I'll mention something different for my own contribution than my usual:
I've always hated Seinfeld, including when his show was brand new. "It's a show about nothing!" was a thought terminating cliche in the 90s that was used to pitch the show at me again and again by its fans, and also to dismiss any and all problems I had with the show and its ultra-privileged smarmy main character. If I got anything valuable out of that show and for that matter his stand up routine, it was a lifelong allergy to New Yorker comedy that front loads a whole lot of "I am a New Yorker which means I am smarter and tougher and wiser and more cultured and more sophisticated yet more grounded than you" self-aggrandizement into the set. :nyet:
EDIT: Please post your own disliked Hexbear-approved popular things! Don’t just reply to mine! :rage-cry:
I dont see the appeal of political streamers at all, like I get dunking on them when they have really bad takes because they do influence kids but I dont get why I see people in their 30s defending some rich guy in their early 20s so often. Also a lot of people act like they actually know the streamers with millions of followers which is so creepy to me
I don't see the appeal of streamers. I've tried to watch a few, and I just don't get the format. It seems so boring and pointless. Why would I sit there and watch people either play video games or react to the news while making inane commentary? Podcasts, I get. Vloggers, youtubers, sure. Makes sense. That sort of content tends to be either edited to be more concise or else was planned from the start. They tend to be focused, and about something.
But then streams are all like "watch this guy play Overwatch for six hours a day." I don't know why people watch that.
I think the biggest reason is that atomization has made people incredibly lonely and so listening to some person talking unscripted or playing video games is sort of a stand in for having a friend over to do those things with
Some people that are funny or entertaining I can kind of get, or extremely skilled like @aaaaaaadjsf said. I used to watch vinesauce ones and sometimes I’ll watch speedruns
But I really don’t get watching it live, I guess the participation is the point but I like being able to skip forward if it gets boring
The only way I can make sense of it is if they're very good at the game, then it's kinda like watching video game sports. But otherwise yeah I got nothing
I watch my friends streams but thats more like us hanging out because we'll actually interact as they're playing lol. I can get gaming streams if they're explain how to play a kinda difficult game
Every episode of Friends I watched was against my will, and I've watched a lot of Friends episodes.
Also Curb your Enthusiasm is worse than Seinfeld.
I had an ex that made me watch a lot of Friends. It was always bad and it aged badly. "Gay lol" and "trans lol" galore, using their existence or hints of their existence as punchlines. :haram:
Also, it was pure :LIB: shit to have all these smug idiotic people with a luxury New York apartment that apparently have invisible trust funds to pay for it.
If he wasn't in :epstein: 's flight logs, and I forgot if he was, that'd surprise me.
Also, that "kids these days are so delicate and sensitive that's why my tiresome unfunny boomer shit from the 90s isn't getting endless laughter from you" rant was almost disturbingly out of touch.
I hope he has Chappelle ride with him on his stupid car coffee show and they have a fatal crash
Unpopular opinion threads are just "Let me be racist/misogynist/classist" threads
one time my extremely cool linguistics professor said something about seinfeld and was like "do you guys know that show? whats that show about?" and when people said "nothing" he said "that's wrong it's about linguistics"
Please post your own disliked Hexbear-approved popular things! Don't just reply to mine! :rage-cry:
Any kind of streamer stuff really just doesn't appeal to me. I might watch highlights if it's a game I really love, but I just can't watch someone streaming for hours regularly
I also don't like eating animals 🤭
I don't like livestreams in general because you can't start from the beginning so I'll wait until it's done to try to watch it but then it might not be made available afterwards as a normal video and then there is a 90% chance it was boring garbage anyways.
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Jerma985. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of car accident physics most of the jokes will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also Jeremy's suspicious outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from American Psycho, for instance.
I think I’m just too old for it. My time to consume media is so limited, why would I want to watch someone else play a video game?
The entire streamer format is grating to me. Even if I would have liked the person or the content otherwise, I don't want to see a continuous selfie of someone slowly drip feeding me what I came for.
I only really watch streamers if they're vtubers, and then I only watch them while doing something else, like eating or working on something.
Dude, I tried to watch the first episode and I couldn't even finish it, like where the fuck is the funny? It's not something about the epoch cuz The Nanny is contemporary and pretty funny, but that shit had me waiting for something funny and it never happened, and the canned laughs made me more and more bored, and my family was "this is garbage, that guy is extremely annoying and unfunny, who the fuck recommended this to you?"
Something something it's a show about nothing.
Something something the main character is a smug smarmy narcissistic asshole just like the comedian playing the character with basically no differences, but because that's on purpose it's good and okay.
But it's not funny, like, there's nothing that can even be interpreted as funny-intended because it's so awkward and forced (plus the canned laughs) so if something might have been funny intended is distorted into a super unfunny and forced bad joke.
