I was talking to this girl who I found interesting and she mentions that she really likes the new seasons of The Simpson’s and Family Guy. I told her I also like the shows but only the earlier seasons, to which she said she’s never watch them because she thinks they were boring.
I had a Seinfeld moment and suddenly my mind was simply occupied with “boring? BORING??” And thinking about what kind of person finds modern simpsons entertaining
The first seven seasons of The Simpsons, the golden age, belong to an America that doesn't exist any more. 3 kids in a family, mom a homemaker, dad has a good job that allows him to own a house and support them all, two cars, benefits. That America of the lower middle-class was crushed by globalization. It's as alien today to people as we find Cold War blackballing and McCarthyist ideological witch-hunts.
It’s as alien today to people as we find Cold War blackballing and McCarthyist ideological witch-hunts.
I got bad news.
At least amiibos hold a modicum of function and artistry.
they are the exact same thing with a chip on the bottom. literally just Nintendo branded skylanders
honestly I'm sure people see it that way but all I see is useless clutter that's gonna be in a landfill in 20 years
I used to live in Japan and if anyone ever told me that they decided to move to Japan "for the culture", I immediately mentally filed them as weeaboo sex tourists.
What other reason than culture would an English speaker immigrate to Japan? Do you mean to say you just ended up in Japan by accident?
i lived for a summer in a rural/agricultural community as a farmworker and was invited to stay long term by the employer. it wasn't clear what the terms would be, but they were very interested in having the conversation and were pretty upfront about it. the healthcare, the food, and transportation/telecom/relaxation infrastructure for rural livelihood were all incredible compared to the states. it was so easy to eat right and be physically active, safely. i lost a bunch of inches off my waistline without even noticing until i came back and my friends were calling me "slim". i was absolutely not trying to eat healthy while i was there. i was going ham at every meal and enjoying treats constantly.
hilariously, my shitty rental house back in the states had been robbed in my absence and when i tried to file a police report to make an insurance claim, the cops were dicks about it and gave me pushback until i dropped it. it's hard to articulate how different this was from my impression of petty crime where i was in japan. all i'll say is that the guys i worked with (all japanese nationals) were surprised to hear tales of "bandits" in the modern US. lol, that was the english word they knew for criminals. in my rural community we left our windows down and doors unlocked while shopping in the convenience store for snacks and b.s. while little old ladies zipped by on scooters. pretty sure if somebody got mugged it would make the regional news. it was a surreal experience.
my language skills were absolute shit tier, but if i was fluent i could see the appeal. i wouldn't want to live in some city though, but that's true for the states too.
I hear answers like that quite often when I spoke with foreigners who stayed long term.
At least for Americans, a lot of them weighed up the prospect of making a bit more money (and even that was questionable) against walkable cities, public transport, public healthcare, and lack of violent crime.
That sounds pretty fucking cool. What kind of visa program let you swing this kind of gig?
it was through an "independent" study abroad i put together while i was working on my bachelors as a 30 year old college kid. basically, through a full professor (born in japan, dual citizenship) i knew socially who had the juice to handle the administrative side of creating an independent research class just for me. she assigned a grad student (international student from japan) to help me find a farm to work on based on what kind of operation/production system i wanted to see. they helped me correspond and figure out the timing/logistics/expectations.
ostensibly it was a for-credit study abroad, so i had health insurance through the university. i also had to pay tuition and describe myself as a "researcher"/"student" at border control in japan and not mention that i was doing "work" on the farm in exchange for housing, etc. i got the distinct impression what i was doing was in a grey area if not illegal and the border control guy in japan definitely was suspicious of me, but it was probably too complicated to try and unravel so he just waved me through with the generic travel visa with a look of "fuck it".
i had to prepay for everything, even though i was applied for and won some significant scholarships to cover my travel. the actual money wasn't released until the following semester, which is when i had to write like 10,000 words on my experiences and do a few presentations.
People who are actually interested in a culture can articulate specific things about that culture that interest them. Someone might go to Italy to see the Sistine Chapel and learn coffee making, or France to visit the Louvre and learn to cook, or Moscow to watch the Ballet and learn about Dostoyevsky. Anyone actually interested in a culture enough to move countries is likely to be able to name a couple of specific things they like beyond "the culture".
In my experience, the people who can only give vague bullshit answers about why they moved are embarrassed about the reason. In Japan, 8 or 9 times out of 10 it's because the only Japanese cultural product they consume is porno and they think they can score a "submissive waifu" or some shit.
Even the weebs who say "anime and games" are generally way cooler (or at least less creepy) than the "culture" guys. In my opinion anyway.
Makes sense, thank you. Gotta say there are cheaper places than Japan to get your rocks off though.
On the bright side, Japan (even Tokyo) is not as ridiculously expensive as its made out go be. Especially true if you're coming from NYC/London/Vancouver, etc. A small private studio in Tokyo can be rented for about US$800 a month, which is not exactly outrageous by comparison to other world cities.
As for getting their rocks off, one Brit I talked to who "moved for the culture" told me after a few beers that he decided to come to Japan because the women in Thailand and the Philippines were "too brown". There's also a contingent of chuds who think Japan is their perfect right wing ethnostate and came because of that. It's so bad that one of my good friends who lives there (white, male, American) keeps telling me stories about other white dudes who think my mate is "one of them" and start spouting off actual Nazi shit.
