When I became a man, I put away childish things

Oh, what it is to be an adult. We are expected to be responsible, we're expected to be predictable, we're expected to be ... boring. I don't understand this mindset. Why is playful and unadulterated enjoyment something limited to being a child? When was using your imagination to create a fort out of towels and clothes pegs deemed unfit for adult consumption? I would argue that it isn't - even if you may come across a little Peter Pan in the process.

Perhaps there are limits to how childish you can be but there's something to be said about unnecessarily gatekeeping what you allow yourself to do. Heck, billionaires are living out their childhoods while plundering undersea treasures, building rockets, building penis rockets, and making cars do rocket jumps. Perhaps, only once you've got a few billion in your pocket, can you be allowed to be a child once more ... but I digress.

Which brings me to my latest point. I am bored of adult movies (not that kind, you dirty, dirty person.) Perhaps I should qualify: I'm bored of Western media, as it's usually padded with healthy smatterings of pandering, representation, agendas, spectacle ... oh, and, perhaps a competent story (once you've jumped through all the mandatory hoops enforced by minority groups.) It tires me. Which is why I have turned to non-western media and, shock horror, children's programs for my entertainment. I should qualify that children's programs don't get a carte blanche - you do still need to thin the herd. 

To list a few recent children's shows which were far more enjoyable than they had any right to be: Sonic 2, KPop Demon Hunters ... and Blue's Clues: the movie.

Goddamn it, Blue's Clues. How you be so goddamn entertaining?

I hate musicals, I didn't watch old Blue (too old); and yet, this was a damn good time. It was fast, it was bright, it had energy and, even if the story was less than highbrow, I was entertained. There were member berries but they were added tastefully. I know that KPop Demon Hunters is the darling of the moment (and also a musical) but I would also say that Blues Clues surpasses it. It was a breath of fresh air to simply have a show simply be fun. After watching these films I came to the realisation that modern cinema has fallen. Very hard. It has lost what made it great. It has focused far too much on spectacle and messaging and forgotten about the whole purpose of its existence: to entertain. 

And, yes, I was entertained - just not by modern western adult cinema. 

 

twitch triggered

Ever since I was a young lad I was one of those people who enjoyed going to the arcades to watch people play fighting games well. I vicariously played the game the way it was meant to be played - even if my skills weren't quite as stratospheric. At the downfall of the venerable arcade scene (circa 2000's) we all moved indoors to play multiplayer games - but I at least still wished for a medium where I could watch people play games competently. And this was where twitch stepped in. And all was good in this world - up until now.

Perhaps it was the level of moochers or perhaps it is the ever-driving desire to wring every last dollar out of the unwashed masses but Twitch in recent weeks has made a serious misstep. In the early days it was relatively easy to watch a Twitch channel and get some instant entertainment - and possibly a few ads every few hours or so. This is no longer the case. Now, if I click on an unsubscribed (i.e. unpaid) channel I am greeted with an unskippable 15-second ad (or even five ads back-to-back) before I have even seen one second of this channel. This is incredibly alienating and, at least based upon my viewing habits, motivates me to avoid watching Twitch (for the most part.) 

It really disappoints me - and I would presume the content creators - that Twitch has turned to this model for making teh moneys. But, rather than simply complaining, I would suggest a few different options which may prove more palatable:

• Have the heavy-handed ad break 15 minutes into previewing the channel - that way at least you get to see whether you like the current stream
  
• Integrate the ad break into a break-out panel - rather than overriding the live stream (and missing out on clutch plays)
• Buffer any lost content while the ad is playing and then allow the viewer to fast-forward (at their own volition) or continue watching from the buffered offset
  
• Allow the channel creator full control of when ads are shown with, possibly, a minimum ad quota on an hourly basis
• Provide the Twitch viewer an x-minute window of free viewing before forcing an ad break - ideally with some kind of count-down

Dependent upon Twitch's desires to maximise ROI any of these options are better than the current solution they have in place. Unless Twitch is very careful they will lose their audience (and their content creators) to better solutions which don't have heavy-handed revenue models which penalise new viewers and dissuade you from discovering new content. 

 You have been warned, Twitch. You have been warned.

 

Getting serial

You know what I'm getting really tired of? Modern TV series. Why, do you ask? Well, it's more because in the age of bingeable streaming TV, every TV series has now aligned themselves with having an overarching story-line which some would argue doesn't have a pay-off until the final episode. And herein lies the problem. In a not-so distant past, we had TV series which had self-contained episodes ... and, for those which were worth their salt, an overarching story and world-building. Notable examples were X-Files (For the first few seasons at least), Firefly, Star Trek (pre-Discovery).

What made them great was that you could watch an episode without having to know the backstory for the entire series. Each episode was a self-contained entity, with a beginning and an end. Perhaps not all plot devices were sorted out at the end (e.g. unrequited love) but you had your pay-off. Nowadays, you don't have that. Each episode plays out like merely a step towards the final resolution or, even more dastardly, season cliffhanger.

Which takes me elegantly onto the agenda of today's post: The Feed. This is another series brought to you by the Bezosian Amazon (um, wot? $35 billion pay-out - for a divorce?). It follows a halcyon/Orwellian future where most of the world have cerebral implants connecting them to basically the internet. I felt like it had smatterings of influence from Ghost in the Shell and Black Mirror, which is a good start, but in the end I couldn't finish the series. The first two-to-three episodes had a nice bit of world-building and a few (already covered by Black Mirror) technological/philosophical conundrums - but that was about the time the series ran out of steam.

In a nutshell the story revolves around The Feed which connects people and allows the sharing of experiences, social networking and making video/augmented reality calls. The system starts to fall apart when certain individuals are 'jacked' and forced to murder people. The rest of the series revolves around a baby with a non-invasive Feed integration (transferred through the blood supply, apparently), the philosophical implications of The Feed governing what you see, the moral privacy implications of being able to monitor feed users ... and that's about it. Most of this is covered in the first four episodes - but unfortunately the series still has six remaining episodes to fill. This meant that there was a whole lot of treading water required while the writers tried their best to wrap up a series about characters that we don't care about nor a story with a well-defined stance on whether The Feed is truly bad or not. Needless to say, there are a lot of slow pans, slow establishing shots, people staring off into the distance and swelling chords while absolutely nothing happens.

If we contrast this with the ill-fated Firefly series, it had distinct characters, very interesting world-building, distinct episodes (but an overarching story) and a relatively clearly-defined stance on good and bad - even if our heroes weren't nearly as black and white. Each episode could quite happily be watched out-of-order (as Fox did, for some reason) and you, as the viewer, would get their pay-off by the end of the episode. Having said that, not every episode was amazing (e.g. Jaynestown) but even that episode provided some nuance to what had initially been a one-note character.

And so, to summarise, I am not a fan of the current trend for series treating their episodes as merely stepping stones toward the final pay-off. I would argue that if a series only gets good in the final episode, is it actually a good series? Just like with life, you need to enjoy the journey - not just the final destination. At this stage I would much rather watch an episode of Murder, She Wrote than sit through another episode of The Feed.