Archive for the 'Pop Culture' category

How Would The Cast of Friends Vote?

Sep 16 2009 Published by under Political Parties, Politics, Pop Culture, Television

A couple of weeks ago, I posed the question “How Would Gilligan’s Island Vote?”. The discussion it generated here, on Facebook, and via my inbox was kind of interesting. The outcome was:

  • Skipper – 83% GOP
  • Gilligan – 69% Dem
  • Mary Ann – 61% GOP
  • Ginger – 83% Dem
  • Professor (the only “near tie”) – 47% Dem 41% Libertarian
  • Mr. & Mrs. Howell – both at 72% GOP

The outcome made me wonder what the result would be if I looked at other classic TV series. As I discussed the idea with some friends, one that drew a lot of discussion was “Friends”. It seems there is a lot of disagreement about how Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Phoebe, Joey and Monica would cast their ballots.

Now here’s your chance to tell me what you think.


How Would “Friends” Vote?
Ross Geller
Monica Geller
Chandler Bing
Rachel Green
Phoebe Buffay
Joey Tribbiani



View Results

You’ll notice I added “Green” as an option for Phoebe as a number of people indicated their thought that she’d lean that way.

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Penny Arcade Expo, Gilligan & More

Sep 04 2009 Published by under Gaming, Miscellany, Politics, Pop Culture, Technology

I’m off to Seattle this afternoon for the Penny Arcade Expo. PAX is a conference for gamers and game designers. I’ve never attended anything like this before (despite my love of all things geek, and gaming in particular).

On Sunday I’ll be speaking on a panel about gaming and advocacy. The purpose of the panel is two-fold.

First, we are looking to teach gamers how to advocate for or against policy issues that impact them. It seems not a week goes by that I don’t see an article about some misguided state legislator who has determined that video games are the root of all evil. They typically then go on to craft legislation that seriously impedes the rights of gamers. We hope gamers will begin to take these issues seriously and organize to become a significant political force.

The second purpose for the panel is to talk a bit about how political groups and causes are using games to convey policy messages. Following the Obama team’s use of paid advertising in an online racing game, the use of such tactics is getting pretty advanced. I, for one, am looking forward to hearing from my fellow panelists as well as the audience on that topic.

If I pick up nuggets of wisdom from the panel, I’ll be sure to pass them along via my blog as well as my Twitter feed. Follow me @MichaelTurk (if you aren’t already.)

Finally, it looks like 11 of my 20 readers have voted in the “How Would Gilligan’s Island Vote?” poll. If you haven’t, I hope you’ll weigh in. I’ll be posting the reply’s over the weekend.

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How Would Gilligan’s Island Vote?

Sep 03 2009 Published by under Miscellany, Political Parties, Politics, Pop Culture, Television

This was originally going to be a straightforward post. I wanted to look at the Gilligan’s island characters and make the case for how each character would vote. My original concept was simple enough:

  • The Professor – This would normally be an easy lift. He’d likely be the typical liberal academic. Definitely a Democrat.
  • The Skipper – Former Navy man, the guy everyone looks to for tough leadership. He’s definitely a Republican.
  • The Millionaire and Lovey – They’re unabashedly rich, and have no qualms about it. They’re Republican.
  • Ginger – Like the prof, she’s the typical Hollywood starlet. She may not actually be liberal, but that’s the trendy thing, so she goes along. That’s a Democrat.
  • Mary Ann – A girl from the heartland with mid-western values. She probably digs God, Guns, Country, and country music. She’s a Republican.
  • Gilligan – He’s kind of clueless and rarely gets anything right. He’s a Democrat.

Like I said, that was easy enough. Until, that is, I started talking to my friend Paul about the list. He’s a liberal, so he views the world through a skewed perspective, but he had some interesting thoughts.

For instance, the Professor, he argues, is a dedicated academic, but also has a heavy lean toward technology. That may indicate he is more Libertarian. Ginger, he suggests, strikes him more as a Patricia Heaton type. He thinks she would actually lean GOP. What about Mary Ann? She may be a farm girl, but she also comes across as a bleeding heart. Could she be a closet lefty? Could “means well, but usually gets it wrong” be applied equally to paint Gilligan as a Republican? While we agree on the Howell’s, could they actually be limousine liberals?

