Do you feel you have outgrown media sources or discontinued them for other reasons?
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Traditional news ironically. It seems to be the “adult” thing to watch the news but it’s just gloomy and controlling. Just wanna claw my eyes out every time I hear them exclaim “X is outrageous!” “The West has fallen.” “We live in a third world country!” “Migrants are destroying America!”. Pisses me off so much. It’s entirely irrelevant whether or not I agree, but it’s how they try to force you to think or feel a certain way, treating us like children. Just tell me the facts like an adult so I can decide for myself.
Traditional news ironically.
Rolf Dobelli wrote a good essay about that some years ago:
Online Multiplayer. I used to love to connect with people, friends and strangers and play games. Now I just want to play alone on my terms and find it super annoying when games introduce online stuff into the single player mode, like raids.
I still enjoy the occasional couch co-op though.
Comedy news shows. They can be funny, but the more I learn about topics in depth the more I realize how much biased the shows are. A segment that might have previously left me feeling better informed might instead make me feel like someone is trying to fool me or tell a one sided story.
In one episode of last week tonight, John Oliver was roasting Boris Johnson for mumbling the poem ‘Road to Mandalay’ while visiting Myanmar. Calling the act, absolutely offensive or something. Now, not a whole lot of Myanmar people here don’t know the poem. And among those who know, the poem is either fairly well regarded or they hold no such feelings like taking offense. Atleast among the people I know. Boris Johnson’s an absolute clown, but you can definitely sense the bias there.
Bingo. John Oliver is one of the worst offenders here, I think. He has a slick, humorous presentation style and a lot of his material is genuinely informative. At the same time, as you note he’ll throw in something that is either horribly cherry picked or has a bad misinterpretation.
I’ve watched “some more news” a couple of times, I found them pretty alright. They’re pretty clearly biased, they’re just biased in a direction that I tend to like more than others. Still kind of, full of stupid skits though, and for the comedy, ymmv, certainly, it doesn’t really land for me at all. Quality of the information is kind of. Iffy, it would seem like, but I haven’t looked into it that hard.
Of course, biased in a direction that you like is the most hazardous to keeping a clear view of a situation. That’s the easiest way to slip by your guard.
Yeah, but I’m conscious of it. I’ve kind of thrown out conceptions of unbiased news as being something that even exists in the first place anyways, so I’d rather at least have something that sort of, is given from a perspective I understand, and which conforms to whatever my standards for information are, rather than just having like, unbiased reporting on events.
The decision of what events to cover isn’t necessarily going to be unbiased, the decision of what language to use when covering those events isn’t necessarily unbiased, the decision of which sources the “unbiased” news trusts for their reporting isn’t necessarily unbiased. I would kind of rather just have a news source that I can sort of, trust to do it’s job, and present me with information that I can understand, and know what to do with, rather than a news source where I have to do my own journalism to find out whether or not their story really means anything as a whole.
If you understand and can more thoroughly comprehend the bias of the news you’re given, it’s easier to kind of push it through the framework and turn it into easy to consume gelatinous news paste.
Cable TV for over 10 yrs now. I‘m not blasting my brain with ads and doom news.
Game consoles since after ps3, I was thinking about ps5 in 2020 but I didnt want to buy a small car so now I‘m not interested anymore.
Television. Can’t remember the last time I turned my TV on to actually watch TV. It’s mostly for streaming, but even that’s getting harder to keep up with. It just feels like there are too many services and shows to keep track of. If I sit down and watch a show then I really need to want to watch it. More and more I’ve been listening to podcasts or treating Youtube videos like podcasts. It lets me multitask in a way that sitting down and trying to watch something just doesn’t.
Eli the Computer Guy and Philip DeFranco. For much the same reason. They told me to leave, and I did.
DeFranco was truly biased but balanced news. And then came the US election before last and balance lost out. Trump won and DeFranco decided political influence was more important than unbiased reporting. Shortly after Biden won the last election, he streamed a response to criticisms of bias, and he flat out said “if you disagree with my politics, leave. I don’t need viewers like you.” Favoring neither is disagreement too. It was that easy. Last I checked his subscriber count was cut roughly in half.
Eli said “If you don’t want to see me study ‘What is a duck?’ Leave. No really, leave. Leave.” His subscribers vanished and he blamed the algorithm, or so I heard.
