I'd also point out that King of the Hill was a great show, if a little too dry for most tastes.
I felt like I was watching an Idiocracy-era satire. "LOOK, PEOPLE ARE STUPID, SAY AND DO STUPID THINGS"
I didn't like Idiocracy the first time I saw it...but grew to appreciate it after rewatching it during the 2008 presidential election
Boy I got a good laugh out of that I tell you what. Mike Judge knows how to cut to the bone with everything he creates
On the one hand it's under appreciated, on the other as cartoon with a complex view of american life that isn't going for the "big laughs" I'm surprised it wasn't cancelled in a week.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs5QbUjmtt8
Edit: Sorry, not by Judge, it's just really funny.
A part of that is just your curmudgeon factor increasing as you get older. [quickly steps off lawn]
Edit: my tablet reinterpreted 'doing things' as 'dong tongs'
Idiocracy was good but not as good as Office Space. I think that there was an extremely dark humor (see also: Borat, Bruno) that hit the spot during the Bush years, but now seems less funny. Or maybe I am just older and less into schadenfreude.
Are you sure about that?
>The film's scheduled release date was August 5, 2005, according to Mike Judge.[7] In April 2006, a release date was set for September 1, 2006. In August, numerous articles[8] revealed that release was to be put on hold indefinitely. Idiocracy was released as scheduled but only in seven cities (Los Angeles, Atlanta, Toronto, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and Mike Judge's hometown, Austin, Texas),[4] and expanded to only 130 theaters,[9] not the usual wide release of 600 or more theaters.[10] According to the Austin American-Statesman, 20th Century Fox, the film's distributor, did nothing to promote the movie;[4] while posters were released to theatres, "no movie trailers, no ads, and only two stills,"[11] and no press kits were released.[12]
>The film was not screened for critics.[13] Lack of concrete information from Fox led to speculation that the distributor may have actively tried to keep the film from being seen by a large audience, while fulfilling a contractual obligation for theatrical release ahead of a DVD release, according to Ryan Pearson of the AP.[9] That speculation was followed by open criticism of the studio's lack of support from Ain't It Cool News, TIME, and Esquire.[14][15][16] TIME's Joel Stein wrote "the film's ads and trailers tested atrociously", but, "still, abandoning Idiocracy seems particularly unjust, since Judge has made a lot of money for Fox."[15]
This is just you turning into a curmudgeon; that is, your mind ossifying and you being unable to absorb new ideas as readily.
In Idiocracy, medical care, among other decisions, are issued through simple touch-screen devices.
Currently, the popular idealized interface is finger-touch, such that even a toddler can figure it out. Styluses and keyboards and other peripherals are ostracized as laughably archaic/geeky ways to do input, and are probably not far from being seen, as Idiocracy's citizens would put it, "faggy".
Bret Victor has a good rant on this: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
In Idiocracy, despite decent progression in technology, the result has been more passive consumerism than active creation of media
From the Times: Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/us/new-digital-divide-seen...
(To underscore that point, I think it's not a stretch to say that the iPad is geared much more towards media consumption than creation)
Ow My Balls
Actually, Ow My Balls was pretty good for an early iOS game. I'm thinking of the popularity of "Fart Sounds" and every freemium social game that dominates the top-grossing list. I'm not as big into the gaming scene anymore, but from my distant perspective, it seems that the future of gaming (despite Zynga's current troubles), is moving more towards Angry Birds or worse...Nintendo is floundering. It'll be nearly 7 years since the PS3 was released (the PS3 was released 6 years after the PS2) and no release date yet for the PS4...I love Angry Birds, but in terms of gaming, I'd consider it more "Idiocracy" endpoint than "non-Idiocracy"
There is still hope. (The counterpoint to the above is the top grossing list. That's much sadder)
OK. That's bad... why? How is it bad to remove accidental difficulty? 'Accidental difficulty' being difficulty imposed by a bad interface, such as how annoying it was to drop a deck of punched cards. Sorting punched cards is not an essential part of programming; it is accidental. This terminology is due to Brooks, in The Mythical Man-Month.
> Styluses and keyboards and other peripherals are ostracized as laughably archaic/geeky ways to do input
As long as keyboards remain available, reasonably high-quality, and not too expensive, I'll be happy. If most people don't use them, that's fine with me.
> the result has been more passive consumerism than active creation of media
Most people have never created most kinds of things. Most people don't want to and are not good at it.
Besides, whenever we do focus on user-created media, what do we do? Laugh at blogs and GeoCities pages. There is literally no way to please the kinds of people who think Idiocracy makes good points.