So I decided to change the focus of this post. Rather than declaring how the Island would vote, I’m asking. I’d love to get your thoughts. I’ll tabulate it all and report back on the consensus (if there is one) view.


How Would Gilligan’s Island Vote?
The Skipper
Gilligan
Mary Ann
Ginger
The Professor
Thurston Howell
Mrs. “Lovey” Howell



View Results

No responses yet

Rob Pegoraro’s Right. He Doesn’t Get It.

Jun 25 2009 Published by under Cable, Craziness, Elections, Pop Culture, Programming, Television, The Internet

Since the day job launched a blog on telecom issues, I have confined my rants about such topics to that forum. This is a “gray area” kind of post. It’s not really policy related, but it touches on the Internet and video. I’m writing it here because it is not, in any way, the view of my employer.

At issue is a column by the Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro about the recently announced TV Everywhere plan cable companies are pursuing. In his column Rob writes:

Yes, you read that right: To watch this new batch of TV shows online, you’d have to sign up for a traditional pay-TV plan.

The TV Everywhere idea has been a dream of some media people for the last few years; see, for instance, Mark Cuban’s defense of the idea. But I don’t get it. At all.

Well, my immediate thought is, “You’re right. You don’t get it.” But after that, words fail me.

First, Rob, this isn’t “a new batch of TV shows”. This is the content you’re already paying for, but you’re now allowed to view it online. In order to view Pay-TV online, you need to pay for Pay-TV. That’s sort of the whole point.

Pegoraro suggests that this is like requiring people to pay for a subscription to the Washington Post in order to take a college prep test course. Ummm… No. That’s not at all the same thing. TV everywhere is, however, the equivalent of saying, “If you want to eat your McDonald’s Happy Meal in the park, you still have to pay for the McDonald’s happy meal.”

Next, Pegoraro asserts that incredibly complicated things like “authentication” are way to difficult to comprehend or apply:

Set aside such operational issues as authentication (how do you verify that one person’s a Comcast/DirecTV/Fios/etc. customer and another is not?)…

Ummm… How do you know if someone is a Gmail user or not? Well, Rob, they’re called “accounts”. When you subscribe, they create one. They come with something called an “account number” or a “user name” and a “password”. When you want to access your service online, you type (that big flat thing in front of your monitor is called a keyboard) those pieces of information into a form, click “submit” and voila! You are authenticated.

Pegoraro, again:

If somebody wants to watch video online, let ‘em: Charge them a fee, make money off their attention through advertising–better yet, give people a choice between watching ads or paying for an ad-free experience. But don’t force them to sign up for an unrelated, non-Internet service.

Sure, because the “ad-supported” model is working so well for broadcasters and newspapers. Even YouTube (ad supported video) is projected to lose between $175 million and $470 million this year. Even TV advertising is a failing venture because people are skipping the commercials. Hollywood has begun writing the commercials directly into the script to stave off that practice. NBC recently announced that Jay Leno’s show in the fall will be “DVR-proof” to force advertising on the public.

Do such actions seem like the tactics of a business model that works?

So let’s take a business model that works (a hybrid ad/subscriber model) and force it to pursue a failing business model because you want content for free – content that may cost millions per episode to produce.

As for the comment that you are forcing someone “to sign up for an unrelated, non-Internet service”, that’s still ridiculous no matter how many times you repeat it. This isn’t a non-Internet service. It’s the same service you already subscribe to, you just have more ways to consume it now. However, if you want to consume it, you have to subscribe.

Finally, Pegoraro suggests that media companies should simply give up and make all their media available for free:

Repeat after me: Trying to introduce an artificial scarcity of easily-duplicated content on the Internet does not work. If you set up boundaries that make no sense to your customers, you will simply cede the field to bootleg redistribution of your work. Fighting this principle is like trying to push water uphill–with a broom.

Well, actually, Rob. Most cable content isn’t available online for free – even through bootleg. Some of the most popular shows on cable are HGTV’s design programs. I challenege you to go find a readily available bootleg source of them. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

…

…

Back yet? What about ESPN sporting events? They’re all available for free elsewhere, right? No? What about NFL games? Surely the satellite guys give those away for free and you don’t need to subscribe to get the Sunday ticket, right? No? Hmmm… Well what about HBO’s programming. You can get Entourage episodes for free all over the net, right? Really? Only the old ones that have been released for sale well after the air date?

