hey that's a bummer, man. i just noticed this and was actually posting to ask where you were going to be in columbus (where i live) before i saw that you ran out of money. i have a pretty firm grasp of the city's venues and live within 2-3 blocks of a lot of the smaller ones that small bands tend to play when they come through here so there would've been a decent chance of you being like a quarter mile from my place during your stay. do you happen to know where you would've played had you made it to ohio?
i'm familiar with the medium's tendency to be 100% earnest in expressing ideas that at face value seem like they must be satirical or tongue-in-cheek (and in fact, the surreal moments of realization this leads to is probably the biggest reason i like terrible games -- at least, thematically terrible games), but i've also seen enough genuinely weird/satirical shit come out out in the past few years that something as overtly strange and freudian as catherine seemed more likely closer to something like no more heroes in its presentation of romance than a generic dating sim or whatever. have you played it? it'd be a bummer if it was really that bad. i kinda remember i mean to play it sometimes and realize i am saving it as something i thought wouldn't suck.
also, i just went ahead and ordered persona 4 on ebay a few days ago, so i'm pretty excited to play it! i mean, i'm not, but i'm about as excited as i can ever be for video games anymore. i am hoping the "magic" between the series and i hasn't vanished in the years since i was a teenager. you can never go home again. . . .
also, i just went ahead and ordered persona 4 on ebay a few days ago, so i'm pretty excited to play it! i mean, i'm not, but i'm about as excited as i can ever be for video games anymore. i am hoping the "magic" between the series and i hasn't vanished in the years since i was a teenager. you can never go home again. . . .
is catherine disgusting? i read about it a year or so ago and always intended to purchase it because it seemed strange and surreal but i also figured that a lot of the elements of relationships and sexual dynamics expressed were satirical or otherwise subversive in nature and that it might have had something semi-insightful to say about romance/commitment/lust.
yapyapyapyapyap
wow, this is exactly what i hoped (but wasn't expecting) to hear! thanks a lot. yeah i own a ps3 and its limited backwards compatibility apparently supports persona 4 and it seems to be about $20 on ebay, so i am pretty much going to order it online immediately -- to hell with emulation . . . . sometimes life's a grand adventure and ya just gotta jump in. i'd still like the series to be closer to the aesthetic we saw in persona 2, or at least dds/nocturne, but after persona 3 i think my expectations have been lowered enough that i'll take what i can get. but given everyone's endorsement of ps2 games that came out before persona 3, i guess i should start digging to see if i still have my copy of dds as well.
as it happens, i did in fact know that innocent sin had been "fanslated" into english. i have a hacked psp and actually have a copy of both the translated version of innocent sin and the normal version of eternal punishment on it waiting to be played. they've been there for like three years and for some reason i never got around to playing them. idk why. i'm bad with this stuff. i think after my initial playthrough of eternal punishment i just sort of gave up on ever playing the completed version of both and have trouble working up the motivation to start it. i always found it baffling that they would localize only the second game in a very clear chronological series, though.
thank you "superflat," that makes me feel sort of optimistic! also sorry, i didn't mean to make an unnecessary thread. the what are you playing one is just enormous and i found the prospect of digging for something that i wasn't sure was even there daunting. i'll look for their posts, though!
alternatively, feel free to use this topic to discuss persona/shin megami tensei in general.
they were sort of popular around here for a while, but i'm kind of tempted to go back and play them because i'm not certain any of them were actually very good. as an adult, my taste in a lot of shit has diverged widely from what i liked when i was younger, to the point where even things i loved and thought were legitimately good in retrospect seem kind of mediocre or just not good at all. i don't really know if this is the case with smt specifically, but my memories of why exactly i thought they were good are really hazy, so if anyone's played the old ones recently and disagrees or thinks maybe they're not that great when you look back, that'd also be really cool.
they were sort of popular around here for a while, but i'm kind of tempted to go back and play them because i'm not certain any of them were actually very good. as an adult, my taste in a lot of shit has diverged widely from what i liked when i was younger, to the point where even things i loved and thought were legitimately good in retrospect seem kind of mediocre or just not good at all. i don't really know if this is the case with smt specifically, but my memories of why exactly i thought they were good are really hazy, so if anyone's played the old ones recently and disagrees or thinks maybe they're not that great when you look back, that'd also be really cool.
