Twitter Revisited
I realized recently that I’ve been thinking incorrectly about Twitter all along. I was taking it at face value, and that was a mistake. I assumed that since the site was ostensibly a place where everyone answered the question “What are you doing?” it was basically a glorified Facebook status update.
But then I downloaded Twhirl, broke my rule about not following anyone I don’t know or allowing them to follow me, added a few more people to my buddy list who use it much more than I do, and I came to understand that it’s not about what you are doing at all. It’s the new chat room.
It has a few advantages over old school chat rooms. It’s slower and more deliberate. It’s well-integrated with mobile devices via SMS. But most importantly, you don’t have to see anyone’s chat if they’re not on your buddy list. You only see the chat you want to.
That last part is pretty big actually. Anyone who has ever been in a chat room knows that at some number of participants they become entirely useless. That number can be as low as a few people, or as high as maybe a few dozen, depending on the location and subject matter, but it’s generally pretty small. The Onion even has a running feature called “Ask A Chat Room” that makes fun of it.
With Twitter, you control whose chat you see, so if your signal to noise ratio gets bad, you just remove some friends. If your chat room is out of control, it’s your fault and you can fix it. That’s a pretty significant difference.
There are a few problems though. For one, the 140 character limit is not a good thing. It seems like it is, because if there’s one thing almost anyone who writes anything (myself included) could use, it’s a little brevity. But the short limit makes it impossible to express a unique, coherent thought. That’s why despite following a lot more people, I rarely found anything of any serious value there. You can say “Facebook is never going to monetize. $15b is an absurd valuation.” But you can’t give any logic behind it. The best you can do is write it in a blog post, then link to it on Twitter, but what’s the point of that? Nobody wants links to blog posts being SMSed to me. If I cared, I’d already see it either in Google Reader or FriendFeed.
Of course, none of that matters when they shut down the reply feature, which is what elevates Twitter from status update to chat room in the first place, due to scalability problems. It’s unfathomable to me that they did that. It would be far better to just close signups than to change your site from one thing people enjoy into something else entirely. But I guess we’ve already established that the people running the show there are grossly incompetent, so this should come as no real surprise.
Even in status update mode, Twitter is still good for one other thing, breaking news. If you have SMS alerts on, only one person on your contact list has to know that George Carlin died and you will. So if any one of the 100 people you follow is watching CNN or surfing the news sites on the web, you’ll find out about it instantly.
But unless you’re a blogger that depends on “breaking” stories, this is of little value. It’s certainly of none to me. And once I realized what Twitter really is, I pretty much checked out.
I think there’s value there for certain types of people, don’t get me wrong. If you or your startup are trying to build a brand in the tech community, it’s pretty useful. Follow everyone who is anyone, and engage in conversations. People Twitter for much the same reason they blog: to converse with strangers, so they’re pretty open to it.
But beyond that, it’s just another time-sucking chat room. I’ve already got more demands on my time than supply, so I don’t see myself really getting too involved. That said, people sure do love new ways to sink their time, so maybe it will expand beyond the tech crowd. I’m still skeptical, but then given the grossly disproportionate amount of time they spend online they might not have to, assuming they can get their house in order. Which is probably not a safe assumption.
My StumbleUpon PagePosted on July 3, 2008
Filed Under tech |
Lost
Is it me, or is this the funniest thing you’ve ever seen? Two women got lost for six days in the woods despite having a compass and a map. Six days!
My favorite quote is this one:
Rangers estimate the women logged at least 20 miles before they were picked up by a helicopter crew outside the northeastern side of the 9,400-square-mile park, Fister said.
In 6 days, they walked a total of 20 miles? While lost? That’s barely over an hour of walking a day. What did they do with the other 15 they were awake? You can infer from the article that they didn’t bother to spend any of them finding food.
“There were steep hills, so we had to get away from them and there was this high brush we had to push through,” she said. “I cried a little bit, but not much.”
I’m no survival expert, but I would think the first thing you’d want to do when you’re lost is go to an area of high elevation, where you can see the land around you and possibly be spotted by a search helicopter. Also, wouldn’t this thought (assuming you’re capable of those) go through your head as you were pushing through high brush? “Hmm, judging from the lack of scratches and torn clothing, I don’t think I went through any thickets on the way here. Perhaps I should turn around and go back the way I came from.”
Flantz, who plans to return to work on Saturday, said she’s not giving up on outdoor adventures — but next time she’ll be better prepared.
