yeah, I hate everything on the internet so I should stop reading it and read a novel instead.
I like that song. AWB makes a good point. I have Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson, the Black Book by Pamuk, and some Neruda poems. Good possibilities, I think.
Or I could read a Property Settlement Agreement now that my daughter has fallen back asleep.
Also, as a fat person, I'll put in my two cents that it's not that bad. Better than dead, anyway. The only drawback I can tell is that you don't tend to want to wear full-body skin-tight spandex out of the house, but other than that, it's really not worth dying over.
I know I'm being a moron; it's just that the negative voice inside me telling me how worthless I am is also always telling me I'm fat and disgusting, so I have a thing about it. it's not rational. I know intellectually I would look just fine at a different weight.
'night all. atypcal antipsychotics...making me sleepy...also making me want to eat a box of walker's shortbread.
al: have you ever posted favorite Narnia foods here?
I'll make a list tomorrow...black pepper crab!
It isn't moronic to feel shitty when you gain weight. I just wonder how much of it has to do with suddenly wearing ill-fitting uncomfortable clothes. If you know that you're going to gain weight on meds, why not go buy a couple of cute, not punitive, outfits one size up? It doesn't mean you've "given up" or are a worthless person. As you know, many people are bigger than you and don't consider themselves unworthy of life. But they have an edge because they own clothes in their size.
11 maybe sounds more flippant than intended. For all that I want to be the voice of body acceptance and shit, I have never gained or lost a significant amount of weight. I had a brief psychotic episode related to birth control, which also made me gain a little weight, but the main problem was the homicidal ideation. I don't know what it would feel like to not recognize oneself in the mirror.
It's been a Walker's shortbread week here, too, though not for equally dire reasons. I haven't indulged much beyond the odd pack of Lorna Doones from the machine at work, which did no good.
I've said this before, but I did the atypical antipsychotic thing (and the Tardive dyskinesia and god knows how many other awesome side effects including what I believe to be ongoing memory damage) back in my teens. The weirdest part of the antipsychotic weight gain as opposed to, say, the contented-lesbian-relationship-weight-gain I'm more familiar with now was that the whole time was about being team robot, being in some strange fog where my body was both strangely lumpy and didn't feel connected to me for reasons way beyond that. But I stopped being depressed to the point of wanting to die, which was the key point and worth being baffled by the rest of things.
I also thought Pym was awesome, though omg did his Incognegro comic fucking suck and make me predisposed to not read the book or follow him on twitter, which I still don't. IMO, obvs.
Sorry about the lack of parallel structure in the previous comment. I'm in total emotional meltdown today, but not at alameida level and I don't want to threadjack. I just got weepy because I do sucky writing on the ipad and then got weepier because I'm supervising Mara's bathtime and she always has her ducks yelling for their mommy (a plastic frog, I believe) but this time the mommy was responding with "Sweetheart," which she definitely got from me even though it's not one of my most common pet names. Oh, and apparently "sweetheart" is the plastic Halloween rat she brought into the bathtub. That part makes me happy!
Oh no! I bought Incognegro but haven't read it yet. I lent it to someone without having a chance to read it first, thinking Pym was good enough I could vouch for him. Eek.
15: I'd have to look back on what I wrote about it when it came out the better part of a decade ago, but it seemed clunky and ugly and unwilling to engage with anything useful about the idea of passing in favor of some macho Mary Sueism, but it's also possible I just wasn't a nice person when I read it or something. I disliked it a lot, but it's not as if I thought he was Craig Thompson or someone equally irredeemable.
After three decades I still remember the words Tardive Dyskinesia, but I can't remember the little drug I took to counter the symptoms.
I don't remember getting fat.
Sorry about the meltdown, Thorn! May I recommend... A novel? (one-trick pony, me)
Most comics are macho Mary-Sueism, no? Like isn't that what comics are?
A novel would be a good idea. Venting on the internet seems to have done the trick for the moment. I'm also reading a non-novel, We Meant Well, about the outrageous excesses of fuckery in the effort to "rebuild" Iraq and it's readable and entertaining. Maybe I should pretend it's a novel so I don't get sucked into the misery of thinking about the implications.