when i was a kid my brother bought revelations: persona and i instantly loved it. i wasn't actually very good at it and in hindsight some of the elements of the game border on terrible, so i never got more than five hours in, but it was really weird in this way that i found indescribably cool for some reason and having not yet been exposed to anime i found the fusion of a diverse cast of japanese school kids and occultism novel. then!! i forgot about it completely for like seven or eight years until i randomly found persona 2: eternal punishment and that was way better! it still had a very strange and unsettling aesthetic, and at the time i hadn't soured on the grind of old japanese rpgs so i played it a lot for a while and then sort of forgot about it.
later on i thought smt: nocturne was really interesting in visuals and tone and despite its difficulty was probably the last rpg i played that i thought was actively fun. i think i bought the first digital devil saga game and only played it a little but thought it was in keeping with the weird, often surreal tone of the series (at least, the ones i'd played -- i know it's a large series and most aren't localized). someone mentioned something about "dickgirls" to me a while later that reinforced this impression. then they announced persona 3 and i immediately went out and bought it all excited because fuck yeah i loved persona 2 and holy shit it was awful. the needless suicide imagery and the dating sims and the party ai and the dissonance of it all!!
this brings me to my dilemma. persona 3 wasn't actually broken or anything. it received generally positive reviews from critics and most people who are into the series seem to like it. but whatever i found engaging about the series is almost completely absent, and there were a few other people around here who expressed similar sentiments at the time. there have, in recent years (catalyzed by the success of persona 3 maybe?), been a slew of new persona/shin megami tensei releases. are these any good?
i have really fond memories of the series and i'd like to play them again, especially because over the past year i've actually bothered to purchase consoles, but being that persona 3 was such a disappointment and that nobody else outside this community ever really seemed to acknowledge this, i honestly have no idea if it's worth the time.
later on i thought smt: nocturne was really interesting in visuals and tone and despite its difficulty was probably the last rpg i played that i thought was actively fun. i think i bought the first digital devil saga game and only played it a little but thought it was in keeping with the weird, often surreal tone of the series (at least, the ones i'd played -- i know it's a large series and most aren't localized). someone mentioned something about "dickgirls" to me a while later that reinforced this impression. then they announced persona 3 and i immediately went out and bought it all excited because fuck yeah i loved persona 2 and holy shit it was awful. the needless suicide imagery and the dating sims and the party ai and the dissonance of it all!!
this brings me to my dilemma. persona 3 wasn't actually broken or anything. it received generally positive reviews from critics and most people who are into the series seem to like it. but whatever i found engaging about the series is almost completely absent, and there were a few other people around here who expressed similar sentiments at the time. there have, in recent years (catalyzed by the success of persona 3 maybe?), been a slew of new persona/shin megami tensei releases. are these any good?
i have really fond memories of the series and i'd like to play them again, especially because over the past year i've actually bothered to purchase consoles, but being that persona 3 was such a disappointment and that nobody else outside this community ever really seemed to acknowledge this, i honestly have no idea if it's worth the time.
late to the game but hey, you know what? this is really sort of revelatory for me. i have fond memories of dr katz because i used to watch it in the late 90s and it introduced me to mitch hedberg, and home movies is legitimately one of my favorite shows and i think i probably made a thread expressing this many years ago on pre-sw gw, but the discussion didn't really go anywhere. but!! i watched the first episode of bob's burgers a few years ago, generally being a fan of h jon benjamin's stuff and sort of thought it sucked! later on my girlfriend insisted it didn't because she'd watched a few episodes while getting stoned with our neighbors and i kinda wrote it off as their all being high but i never realized there was a connection between it and the earlier two series. i feel like this is going to make me give it a legitimate chance.
having said that, i think a lot of the humor in dr katz and home movies was derived from conversation-driven scenes set against pretty mundane backdrops (e.g. therapy, soccer game, dinner, etc), and the one episode of bob's burgers i watched, iirc, had a very different narrative structure to it? but honestly my memory is hazy so i should probably give it another shot.