I’m sorry, but if a compass and a map aren’t enough, you really can’t be better prepared. Maybe you could bring a GPS and use it to smash open walnuts.
Posted on June 30, 2008
Filed Under Conclusive Proof That People Are Stupid |
Overheard at Denny’s
I generally don’t like to blog about the little things that happen in my life. We’ve all seen those ones, and they’re tedious to read, and probably tedious to write. But last night, something happened that made me say “that’s why God gave us blogging.”
I was in a Denny’s (which could be a post in and of itself) when I overheard quite possibly the most ridiculous thing any human has ever said. It was a very large body-builder type guy. When the waitress asked him what he wanted, he said “Do you got any food for these muscles?”
There’s not much I can add to that one. I will say, though, that the waitress, whose picture is probably shown in the Wikipedia entry for the term “3 dollar skank”, was even offended. She hid in the back for the rest of the time because she thought he was hitting on her.
Posted on June 26, 2008
Filed Under Dialogue |
WoW
Someone the other day wrote a question on Hacker News asking why World of Warcraft is so successful. The question, as posed, is”
“Why is world of warcraft so successful? What about it made it that it became the largest and most profitable MMO game of all time? Is it the first MMO that tried to appeal to non-hardcore gamers? Or a lot more than that?”
I think there are really two questions there. The first is “Why are massively multiplayer online (MMO) games successful?” The second is “Why is World of Warcraft (WoW) the most successful MMORPG?” (the RPG being “role playing game”, for non-techies in the audience) .
I think people in the comments gave a lot of good answers to the second question, better than I could since I don’t play it or any other MMO games (unless you count poker). But my answer to the first got downmodded quite a bit. Nonetheless, I’m pretty certain that the answer to it is that MMO games are a solid form of escapism.
When you play WoW, you aren’t thinking about your bills, or how much of a dick your boss was to you at work yesterday. You’re just thinking about how you’re going to slay the Evil Orc with the Dagger of Despair in the Crystal Cave.
Damn near everyone in our modern world engages in some form of escapism. For some people it’s sports (or fantasy sports). For some people it’s gambling. For tens or maybe even hundreds of millions it’s television. And like any other form of escapism, there’s a healthy amount, and a lot of people who cross that line (largely out of depression, I’d guess) to where it becomes an obsession.
So I think if you want to replicate the success of something like WoW, step one is to create something so engaging that people forget about the other things in their life while they’re using your product. If someone is playing your game and thinking about how he has to take out the garbage, you’ve failed. If someone is taking out the garbage and thinking about how he is going to play your game as soon as he’s done, you’ve succeeded.
WoW also has a strong social aspect, and it’s largely (but not exclusively) engaged in by people who generally aren’t the most social guys around in the real world. I remember listening to Opie and Anthony a long time ago, and one of them played. He got kicked out of a guild, only to find out later that the leader was some dorky 14 year old from New Jersey.
In WoW, nobody knows you’re a nerdy teenager. You’re just a level 82 paladin. So it’s yet another level of escapism. You’re not only escaping from your environment and responsibilities, but also from your own genetics and a world that often judges you based upon them. It’s a more meritocratic universe than the one we actually inhabit, so it appeals largely to people whose strengths are mental rather than physical.
So there’s that element as well. Of course, all of that wouldn’t matter if the product wasn’t just plain fun. But I think for something to be as successful as WoW is, it takes a lot more than being fun. You have to appeal to unsatisfied primary urges, like the desire to forget your troubles and be judged not on how you look, but by how you perform.
I’ve never played the game, though I’ve watched others play, for two main reasons. One is that I don’t think I’d enjoy it. I’m not into the Dungeons and Dragons theme (which is odd, since many of my closest friends are) and I like games that are more about solo competition. I’m more of a Guitar Hero, Mario Kart Wii kinda guy. I like to be able to compete against others and myself, by going for a higher score or a shorter time.
And the other reason is that I would be screwed if I did enjoy it. I tend to be overly competitive, and often obsessive, so when I take on a new game, I usually go all-out. I simply don’t have the time for that these days. I have a wife and a startup, and if any time is left over I spend it playing games I know I won’t think about when I’m done.
