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kimberlysteele) wrote2023-02-22 11:48 am
The Trouble with TV
At nearly fifty years old, my life has been inundated with television since I began this incarnation. My grandmother once told me that she got a TV early on (1950s era) and it attracted a fair-weather friend who came over only to watch soap operas. She was one of the few people I remember who budgeted the amount of time the television was on. My best friend's house was far different: they had cable TV in the early 80s. Cable back then did not have commercials. If regular TV was cocaine, cable was crack. We watched countless R-rated movies without any form of adult supervision. No wonder Generation X is so fond of its foul language and Facebook drama: our childhoods were chock full of both in the form of cable TV. As a teenager, I began to be bored by most TV despite my entire family remaining addicted to it. Despite my overall dissatisfaction and boredom with TV, my brother and I still fought to watch it when we went to our family vacation cottage as children, as if there wasn't an entire world waiting outside for us to break out of our trance and join it.
Approximately fifteen years ago, my salary class aspirations got flushed down the toilet when the company my husband worked for as a high level executive crumbled due to managerial infighting and incompetence. My budget tightened like a noose as I scrambled to cut costs. I played a constant game of Whack the Pop-Up Expense to fend off the forces that sought to consume the contents of my tiny, dwindling bank account. One day the incredible noise of Duck Dynasty, a reality TV show about a group of loud, redneck hunters emanated from the next room. I strongly suggested to my husband that I wanted to get rid of our TV and its accompanying package of channels; he reluctantly agreed we could do without it. We have never gone back, though this is mainly due to my status as the breadwinner of the house. My husband likes TV a great deal more than I do and would most likely pay the hefty fees per month for a package of deluxe channels if he had the money to do it.
The Astral and Etheric Poison Effects of TV
Consider a stereotype about the Boomer generation: the Boomer sits transfixed in front of the television most of his or her waking hours, slowly losing the ability to do anything except sit and watch. The characters on TV become more real to him than his family. There is more than a few grains of truth to the stereotype.
In Hubert Selby Jr.'s novel Requiem for a Dream, an elderly woman named Sarah Goldfarb retreats into television and diet pill addiction as her adult son and his friends retreat into their own parallel heroin addictions. The genius of Requiem for a Dream is its brutal portrayal of Sarah's addiction, which is just as destructive and deadly as a descent into illegal drugs. TV is designed to be addictive and the majority of American Boomers fell for it.
On the astral plane, TV creates a mess of emotional manipulation mixed with addictive dependency. The watcher’s best instincts of charity, love, friendliness, and bravery are turned against him as he becomes an inert captive, watching other people living a facsimile of the karmic lessons he should be out there having in real life. Breaks in the monotony of programming are more potent and obvious brainwashing: commercials. Again, we have an astral mess of being urged to eat “healthfully” yet being bombarded with images of processed convenience food. Is it any surprise the TV-addicted Boomer has a refrigerator that resembles a small morgue with a smell to match? Pre-packaged convenience foods seldom live up to their advertising.
TV manipulates via mixed messages. The lovely, slim actors and actresses indulge in every vice yet remain beautiful and enviable. One moment, there is an ad or a product placement for convenience food. Thirty seconds later, there are two ads for the latest pharmaceutical drug to treat a disease caused by a sedentary lifestyle that involves eating lots of convenience food.
Good Cop, Bad Cop
Despite the proliferation of emotional puppeteering designed to engage do-goodnik instincts among sedentary watchers, TV is a bad influence. The worst kind of behavior is treated with reverence and fascination on TV regardless of the fictional or nonfictional nature of the program. Crime shows about cops who run around chasing murderers and rapists are thinly disguised profiteering off of the excitement created by evildoers. Without evildoers, the chickenhawk planted firmly on the couch would have nobody to look down upon. Without the alcoholic celebrity stumbling from hook up to hook up on the reality show, the wannabe would have no darkness to use in order to compare and contrast her beige, corporation-enslaved life.
In Lionel Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, a teenaged boy named Kevin goes on a massacre and slaughters other kids and teachers in his school. When Kevin returns home, he murders everyone in his family except for his mother, forcing her to live down the shame of having a mass murderer for a son. After Kevin goes to prison, he is interviewed by a media reporter. Kevin remarks:
"All of you people watching out there, you're listening to what I say because I have something you don't: I got plot. Bought and paid for. That's what all you people want, and why you're sucking off me. You want my plot. I know how you feel, too, since hey, I used to feel the same way. TV and video games and movies and computer screens... On April 8th, 1999, I jumped into the screen, I switched to watchee. Ever since, I've known what my life is about. I give good story. It may have been kinda gory, but admit it, you all loved it. You ate it up. Nuts, I ought to be on some government payroll. Without people like me, the whole country would jump off a bridge, 'cause the only thing on TV is some housewife on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? winning $64,000 for remembering the name of the president's dog."
The Feng Shui of the Black Box
The television is etheric poison. Even when off, the TV is an ugly black box. The only way it is ever going to blend into its surroundings is when it is either in a store full of other TVs or if it is hidden by the doors of an armoire as was fashionable in the 90s. When it is on, it perpetuates a colorful and bombastic assault that destroys entire rooms with its etheric miasma. If the average person could see the etheric plane, the television would look like a chemical spill vomiting its rainbow tinted poison in a toxic pool around itself. The only true way of cleaning up the noxious spill of the TV is by getting rid of the device entirely.
