I know I've probably done a few too many "stupid culcha" posts as of late, and I'm teasing it out a bit more and more each time (hopefully), but these things are occasionally just fascinating (to me, anyway). The latest bit is this here; it is not that I have any supposition pro or con as to the qualitative merits of miniseries of bible stories produced by the guy who became a kajillionaire helping America watch people eat bugs for money, it's that so many of the commenters there seem to be so morally vested in its verisimilitude and theological probity. And they will brook no disagreement.
I humbly posit, as a generic logical viewpoint, that people who can get so butthurt one way or another about such a mundane basic cable artyfact, cannot possibly be of much use in just about anything. Maybe they can cook Hamburger Helper in a microwave, maybe they even remember not to leave in the foil and the fork when they cook it. But surely not much else; there's no one here that's going to we working at CERN in the near future.
Mediocrity is a continuum; it is possible but highly unlikely that, say, Neil deGrasse Tyson or Michio Kaku spend any time watching Honey Boo Boo or Duck Dynasty. The success and proliferation of these preposterous modes of "entertainment", like the mainstreaming of poorly-written fanfic, are due primarily to being impossibly cheap to produce in comparison to something that requires people of skill in writing or acting to produce.
But it is also that lowest common denominator crap is no longer rejected as such; the idea of "guilty pleasures" has been ironically embraced, something along that line. It's too easy and too lucrative to just take a huge dump and sell it as chocolate. I think I need to work on some fanfic, or rewrite an old fairy tale as a spec script for Disney. It's just easier to give up and go with the Ganges flow.
I humbly posit, as a generic logical viewpoint, that people who can get so butthurt one way or another about such a mundane basic cable artyfact, cannot possibly be of much use in just about anything. Maybe they can cook Hamburger Helper in a microwave, maybe they even remember not to leave in the foil and the fork when they cook it. But surely not much else; there's no one here that's going to we working at CERN in the near future.
Mediocrity is a continuum; it is possible but highly unlikely that, say, Neil deGrasse Tyson or Michio Kaku spend any time watching Honey Boo Boo or Duck Dynasty. The success and proliferation of these preposterous modes of "entertainment", like the mainstreaming of poorly-written fanfic, are due primarily to being impossibly cheap to produce in comparison to something that requires people of skill in writing or acting to produce.
But it is also that lowest common denominator crap is no longer rejected as such; the idea of "guilty pleasures" has been ironically embraced, something along that line. It's too easy and too lucrative to just take a huge dump and sell it as chocolate. I think I need to work on some fanfic, or rewrite an old fairy tale as a spec script for Disney. It's just easier to give up and go with the Ganges flow.
2 comments:
What was "this here" supposed to link to? Wondering... :)
Fixed, thanks for catching that. :P
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