As someone in the gaming industry, it’s impossible not to admire what they’ve done. Of course, it’s been about 10 times more successful than they had even dreamed it would, and it’s good to see Blizzard (who has been making great games since I was in high school) hit a grand slam after years of home runs. Most of all, I think it’s an interesting case study, because the game has supplanted 100% of a lot of people’s free time activities, and if you’re in the industry, it’s worth delving into why.
Posted on June 25, 2008
Filed Under Enjoyable Ways to Waste Time |
Shouldn’t It Be Breaking Badly?
I just wanted to say thanks to cchjd for recommending Breaking Bad. Good show. I’m only two episodes in (yeah, I know, I should run more) but I’m enjoying it greatly so far. It’s also rather long (it must have few or no commercials, given the run times) so I get an extra mile in.
I just got done with Frasier. That took me months because there are so many episodes. In fact, I’m not even sure I started that one this year. I feel like it was one of the better examples of the old vanguard sit-coms (3 cameras, studio audience/laugh track). But it still always felt a little too contrived, but not in the fun, obvious sort of way that Seinfeld was. In fact, Frasier, like almost every sit-com other than Seinfeld, made you feel that the outrageous situations were often just hashed together to enable one-liners, whereas with Seinfeld it was the other way around.
So I liked Frasier (enough to watch 11 full seasons of it, much from an elliptical machine) but I didn’t really like it, let alone love it. Nonetheless, it was better than staring at a wall while running in place.
I’m not sure what I’ll watch after my current project, since it’s only 8 episodes. I might take someone’s recommendation on some of the Adult Swim shows. I also may check out The Wire. I watched a few episodes and didn’t really care for it, but everyone I know is telling me how great it is. Can they really all be wrong? Maybe I should find out.
I’m thinking of turning the basement into a home gym, which will probably boost my TV-watching time, unless I can figure out how to play poker while doing bench presses. Strangely, I feel like I don’t watch much television, yet I can name at least 20 shows I’ve watched straight through. And I don’t know if I ever watch more than an hour in a day, and many days it’s zero.
Enough blogging about my boring life. But thanks to everyone whose recommendations made working out a little less soul sucking.
P.S., if you get the joke behind the title of this post, you spend too much time playing poker.
Posted on June 25, 2008
Filed Under TV, Movies, Music, and Why They All Suck |
Bubble 2.0
One of the things that annoys me so much about the tech industry these days is the rampant arrogance. I’m certainly not one to begrudge someone a moderately over-inflated sense of self-importance. But I think it’s long left the bounds of reasonable self-confidence and entered the realm of self-aggrandizing stupidity.
The most telling sign is the way that the tech industry seems to deem itself immune from the basic laws of economics. Out is the 80/20 rule; in is the long tail. Out are revenues; in are page views and subscriber counts. And I think we’re seeing them both come crashing down, just like we did seven years ago.
This time it’s going to be much slower and less remarkable, because the action is not taking place in the public markets. Startup exits morphed from IPOs to acquisitions, eliminating much of the speculators’ irrational exuberance of the late ’90s. Now we’ve only the exuberance of venture capitalists, and while still probably on the high end of reasonable (or the low end of unreasonable) it’s a far more educated one than that of any Joe Blow with an E*TRADE account.
But the web has, in the years since the first bubble, shifted almost entirely to a culture of free, and I don’t think it can last. Free services, free (in multiple senses of the word) software, free everything. This is a combination of “The Penny Gap” and a shift to a focus on user stats rather than profits, immediate or potential. Say what you want about Webvan or Pets.com, but they had real revenues, and real business models. Their bottom line spending was clearly out of line, their optimism about the growth of the net turned out to be unfounded, and they too ignored certain fundamental principles of economics. They were different principles, and were no less bankrupted when reality came crashing down, but at least they got step 1 right, which is to make something that someone will pay for.
I think that at the end of the day, much of our new free culture is going to turn out to be just plain unsustainable. I’m predicting that we’re going to see a large number of high-flying startups crash, just like we did before. They aren’t currently flying as high or as conspicuously as last time, so the crashes will be much more graceful, but crash they will. This time they won’t depress the public markets, at least not directly, just hedge funds and private equity.
Free software, for the most part, will endure for ages. I’m convinced that businesses attempting to profit from free software (Red Hat, Sun with their MySQL acquisition, Wordpress, Mozilla, etc.) will have a mixed record. Some will do well (Mozilla for instance) and some will not.