having said that, i think a lot of the humor in dr katz and home movies was derived from conversation-driven scenes set against pretty mundane backdrops (e.g. therapy, soccer game, dinner, etc), and the one episode of bob's burgers i watched, iirc, had a very different narrative structure to it? but honestly my memory is hazy so i should probably give it another shot.
mellytan i remember that. i hadn't really considered this in the context of my own neighborhood, because despite what i said about the very real barriers that existed for young children, it wasn't all that bad a place at the time. there were some woods that were pretty cool and some places you could hide and it was an alright environment. a couple years back tho my girlfriend and i were in town for the holidays and she was kinda curious about where i grew up so we went there and i think it read a lot more like what you mentioned. it was right around dusk on a brisk day in late november and there was literally nobody in sight in the entire area. no kids, no adults, no pets. it was windy and quiet and everything sort of seemed to be dead or dying. we sat in a playground for a while and then went to see my old house and then went to check out a nearby school that i went to and as we walked around the place, every gate we opened and went through creaked loudly from disuse and, knowing this was absurd even at the time, i mentioned to her it felt like the entire place had just been abandoned since i left. it felt kind of like those levels in videogames that are set in places like pripyat.
the thing is, it really wasn't like that when i was a kid! but i had a p. unhappy childhood there, so i remembered it being like that. i understood this was just me projecting, though, so i thought i was funny that the very day i happened to take her to see what it was like, it somehow seemed to magically transform itself into precisely the desolate setting it was in my memories.
the thing is, it really wasn't like that when i was a kid! but i had a p. unhappy childhood there, so i remembered it being like that. i understood this was just me projecting, though, so i thought i was funny that the very day i happened to take her to see what it was like, it somehow seemed to magically transform itself into precisely the desolate setting it was in my memories.
dubiously relevant but a few years back i went to the screening of a documentary about the evolution of soviet culture through the introduction of western forms of entertainment, and specifically the disco movement during the late 70s/early 80s. most of it focused on the ground-level movement away from the foundational assumptions of contemporary russian society, but the early part of it seemed to establish the environment as being repressively isolated and bleak. it was a different, dirtier kind of bleak, and it didn't have have the juxtaposition of hopelessness against (relative) prosperity that you find in a lot of small american towns -- these places looked pretty hopeless.
i think there are some strong parallels, though, because their response to the introduction of disco music seemed driven almost entirely by their desperation. in this sense i think the... thoroughness of soviet culture and the geographic vastness of russia contribute in similar ways as they do here. these static, grimy urban environments weren't just living spaces; i think eventually their oppressiveness is internalized and afterwards a quiet despair begins to set in. i remember footage i'm assuming they obtained from old video cameras of people in their homes and some of it read as people just sitting on their couches waiting to die.
i think there are some strong parallels, though, because their response to the introduction of disco music seemed driven almost entirely by their desperation. in this sense i think the... thoroughness of soviet culture and the geographic vastness of russia contribute in similar ways as they do here. these static, grimy urban environments weren't just living spaces; i think eventually their oppressiveness is internalized and afterwards a quiet despair begins to set in. i remember footage i'm assuming they obtained from old video cameras of people in their homes and some of it read as people just sitting on their couches waiting to die.
this is part of what makes the concept of a suburban limbo really compelling to me. it's just like this listless malaise as you wait for something to happen while knowing it won't. i grew up in the suburbs and they just... went on and on for miles. literally miles in any direction before you hit something that wasn't a residential neighborhood, even a grocery store. as a kid, with limited autonomy and no personal transportation, this was insurmountable. i distinctly remember the feeling that i couldn't get out. i didn't always want to, but i knew i couldn't. high walls and such.
i'm trying to think of other examples. i think daria did something similar to beavis and butthead, but i think it probably focused too heavily on openly satirizing suburban life to be as effective. a few years back i had the tv on in the background and some movie called dreamland was on. it wasn't good at all really, but thematically it related to escape in a vacuum of opportunity and evoked a sort of similar sense of isolation as what's eating gilbert grape did. everything about the environment was familiar, but it also seemed qualitatively different to the extent that it felt like a world apart. like at the end of the silent hill movie (and maybe games too?) where they try to cross the bridge out of the town and it's just fog. everything about it is as it should be, but there's some disquieting emptiness that makes it seem disconnected from everything around it.
