{"id":1283,"date":"2009-10-11T14:53:04","date_gmt":"2009-10-11T04:53:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=1283"},"modified":"2009-10-11T15:02:21","modified_gmt":"2009-10-11T05:02:21","slug":"weekend-of-tv-shows-facebook-and-podcasts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=1283","title":{"rendered":"Weekend of TV Shows, Facebook and Podcasts"},"content":{"rendered":"

1UP Yours\/Listen Up<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I write this, I’m listening to the final 1UP Yours\/Listen Up<\/a> podcast before host Garnett Lee leaves the UGO gaming network for Shack News.\u00a0 That might not sound terribly interesting but listening to this weekly video game podcast has been a habit of mine for the past four years and the show was enourmously influential personally.\u00a0 It was the first podcast I ever listened to, it introduced me to many types of games I’d never previously considered and it was the impetus for us doing our own podcast back in 2007\/08.<\/p>\n

1Up Yours and Listen Up were great shows to listen to while doing mundane chores around the house or for passing time in the commute to and from work.\u00a0 I’m sorry to see it go.\u00a0 Nowadays, I’ve still got The Bugle, a political comedy podcast with Jon Oliver from The Daily Show and BBC Five Live Film Reviews with Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo.\u00a0 If anyone else has any recommendations for other podcasts to listen to, I’m all ears.<\/p>\n

Facebook<\/strong><\/p>\n

Most of the people in our office are all on Facebook and are friends with one another, including with their colleagues and their managers.\u00a0 And yet I keep seeing and reading about people who’ve called in sick to work but post contradictory information on their Facebook status.\u00a0 I’ve also seen people updating their status while in the office to say they’re bored and not doing work and people who heap shit on their job or on their colleagues.\u00a0 Does this happen at anyone else’s work?\u00a0 Maybe its a generational difference but I have no idea why people would do this.\u00a0 Aside from being really unprofessional, its almost always going to have a detrimental effect on the person themselves.<\/p>\n

TV Shows<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lots of shows back on!\u00a0 The second half of South Park <\/em>Season 13 started this week.\u00a0 It was a pretty so-so episode which is reflective of the quality of the season overall.<\/p>\n

I’ve only managed to watch the first episode of the new ABC show Flash Forward<\/em> and based on the intial viewing, I think I’ll check out a few more episodes.\u00a0 The concept of the show is that the entire global population passes out simultaneously over a two minute period and has a ‘flash forward’ dream of what they’ll be doing in April 2010.\u00a0 Its very reminiscent of the Lost<\/em> pilot, where the show opens with a high budget disaster scene, has an ensemble cast and employs the use of flashbacks and of course, flash forwards.<\/p>\n

The show is completely cheesy and comically bad.\u00a0 The characters are cookie cutter stereotypes:\u00a0 There is FBI chief who is basically the black police chief in every Eighties action movie.\u00a0 The only Arab characters are terrorists.\u00a0 All the kids on this show are the creepy kids from horror movies who whisper\u00a0 eery omens.\u00a0 The sassy computer-savvy lady in the show honestly suggests that a practical way to compile the entire planet’s memories is by ‘building a website’ which they can ‘cross-reference’.<\/p>\n

The show also treats its audience like complete morons.\u00a0 Any scene in which the characters watch TV news footage or contact someone overseas, that person is always standing in front of a flaming wreckage of the landmark of their country (see flaming Eiffel Tower, flaming Big Ben etc).\u00a0 The show has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.\u00a0 During the lead characters flash-forward he notices that he is wearing a friendship bracelet.\u00a0 Not only that, the words ‘friendship bracelet’ helpfully flash across the screen.\u00a0 Then, he remarks outloud “How odd, I was wearing a friendship bracelet in the future” to ominous music.\u00a0 Later in the episode, his daughter gives him a friendship bracelet.\u00a0 Not only does the ominous music return, the words ‘friendship bracelet’ flash across the screen again<\/em>, just in case you didn’t catch what was happening.<\/p>\n

Regardless, the concept is enjoyable and the show, despite its goofiness, certainly isn’t dull.\u00a0 As aforementioned, I’ll give it a few more episodes and see where it goes.<\/p>\n

\"Curb

Curb Your Enthusiasm Season Seven: Larry is neurotic and gets stuck in a socially awkward situation!<\/p><\/div>\n

I’m also digging the seventh season of Curb Your Enthusiasm<\/em> and the nineteenth season of Survivor<\/em>.\u00a0 Now, I lump these two shows together because they are both the same as they always have been.\u00a0 Jeff says ‘Come on in guys’ to the contestants as they walk towards their challenge and Larry is yelling at Suzie Green.\u00a0 The formula is unchanged.\u00a0 For whatever reason, I never tire of this shit.<\/p>\n

I remember reading an article about the Teletubbies<\/em> that said the reason that they repeat the short video of kids doing an activity twice in each episode is that children like to know whats going to happen and its comforting for them to watch the exact same thing over and over.\u00a0 I don’t think we really lose that too much as we get older.\u00a0 All those episodes of the Small Wonder, Airwolf and Mr Belvedere that I watched in the Eighties and Nineties were pretty much identical.\u00a0 As you get older, you’ll want to watch some shows that do challenge you, which is where your shows like Lost, The Wire and Mad Men come in but there’s nothing like a bit of TV comfort food.<\/p>\n

Some formulas wear off after a while.\u00a0 For me, House<\/em> was like that.\u00a0 I liked him being cranky pants and checking to see if the patient has lupus, but one season was enough.\u00a0 Apparently, that show is still going and is more or less the same.\u00a0 Some shows I think aren’t designed to slavishly follow a formula but their producers decide to try anyway which is how we end up with Jack Bauer having seven really, really busy days in a version of America that has a terrorist attack every six months or that guy in Prison Break who’s been breaking out for four seasons now.<\/p>\n

For me, the Curb Your Enthusiasm and Survivor formulas never seem to lose their charm to me.\u00a0 You get the odd clunker every now and then, but by and large, as long as Jeff is still asking contestants ‘wanna know what you’re playing for?’ and Larry is still being Larry, I’m a happy viewer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1UP Yours\/Listen Up As I write this, I’m listening to the final 1UP Yours\/Listen Up podcast before host Garnett Lee leaves the UGO gaming network for Shack News.\u00a0 That might not sound terribly interesting but listening to this weekly video game podcast has been a habit of mine for the past four years and the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[431,219,433,430,432,434,2395],"class_list":["post-1283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-curb-your-enthusiasm","tag-facebook","tag-flash-forward","tag-podcasts","tag-south-park","tag-survivor-samoa","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1283"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1299,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283\/revisions\/1299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}