But in the end, free software is all about hackers making tools for hackers. They do it out of love. Only a small percentage of people who contribute to open source products ever make any profit from it (or expect to) so it doesn’t need revenue (beyond hosting costs, which are frequently donated) to endure. Hell, with Bittorrent and other forms of p2p distribution, they could probably reasonably reduce their infrastructure costs to nearly nothing.
For-profit websites, on the other hand, are another story. They have to make money, or they will eventually go out of business. They aren’t passion projects, not entirely at least, and they can’t exist forever without income. Even if they’re acquired, the same is largely true. They’ll have to pull their weight (not necessarily in terms of profits, but usually so) or they will be shut down by their corporate owners.
Oddly, I think the general public perception is exactly backward. They think YouTube will exist forever, no matter how much of a money pit it remains going forward, and that Linux is disreputable because it’s free. Don’t believe me? Try to explain to someone in a bar (outside of San Francisco) or at your family reunion that there’s an operating system that’s better than Windows for many purposes, and that it’s made largely by volunteers who donate their time to the project, largely for nothing more than the pleasure of doing so. Average people just can’t understand how Windows could make trillions of dollars while a better OS is offered for free, and think you’re crazy for even suggesting it.
And in reality, they shouldn’t believe it, because in almost any other part of life (the parts they’re familiar with) someone telling you that something is both cheaper and better than what most people pay good money for is generally trying to scam you. It’s as if someone were saying “Sure, we’ll sell you a brand new car as nice as a Cadillac for $10,000.” Software is, of course, much different than a car because a collection of ones and zeros can be copied at a very tiny cost, while an automobile cannot. But most people never feel that distinction in their everyday life, and they think that if Windows is a Cadillac, surely Linux must be, at best, a Kia. So even though they’re largely incorrect, their logic is not.
But, as far as for profit-websites (which have not-insignificant expenses) are concerned, since user base is the new revenues, startup founders who want an exit down the line and easy access to funding along the way have little choice but to play the free game. The Penny Gap is a very real and very powerful effect. Because of it, people gravitate to services that are free, and acquirers gravitate to large user bases.
This cannot last forever though. It’s just a game of mutually assured destruction. Let’s take the personal financial software industry as a hypothetical example. You have Quicken, the old-fashioned, balance your checkbook, downloadable GUI we all know and despise, and that costs money. And you have Mint.com, the newer, slicker, less featured (but in a good way) and totally free web-based version.
Suppose Mint starts making serious inroads into Quicken’s user base (and it very possibly will). Intuit (in a hypothetical world where that was their only product) would now become virtually worthless to acquirers. Who wants to buy a company whose user base is flocking en masse to a rival? Never mind the fact that Mint is hemorrhaging money (theoretically, of course) because Quicken’s makers will soon be too as their subscribers jump ship.
I realize this example is largely contrived, but I think it communicates the point which is that the culture of free, seductive as it is, is destructive to everyone involved. Everyone is undercutting everyone, until nobody is making a profit. At best, the winner is the group that can survive off of (usually meager) ad revenues.
This isn’t new. This happens in almost every burgeoning industry. The automotive industry once had over a hundred Amercian manufacturers engaging in such warfare, until consolidation reduced them to three American companies and a handful of foreign ones. The same thing happened recently in the cell phone and PC industries (much faster than it did with cars), is happening currently in the airline industry currently, and soon is going to happen in many segments of the web.
In my above example, both Mint and Quicken are going to be long term losers. Everyone will jump ship from Quicken to Mint, who, eventually, will have to start making money or be faced with intolerable server and payroll bills. But they won’t be able to charge users, or they’ll just jump to Wesabe or whoever the next free personal finance management software provider is. The Penny Gap ensures that as long as customers have a free choice available to them, that’s where most of them will end up.
And suppose they can’t make money off of advertising. (Again, this is theoretical, Mint might be one of the sites for which an ad-supported model, or maybe something like freemium or credit card affiliates, actually makes sense. But let’s suppose it is not.) What happens then? Both it and Quicken are driven out of business. And in the long term what happens? Providers in this industry drop like flies, and new ones stop popping up because eventually they realize they can’t make money. And eventually we’re left with one or two who have a business model either of actually charging a healthy markup.
This cycle has to end somewhere. It always does. The internet makes some things possible that aren’t in the physical world. For instance, a team of a few people can make a product used by millions in a matter of a few months and with little or no capital expenditures. But it doesn’t circumvent fundamental laws of economics, and it certainly doesn’t mean that a company that loses money can go on doing so forever. And acquirers can’t indefinitely support them and continue to face their board members in meetings.