And yeah, I just got a message from a freind saying I should really be reading the new Batgirl series but I'm not sure I want to go back there. Incognegro struck me as more wrong because its aspirations were so much higher, but it's not as if I gave it a second chance or anything.
Bob, I don't remember what TD drug I had either but it was the same as my grandfather's for his Parkinson's at the time. As far as I recall, Moby is right that the old drugs have Td and the new ones have weight gain. I ended up better off with the latter when I needed them, but I still have perpetually dilated eyes I can thank one of the old-school drugs for, possibly Haldol but I'm not even sure anymore.
19: What I'm trying to say is that Macho Mary Sueism about how "I would have investigated lynchings and fucked up a bunch of racists!" seen worse and more annoying than ones about how awesome it would be to be Matter Eater Lad, at least to me. But I can go back to the Penn State thread to talk about this!
Most comics are macho Mary-Sueism, no?
Every work of art with a hero is a Mary Sue story for somebody. Mumble symbols of violence in eternal violent conflict mumble reification this mumble problematization that mumble.
21: Understandable. And one of the things I love about Pym is its willingness to confront one's own sense of anachronistic self-righteousness.
Like all of Johnson's work is obsessed with historical injustice and outrage about that, but it feels like Pym is an attempt to analyze his obsession with slavery through several different characters who are all assholes.
Also, Kanye West just seems like the worst sort of Internet-activated jackass.
Where is helpy-chalk? A while ago he complained that Joey only wanted to wear camo clothing, and I may or may not have noted at the time that I had very recently been in Big Box Kid Store in OH and remarked afterwards to CA that all, but all, of the boys' clothing was camo (and gender fascist not just for the kids but for the kids' parents -- to wit, "My Daddy Is a Tough Guy!" and "My Mommy is Hot!"). So yesterday at the pediatrician for O's 9 mo. appt, a woman was in the waiting area with her three sons, all head-to-toe camo (and a baby daughter in pinkest pinks of pink). The oldest boy took one look at me and started yelling, "WITCH! It's a WITCH!!!! There is a witch herrrrre!" I, of course, was in black dress, black tights, black boots, high black ponytail and bright red lipstick -- ie my uniform since 1986. I am sad it took a minute to realize that he meant me, otherwise I would have smilingly threatened to turn him into a newt.
20.3: My knowledge is about eight years out of date, but some of the new meds still had a TD risk. Lower than before, but it is still there. I don't know about aripiprazole, which is the big, new medication that was just starting as I left.
Drove past a building this afternoon with a sign out saying "Nearly New Kids Sale". I'd have taken him and left him there. $5.00 ono.
Which ones did they give you? Be careful of Abilify. It can give people terrible akathisia.
the Tardive dyskinesia
Seriously? Does your tongue stick in and out? Were you on them for years? Shit.
Why is tardive dyskinesia "tardive"? Is it that the onset happens late compared to when you start taking the drug? Or just later than childhood?
26: Hi!
Joey is now going a little easier on the camo, mostly to make room for more superhero stuff.
This morning I was wondering if it was a fashion faux-pas to mix Marvel and DC in your outfits.
On the girl side, Caroline and I are making a trebuchet, which I think balances things out a little. It turns out I am a poor carpenter, but that just lets me blame my tools.
Didn't you also once have a stranger come up to you and say "JEWESS!"?
Me, BG? This would have been between '96-'98, at which time I got put on Zyprexa, which I took for about a yer before being off anything. Before that, they tried risperidone, haldol, Trilafon, Navane (which I'd forgotten until I looked at Wikipedia right now) plus probably some others I don't remember. I resonded very, very badly to drugs, which is why there were such frequent changes.
It was pretty routin for a new med regime to make me shake so hard I had trouble walking safely. I often had severely dilated eyes and I know there were other side effects I'm not thinking of now. None of them got rid of the depression until Zyprexa, which is what made it worth taking the medicine and the medicine to deal with that medicine's side effects. I want to say it was the trilafon that caused the TD, but I honestly don't remember. I just had what I guess were horrific-looking facial spasms, though I wasn't entirely aware of them. When I had tongue spasms, it could make breathing hard. And I was anorexic through all of this, so probably in some sense my bad response is my fault for not keeping my body healthy enough to handle it all. I hadn't responded to regular anti-depressants or to lithium, though it was clear that I wasn't bipolar. Despite all of this and the underlying major depression that made the medication sound appealing, I did very well in high school and had an active extracurricular schedule and even some friends and a fucked-up relationship.