Television in general. Video in general. A movie is nice now and then, but I almost never seek it out.
YouTube. From around 2008 - 2016, it was pretty much my only source of media and entertainment. I was subscribed to so many different channels and never missed an upload. I could spend hours just binge watching all types of content. These days, I only watch / follow a handful of creators. Really only visit the site when I have nothing better to do.
3-2-1 Contact
I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point I stopped receiving that magazine.
There was always a section called “BASIC Training” that had a bunch of source code in BASIC. They wouldn’t tell you what it did. You had to try and guess what it did, then type it into your computer to find out whether you were right. But I didn’t have a computer.
In 1994 I finally got a computer, and immediately opened up the QBASIC interpreter and started typing it all in, to see what it did.
Holy shit I just realized that’s 30 years ago this year.
American TV and movies after the '00s. Not representative enough of normal American life to be relatable (which is why I like '90s and '00s American TV so much) and not original enough to be interesting (which is why I’m into anime.)
I literally stopped watching movies, especially Bollywood and Hollywood movies. Somewhere along the line, I just decided to consume almost exclusively Japanese media, particularly anime. The simple reason is that anime tells some really amazing stories that most Hollywood movies don’t hold a candle against. Think Attack on Titan or FMA. I am not saying that all Japanese media is great, no it’s not. But, the variety there is pretty amazing.
I enjoyed Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon quite a bit. It’s not exceptional or great, but good. It certainly tells a unique story.
TV in general, I can’t remember the last time I’ve sat down to watch anything airing that wasn’t, say, footage of the new year’s eve fireworks show or something.
I don’t really care much for recent movies as well, most of what I watch is stuff from before 2000 and if I ever go to the theater I go with friends just as an excuse to hang out.
And I think I’m currently in the process of outgrowing gaming in general, I still play games but I’ve been gaming less and less nowadays, most of what I play are old games from my teenage years and childhood, and I don’t really keep up much with newer releases… In truth I’m sort of disgusted by the industry in general nowadays, so that might have some influence as well.
Stupidly, anything that requires too much of a time commitment, which has led me easily to death by a million cuts. I’m conscious of my zoomer mentality in this respect, but it’s much easier to generally piss away all your time on like, 50 tiktoks, that all last 5 seconds, compared to a TV show or a movie or whatever. The secondary effect, understated, I think, of this, and I think this is the kind of, horrible advantage of those platforms, is that you will inevitably spend more time trying to find stuff to look at that interests you, rather than actually watching content, so I think they can skate by a little more with a little less content. More efficient for them, less efficient for you.
I find myself doing the same thing with 10 minute youtube videos, but I also will end up watching multiple hour long video essays on random garbage, so I don’t really know what that’s about. Maybe just easier to convince myself that it’s a “productive” activity, to learn about some random nonsense, as compared to engaging in some sort of probably wholly escapist form of media, that might in reality lend itself towards an easier foothold for conversations with other people? I dunno, maybe the problem is just kind of trying to look at media in terms of its pure utility value, rather than looking at media through some other lens.
Certainly, I think the biggest contributing factor is just environment. I’m on my computer and phone a lot more than on my e-reader or my TV, so I naturally engage with the easier to access forms of media found on those platforms. Regression to the lowest condom domino gator, or whatever.
Also, I feel like I’ve seen enough people answer “anime” that the anime… subs? boards? communities? communities sounds a little too long. Anyways, it should be more popular, but I really haven’t seen any engagement on any of them, the anime holes.
Your use of commas, makes this painful to, read.
Yeah. I just kinda write how I talk a lot of the time. The commas end up being necessary because I kind of naturally talk backwards, yoda-style. If I had/wanted to commit more time to this, I also probably would’ve written a shorter letter.
I don’t watch movies that much anymore. They just don’t seem that interesting nowadays, and I can’t bring myself put that time sink in of just sitting. TV shows are kind of the same way. I don’t really just sit and watch them unless I’m eating or with my friends. Books have also gotten away from me, but I’m trying to get back into reading. It’s just a little overwhelming when I look at my unread pile lol.
If ever, don’t overestimate what you “have” to read. As a real bookworm I stopped reading for various reasons, got back into it many years later by reading simple manga and so forth.
Inb4 anyone says Reddit.