Of course, as David Heliocentricity Hansson will point out, a small company doesn’t need to make hundreds of millions per year. If a team of 5 people makes $5 million per year in profit, that’s a pretty damn good life for those 5 people, and the angels who backed them for a couple hundred grand in the early years. And at the end of the day, when all of the cards are turned over, that’s where we’re going to end. The web, I think, will be populated with lots of small teams of people making relatively focused websites, and making relatively small (compared to Google) amounts of money off of them, often by charging customers small amounts of money.
Most of them won’t crack the Alexa 100. As Mike Maples once told me, only 100 can at any given time. But they won’t need to. A hundred thousand customers paying you $5 a month is a fortune, both to them and to their investors.
The problem, in the mean time, is the VC funding system. The large amounts of money injected into companies by these firms gives them a large temporary edge. Go down the Alexa 100 (removing adult sites, who operate in a largely separate sphere from the rest of the net, and even then are generally well-funded, just not by VC firms) and you’ll notice a tremendously large amount of companies funded by VCs or publicly traded companies, most of which were, at one point, funded by private equity. Only a very tiny percentage of total websites fall into either of those two groups, but probably the majority of the Alexa 100 does. If that’s not evidence of the value of money and connections, what is?
The reason of course is that money still talks, even on the web. We want to believe that the internet is fundamentally Darwinian and democratic, and that everyone has an equal shot and the cream will rise to the top. But it just isn’t true. It’s more true than it might be in the automotive or casino industries, but it’s far enough from absolute that the balance of power is still largely determined the same way it was twenty years ago. The fact that Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Plentyoffish exist shows that it can happen. But the fact that they’re the only three I can name shows that it’s still exceedingly rare.
A very good site can earn billions of users without spending a dime in advertising, and possibly without raising large amounts of funding. But at the same time, give me a few million bucks to throw into advertising, and I could turn this blog into an Alexa Top 100 site, at least for a little while. And even if it didn’t last, other blogs of similar genre and quality would be permanently left in the dust.
But in the end the little guys will win out over the big ones more often than not, because their economics are fundamentally viable. The big VC funded companies who are forced to scale beyond their profit potential just to justify the millions they raised, just like Webvan was by their investors, will go bankrupt. And they might take a lot of little guys down in the process, but in the end, it will be little guys who pop back up and fill the void. After the nuclear winter, the cockroaches will rule the Earth.
I think what we’re going to see happen is a lot fewer large, YouTube like acquisitions, and a lot more little ones. Google, with one or two notable exceptions, has pioneered this brilliantly. Acquire 100 small companies, and only a few have to be a smash hit. And if you get 20 moderately profitable subdivisions, you’ve made out like a bandit. You just shut the underperforming ones down.
Big companies like Google can acquire some companies that they know will directly lose money, so they won’t cut out large acquisitions entirely. One of the incredibly valuable things about Gmail, to them, is that it gives people a reason to log in. Even if it were fairly unprofitable in and of itself (and I have no idea if it is, so I’m not trying to imply that) giving Google the ability to track its customers as they move around the web might make it worth the subsidy. Google Docs might make serious inroads into Microsoft’s profits (though I don’t think it will) making it easier for Google to compete with them in other areas, and worth the relatively small expense of trying.
But most businesses don’t have this working in their favor. Even if they’re lucky enough to be acquired, they’ll have to pull their weight at some point or they’ll get dropped. I think YouTube is in that category, and I’m uncertain if it will ever change. I definitely won’t count out the possibility, but I’d bet against it.
This line of thinking has made a lot of difference in how I’ve chosen and operated my current fantasy sports startup, Draftmix. The beautiful thing about gaming is that it requires a buy-in, and so The Penny Gap is essentially irrelevant. A lot of the reason Craigslist has crushed so many competitors is that they don’t require someone to cross the gap. They can provide the same service, minus that necessity, and that’s a compelling alternative.
With gaming that’s not the case. Playing a game of skill like fantasy sports or poker becomes so much different when money is involved that you can’t even compare it to the free versions. It’s not the same game. It’s the difference between playing putt-putt and golfing 18 holes at Pebble Beach. And therefore, when you’re running a gaming site that allows people to play for money, you’re really not even competing with the free sites.