I don't remember it all very clearly anymore, partly from actual memory loss (where the year between 17.5 and 18.5 is mostly missing) and partly because I don't really want to and haven't tried to reconstruct it. It's easier to believe I'm just beyond all that.
32: Your first answer is correct, not that is it always delayed.
34: That's just a whole bunch of medicine for somebody that young.
It turns out I am a poor carpenter....
Dude, we GET it already. Enough.
33: Yes! But I actually responded to him ("Shalom to you, too!"). Once in HP a little kid started yelling, "Dad! It's Alanis Morisette!" about me (long, dark, curly hair). I must say that's nicer than, "WITCH!"
"Dad! It's Alanis Morisette!" ... I must say that's nicer than, "WITCH!"
Sure, why not.
41: It's right there in the Bible! "Thou shalt not suffer a patchouli-reeking Canadian hippie to set her spring break in India stories to music."
OT: On Scooy Doo, why is Fred always the downer? "It can't be aliens, Shaggy"; "We have to fix the Mystery Machine"; "That abandoned gold mine doesn't look SEED-compliant."
36: Yeah, I might have done better without all the medicine, really. I haven't taken anything in years and years. I think the SWPL assumption was to just start anti-depressives and when that didn't do the trick I got dragged in deeper and deeper and the prescribers were frustrated and wanted to figure me out or something like that. I mostly wasnt't told what side effects were possible or normal in case my responses were a form of hypochondria, which they were not. I evennhad pseudolactation, whatever the technical term is, for a short while. Mostly it seemed like we were changing medications every six weeks or so and that was supposed to count as progress.
¡Viva Las Vegas Nachos Frijoles!
34: Oh Thorn, that sounds awful. I'm so sorry.
45: Modern medicine is not an unmixed blessing, but that is awful.
||The wackaloon raw-milk fundamentalist anti-vaxx pro-Bu/d/d/y Roemer super bananas person with whom I went to college and with whom I am friends on FB is now posting halfordisms. |>
Does that mean he's eating paleo, has strong feelings about IP law, or despises a broad swath of colleges?
50: Additional options include rooting for the Lakers despite the inherent moral superiority of the Clippers and putting off writing a really cool history of LA.
50: She! (You sexist.) She's complaining about the China Study and paleo-ing it up. Oh, and the gov't is coming to take ur foodz.
54: Well, in her estimation, the govt is coming for more than your raw milk. But I don't know his opinion on that! There is an apparent schism in the paleo movement about dairy, anyway.
54: milk is for agrarian patywaists.
Cavemen tried to milk the woolly mammoth, but it didn't end well.
inherent moral superiority of the Clippers
While the Lakers are the the team that I most hate in the NBA I have a difficult time using the phrase "moral superiority" for a team owned by Donald Sterling.
My milkshake brings all the caveboys to the yard, and then they DIE.
60: You just reminded me of my favorite K&B joint.
|| I just read that North Dakota in the nation's 4th largest oil producer, and is expected to leapfrog Alaska and California to take the n umber 2 spot next year. I also see that the number one ranked Bison -- 'where winners migrate' -- are leading the Penguins of Youngstown State. Penguins in Ohio -- in this a proximity to Pittsburgh thing? |>
No idea. Youngstown is kind of the concentrated essence of the rust best. I went to see a guy talking about the foreclosure crisis there and it made Pittsburgh real estate prices seem like New York City.
he concentrated essence of the rust best
The best rust is no rust at all.
Apparently the nickname dates from a basketball game in the '30s either because of the snow on the way or how cold it was in the gym.
Or maybe there's artisanal rust hand-oxidized from virgin steel.
OT: this seems like it might be of interest here. Or maybe there aren't enough Main Liners to care.
Penguins have taken the lead; 24-21 early in the second half. If McCain were alive today, he'd surely intone "We're all penguins now."
Carp, someone from North Dakota drove me off the road about an hour ago. It seems that the Fighting Sioux are here to play the...um...whatever our football team is called. Anyway, as I picked myself and my bike up out of the small ditch, I thought of you.