How can that be? How can people control such things? How can they possibly defeat the bootleg distribution of their work? Because they don’t make them available online for free? Perhaps.

The fact is, despite Rob’s characterization of Pay-TV as “easily-duplicated content”, it’s simply not true. Look at YouTube. The most popular video sharing site will disable the soundtrack to your video if the audio patterns in the file match copyrighted content. Sure. You could cruise BitTorrents looking for content. And many do. Those sites are constantly defending against their copyright violations and go out of business regardless of the legitimacy they claim (AllOfMP3.com, anyone?).

You can also find websites that show grainy, handicam captured versions of first-run films – often before they appear in theaters. But the quality sucks. Under Pegoraro’s theory, movie theaters should simply give up the fight and make all movies (regardless of the cost to produce and market them) open to the public at no cost on day one. Better yet, just close all the theaters and let people download the movies for free? Heck, the studio could easily make up those $30 million salaries and production budgets by displaying an ad for mortgage caluclators right along side the film, right?

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Summer Reading: Some New #Lost Theories Part II

Jun 05 2009 Published by under Programming, Society, Television

But What About Jacob

Ok, so what if they don’t go with a completely unsatisfactory ending.

Let’s assume that the battle between good and evil, wrong and right, darkness and light, black and white, has a point. The season finale introduced a few things that we may need to reconcile.

It is clear that Jacob and company have been on the island a VERY long time. As the sailing vessel (I must assume it is The Black Rock), cruises along the coastline, our would be Johnny Cash (the man in black) asks Jacob if he brought them to the island and is still trying to prove him wrong.

This is where I dive into unknown territory to some extent. I am not a biblical scholar or a religious person by any strectch, so forgive me if I get some of this wrong.

Jacob and Esau were brothers. Jacob was the pious brother while Esau was not. When Rebekah and Jacob conspire to deceive Isaac and Jacob recieves Isaac’s blessings, Esau is angry and swears he’ll kill Jacob.

Let’s assume that the man in black will be revealed in the final season to be Esau. What is the detente that the two of them have respected? What is the “loophole”? Is the rule by which Esau is unable to murder Jacob similar to the accord between Ben and Whitmore? When the smoke monster spoke to Ben, was it Esau who commanded Ben to follow Locke’s every word? Is Esau the smoke monster? Did he kill Mr. Eko as a surrogate for his brother? Eko was, after all, now a pious man.

Are all the “visions” of the dead and or disappeared actually manifestations of Esau? Was it Esau who had kept Jacob locked in the cabin with the ring of ash to contain him?

If you view Jacob and Esau as somehow temporally unrestrained, they could be anywhere or anything. Jacob can clearly raise the dead with a touch of his hand, as he did with John. Can they assume other forms or be omnipresent?

Using the construct of Jacob and Esau, you could easily begin to make sense of many occurrences on the island. Just about everything that has happened and every vision could be explained away with these two playing an odd cat and mouse game to “test” humanity.

As they meet on the beach at the beginning of the finale, Esau says to Jacob, “It always ends the same.” It is clear that they have done all of this before. Did the crew of the Black Rock – like Danielle’s Party – come to distrust one another and kill each other off? Are “The Others” the sole survivors of each such iteration of the cycle of violence? Did they band together realizing that they were somehow a part of the island now? Did Whitmore come to the island as a soldier with the Jughead crew? Ben was the sole survivor of Dharma? Was that the common characteristic The Others shared at the beginning?

And what of Richard Alpert? Did he come to the island aboard the Black Rock? Or further back?

I can see a clear scenario where an island with abundant resources and strange healing powers would be paradise. But to borrow from The Matrix:

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program, entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe, that as a species, human beings define their reality though misery and suffering.

Perhaps the two brothers are running some sort of test to determine whether people can simply live together in paradise or whether they will, eventually, devolve into tribes and attack one another. Is the story of Lost simply a karmic test based on The Lord of the Flies? Could be.

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