For a very long time Yahoo offered free poker but nowhere to play it for money. I remember asking a Party Poker executive on one of their cruises who he thought his chief competitors were, and he named about 5. Yahoo, despite being (back then) by far the most trafficked site on the net was nowhere to be found. As far as he was concerned, they weren’t even in the same industry.
So what happens is that competition is not about undercutting each other by making the service free, or even cheaper (since the house fee is well-disguised) but rather by building the most compelling site possible. And they had to do it, in the early days, with small marketing budgets (compared to what came later, when you would regularly see their ads on general programming like CNN) and an audience that was hard to reach due to poker having not yet made it into the mainstream.
As such they developed a lot of very innovative features and practices. What they are is beyond the scope of this article, and I wouldn’t want to give them away even if they weren’t, but suffice it to say the industry became incredibly efficient. In only a few cases did a player even try to compete by undercutting the majors, and never successfully.
I should mention that I’m not suggesting that the advertisement-supported business model won’t ever work. It clearly has its place. It’s just not going to be the economic panacea that a lot of people seem to expect, and that a lot of startups have depended on to justify that $10 million Series C. It’s going to be fairly rare that it builds the sort of home-runs that VCs and publicly traded companies need to recoup the sort of investments we’re seeing now.
The last bubble seemed to be all about people thinking that the top line potential was higher than it really was, because everyone would be doing all of their shopping on the net. This one is all about thinking advertising revenue will take its place.
Facebook, on the merits of current ad revenue alone, would still be a successful company, as they could probably slow down growth, scale down their employee base, and make $100m a year in profit pretty easily. But it’s debatable if it could ever hit the $15 billion valuation it currently commands. And it’s undoubted that its investors won’t let that happen.
So when people ask me if I think we’re in a bubble, I say probably, but not a very big one. People are still, I think, a little overly-optimistic, but nowhere near as much so as last time. And the top line still isn’t higher than the bottom one in most cases, but the gap is a lot smaller.
But I think we’re nearing the end of the free economy of the venture funded internet. I expect to see a lot of the free services we like that aren’t offered by the bigger corporations (and even some of the ones that are) to start charging, offering premium services, or just plain closing down. Some of them will find their way to profitability, others will be replaced by high-flying competitors due for a crash. But in the end it will be the little guys, the only ones who can afford to live off of a few million a year in ad revenue or subscription fees, and the ones that can offer a compelling premium service that survive.
Posted on June 19, 2008
Filed Under tech |
Winklevoss
Cool article by Rolling Stone about Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg. I’ve found this story interesting ever since it began popping up. At first, it seemed like most of the digerati dismissed these types of allegations. It’s easy to chalk it up to the idea that now that Zuckerberg is doing well, everyone wants a piece of the pie. The people claiming they’d been wronged were cast as just greedy assholes suing for money they didn’t earn.
The problem is, there’s just too much of it to be ignored. Lots of people run companies that turn into smash hits, often times far bigger ones than Facebook is. But even when they do, there aren’t usually this many somewhat reputable claims of douchebaggery. I’m inclined to believe that the guy’s a thieving bastard just due to sheer volume.
That’s too bad, because in general I would want to be on his side. The principles in the suit against him are Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. Winklevoss? I’m sorry, but I’m just unable to root for someone named Winklevoss.
You remember the kids from middle school with names like that. They were the ones who you didn’t feel even a little bad for when they got stuffed into lockers. The article tries to spin them as the cool kids, but look at this picture:
Those aren’t jocks (and rowing isn’t a sport). Those are Winklevosses.
I’m still sticking with the Zuckerbot3000 theory though.
Posted on June 14, 2008
Filed Under Conclusive Proof That People Are Stupid |
TV
I generally am not much of a television watcher. With a few rare exceptions, I almost never sit down specifically to watch a show. Sometimes I’ll flip on Discovery HD if I need to kill a few minutes, or if I’m too tired to do anything else but not quite ready to sleep, but for the last 5 years or so that’s been the extent of it.
But since I’ve started working out, I’ve been watching quite a bit more. I’ll run on the elliptical machine for long enough to watch about one hour of TV (minus commercials). Generally I just pick a show that looks good and watch it from beginning to end. With most programs you can either rent the DVDs or download the whole series, so you get to watch them in order with no commercials. I have a fairly elaborate home media network set up for that purpose, as I find I exercise more when I have something to distract me from the fact that I’m working out.