I think my allergy to laugh tracks also started with repeated attempts by friends to make me watch Seinfeld. If I sat there frowning, I'd be told "it's a show about nothing!" as if those were magic words to dispel my lack of laughing. :agony-minion:
What did it start? Being boring as a bit? It's garbage, don't try to essay-out of reality
The page does say this lol
Not to be confused with honestly thinking Seinfeld is not funny.
I don't have any strong opinion on Seinfeld but I was too curious about the tropes it started and sad that the tvtropes page didn't mention any so I found these articles.
https://www.vox.com/2014/7/6/5874267/how-seinfeld-changed-tv-30th-anniversary
https://screenrant.com/seinfeld-ways-about-nothing-changed-tv/
https://www.indiewire.com/2014/02/how-seinfeld-revolutionized-the-sitcom-29472/
yeah, it really was the first sitcom that didn't have a high concept. i think that was a key part of it's charm was that it didn't have an elevator pitch the way basically every tv show had. it was allowed by execs to be a vehicle for one comedian's style of observational humor and became a huge hit.
it wasn't like "a bunch of doctors working in a military hospital during the korean war" or "the whole thing takes place in the 1950s in a small town with a loveable rebel" or "two people with 3 kids each get hitched and there's a maid or some shit."
like even the term "sitcom" implies there's some novel, describable situation which induces comedy. as though the comedy writes itself due to the situation.
i also don't really give a shit about seinfeld anymore, though i used to watch it when it was new and i was a teenager. it was almost a given that most people thought jerry was the weakest part of the show. george was the gas, because he was constantly fucking up and emotionally charged all the time. elaine pretty normal except when she wasn't, and kramer was the wild card. the door thing with the audience cheering is crap today, but his more subtle twitching and mannerisms would still work if deployed today. giddyup. add in the truly absurd peripheral characters like newman or frank constanza, and there's some real pepper in that gumbo. mouth pop
i saw it was on streaming last year and revisited the episode where they forgot where jerry parked in the mall parking garage. very 90s. totally just a nostalgia experience at this point, because everything is so dated. especially the laugh track. but yeah, it was amusing watching kramer awkwardly and disastrously carry around some appliance in a box and to see both george and jerry get busted by a mall cop for taking a whiz, because george would of course fuck up like that but jerry is too refined. back then, an entire episode of a show taking place in the impossible labyrinth of a massive mall parking structure, trying to find the car was pretty clever for the shit that was being cranked out.
for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave%27s_World
Ah I just have to skim-watch the first 1200 episodes like that stupid anime that never ends
I actually jumped in a later season and that was fine. I dont think I've ever seen the first or second season.
The thing that is bad is bad intentionally so it is good actually :galaxy-brain:
I haven't given up on it yet, but I'm having a hard time getting into Disco Elysium. Haven't gotten past the opening yet, but taking multiple pages of text and clicks to communicate "you're hung over and amnesiac and feel like shit" left a poor first impression on me.
I've almost finished it and though I enjoyed it I definitely wouldn't put it in my favorite games category. It's fun for what it is, which is basically a playable novel, but you've got to be in the right mood for it and I haven't been in the mood to play it in months.
:lt-kitsuragi: read the dialogue, it's so poetic! role play a type of cop! your conversation choices matter!
:lt-dbyf-dubois: clicking through every possible dialogue tree in a row, dismissing anything that doesn't advance the story, also ACAB
I having trouble getting into most games nowadays, tried Disco Elysium for like a hour and haven't gotten back around to it. Just bought Dead Cells however and it's been taking up most of my free time the past week.
I just want to read it as a book, I don't want to click so much and read so much while sitting at a computer. Give me the communist path as a book and I'd actually finish it.
I kinda liked it, but I'm never in the mood for it. I think I just don't care about story in videogames. I play vidya for fun mechanics and I read books to consume thoughtful stories. For the same reason I can't get into Red Dead Redemption 2. The basic gameplay loop for Rockstar games sucks, I don't want to play an hour of horse riding and auto-aim shooting for this story that everyone preaches about.
You might as well watch the cutscenes on YouTube in that case, although I think spending 80 hours as Arthur Morgan is a pretty major crutch for emotionally connecting to the story.
Exactly, it won't hit the same just watching all the cutscenes. I'm fine with not knowing this sad cowboy story.
Fucked In The Butt By My Own Prostate by Chuck Tingle
Chuck Tingle is one of a kind, a legend. I unironically believe what he does is art. It's absurd, but it's art of the best kind, the kind that both reflects society and makes it examine itself.
Pounded in the butt by the subjective experience of reading about being pounded in the butt.
Waifuism is a bleak reminder to me of the cultural dominance of the concept over an entire animation genre.
Yes, anime had a horny side, even before it was called anime in the west and was called "Japanimation" or even before that when it had no genre name and was just weird Disney-inspired locally made cartoons post-WW2. The descent toward "this ego insert blank slate isekai boy got hit by a bus and woke up in a maid harem" and "this high school full of superpowered yet PUR~E and impressionable underaged children all want to fight for senpai" and other such pandering trash was gradual, but insidious. Yes yes I know it isn't the only anime out there, but its preeminence still sucks.