Oh, we're the Aggies. I thought it was more complicated than that. I mean, I knew we're the Aggies, but I thought the horse had a name. Trigger? Mustang? Apo?
70: The internet says GUNROCK, which sounds like a speed-metal band.
71: ah, that's right. But we're not the Gunrocks. We're the Aggies. I wish we were the Gunrocks. That would be way cooler.
It'll be a conference game next year.
Oh, it's a conference game now.
Penguins back in the lead, by a field goal. I now everyone is just one the edge of their seats . . .
71: Perhaps a cover band playing exclusively Guns 'N' Roses and L.A. Guns. Except possibly for the odd .38 Special or Sex Pistols song.
On Scooby Doo, why is Fred always the downer?
"Supposedly" the protagonists as originally conceived were students from the various Five Colleges, with Fred being from Amherst; Velma from Smith; Dahpne, Mt. Holyoke; Shaggy, Hampshire College; and Scooby, UMass-Amherst.
||
66:I hesitated, but VW encouraged me. OT
The telling of the experience as story betrays it as experience. Narration is the antithesis of madness; it signifies survival and the overcoming of irrationality, but it also signifies the antithesis of the experience itself. It is in this way that narrative destroys experience but, through repetition, creates memory.In post-traumatic stress disorder, a traumatic event is relived in some iconic fashion (as hallucinatory flashback or unconscious reenactment,
for example) until a person learns to remember simultaneously the affect and cognition associated with the trauma through access to languageOnce a trauma victim can narrativize his or her
experience, the involuntary and frightening reliving of the traumatic experience ceases
Sharalyn Orbaugh, Japanese Fiction of the Occupation, discussing Hiroshima non Amour
1) This of course should also apply to positive and pleasant experiences, e.g., when love becomes a story it ceases to be love.
2) I'm early in the book, but Orbaugh's theme seems to have a very specific example in Yoshida's Akitsu Onsen 1962 (novel S Fujiwara) in which the heroine (M Okada) creates a sustaining personal romantic (delusional) narrative around the traumatic days of the Japanese surrender.
|>
Jim Tressel was the fairly longtime head coach of Youngstown State before he coached Ohio State. They were a perennial 1-AA (or whatever it was called) power--Four championships and runner-up once.
From 80:
A beer showered Matko. One man slapped his stomach. Another called him a "p--."
A poophead?
A rather less sensationalistic account ( i.e. non-Washington Times) of the same guy.
Matko, for the most part, was ignored. A few fans offered a colorful word or two of "venom," as he called it. But that was about it.
Penguin might just be an insult in State College.
Penguins are punting with 28 seconds in the game. 3 point lead. Hold your breath folks.
Does this game matter to you in any conceivable universe?
81: The Washington Times knows obscenities we can only dream of.
Alums rooting for the number 2 ranked team can care when the number 1 ranked team gets upset.
85: Penguins hold on and Horned Frogs beat Boise St. 36-35 (BSU misses 39-yard FG wilth 1 second left) so two northern tier undefeated team knocked off.
So, I just called 911 for a car wreck that happened 50 feet from me. Before I could get through to 911, other people had already removed the driver from the car. On the one hand, nobody did nothing. On the other hand, unless the Boy Scouts and the CPR people lied to me, you aren't supposed to move injured people. We were six blocks from a fire station and the car wasn't on fire or anything.
I don't plan to live comment on next week's game folks, have no fear.
77: "Supposedly" the protagonists as originally conceived were students from the various Five Colleges
No way. I'm completely stunned: Scooby Doo had something to do with the Happy Valley (western Mass.)? I can google this, I'm sure, but I'm delighted to leave things as they stand on this matter.
77: No way. Both Smith and Mt. Holyoke are populated by Velmas only.
http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/scoobydoo.asp
Snopes says no.
94: Yeah but, yeah but. I saw Laurie Anderson perform at Smith. Mt. Holyoke I don't have a good read on. I'm willing to go with Fred for Amherst, but I know a few people who went to Amherst, so it becomes confusing.
Anyway, where does that leave Daphne?
I met a real, live Daphne recently. She was a doctor in Latin America.
For some reason Daphne fades most from the cast of Scooby Do for me. In memory, she's mostly earnest and trying hard but a bit out of it.