I did not care for modern Family Guy. Did not like it. Just couldn't get into it. It- it insists upon itself.
Eh I didn't really enjoy it stoned tbh. If anything I found it worse cos those painfully unfunny bits that go on for ages seem to last hours when I am stoned. There was one bit where Peter fights a chicken and yeah kinda funny for like, 20 seconds but it just went on and on and on to the point it felt like I had been watching it all fucking day and it was mildly stress inducing.
:this:
Family Guy is disposable slop for me to watch stoned. :stalin-smokin:
Almost all of my pop culture references are completely lost on zoomers at this point.
Yeah kinda cringe but whatever. Let people enjoy what they enjoy.
I have a lot of critical opinions of things. It feels very online to me. Like someone will bring up something they just discovered, like Ted Lasso, and then ask me if I know. I do know. I know all the internet talk around it. But they don't. I feel silly for bringing it up. I want to let them enjoy things and not taint them with internet brain stuff. But I also feel like I'm not being honest if I say no.
I had a friend do this with Rogan years ago. They'd ask me if I heard of Rogan. Of course I have. I knew all the reasons why he fucking sucked way before he became the center of this cultural debate about misinformation. But I lied and said no because that's easier than revealing how much I knew and then trying to convince them he's bad.
That is one good thing about the internet. You can let your more maximalist opinions fly without any real repercussions, and find others that think like you do. But an actual conversation, however uncomfortable, with a person physically in front of me would probably be more fulfilling.
People who like Big Bang Theory are questionable to me definitely
American peeps who enjoy fishing. Miss me with that boring shit.
it's an activity where you don't have a constant stream of noise blasting in your face the whole time. I'm shocked that the USA even remembers how to slow down and wait.
The real sad thing about it is that the only people I see participating in said activity are fascists
Unfortunately there's a good amount of overlap between outdoor activities and fashies.
Also if you're desperate for something a bit more exciting go jug fishing or something. I remember doing that with my Dad and Grandad. It was always a lot of fun. Or if you like hiking you can fly fishing in streams. It's really a versatile hobby and it gets a bad wrap since chuds like it so much
I think it's just because chuds like sitting in silence for hours. Plus the whole murdering animals for food thing, they like that a lot.
I don't think they'd like sitting in silence for hours if they weren't murdering
I mean like I said it's a versatile hobby. Not all fishing is sitting in silence for hours.
This isn't to say you have to like it though. It's not for everyone for sure, but there is more to it than just sitting there.
Fishing is an excuse to go out into nature and drink beer. Even avid fishermen will tell you this
so why even have an excuse? I just go into the woods and drink beer and have no problem with it. No reason to spend money on equipment and shit just for an excuse.
I think it's masculine and protestant brain-worms, like, you can't go for a hike unless you're providing for your family.
Modern Simpsons episodes have all the inane references to modern pop culture and celebrity appearances that some people love. Family guy is basically only references to pop culture, so I can get why they like both.
Also, I bet the newer Simpsons episodes move faster or are more visually captivating for an audience with a shrinking attention span.
One of the new Simpsons episodes has Homer getting cancelled and going on Joe Rogan.
I don't believe you, but I know we live in a world where this kind of stuff happens. I'm logging out :homer-bye: to watch some classic Simpsons to cleanse this from my brain
How immediately out of date. Feminists got cancelled too LOL. Fucking TERFs.
They had to flee to free speech sites...where they were given a sullen welcome by all the pro-free speech right-wingers they had just finished shitting on. But they had to allow them in...because muh freeze peach. And, in the really hilarious part, the moment the feminists started getting moderator powers they started censoring the right, to immediate howls of "but that's not fair!" LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL. Both sides richly deserve each other.
Whoa hold up, they're still making new episodes of family guy? If you told me it ended in 2015 I would believe you
Whenever someone says they like SAO it triggers my fight or flight response
Coincidentally, I'm on somewhat of a Simpsons binge, atm. I haven't watched any of the new episodes, so I figured I'd scour the internet for people's opinions on "the best episodes of the last 15 years". Who knows, maybe some of them are actually good. I ended up with a list of ~40 episodes which I'm currently working through. I'll post my definitive list of good new episodes once I'm done.
I think the newest episode of The Simpsons I've seen (on TV, too) was the Elon Musk one. Shameless rip off of the classic "Oh Brother where art Thou" episode. Celebrating Musk way before he became the human cultural-financial bubble he is now. Doing active harm to the world, in retrospect, by stroking his ego and imprinting him as an engineering business genious on tens of thousands of nerds watching.
Celebrating Musk way before he became the human cultural-financial bubble he is now.
crazy how the show is still making accurate predictions even though it's been unrecognizable garbage for like 20 years
There's a later episode that mentions how they have to repair the damage done by Musk, who ended up being a snake oil salesman on par with the monorail guy. One of the few episodes with a canon effect felt later.
That's pretty cool actually; maybe they noticed they had done blatant advertisement "on accident"
the one with comic book guy getting over his roots, and the ned flanders episode where it's like fargo. that's basically all you've got.
season 32 ep 11, and season 33, episode 6 and 7
I'm already 1/3 through the list and have found 4 episodes I'd consider "good", but I'll add your recommendations to my list.
