass I have no idea. I saw her last year quite by accident at a Richard Thompson concert and was surprised by how much I really did not want her to come over and talk. She did of course, but went away quickly enough when I wasn’t all forgiving and excited to see her. So stick to your decision, you deserve to be treated like a person!
@Yutolia Well done for standing up for yourself.
I just googled to find out what a Metal Ox is, and found that I’m one myself.