Actually, the one Mt. Holyoke grad I know is much more a Hermione than a Velma. It is important to recognize subtle distinctions in your geek girl stereotypes.
I saw Laurie Anderson perform at Smith.
I don't understand what this is supposed to say about Smith. I saw Laurie Anderson perform at Harvard. ??
I just skimmed the Wikipedia articles for Scooby Do and for Daphne herself, and found it disturbing that Daphne and Fred apparently had a thing for one another from time to time. They dated?! I just don't want to hear about that.
Parsi, how come you're not watching the GOP debate?
(Obviously, Scooby doo is much more intellectually stimulating)
100: Not much more or less than that I don't see a school full of Velmas hosting Laurie Anderson. But maybe I'm not giving Velma enough credit. I also saw Billy Bragg at Smith. Velma has more to her than I thought.
For some reason Daphne fades most from the cast of Scooby Do for me.
But Daphne was Sarah Michelle Gellar, and... how can it possibly be that I remember watching the live action Scooby-Doo in the theater? I think it was a date, but I can't remember who would have dragged me to that movie....
98: The most recent iteration, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, has Daphne as the youngest daughter of a very wealthy WASP family. She is deeply in love with Fred. Fred is, initially, just fond of her as an investigator and deeply in love with trapping people. There is a similar, but somehow less pathetic, thing going between Velma and Shaggy. Scooby responds like a wife whose husband is let her know he will be spending Christmas with the secretary.
The version before that, Daphne knew karate and was generally less whiny than I've seen before.
Also, all the new animators have, in a welcome decision, decided to make Velma's sweater much clingier.
I think I prefer to remember Scooby Doo in its original. I can't have no truck with this real people / live action version.
As for the GOP debate: I believe the candidates have been comically cast (somewhere, I forget where) as various characters from The Simpsons.
108: It isn't just live action. There are two new animated series plus various special movies.
Romney is Fred, Johnson is Shaggy, Santorum is Daphne, Perry is Scooby.
Gingrich, Bachmann, and Cain are still auditioning for Velma?
Was Santorum just saying, in a roundabout way, that he thinks the most pressing foreign policy issue is that we need to have spies assassinating Iranian scientists?
And Perry just answered some kind of question about the Department of Energy by talking about securing our southern border.
Cain says that waterboarding should be used and the audience applauds. Bachmann says the same thing and the audience actually cheers. Then she says the ACLU runs the CIA.
Even watching a few minutes of this is too much.
Hey, remember the time when Wallace Fennel and Veronica Mars talked about which Scooby-Doo characters they were?
You know there is no actual point in watching it.
Even if you could vote in the primary or persuade someone who will vote in the primary, you could gain the same information by waiting for people to tweet about the good parts.
I just find it so cool that lactose tolerance in adults evolved completely separately in different parts of the world. It seems like it would be ungrateful to the ancestors who went to do much trouble just to survive, not to imbibe dairy.
I'm not watching it. It's just what the TV happened to be on when I turned it on. I have enough of a headache today without listening to Republicans.
I listen to them so rarely though that the total disconnect from reality still bewilders me.
I thought you might have gotten infected with ultra-civic-mindedness or something.
Does that cause a sore throat and headache?
The live action Scooby Doo with Sarah Michelle Gellar introduced the first major changes in the characters in 25 years. Daphne learned Kung-Fu, which, combined with her pre-existing princessiness, made her very Buffy-y. The romance angle between Daphne and Freddy came because SMG was already involved with Freddie Prinze Jr.
In real life, most of the Velmas I know wind up settling for Shaggies, but you don't see that in the show.
120.2: You do if you watch the new one they just started last year. It isn't bad.
To be fair, Buffy was kind of a Scooby-y show already.
I imagine that the Scooby Doo stereotype explanation dates from the era when Mt. Holyoke was for bluestockings and Smith for girls from Miss Porter's who boarded their horses on campus.
OT: Crowds at UFC events are ... colorful. Brock Lesnar's head looks like a minor planetoid with a flattop.
120: Well, that's just dumb. It's like the live action actors had to change the characters; I don't approve. Daphne is not Buffy is not Sarah Michelle Gellar and SMG doesn't get to say who Daphne is. Pfft.