the original tremors felt the same way. i haven't seen it in years, but they show up in town at the beginning and you're just kind of wondering where the fuck they are, because there seem to be approx. 10 people living in the town yet businesses still exist and there's a kid there so presumably there are schools. it was just a bunch of people living in a ditch. it felt like this strange, insulated limbo world.
more broadly i think i just find the presence of existential ennui in such a familiar context interesting. there's this sense of fatalism in being so deeply dissatisfied but not bothering to leave because everywhere is the same. this is probably also where american geography becomes significant; idk where you're from or where you live but america is pretty fucking huge and i think some type of road trip is required to drive this point home, because you can literally drive at high speeds for hours in any direction without perceiving any significant differentiation in your environments.
i also thought your word choice was interesting. small town america is a particular thing, but it also holds significant symbolic value and as such sort of transcends its definition and becomes a conceptual framework within which people understand the scope and parameters of their own lives. this, i think, is what makes it so oppressive and difficult to escape. it's a prison of the mind. . . . . .
i'm trying to think of other examples. i think daria did something similar to beavis and butthead, but i think it probably focused too heavily on openly satirizing suburban life to be as effective. a few years back i had the tv on in the background and some movie called dreamland was on. it wasn't good at all really, but thematically it related to escape in a vacuum of opportunity and evoked a sort of similar sense of isolation as what's eating gilbert grape did. everything about the environment was familiar, but it also seemed qualitatively different to the extent that it felt like a world apart. like at the end of the silent hill movie (and maybe games too?) where they try to cross the bridge out of the town and it's just fog. everything about it is as it should be, but there's some disquieting emptiness that makes it seem disconnected from everything around it.
the original tremors felt the same way. i haven't seen it in years, but they show up in town at the beginning and you're just kind of wondering where the fuck they are, because there seem to be approx. 10 people living in the town yet businesses still exist and there's a kid there so presumably there are schools. it was just a bunch of people living in a ditch. it felt like this strange, insulated limbo world.
more broadly i think i just find the presence of existential ennui in such a familiar context interesting. there's this sense of fatalism in being so deeply dissatisfied but not bothering to leave because everywhere is the same. this is probably also where american geography becomes significant; idk where you're from or where you live but america is pretty fucking huge and i think some type of road trip is required to drive this point home, because you can literally drive at high speeds for hours in any direction without perceiving any significant differentiation in your environments.
i also thought your word choice was interesting. small town america is a particular thing, but it also holds significant symbolic value and as such sort of transcends its definition and becomes a conceptual framework within which people understand the scope and parameters of their own lives. this, i think, is what makes it so oppressive and difficult to escape. it's a prison of the mind. . . . . .
p.s. for whatever reason i still remember that all the original members used to have the same join date of, iirc, november 27th 2001, i'm assuming because that was when bart launched the ipb forums and everyone had to re-register their accounts. i think i've heard people say the original site was around for a year or a year and a half before that. so maybe somewhere between mid- to late-2000.
idk about the actual first day tho
idk about the actual first day tho
how much time are we talkin' here
i go to school and have a job. it's not like i don't have free time. i'm confident i could walk it on a daily basis even if it wasn't at a consistent time. but i feel like i'm gone a lot for like... large chunks of time and so is my girlfriend and didn't know how healthy it was to frequently leave a dog all by itself all day and come home to it at night. a lot of people i know seem to do this but i've always wondered whether it was safe/fair to the dog
i go to school and have a job. it's not like i don't have free time. i'm confident i could walk it on a daily basis even if it wasn't at a consistent time. but i feel like i'm gone a lot for like... large chunks of time and so is my girlfriend and didn't know how healthy it was to frequently leave a dog all by itself all day and come home to it at night. a lot of people i know seem to do this but i've always wondered whether it was safe/fair to the dog
i sort of want a dog but i'm pretty busy and not around a lot and i think it'd be kind of shitty to leave a dog home alone all day every day. aren't you like supposed to walk them multiple times a day? plus all the other attention one would probably need. in my old place i had a neighbor who did this and his dog would like wail all day and it wasn't really annoying, but he sounded like the loneliest dog on the planet. it was a really cool dog tho.