What I’ve noticed is that otherwise good shows often fall apart when you watch them back to back in a short period of time. For instance Lost, which I generally like when watching as it comes out weekly, turns into a cliché when watched in order. Every episode features the same things. A few people get shot (but somehow usually not dying, despite being on an island with no hospitals) and one guy who appears to be drowned. Then another character (usually Jack) does the whole chest pumping CPR thing for a little while. The drowned character doesn’t respond and everyone thinks he or she is dead. Maybe someone says “it’s over Jack”. But Jack refuses to give up. And then, at the very last possible second, the victim coughs up a little water and is basically back to full health two minutes later. On TV, not breathing for minutes never causes brain damage.
And then there’s everything Aaron Sorkin ever did. It’s all the exact same. Back when I used to watch television I thought Sports Night was the wittiest thing I had ever seen. Watching the whole thing in order, I’ve realized that every conversation in every episode is identical.
Character 1: ”I need to talk to you.”
Character 2: ”I don’t want to talk about x.”
Character 1: ”I didn’t come here to talk about x.”
Character 2: ”Ok, because I really don’t want to hear about x.”
Character 1: ”I swear I don’t want to talk about x.”
Character 2: ”No x?”
Character 1: ”No x.”
Character 2: ”Ok, then what did you want to talk about?”
Character 1: ”I want to talk about x.”
That’s funny maybe once or twice ever, but watch the series while running on an elliptical and it happens about once per mile. And Sorkin’s other two shows seem almost identical. No wonder he’s only batting .33 on television.
I think that when you watch TV the way most people do, following it from week to week, you just don’t notice that level of detail. Even if the episode is largely the same as the one preceding, it’s been a week and you’ve forgotten. But watch multiple episodes in one sitting and you can’t help but notice the repetitiousness.
A few shows hold up tremendously though, and unsurprisingly, they’re among my favorites. Seinfeld, Scrubs, Family Guy, they do a lot of the same types of things (flashbacks and asides in the latter two) but never to the point where it feels formulaic.
Now I’m running out of TV shows queued up to watch. Any suggestions? And if this post is poorly written, it was done from a cell phone. My bad.
Posted on June 13, 2008
Filed Under TV, Movies, Music, and Why They All Suck |
The Headless Sewer-Dwelling Troglodyte Army
The only thing I’m going to miss now that Hillary has withdrawn is the constant stream of footage from her rallies. I think it’s safe to say that she had the most aesthetically displeasing voter base in the history of American politics and now that it’s over, instead of just flipping to CNN, I’m going to have to go back to Ryan’s Steakhouse when I need something to make me feel good about myself.
Every single person at every single rally could be described the same way. Middle-aged, obese female with short hair and a New Yorker accent who is tired of being a “second class citizen” despite never having expressed feeling like one before 6 months ago.
Where does she get them from? I didn’t know there were so many people fitting that description, but unless CGI is involved (which it might be, given their uncanny resemblance to Shrek) these troglodytes either exist in large numbers out of my daily view (perhaps dwelling in sewers) or there was some other trickery afoot.
My theory is that it’s the same few hundred women, shuttled around from one speech to the next. And where did they come from? Hillary sent local representatives to each and every Wal-Mart with the instructions to hire anyone found shopping for a purse there. That also explains her sizeable gay male contingent.
It’s either that, or right now in America there’s a sewer-dwelling troglodyte army that has no leader. I’m not sure which scares me more, but I beg you not to print this out and then flush it down your toilet, just in case.
Either way, congratulations to you Hillary. You managed to make women realize just how second class they were by comparing them to a group of people who weren’t inferior for being female, but rather for eating three meals a day at McDonalds and then using the leftover grease for makeup. And then you showed them how, by voting for you, they would be fighting centuries of repression when they should be spending their time fighting diabetes.
You’ve done a great service to your gender. And at least when it was over, you didn’t have to look very hard to find a fat lady to sing.
Posted on June 8, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized |
From Drug Kingpin to Mayor of New York City: The Michael Bloomberg Story
I love Wikipedia. Where else can you just make shit up, and then it’s in an encyclopedia? Just today I found this nugget:
Click the image to see the original. Note the second sentence. I bet you didn’t know that Bloomberg was the cofounder of one of the most successful Columbian drug cartels. I can’t wait for that question on Jeopardy.
Posted on June 6, 2008
Filed Under Enjoyable Ways to Waste Time |