Detritus of the Mind

I will be honest - I can be a spiteful bastard sometimes.  So to commemorate the start of another destined-to-be-mediocre network television season, I have decided to pick out three shows that I would like to see fail in some way and why.  I don't watch a lot of network television (it's really only three or four shows, half of those only casually), but because it's the most ubiquitously advertised, they're the ones you're expected to weigh in on, viewable or no.  So here are three I don't want to see in next year's returning list. Revenge (ABC): A woman goes back to the Hamptons under an alias to exact revenge on those responsible for framing her father for a crime he didn't commit.  In other words, Electra Complex meets Count of Monte Cristo. Why It Should Fail: Overadvertisement, creepy undercurrents. Allow Me to Explain: I am one of the people who justifies the entries for "Hype Aversion" and "Hype Backlash" on TVTropes; whe...

Back in college, I was an anime nerd.  I still have a fondness for anime, but the genres I prefer usually aren't imported (legally) because of the same "girls don't buy shit" mentality that afflicts Western animation.  That and the boom on that medium has ended as well; I can't think of any anime series right now that are on TV and aren't tied from the foundation with some sort of toy, outside of a few overnight blocks on basic cable.  But that was how we got into anime, and I'm sure that would be how future generations would as well. So when I hear a quote like this one, from an individual named "moonlight01" on Livejournal, I want to scream: Dubs have scarred (meaning injured) me greatly since BSSM so it's not my fault I don't like English dubs. (It's worth noting that this quote came after a prolonged "OMG, someone should call the POLICE before they dub any more poor, innocent PreCure !" that was completely devoid ...

(The following is the first of the Omnicommentary reviews for Legionnaires ; due to RL time constraints & the desire to get a good backlog of reviews, these will appear monthly.  This first entry is not so much a review as an explanation for the reviews' existence and will be rather long compared to the reviews proper.) Before we visit the future, let's go back in time for a bit. 1994, small town South Jersey.  The local main street had one block that seemed to have new stores every other month.  One that lasted the longest (18 months) was a bizarre combination ice cream shop/comics and collectibles/video rental store.  While Dad bought the not-that-good ice cream, I'd look at the comics tossed in long boxes and sold two for a dollar. These were the heady days of the Speculator Bubble; soon, I would learn what what real comic shops run by legit businessmen/fans were like and just how close the industry came to self-destructing.  But for now, I bought t...

So I was surfing on The Nerdy Bird, when one of their commenters (someone by the name of Gerry) says this in regards to comic fandom on the internet: "I'm a little tired of the fanboy rage in general on the internet, every time a change comes along. They complain they are tired of the same old thing, then complain when the companies try to change things." Good Lord, do I agree.  Gerry's comment was in regards to the frankly appalling reactions to the announcement that Ultimate Spidey will no longer be a white guy but rather a mixed-race Hispanic named Miles Morales.  The kindest complaint I've heard is that Miles' creation is somehow "pandering", but the complainer cannot state how other than having a person who is not the same race as a hero being inspired to pick up his legacy & duties out of respect is somehow 100% a hacky marketing decision.  But believe me, there's been much worse.  MUCH worse.  This is the first time in a long tim...

If you've ever seen me, you wouldn't be surprise in the slightest that I like to cook and I like to watch people cook.  I sort of like cooking shows, and I sort of like Food Network.  The latter has been trying to make itself hip & cool, with the end result being more shows like Ace of Cakes , with supposedly wacky workplaces that are only increasingly vaguely related to food, and rip-offs of popular network shows like Restaurant: Impossible (which, to be fair, feels more like the more entertaining British version of Kitchen Nightmares and keeps covering places I've been).  The cooking shows veer between two schools: "hand full of amphetimines" and "hand full of Valium", with the shows that brokes the mold apparently vanishing.  Seriously, when was the last time we got a new season of Good Eats ?  It's pretty dire. But Food Network isn't as dire as its sister channel, the Cooking Channel.  With the exception of Foodography (which is buoy...

The quality new comic strip Oh Brother! has ended.   Citing lack of sales and stress-related health issues, the creator has had to bow out voluntarily. I feel really bad for Mr. Stephens; his strip was solidly enjoyable, and I still get mad thinking about how Cartoon Network screwed over The Secret Saturdays because it wasn't toyetic enough (though, to be fair, the pacing desperately needed tweaking, but that's not important now).  Oh Brother! was consistently enjoyable, not in a laugh-out-loud way but still more amusing & creative than the vast majority of popular strips. This is what's wrong with the cartoon market.  Here we have a strip that kids, adults, & families can enjoy together, that doesn't go out of its way to demonize any demographics or reek of authorial ego trips, and it dies entirely too soon.  Meanwhile, readers continue to have  Dustin tell us that unemployed twenty-somethings deserve poverty because they're not Baby Boomers and ...

Yes, it's official. MTV is as old as me today; we're both old farts, out of the golden years of our twenties with only impending middle age and the cultural irrelevance it brings.  In ten more years, MTV & I will sit and wonder what we did with our lives. Only one of us will find that while our life trajectory has swayed, it has not been to our detriment, and it won't be MTV. I can't pinpoint exactly when I started to drift away from MTV and realized that I wasn't its target market.  Was it when Daria turned from an insightful sarcastic comedy into another generic teen soap opera?  Was it when they let the awesome Cartoon Sushi anthology die on the vine?  Was it when every other day was a Real World or Road Rules marathon?  Was it when they decided that viewers wanted to watch strangers in Florida dry-hump each other to music every summer, all summer?  Was it the overemphasis on hip-hop, showing that for every artist who can weave spoken words ...