Reality TV and Why I Like MTV's Catfish

I was sitting and watching a video from funny YouTube man We're In Hell about the Netflix Show Love Is Blind. It's a meditative piece and really gets into the weeds about bad media and our relationship to it.

But I also have something of a personal story about this to share.

My partner and I watch a lot of MTV's Catfish. It's not the trashiest show but it's not prestige television by any means. I'm not pretentious enough to say I'm above it, but it's kind of something to watch while you eat breakfast on a Saturday morning. Sometimes there is genuine emotional investment; You see someone you're really rooting for and I imagine that this connection happens more often than people would like to admit. Sometimes it's the same as ragebait content, someone does something so objectionable that you're hate watching. 

 

Sometimes it's just messy and the drama is exquisite. 

 

I come up against how exploitative these shows are all the time. For all the pretense that Max and Nev are crusaders fighting off the evil doers catphishing innocent people, they're profiting off human misery. Like sometimes I feel bad for the catfish because they let a silly prank or game go on for too long, genuinely not meaning to do actual harm, and then they get blasted on international television. Like, all of us can be mean spirited or do something we later come to regret, but exactly zero of my mistakes have one million views. No one on the street is going to recognize me from that time I said something shitty, or when I was a jerk to someone. And I also think the show is pretty aware of this, Max and Nev try their best to give the situation a happy ending... But they also escalate it to a messy in person conflict first. 

 

The other thing is that... We know right?

 

Several of these are scripted, most of them use 'evil editing' to portray a situation as more dramatic than it actually is, sometimes the ADR is so blatant that they're literally putting words into someone's mouth, there is an amount of kayfabe at play here. Sometimes it's a little, sometimes it's a lot, but Reality TV is not reality... It is a heightened reality that seeks to first and foremost entertain. People are absolutely playing it up for the cameras, we have no idea what happens between cuts and the cuts are there for us, not for the subjects. I could make an argument for why this is enjoyable, about the refreshing feeling of media that doesn't hide its artifice and puts it boldly on display, about TV made for the lowest common denominator being obviously enjoyable to anyone with eyes like it's the Big Mac of audio-visual experiences... But like, when Nev busts down a door to confront that motherfucker who was catfishing that poor, very naive girl, you just... You're there. Get his ass, Nev. 

 

Reality TV is enjoyable, bad TV can be very enjoyable, I don't really have to explain why. Is it good for us? Like anything... In moderation, our vices are what make us human.

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F*ck You, Injustice Is Good Actually

 

This week I went through it all. I started at Year 1, read through all the prequel comics, played through Injustice: Gods Among Us, read the in-between-quel, played through Injustice 2 and as I sit here I need to express a thought;

I love this universe.

Look I'm a sucker for a good Batman vs Superman trope. Something about the juvenile pleasure of smacking action figures together makes my neurons fire and I love spending time in this universe.

As a long time fan of these characters the thing that stands out to me is that for any of this to work someone's gotta get character assassinated and the real victims here are Supes and Wonder Woman. But this take on them works. It works because we see our real, actual heroes and we know this is an anomaly, an elseworld, an alternate dimension where the rules are different.

Let the action figure slapping commence.

I think the other thing that sticks out to me is how sincere the story can get. Lex Luthor sitting at his desk, staring at a picture of himself, Clark and Lois and wondering how it all went so wrong. Harley getting dosed with fear toxin and seeing the return of the Joker, but also her standing up to this nightmare vision. No clown with a cheap grin and an even cheaper suit will ever put her in the corner again. That moment when Wonder Woman finds Wonder Girl buried in the wreckage and Cassie wants nothing to do with her, and that intense close up on her eyes as she swears she didn't know.

And literally everything involving Alfred, our wonderful father.

I need an Injustice 3. I need another 80 issues in between the games and I need to know how Killer Croc and Orca are doing after their touching gross wedding, I love that, I love that so much.

There's a lot I could say and there's more I will eventually say, I plan to ruin the lives of everyone I know by yapping on about the silly fighting game, but this is the last word I'll write about it here;

Of the infinite possibilities, all the paths we took and did not, all the things that could have been and never were... I am glad to be alive just in time to enjoy the hell out of Injustice: Gods Among Us.

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Cancel Culture, Reputational Harm and Deplatforming

It's really difficult to talk about cancel culture without the conversation turning into a swamp.

I'm going to paraphrase Hank Green here, but there was an insight he shared that I think is really relevant. He said something to the effect of "You'll navigate the conversation much more successfully when you replace the word 'cancelled' with 'had some harm done to their reputation'."

It's a bit of an oversimplification but that's also the truth. Left of center we don't talk much about being cancelled, we tend to distinguish between reputational harm and deplatforming. The definitions of those words being kinda self-evident but for the sake of being thorough, when I say reputational harm, I am talking about what everyone thinks of a person, and when I say deplatforming, I mean an entity taking away a person's platform. An account banned on Twitter, being locked out of posting videos on YouTube, being blacklisted from speaking on college campuses. A body that determines a person's speech is harmful enough to not provide them with a platform.