I listen to them so rarely though that the total disconnect from reality still bewilders me.
Yeah, it's utterly freaky. I read something today pointing out that DUH, nobody's going to ACTUALLY abolish entire federal agencies (not without farming their actual responsibilities out to other agencies anyway), so the degree of saying things you utterly and completely don't mean -- except for Ron Paul -- has gotten completely out of hand.
Well, this is obvious. Sorry.
Cosma got into Slate, but honestly.
122: They did call themselves the scoobies.
121: And its on DVD now. Hmm. If I can steer the kids to one of those when the are at the library maybe we can watch it together.
Some of the earliest Scoobies-Doo are astonishingly bad. They remind you that Hanna Barbara got the edge over Warner Brothers when they realized "Hey, children don't actually care about quality animation!"
Slate lifted this piece, which I would have noticed when Crooked Timber mentioned it if I wasn't have a week where I was too busy to read CT.
128.last: How you see some of the other series from 10 to 15 years later? Thanks to Netflix and a 5 year old, I have. The animation was so crude that I couldn't believe I didn't notice it in 1978.
I also didn't realize that for the last ten years Velma has been voice by Natalie from Facts of Life.
My kids bring home random dvds from the 42 year history of the show and catch random bits of what they watch.
The worst is definitely the scrappy doo period (in the 80s?). I saw a funny moment a while back where they split up to look for clues and Fred got paired with Shaggy for once, and the conversation was really awkward.
"Hey, children don't actually care about quality animation!"
I definitely avoided Hanna-Barbera stuff because I hated the way it was drawn. Yogi? Awful.
Scrappy sucked, and I write that as someone who had Scooby Doo wallpaper.
Don't judge me.
Fred got paired with Shaggy for once, and the conversation was really awkward
That is funny.
136: That's awesome, Flip.
Scrappy was sort of short and stubby, like Barney from The Flintstones, as I recall (yes, I'll check in a minute). He didn't seem to add much.
I always confused which one was Scooby. I thought it was the guy who's actually Shaggy.
Do you like our owl?
It's artificial?
Now that you can run faster her, I suppose they'll all be short unless you trip or something.
+ than. I should really try to double-check for typos when I'm making jokes about husband-beating.
Wow, so it sounds like the GOP candidates one-upped themselves in making demented statements this evening.
(Also, what fight? It's impossible to fight when talking about Scooby Doo.)
I figured you were talking about UFC.
I don't really care how much the live-action movie tromped over people's childhoods, I found it fairly fun, certainly much more funny than the series. (Shaggy mind-swapped with Daphne: "Don't you ever eat?") I had the distinct feel that its quality was an accident, though, and haven't watched anything in the franchise since.
Yes, well, we'll see how you feel about these matters when the live action version of The Simpsons comes out.
151: Not gonna happen. Andy Rooney was the one to play Grandpa Simpson, and he's shuffled off.
And I would've paid good money to see Rooney say, "Now my story begins in Nineteen-dickety-two. We had to say 'dickety' because the Kaiser had stolen the word 'twenty'".
The Simpsons managed to start sucking without going to live actors.
I just saw Muppets from Space for reasons not worth going into. I don't know why, but instead of just zoning out I found myself profoundly irritated by it. I don't have any particular sentimental attachment to the muppets, but I wanted to scream "Gonzo is not that lame!!!" Maybe he was...it's been a long time.
This is so dumb I now have to decide between deleting it and going presidential.
p.s. baffling cameos from Ray Liotta, Kathy Griffin, and Jeffrey Tambor. Slightly less baffling cameo from Andie MacDowell.
p.p.s. Scrappy Doo was agony, even when one was younger and less dour.
154: There's a good article somewhere (I can't remember where) about what went wrong. It points out that Homer becomes a parody of himself, and no longer even makes sense. Also, the narratives went from being one episode-long arc to being three randomly strung-together arcs.
Not gonna happen.
Uh-huh, uh-huh. You just keep telling yourself that.
In the live action version, Homer's going to learn kung-fu, and Marge is going to cut her hair and get a smart bob.
It points out that Homer becomes a parody of himself, and no longer even makes sense.
I've heard (I forget where) that part of this was that their market research showed that Homer was the most popular character, so suddenly they started making every episode about him and clearly ran out of good ideas very quickly. The lack of coherent plots that fill an entire episode was probably related to this.