The very concept of "isekai" has been hollowed out, where it used to mean anything from The Neverending Story to The Vision of Escaflowne but now there's a cultural expectation even in the narratives of most isekai that "well, now that I'm in an isekai, where are the waifus and how is my mediocrity as a horny audience insert going to be turned into a superpower to get them to fawn and fight over me?" :disgost:
Any talk of how "empowering" it is when the half angel half vampire, dubiously aged but totally centuries old, maid/schoolgirl/healer gets world shattering powers when she "fights for senpai" rings laughably hollow for me.
I believe such ideology in entertainment does have a gradual and subtle detrimental effect on its consumers, no matter how treats defenders hate criticism of the treats and how much flak I get for criticism.
just look at how porn fucks people up mentally
That's a can of worms right there to talk about, even on Hexbear, but I don't think you're wrong, especially when the hedonic treadmill gets involved and porn-saturated people start needing bigger hits for the same effect. The contemporary behavioral fad of "choke-fucking" didn't come out of the aether (no matter what the "my entertainment has no effect on me" crowd may insist) and it's genuinely disturbing to know women in my own social circles that have experienced alienated violent dates trying to live out their entertainment with that, or spitting in the mouth, or similar misogyny-coded kinks established and normalized by contemporary porn.
I've long used the "baked potatoes and ice cream" metaphor. It's possible to like baked potatoes and to like ice cream but not want baked potato flavored ice cream.
:volcel-judge: posting aside, I'm not anti-sex or sexuality in storytelling, far from it, but I do roll my eyes at 90% of movie trailers that have to have the mandatory "1 second of hot sexy sex thrust against the wall, between psychologically researched committee designed sequences of thumping sounds and screeching sounds, before the title bwaaaaaams onto the screen" arrangement for maximum engagement.
The term I've seen used for the kind of people you mentioned are fuccbois, and that term amuses me so I use it sometimes.
Disco Elysium. "Yo, I'm seeing a fuckload of text-bubbles and not a lot of sick combos."
Tangentially related, but it's kind of amazing to me how dontnod made Remember Me, which was just all about sick combos and sci-fi memory editing fuckery, and then they made Life is Strange, where you're a teenage lesbian walking around and dealing with trauma.
Don't get me wrong LiS is one of the best games I've ever played, but I genuinely don't get how Gamer Bros absolutely hated Remember Me, but love Life is Strange. Dudes will really spend a decade bitching about walking simulators and lgbt themes in games and blue hair and female protagonists, and then their favorite game they've ever played will be a walking simulator with a female protagonist whose girlfriend has blue hair.
It's 'cause they want to :volcel-judge: the underage girl, whereas Nilin was an adult.
But it is the best simulator of complaining about other communists!
I disliked squid game, every one goes on about how anti capitalist it was but it wasn't anything special. I watched a movie a month before squid game came out that had a guy volunteering to be hunted by rich people because he had cancer and didn't want to leave his family massive medical debt. I've seen quite a few shows/movies with that idea. As for the battle royal setting that's been done better by other shows too.
The only special about squid game was it came out when a lot of people were stuck at home and acutely aware of how fucked up the system they were living in is.
It belongs in the very tolerated and accepted genre of anticapitalist media that just end up portraying the general bad feelings and shittiness of capitalism without a real conclusion of what is to be done, combined with the story just ending up being a drama between individuals rather than dealing with structures and organizations.
Its well done for what it is but its also bourgeoise-friendly, just like how Parasite had a bunch of rich people praising it, they dont really miss the point because there isnt that much of a greater point beyond "wow our world and system sure is shitty huh", which is a sentiment you could hear from fucking Churchill in that old dogshit quote about how "Capitalism and democracy are the worst systems ever except for all the rest" or however it goes.
I thought Squid Game was fine, but I'm with you in that I really didn't think it lived up to the hype. Maybe season 2 will be more explicitly revolutionary, but with South Korea's laws probably not.
Chapo Traphouse. I don't remember how I found the reddit sub, but it was before I knew about the podcast. I tried listening for a little while and eventually reached the extended riff on "Der Funkenbeats." Decided to take a break after that. :what:
I kept waiting for it to end and get to the rest of the show and it took me a while to realize that that was the whole thing.
I think most people here don't really care for the podcast. I think this website does a good job distancing itself from a lot of their 😬 vibes
I have never interacted with the podcast in any way, shape, or form. At most I may have watched a singular clip. I don't know who's on it, what they are up to, what cringe they have committed. It has not impacted my ability to engage on the old sub or the site today. I don't watch any podcasts to be honest.
I think the last time it was polled a majority of us usually listen, but that was a while ago. Personally I still listen to every episode, their sense of humor just hits all the right buttons for me and lately their takes have been pretty consistently on point. The only one I like more is Trashfuture