And make no mistake of it, I think that there are people who we think should be deplatformed, who should lose their ability to continue doing harm. The big example being Woody Allen, a convicted sexual abuser who fled imprisonment and is living mostly consequence free. Or Alex Jones, who spread his Sandy Hook hoax conspiracy theory so far and wide it ended up harming the parents of the children victimized in a school shooting. And I don't take deplatforming lightly, to me it is the hammer of last resort reserved for when the evidence against a person is very strong and no other recourse for justice is available.

Reputational harm is different. This is your garden variety cancelled. Someone sees you said some shit online and distance themselves from you. You're still allowed to post or whatever but folks decide you are not worth their time. Losing good-will with the people.

And if your job is contingent on not losing people's good will, that's a harder problem to solve, but it is yours.

Posting on the internet can suck if your job is dependent on your reputation and you have enemies or you're just a bad public speaker or you have nothing in terms of public relations. There's a reason people spend six figure amounts on a good PR Team or a good PR Campaign. It's hard to gain people's trust and very easy to lose it.

We live in a low trust media environment, both in that we can't trust a lot of our news outlets and in that there is so much misinformation and disinformation online that you can't be sure of the truth of anything you read. And people launch misinformation campaigns, someone out there can decide that you are their enemy and you must at all costs be stopped.

Should we forgive online figures for messing up? Honestly, yes. I believe that people should be able to make mistakes, make mistakes repeatedly, and as long as they are making a good faith effort to fix the issue, we shouldn't dole out infinite punishment. That's not to say I don't think some mistakes are beyond coming back for. No one wants to bat for a sex pest, no one wants to bat for an abuser. But people make mistakes and people are human.

There isn't a clean note to end this on. I might change my mind on this a bunch more in the future. But what I know about this in the here and now is that we can't keep going on like this. This isn't going away and we're destroying the mental health of creators who are constantly walking on eggshells.

We need better solutions to these problems.

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Game Immersion, or Why You Need To Stop Staring At Traffic In Games And Drive

I love The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

It's one of my favourite games of all time. Specifically on PC. What makes Skyrim so special is how unabashedly moddable it is. You can practically change anything in the game, it's so robust that it's almost become a game engine of its own.

But one thing that Skyrim players often go to absurd lengths to protect is their immersion. And if you look on Nexus you'll see some truly unnecessary mods. There was one that actually crashed my game from the strain it put my PC under just to simulate flocks of birds.

All in the name of immersion.

Immersion in a game is kind of a strange thing. When people talk about something breaking their immersion, they usually mean that they've seen or heard something that took them out of the experience. Sort of like a wrestler breaking kayfabe. The game isn't supposed to acknowledge that it is a game. The NPCs shouldn't do things that are inhuman and uncanny.

Keep the mask on.

When I was in school we did film study. I remember there was a kid in the back who would yell and interrupt the film every few minutes, until the teacher eventually go fed up, paused the film, went to the whiteboard and wrote in big black letters

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF

Where that line is for everyone is going to be different. For some it's not seeing hanging signs in Skyrim sway realistically in the breeze. Other people can interpret the 16x16 sprites of an NES game as full living breathing world.

There's something that stuck with me. I remember MovieBob saying it but I don't think he's the first, that's where I heard it first though.

"Are you guys sure you don't mean engagement?"

It's a lot harder to suspend your disbelief when you're staring at signs instead of doing something engaging. You know why you don't ask worldbuilding questions about the mushroom kingdom? There's a goomba coming to kill you, you do not have the time. Get running. The clock is ticking down.

I have a feeling that modern games are all trying so hard to make complex simulations of real life that we've confused the quality of the simulation with the quality of the game. What pedestrians do in Grand Theft Auto, what the other drivers on the road do in Watch Dogs, whatever the moon logic was behind the swordplay in Kingdom Come Deliverance, seriously, what is with the game's combat, why did we bring back Daggerfall's worst feature?

Games are about play. Or at least, they are to me. It is about being playful, it is about playing. Some argue that games don't need to be fun, and I think there are some games that can make an interesting point or be a worthwhile experience by being deliberately unenjoyable, at least for certain stretches.

But it'd really suck if that was every game, or even a majority of games.

I'm not worried about my immersion. Suspension of Disbelief comes easy to me. And it's not stuff like janky AI or broken physics that do it, one of my favourite games is Skyrim. It's usually stuff like bad character writing, people making decisions that don't make a lick of sense. Why can't I send the radiation proof super mutant to go and flip the switch in the big radiation tank, Bethesda? Why must I, a regular wastelander who is very much not immune to radiation, go into that room and die? He's my friend, he'd do it if I ask, it's no inconvenience to him.

I think a lot of people would actually agree. Just make s fun game. We'll figure out our immersion later. And if it's that much of a problem, well...

There's always Nexus.

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NFTs and Crypto (Wow, in 2024? That's old news, who gives a shit?)

I've on my socials pretty thoroughly expounded on my position on NFTs and the Cryptocurrencies.

These are technological solutions in search of problems.