Homer's going to learn kung-fu, and Marge is going to cut her hair and get a smart bob.
I haven't watched the show in years, but I'm sure something like this has already happened. It would be far from the nuttiest change they've done.
They ran out of ideas, but I wouldn't say it was "quickly" in the context of TV comedies.
Fair enough, but in the context of the remarkably long run of the show it did happen relatively early on.
151: Pretty much the same, I think. Never watched the Simpsons regularly.
The Simpsons was funny well into the tenth season, perhaps even the eleventh.
Didn't someone once link a live-action Simpsons porn movie here? I can't imagine where else I would have stumbled across it.
flippanter, each day you charm me more. watching UFC and having scooby-doo wallpaper are both great, and you should put them in your hypothetical online dating profile. and you're not even unpredictably violent! well, no, I guess we can't say that for sure, but you don't seem like it IRL. though dudes: they can fool you on this one, boy howdy. On the gripping hand, to be fair to irrationally violent dudes, for the most part they're pretty upfront about it.
141 offends me deeply. it's illegal to have real owls, and the tyrell corporation would never do anything unethical.
I just saw Muppets from Space for reasons not worth going into.
I think I'm going to have to see the new Muppets movie just because they show ATLAS in the commercials.
I am still waiting for the detailed statistical analysis that charts out how the Simpsons has changed over the years and then tries to relate that to what people say about its decline.
I gave up on it for a while, then filled in a lot of the later seasons with re-runs and came to the conclusion that after about 5-8 seasons or so*, they pretty much had a few templates for episodes that they kept going back to and things didn't change that much structurally after that. But while they kept doing the same stuff they did before, they just didn't do it as well anymore. This is a whole lot less satisfying an explanation than "Conan left and then it went downhill" or "it became all about Homer" or "they started throwing in random stuff instead of full story arcs" but I don't find those explanations convincing. Anyway, my opinion is that the Conan explanation is wrong, but that's because I still found the show worthwhile for some time after he left. And some of those three-story episodes are actually good, not just the Halloween ones (which were always uneven, anyway).
There are still some good later episodes and a surprising number of good sequences in the beginning or middle of poor episodes.
*The early seasons really stick out to me still, but then there's a point where I really can't remember which episode happened when, and then there's later stuff that seems clearly later.
168:
ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS)
I know people like to have clever acronyms for things, and are often willing to stoop to strained backronyms to get them, but this is just ridiculous.
But while they kept doing the same stuff they did before, they just didn't do it as well anymore.
This is surely part of it, and probably inevitable with such a long-running show, but I do thing there were some major changes in how they structured the episodes over time (not all of them bad, imo). The most obvious is the difference between the very, very early episodes (first half of season 1 or so), which have much more elaborate plots than anything that came later. There are full narrative arcs and morals and stuff. I think the shift away from that to what I think most people regard as the best period (maybe seasons 2 through 7 or 8) was an improvement. I'm not sure exactly where or how I would pinpoint the beginning of the decline, but I think there were multiple periods within it as well, with the "everything's about Homer" period being just one of them, and relatively brief. It would definitely be interesting to see a full analysis of all the shows, but for total thoroughness you'd want to do it after the series had come to an end. (It is still on, isn't it?)
There are still some good later episodes and a surprising number of good sequences in the beginning or middle of poor episodes.
I definitely agree with this though. Even the bad episodes were usually worth watching for the occasional flashes of brilliance.
171: Agreed on all counts. And there's an argument that there's no Family Guy without The Simpsons.
The most obvious is the difference between the very, very early episodes (first half of season 1 or so)
Definitely. And in 2-4 it still seems like they're feeling their way around what they can do with the show, given that they don't have the constraints of a normal sitcom. That's why I figure it's 5-8 as where things sort of stabilize. I agree too that there's various smaller periods later on when one or another things becomes more of a focus.
Two additional things stick out to me: 1. the problem of repetition - how many times can you cover similar ground?* 2. writing talent - there's a lot more animated shows on now than before, so I would guess that talented writers have a bunch of choices. Maybe before they were mainly going to the Simpsons.
