Television and hype

If you spend an amount of time browsing the actively populated areas of the internet, you're probably aware that there are several television shows with a large following behind them, and with that following, hype. Lots of it.

These shows being Game of Thrones (HBO), Breaking Bad (AMC, ended), The Walking Dead (AMC), and to a lesser extent, Mad Men (also AMC). It's no secret that I watch a lot of television - over 120 shows - but of those four, I only watch one and a half. "How can there be a half?" I actively watch Mad Men (am in the process of catching up again), and I watched Breaking Bad up to and including Season 4 Episode 7 before I finally threw in the towel. I'm sure I'll finish it eventually, but it never really won me over.

That's my issue - it never won me over. I'd heard people praising it like it was the best thing ever to grace television screens, that it's the equivalent to sliced bread and the second coming rolled into one. The Wikipedia page says it's "widely regarded as one of the greatest television series of all time". To me, it simply wasn't. It was slow paced and empty, but not in a good way. When things happened, they felt like they were just trying to ramp up the pace for the sake of it, and when nothing happened, it felt more like a bottle episode than a deep focus on the characters (see S3E10, 'Fly'). As bitter a pill as it may be to swallow, Walter White is an asshole. He started off noble (perhaps too much so) and with good intentions, but he broke bad far too soon and then roller coastered around that level. The characters in the show are just... extremes of humans in a way. I'm sure there are people in the world like that, but for them to all be in the same circle? Anyway, I'm getting distracted. The point is, it didn't live up to the hype I heard.

Mad Men is another matter. I find Don Draper's mentality fascinating, the look into the not-so-distant past equally fascinating, and all the characters very deep. Incidentally, the hype there was a few years ago for Mad Men seems to have died down, and now the only hype I see about it is from dedicated fans - not posers jumping on a bandwagon.

Maybe I'm just jaded, maybe it's all just a social construct. Perhaps people watch these hyped up shows because their friends go on about them, so they watch them and then, to avoid being different, rave about how awesome it is and all views snowball out of proportion. This could be why I 'bear' Mad Men, because the only other people talking about it are other people who actually care about it.

I am not a hipster. I don't get annoyed at certain shows because they become popular, I'm just irked when hordes flock to mediocre programming and hidden gems die because of a lack of viewers.

Why can't you add audiobooks to the iTunes queue?

I just tried to drag an audiobook into my iTunes queue, and it wouldn't let me. I then tried to add it to play next via the iOS Remote, and I couldn't there either, so it must be a lack of function rather than a UI oversight.

I understand that the two are different types of media, despite being transmitted through the same means. However, is it not feasible that I may want to chill to some music before delving into an audiobook, and then may want some music afterwards to relax themselves out of the tension of some exciting roller coaster of fiction. Better still, if audiobook publishers used .m4b files properly and added chapter markers, would it not be a neat experience to listen to an audiobook, with chapters separated by some tracks of your choosing?

One final note, I spotted in the iOS Remote app that the "Rewind 30s" button is displayed when an audiobook was playing, which is useful. However, I can't find such a button on iTunes itself.

(One last note - when viewing this post the i in iTunes looks uppercase. It is not; I wrote the i in lowercase, it just seems to display merged)

I'm nervous about Rainbow Six: Siege

I have some very fond memories of some Rainbow Six games, as I do with Star Wars: Battlefront II, and as is natural with any reboot/revival/return, there's an element of fear.

E3 is happening at the moment, and one of the various videos Ubisoft unveiled was gameplay footage of Rainbow Six: Siege:

I was in awe for four minutes and thirty seconds of the video, constantly thinking "finally, the 'realistic' combat game I've always yearned for is being made", until it occurred to me - don't hate the games, hate the players.

If you happen to have ten people playing Siege in the manner demonstrated in the video, then fine, it will be the amazing game it has the potential to be. If, however, you have ten stereotypical FPS pros playing it, there will be a bodycount of nine, perhaps ten, within the first thirty seconds of the rescue team explosively breaching through a garage. I suppose there is a balance somewhere, as if the majority of people playing want to play it realistically, measured, and slowly, then the trigger-happy FPS pros will be out for the count just as soon as if they were playing against other FPS pros. Or, all the people creeping around bannisters to get a better look will be executed by somebody sprinting and jumping all over the house.

In all honesty, I don't know how it'll turn out, as all I've seen is the video above. I can only hope it's everything it looks to be.

My issue with Netflix Originals

As the internet is well aware, Season 2 of House of Cards was released today. As with the past season, it was released all at once. While this is a modern, unconventional rock-the-boat strategy, I dislike it, and don't think it's wise.