otoh my girlfriend's family has dogs and they're annoying stupid yipping pieces of shit who eat dumb things and then puke everywhere. dogs are disgusting. are all dogs this disgusting? when i get drunk or high i convince myself it's not that bad but when i sober up i realize it probably is. i keep telling her no they're gross we're not getting one but secretly i might want to.
otoh my girlfriend's family has dogs and they're annoying stupid yipping pieces of shit who eat dumb things and then puke everywhere. dogs are disgusting. are all dogs this disgusting? when i get drunk or high i convince myself it's not that bad but when i sober up i realize it probably is. i keep telling her no they're gross we're not getting one but secretly i might want to.
yeah i guess it did sound judgmental. i'm sorry. i really didn't mean it like that tho! i think it has less bearing on you and more on the ~college lifestyle~ that you sort of seemed to hint at. i've spent a lot of time with people who genuinely couldn't seem to find a Way Out; this has probably left me more cynical than i'd like to be.
i'm not saying you're an idiot or anything, but from your post it kinda seemed like you felt more negatively about your own attitude/performance/regression in addition to the sad old professor part. maybe i read too much into it. in any event i just identified with finding yourself doing things you thought you'd moved beyond. sometimes there'll be points where i make a big step forward only to look up a year later and notice backslide and kinda marvel at the fact that i could lose touch with insight a lot more easily than i could gain it
p.s. final thesis projects wow. what do you study? in my major theses are optional and mostly only advised if you want to demonstrate interest/commitment to grad schools you're applying to. sometimes in the spring i'll walk past the architecture building and i see a bunch of people with their huge models of buildings or whatever they're showing off and wonder what their classes are like. all i get to do is read
i'm not saying you're an idiot or anything, but from your post it kinda seemed like you felt more negatively about your own attitude/performance/regression in addition to the sad old professor part. maybe i read too much into it. in any event i just identified with finding yourself doing things you thought you'd moved beyond. sometimes there'll be points where i make a big step forward only to look up a year later and notice backslide and kinda marvel at the fact that i could lose touch with insight a lot more easily than i could gain it
p.s. final thesis projects wow. what do you study? in my major theses are optional and mostly only advised if you want to demonstrate interest/commitment to grad schools you're applying to. sometimes in the spring i'll walk past the architecture building and i see a bunch of people with their huge models of buildings or whatever they're showing off and wonder what their classes are like. all i get to do is read
sad story about profbarret that's pretty depressing. who skips a day-long field trip? that's the type of stuff i spend like the entire class looking forward to! it's good you feel a little guilty though -- i think that's productive. i'm not making any judgments or anything but i'm a student too and i'm constantly surrounded by other students who are checked the fuck out by semester #2 and it kind of gets under my skin i guess. college is ludicrously expensive and probably the one time in your life you'll have access to billions of dollars in resources and countless people who've devoted their entire lives to what they study; it frustrates me a little when i see bros in yolo shirts dragging a dolly of natty lite crates and being seemingly oblivious to how many people dream of the opportunities they have but never end up getting them. sometimes when i'm feeling like a lazy bum i think about this and instead of phoning it in on an assignment i think is Missing The Point or skulking out of class as soon as it's over i'll ask the prof a question about their research and they seem to like that and usually i learn something at least interesting, if not useful.
i empathize with on you the regression tho. nobody tells you you can have grand revelations about your life and behavior and then kinda forget them and go back to being an idiot after a few months.
i like your reviews jamie. probably 25% of that is romanticized associations with scottish accents but i also find the content useful. especially because i was maybe gonna play max payne 3 and now i think instead i'll do anything else at all.
also i bought an xbox a month or so ago, mostly to use to watch shit from my computer on my tv, but i finally poked my head out of xbla and decided to buy mass effect 2 because i'd played the first one years ago and why not. so i'm playing that. i like it but it's what you'd expect it to be. there are stupid restrictive dialogue trees for interacting with your pals and one time i accidentally punched a female reporter because i thought he'd tell her to fuck off or something. idk it's fun i guess.