 Do I really need to explain either concept? Maybe there's one person who needs the cliff-notes; The blockchain is both a system of validating transactions and also kind of a cloud storage, but it's way better at the former than the latter. Just think about a bunch of computers keeping full copies of a database, and whenever something needs to change, all of those computers need to agree that the the change is legit. Non-fungible Tokens and Cryptocurrencies are built on top of blockchains. It is the data that goes into the database. It's resistant to man-in-the-middle attacks but those are relatively rare. And now I've given you a one paragraph version of Folding Ideas' Line Goes Up. It's a good video. You should watch it.

Blockchain technology is interesting but has as of yet only really been great for the grifter; Do you want to run a ponzi scheme without running a ponzi scheme? Invent your own crypto coin. Do you want to part some easy marks from their money? Mint some NFTs. You can even set the system up so the minting cost is bore entirely by the buyer.

And just to be clear, I say 'easy marks' but often there are sincere investors looking to expand their personal portfolios and they just don't know any better. These folks can sometimes be very annoying and very over-zealous but truly, they do not deserve to be scammed like this.

Now, I'm hesistant to put Web3 as a concept in with NFTs and Crypto, mostly because while NFT and Crypto follow the philosophy of decentralization, rather than one company owning the servers your data goes on, it's separate entities cooperating and potentially hosting entirely bespoke data... A lot of Web3 is smoke and snake oil. See the excellent Web3 Is Going Great blog for just how much of a trashfire it's been.

The most solid and promising ventures I've seen are in the landscape of decentralized web applications; Mastodon, Peertube and the like. This is actually very cool. But it's also a trend backwards, showing a version of the internet where private individuals create and share things they themselves host, much like it was before 7 corporations bought everything.

Blockchain is an inefficient solution to a problem that's not that big a problem and the pure electricity cost is staggering. NFTs have yet to show anything worthwhile, there's very little you can even buy with your Bitcoin.

But I suppose none of it matters anyway since the grift has moved on towards generative AI. The crypto grift is dead, long live the AI grift.

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One Way Sonic 06 is Better Than Sonic Frontiers

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

I'm not one to easily give Sonic The Hedgehog (2006) praise but one way Sonic Frontiers is worse than Sonic '06 of all games is in the... Let's call it the "Sonic dies but the power of friendship brings him back" bit.

For context, in Sonic Frontiers around the 75% mark, Sonic succumbs to Cyber Corruption and his friends have to find a way to bring him back. They trap themselves in Cyber Space again to stave off the corruption. The issue is more with the pacing of the game than any flaw with the scenario, since Sonic remains out of commission for all of two minutes before his friends bring him back again.

Something similar actually happens in Sonic '06 where Sonic is mortally wounded by Mephiles and his friends need to go find the 7 chaos emeralds in order to bring him back. Rather than it just being a cutscene, there's a mission where all the characters go search for chaos emeralds and it's the culmination of the games various mechanics. Rather than Sonic dying and immediately being brought back, the player has to earn that moment and Sonic's friends have to all band together and find the chaos emeralds inside the broken remains of the world.

The actual nuts and bolts of the gameplay in Sonic '06 is still poorly constructed, but the narrative pacing is better in this one moment. There's a ludic element to the events happening on screen and there's a tension that lingers and is hard fought to be resolved.

I just think that's better. I would have liked a couple levels where Tails, Amy and Knuckles had to go into Cyberspace and fight the Cyber Corruption rather than just a cutscene that immediately brings Sonic back.

That said, Frontiers is in its construction still a far more solid game, and while it has issues, it manages to rise above its flaws where as Sonic '06 drowns in them.

That said, a broken clock is still correct twice a day. Good for you, Sonic '06. There's a lot to learn about your failures, but there is at least on triumph to your name.

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The Thing That Bothers Me The Most About Batman

Source: Black Metal Gun by Somchai Kongkamsri

Something that bugs me about Batman is less of like, a character thing and merely that they keep making him bulletproof.

I think a lot of tension gets taken out of Batman stories when he shrugs off 9mm slugs like nerf darts, instead of the incredible gut punches they would be. 

Every Batsuit in the modern era has basically been made into a high-tech suit of armor so advanced that gunfire isn't an issue. It's a writing conceit meant to deal with the fact that Batman routinely goes up against armies of armed thugs and without it he'd be turned into Swiss Cheese.

And while I'm sympathetic towards the idea of not having to deal with it... I also kind of think that it goes against the principal of the matter? The heart of Batman stories is that Bruce Wayne is a very human superhero. One guy using his money and privilege to change his city for the better. He isn't faster than a speeding bullet, he can't shoot laser beams from his eyes, he hasn't inherited the thunderbolts of Zeus, aliens didn't give him a super advanced light construct ring...

Batman is just a guy.

A guy that writers keep trying to turn into Tony freaking Stark.

The Tony Starkification of Batman has always been a sore point for me, Batman's superpower isn't money or super advanced tech. It's his deductive reasoning, it's his ability to get into the mind of criminals, it's and it's his humanity. 

Batman is Halloween Sherlock Holmes. We don't need a second Iron Man.

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