With conventional broadcast TV, episodes are released one by one, week after week, in a scheduled timeslot, unless they're preempted by happenings. Either way, the day after airing, people discuss the episode, and most importantly, memory and current activity of a show can last up to half a year. With something like House of Cards, you could watch all thirteen episodes one by one at a self-chosen time and pace yourself, but with all the content already available, why wait? Especially when others will have just "binge watched" (a term I dislike because it's the sort of term old media would come up with to try and sound relevant) it all in a day. Now their minds are loaded with spoilers that, if they are a decent human, they won't share. Once you've caught up and are ready to discuss it, it's no longer fresh in their mind. What's more, House of Cards isn't likely to cross their mind until a few weeks before Season 3 is released, when the hype and 'news' starts surging.

When a broadcast TV show is off the air for a while, even just a  mid-season break, it doesn't exactly aid the popularity of the show - more casual viewers will forget about it when it returns. When a show is 'on' for one day a year and then the wait commences again, memories will forget.

Other than the broken social 'watercooler' aspect of House of Cards, where a typical conversation is merely:

"Do you watch House of Cards?"

"Yes. It's awesome, right?"

"Totally"

"Good talk"

missing any intricacies or plot details for fear of spoiling it, as far as I can see, this strategy does work for Netflix, as it's a subscription based service that people tend to visit on a whim when they've got nothing else to do, and dipping in and out at your own pace  works a lot better when you aren't then waiting for the next episode to become available. However, I hope that traditional media companies don't try this model, as it will not work.

The internet is ruining me.

For these last few weeks, I have had nothing to do, resulting in my sleeping pattern, well, matching my media habits more than the day/night cycle. In an effort that will probably turn out to be in vain, I just stayed up all night so that hopefully I'll be tired enough this evening to sleep at a reasonable hour and get everything back in sync. After all, when the clock strikes 04:00, you can tell there isn't much point in attempting sleep. After finishing a film, I set about my tasks for the day, the first of which was to sort out my iTunes library on my desktop PC so that I actually had my various podcast subscriptions accessible somewhere other than my iPod. While waiting for the 80GB iTunes library to transfer to another disk, I pulled a book off the shelf.

My bookshelf is, sadly, rather a decorative feature, a memorial to a bygone era and an everlasting glimmer of potential hope. That said, the 'optical media' shelf directly below it, holding several DVD boxsets and my physical Xbox 360 gaming collection, is almost as untouched. The difference between the two (or three) mediums though is that I can still absorb visual media. Well, I've become rather disenchanted with gaming at the moment, but I'm assuming that'll pass, although I'm sure my wallet will wish otherwise.

Anyway, to my point - the book I pulled off the shelf was The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, the sort of non-fiction book that ought to appeal to me. The subtitle of the book is "How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember", and only a couple of pages in to chapter one I feel a certain resonance. The thoughts themselves aren't shocking revelations to me, but they are a moment of clarity. I used to read all the time. Well, I still read nowadays, perhaps more than ever, but I used to read paper all the time. Considered, edited, and published words were the expectation and that was exactly what my eyes received. Since "I cannot tell a lie", The Shallows is the first physical book I have picked up to read in quite some time. However, let's focus on the first part of that sentence, the quotation. To be absolute certain that it was in fact George Washington who people claim originally said that, what did I do? Googled it. What would I have done in the days before my access to the internet? Perhaps gone to a library and trawled through book after book in the hope of ever finding it, or just not bothered to spruce up my words - not that the quote was completely necessary. But this is the point - I relied on the internet to give me the answer. Not only that, but I expected it instantly, and received it instantly. The difference between Carr and me is that I grew up with the internet rather than evolved into it. Not that evolving into it hasn't in Carr's eyes left him unscathed - it still has an effect, but I'm even more concerned about my generation, who barely know of any alternative. At a glance, you wouldn't think it's an issue as the internet certainly doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon (SOPA etc. aside), however, it's creating an overreliance. I expect to have the answer to life, the universe and everything at my fingertips in a snap. But what happens when I am without technology? Putting it extremely, I'm at a complete loss and have no idea how to accomplish anything. Seriously. I've often said that I don't have a good memory, which isn't strictly true, as I am extremely good at remembering where I was when I heard something and what people have told me, but when it comes to facts, figures, quotes,... general public information - I can barely remember anything, because I don't 'need' to. Why do I remember the former type of information? Presumably some competitive part of my mind saying "this is how you can sometimes one-up people when they forget" - evidently it doesn't think remembering information to pass exams is as important.

So far I've clumsily explained why the information side of the internet has ruined me, so now on to the related part of that to do with traditional media. I cannot focus on books. I don't know why, well, I do, it's because of technology, but I wish that wasn't the case. I'm good at skimming online news articles, or even reading them in full, but when it comes to paperback books, my mind lacks the focus it once had. The slightly odd part is, I managed to read three debatably trashy novels on my iPod with iBooks and maintained focus, but I'm unsure as to whether my concentration held because it was consumed on a digital device, or just because of the unchallenging subject nature of said novels. I do keep trying to ease myself back in to reading, but so far it just hasn't clicked back in to place yet.

Now if you'll excuse me Mr Carr, I've got an internet to waste my time on.