a couple things that really irk me about it though. for a game (and series) so dedicated to a fully realized setting complete with a detailed encyclopedia you have to read for things to make sense, it's jarringly constricting; you can't really go anywhere or land on random planets and wander around anymore and things like the citadel which is a galactic center of art, commerce, and government with a population in the many millions amounts to like five floors in a mall somewhere and somebody's office. there's a lot of mixed signals about what kind of game it's supposed to be.
also the handling of sexual partners is really uncomfortable and it's unsettling that a) i'm not sure there's a major female character you can't fuck, b) once you choose a side in some Cat Fight that serves as a thinly veiled pretext for you to choose who you're going to bone, you have to deal with a bunch of terrible woman scorned stuff, and c) once you find yourself in the prelude to an intimate relationship there doesn't seem to be an option to avoid sex without ruining your relationship with the person. like, it's either you're friendly and you wanna get it on or you just cease interaction altogether; there's literally no "i don't want to have sex b/c that's weird but find you interesting nonetheless" option. when you consider it all in tandem it kind of feels like they're heavily implying that the only reason you're talking to any of these broads is to pound. dat. box and all the preamble is just you putting up with their yammering. yap yap yap
having said that tho did anyone else play it and find the loyalty mission for jacob kind of out of place and handled in a way that was noticeably better than a majority of the rest of the game?
also i bought an xbox a month or so ago, mostly to use to watch shit from my computer on my tv, but i finally poked my head out of xbla and decided to buy mass effect 2 because i'd played the first one years ago and why not. so i'm playing that. i like it but it's what you'd expect it to be. there are stupid restrictive dialogue trees for interacting with your pals and one time i accidentally punched a female reporter because i thought he'd tell her to fuck off or something. idk it's fun i guess.
a couple things that really irk me about it though. for a game (and series) so dedicated to a fully realized setting complete with a detailed encyclopedia you have to read for things to make sense, it's jarringly constricting; you can't really go anywhere or land on random planets and wander around anymore and things like the citadel which is a galactic center of art, commerce, and government with a population in the many millions amounts to like five floors in a mall somewhere and somebody's office. there's a lot of mixed signals about what kind of game it's supposed to be.
also the handling of sexual partners is really uncomfortable and it's unsettling that a) i'm not sure there's a major female character you can't fuck, b) once you choose a side in some Cat Fight that serves as a thinly veiled pretext for you to choose who you're going to bone, you have to deal with a bunch of terrible woman scorned stuff, and c) once you find yourself in the prelude to an intimate relationship there doesn't seem to be an option to avoid sex without ruining your relationship with the person. like, it's either you're friendly and you wanna get it on or you just cease interaction altogether; there's literally no "i don't want to have sex b/c that's weird but find you interesting nonetheless" option. when you consider it all in tandem it kind of feels like they're heavily implying that the only reason you're talking to any of these broads is to pound. dat. box and all the preamble is just you putting up with their yammering. yap yap yap
having said that tho did anyone else play it and find the loyalty mission for jacob kind of out of place and handled in a way that was noticeably better than a majority of the rest of the game?
idk, the thing that troubles me about those is that by specifically focusing on people pretending to pee in front of cops, you're kind of unintentionally constructing this filter through which various demographics are sorted in order of their tendency to interact with law enforcement. i think this is one of those points where you start to encounter a really meaningful problem in disproportionate representation, and i don't think i should have to explain all the bad places that could potentially lead. i'd feel a lot more comfortable if you were to search for youtube videos of people pretending to pee in front of law enforcement officials in addition to city managers, food service and hospitality workers, civil service employees, university professors, etc.
yeah maybe so. idk, something about that sort of sweeping Yeah But Who Cares type of argument deals with dissent a little too tidily for me sometimes
also lol sorry jamie i didn't mean to come off like i was saying she was "just another kelly osbourne." i didn't even know that was a line of critique! it's not particularly surprising but yeah. honestly, there is a lil bit of resentment, because hbo axed bored to death and replaced it with this and i really liked bored to death and thought it did a couple p. interesting/novel things. mostly tho it's just that i've spent so much of my daily life around people like this for years and seeing a show championed as being about real people with real lives only for it to actually be about highly cloistered urban youths (as in, real life as defined by people insulated from real life in any meaningful sense) seemed a little too coincidental not to attribute at least in part to disproportionate market power.