*There's an episode, quite well done, I thought, where Marge and Homer are in college in the 90s instead of the 70s. I wonder how much thought they gave to shifting the setting like that, given that in the real world the Simpsons has already been on a bunch of years by the time that episode was supposed to take place. There probably wasn't a whole left they could have done with another 70s episode.
As for Scooby Doo, that show would have been great if it hadn't been for those meddling kids.
I just cannot write a grammatically coherent comment anymoo.
There's an episode, quite well done, I thought, where Marge and Homer are in college in the 90s instead of the 70s. I wonder how much thought they gave to shifting the setting like that, given that in the real world the Simpsons has already been on a bunch of years by the time that episode was supposed to take place. There probably wasn't a whole left they could have done with another 70s episode.
I haven't seen that one, but I do think the longevity of the show puts them in a tricky position with doing flashback episodes since the characters never age. In general, my impression is that over time the show reached a point where you really just have to take each episode on its own and not bother looking for continuity with earlier episodes, even when episodes refer explicitly to events in earlier episodes.
It occurs to me just now that there's an interesting parallel here to long-running comic book series.
Mitchell and Webb have the definitive defense of Scrappy.
I freaked out when I saw a clip of the debates and I realized the second-most presidential person on stage was Ron Paul.
Early in the primary, the media collectively decided that Ron Paul was too crazy to be president and shouldn't be covered. Now that we've learned about the rest of the field, it really seems unfair to single him out as the one who is just too crazy.
Early in the primary, the media collectively decided that Ron Paul was too crazy to be president and shouldn't be covered. Now that we've learned about the rest of the field, it really seems unfair to single him out as the one who is just too crazy.
Isn't it because his craziness, unlike the others', is about imperialism?
Or rather, his "craziness" is in being negative about imperialism. Not that he's not truly horrible in other ways.
180: Yes.
I was reminded afresh just how crazy various of the Republican candidates are: on one of the Sunday shows this morning, Michelle Bachmann declared that Iraq should pay us back all the bazillions of dollars we've spent there in the last decade, and should also pay the families of our 4000+ fallen U.S. soldiers a couple of million each for the life lost.
Sure, it's not like they don't have a smaller population to support after all. Thanks to us.
Good point, JP. It's not like they have much of a functioning infrastructure left to support either. Mostly they just have all that oil and not very much to spend on it on any more, and it's totally greedy of them to keep the money for themselves when the families of our fallen soldiers are suffering here.
(The purely vindictive part of me dearly hopes that the broader mainstream media picks up on this idiocy from Bachmann and declares it as distastefully laughable as it is, but it's more likely that it will go by as just another stupid thing she said that shouldn't be dignified by a response at this point.)
Bachmann is just a traditionalist. In the good old days, it was standard for the losing side of a war to pay a tribute to the winning side. Then a bunch of stupid hippies convinced people that the way people handled Germany's war reparations after WWI was a mistake and then everything went to pot.
I'm a contrarian on the Simpsons. I think episodes as recent as a couple seasons ago (the most recent I've watched) are really very funny and up there with your canonical seasons 4-5.
With most TV comedy shows, I think there are fews way to succeed over the longterm with individual viewers, even if the writing is consistently good: at a certain point, you're going to move on because the experience isn't novel.
It would be interesting to me if someone younger who, say, started watching the Simpson's at age 15 in 2003 would have the same opinion of series' creative arc**. I, being 33, watch late 70s SNL and really don't think it's much, it all funnier than the Dana Carvey or Will Ferrell eras. That show has always been terribly uneven with most of it being unfunny.
**It's also a hard comparison in that, overall, television sucked a lot more in the early 90s than in the early aughts, especially with a lot less alternatives on cable for interesting programming. The experience of something being new is always going to enhance its value in a medium like old-school network TV.
69: Carp, someone from North Dakota drove me off the road about an hour ago. ... Anyway, as I picked myself and my bike up out of the small ditch, I thought of you.
I'm waiting until it gets written up in the local paper to comment on this one time that a cyclist had it coming, so you know, it all evens out.
167: Lost love turned my youthful anger inwards.
have you considered heavy drinking? I hear that helps.
I am coming to like this song a lot too!
167 should take it as a compliment. The owl looks quite real. Must be expensive to not be sure whether it is the real thing or a replicant.