> Ow My Balls
Bear baiting. When bear baiting makes a comeback, come talk to me.
Why do you say this? Almost everyone I know makes SOMETHING and they normally like doing so and are proud of their creations. It could be a batch of cookies from a personal recipe, a well crafted letter to a newspaper, a hand knit bedspread, or a nicely decorated living room. People are making things all of the time!
They might not be making things professionally or for distribution, but to say that they don't want to and are not good at it is very short sighted.
In 2004, relatively few of the people I was listening to voted for George W. Bush.
It's not one of the standard things that one generation always accuses "kids these days" of being guilty of. It's not like language choice or concepts of etiquette and politeness and changing social mores.
It's something that pops up in cultures constantly and when it gains a good foothold it royally fucks that culture up for a few generations before being stamped out again ... if it's not destroyed by a culture still embracing new ideas in the interim.
The whole premise of Idiocracy is as a morality tale about the dangers of anti-intellectual consumerism culture. Exactly what new ideas are being ignored if you find that a well suited criticism of contemporary culture?
In fact if I were prone to more paranoia, I would suggest that some Hollywood honcho sat Mike down in some dark office and explained to him that he has done a terrible thing by making office space, and he has to suffer, and only if he suffers willingly and eagerly for more than ten years by continuously making this awful trash called King of the Hill, only then he will be back in the good graces of the powers that be. But of course that is just my imagination. I am sure nobody actually had to explain this to Mike Judge. He likely figured it out on his own.
I don't think Mike Judge has much to apologize for; also, if you really think KOTH "carefully reinforces the traditional power structure", your irony sensors are so irreparably broken that you should have all of modern culture explained to you via a translator.
I'm not sure if I'm being serious or not. I do love those shows though.
While any show running for so long has hit-and-miss episodes, overall the the show is very well rounded - it explores controversial subjects with care and grace, while remaining funny and heartwarming. And yes, the humor can be quite dry. It's not for kids with short attention spans and who need constant gag after gag, i.e. Family Guy. In most episodes it's difficult to discern whether the moralistic views are real "American values" or a parody of them. It's much more about episode-long deep satire than one-off jokes.
It's not about the setting or the characters or even the jokes (which are both more dry and generally less funny than other projects, and I love dry humour).
It's about the complete reversal of the counter-culture commentary that made Office Space and Idiocracy popular. If you choose a boring hack writer setting (teacher wife, blue collar father, stupid son, etc, etc) for your show then you better make that choice the focus of your commentary, like the Simpsons did. The setting was chosen in order to comment on it. If King of the Hill was doing that then the commentary appeared to be "Isn't this nice. See how wonderful life can be when you don't question your place? Learning won't make you happy, conformity will. Good hard work and ignorance can be fulfilling".
I don't think anyone is wrong for liking it, but you certainly can't complain that fans of Judge's other work dislike that level of support for an anti-intellectual outlook.
But it's really not. Another reply put it better than I could as far as the reversal of commentary:
> if you really think KOTH "carefully reinforces the traditional power structure", your irony sensors are so irreparably broken that you should have all of modern culture explained to you via a translator.
Note: I didn't watch the show religiously.
We can agree that there were specific times when the characters were happy but I think we can also agree that there were times of deep sadness. Mostly the happiness was portrayed as being very superficial, and the sadness was generally existential and deep. In the episodes that I saw, this deep sadness was due to how the "traditional power structure" tried to mold them. It's a pity that they didn't break out of their molds, but as a show I think the zeitgeist was their deep dissatisfaction with their lives, punctuated with small insignificant victories.
Think about Beavis and Butthead. Do I think that it glamorized(to some extent) acting like a jackass? Yep. Did it make me want to act or be like either character? Nope. Do I think it "convinced" any normal humans into acting like jackasses any more than the evening news does? Nope.
The word "agency" is often used to describe the ability of a human to act as an agent, or the ability of a system to act as an agent. Philosophers like Marx often focus on systems as agents, other philosophers (I am not well read) and sociologists commonly focus on individuals as agents. Debating agency is very fun, and can be done at all times in all places, since literally everything is an "agent" :) . How much free will does a given agent possess; how are an agent's choices constrained by the systems in which it exists and the tools it has available?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_%28philosophy%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_%28sociology%29
Also there is an academic philosophy thread here that you might be interested in: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4891502
> Debating agency is very fun, and can be done at all times in all places
Yes it is and yes it can! I can't count the number of times I've had to backtrack and explain the concept of agency when having discussions where I brought it up.