in any event good talk i guess
also lol sorry jamie i didn't mean to come off like i was saying she was "just another kelly osbourne." i didn't even know that was a line of critique! it's not particularly surprising but yeah. honestly, there is a lil bit of resentment, because hbo axed bored to death and replaced it with this and i really liked bored to death and thought it did a couple p. interesting/novel things. mostly tho it's just that i've spent so much of my daily life around people like this for years and seeing a show championed as being about real people with real lives only for it to actually be about highly cloistered urban youths (as in, real life as defined by people insulated from real life in any meaningful sense) seemed a little too coincidental not to attribute at least in part to disproportionate market power.
in any event good talk i guess
well ok. i mean, it's fine that it resonates with you and certainly i know enough about self-loathing to understand the appeal of the central character.
also, i think context is important. i think it's THE only issue because it was hyped up as a show that was, above all else, scathingly relevant. whether political or otherwise, these were the expectations people went into it with. i don't necessarily think those expectations are unfair to have, given this is how the show represented itself (or, maybe just how network marketing people chose to represent it). if this was everybody loves raymond, i don't think anyone would really care. i'm not super invested and tbh i feel more ambivalent about the show than you might think, but what irks me a little is that i don't think everyone is watching it as though it's super self-aware? like, i have not encountered a bunch of jamies walking around talking about how it's a tongue-in-cheek depiction of a self-involved spoiled former art student trying to get her shit together so much as people saying it's a show about a believable character with a real life and real problems, i.e. the people i know who watch this show seem to have far more in common with hannah than dunham, and i find sort of uh… eye roll-inducing. idk, maybe that's just something on my end. i live near a campus so i meet a lot of girls in their early twenties whose parents are bankrolling their lives.
but saying there's nothing to be suspicious about seems sort of misguided maybe? like, it's not a coincidence that the subject matter of most television shows mirrors that general experiences and preferences of valued advertising demographics. this is less of an issue with hbo of course but i don't think it's fair or wise to simply say "there's no conspiracy." i absolutely think decisions of what makes it onto television or into theaters reflect broader political/economic power dynamics. i don't think that makes me a conspiracy nut! sorry if that sounds combative, i really don't mean it to be. i maintain my suspicion tho.
but yeah idk, i don't really care about it that much, i just thought it was sort of curious that you continued to like it and thought maybe you'd have something to say as to why. i guess just file me with mr president under the list of people who don't think their problems seem particularly compelling.
also, i think context is important. i think it's THE only issue because it was hyped up as a show that was, above all else, scathingly relevant. whether political or otherwise, these were the expectations people went into it with. i don't necessarily think those expectations are unfair to have, given this is how the show represented itself (or, maybe just how network marketing people chose to represent it). if this was everybody loves raymond, i don't think anyone would really care. i'm not super invested and tbh i feel more ambivalent about the show than you might think, but what irks me a little is that i don't think everyone is watching it as though it's super self-aware? like, i have not encountered a bunch of jamies walking around talking about how it's a tongue-in-cheek depiction of a self-involved spoiled former art student trying to get her shit together so much as people saying it's a show about a believable character with a real life and real problems, i.e. the people i know who watch this show seem to have far more in common with hannah than dunham, and i find sort of uh… eye roll-inducing. idk, maybe that's just something on my end. i live near a campus so i meet a lot of girls in their early twenties whose parents are bankrolling their lives.
but saying there's nothing to be suspicious about seems sort of misguided maybe? like, it's not a coincidence that the subject matter of most television shows mirrors that general experiences and preferences of valued advertising demographics. this is less of an issue with hbo of course but i don't think it's fair or wise to simply say "there's no conspiracy." i absolutely think decisions of what makes it onto television or into theaters reflect broader political/economic power dynamics. i don't think that makes me a conspiracy nut! sorry if that sounds combative, i really don't mean it to be. i maintain my suspicion tho.
but yeah idk, i don't really care about it that much, i just thought it was sort of curious that you continued to like it and thought maybe you'd have something to say as to why. i guess just file me with mr president under the list of people who don't think their problems seem particularly compelling.