Video Games
Games or what used to be called video games are hideous astral plane polluters, replacing the normal functions of human imagination with caricatured worlds of television-like brainwashing. If you want to take a perfectly normal young man and turn him into a miserable, pale, flabby drudge who accomplishes no original works and never realizes his own unique potential, by all means introduce him to video game addiction.
Video games are expensive. The equipment and sheer computing power needed to use them cannot and will not exist in a world where server farms are no longer subsidized and where internet is expensive to the average person. As in the case of the TV addict, we have an inert captive living vicariously through a fake, prefab set of characters. Life lessons aren’t lived and learned; they are procrastinated and set aside for a “later” that will hopefully never arrive. Once again, the television dominates the living space like a black hole, and instead of providing cooked food, heat, and warmth like the fireplaces of old, it is a cold electronic eye that watches and sucks the vitality of humans even while it is asleep.
One of the reasons I chose not to have children in this incarnation was the influence of TV and games. I was addicted to PacMan by the age of 10 and by TV and movies at the age of 18. I was addicted despite knowing better and feeling in my gut that it was wrong to fritter away the hours in front of the barking, bleeping screen. If I could not resist the pull of the electronic hypnotist, how on Earth would I keep my child from becoming an addict? My hat is off to any parent nowadays who is able to sanely budget their child’s TV and game time. I don’t think I could have pulled it off and that is why I decided not to do it.
The Rise of Influencers
The influence of TV has been supplanted by the rise of influencers, but this is not to say that influencer culture is any better than TV addiction. Influencing as a career offers far more than TV because unlike the world of Hollywood, there are no gatekeepers. Though the Kardashian/Jenners and their ilk may be plagued with rumors about how they maintain their top dog status, top influencers do not need to be part of the alleged Satanic, supposedly fecalphiliac/infanticidal elite. All that is needed to get in to influencing is a mobile phone with a decent camera. Lovely young girls can stay far away from the neo-Harvey Weinsteins of the world and still make all the money. Like Kevin of We Need to Talk About Kevin, the influencer is not the watcher, she is the watchee.
The influencer is perfectly happy to leave the habits of her Boomer grandparents behind in order to embrace a new and equally fake set of images. Unlike the Boomer's worship of prettied-up celebrities, her altar is the digital mirror. Her own prettied-up, photo-edited, "improved" face and body becomes the standard by which all must be measured. The cadre of ghosts that haunt the aging Hollywood celeb become much more personal, and therein lies the rub. Influencing takes a great deal of energy across the planes: like gaming, it only exists because of subsidized internet grids. Like a TV watching habit, it is a time suck extraordinaire to create the content and to whip the avatar into apparent good shape. Last but not least, there is the pouring of one's entire spirit into the avatar and the investment in its fake karma and destiny. But that's a topic for future conversation.
TV Isn't All Bad!
I am a visual learner and I owe much of my current knowledge directly to the television. Being a visual learner means that it often takes me three times as long to learn via written instruction as it does from watching a few boring, jerky images on a screen. I have learned countless skills from television: I remember Sesame Street helping me count, Schoolhouse Rock helping me understand the functions of government, heaven knows how many origami and cooking videos, and last night's tech guy video teaching me how to use Open Broadcasting Software (OBS). As I mentioned, I don't have TV, but I do have a computer screen that functions in much the same way.
I use TV to learn but I also use it to relax. I am no stranger to movies and various series. I often watch them while I exercise on my stationary bike. Right now, I am watching a sweet series from Japan called The Maikanai: Cooking for the Maiko House on Netflix. The show is a subtle education on what the daily lives of maiko (apprentice geisha) are like and since it is in Japanese, it is a good intro/review of Japanese language. It's also a straight up entertaining show. I am grateful for TV and much like any other pastime that can turn into a vice, I believe it is fine in moderation.
Humans are weird and we can turn anything into an addiction. The moral of the story here, I think, is to recognize the good and the bad of the omnipresent screen and to do what little we can to amplify -- and be thankful for -- the good.
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(Anonymous) 2023-02-23 12:13 am (UTC)(link)Interesting you mention We need to talk about Kevin as well - I've actually seen the film but not read the book, funnily enough, they left out that fun little speech of his you quote - I wonder why...? As I read it, I was also put in mind of the song Vicarious, by Tool: https://genius.com/Tool-vicarious-lyrics
I'm not a visual learner myself, and part of that is because I read remarkably fast. TV, and particularly youtube videos are so sloooow. Even when I did used to watch TV, it was always in the background, whilst doing something else like (ironically) playing video games, or when I was a child, building Lego. I know I've mentioned banishing several times before, but since I started that, I can't even watch 5 minutes of TV. I just cannot stay focused on it, I just keep thinking of more interesting/useful things I could be doing.
As for video games though - yeah, those were a hard addiction to kick when I deliberately tried to stop playing them back in 2018. I used to be what might be termed a 'completionist' - I had to 100% finish games, even if I didn't like them (might have just been a "getting my money's worth" thing). I try to play them now though, and it's like the spark has gone from them, I literally just cannot enjoy them any more - even the 'epic' ones like Skyrim, which I used to love. Astral issues aside, it's probably for the best anyway though, as all more modern video games have become either pay-to-win nightmares (see: any mobile games, anything made by EA), multiplayer hellscapes or indie shovelware that only about 5 people will ever play, but which win 8 baftas for having a gay trans female lead character, with a thinly-disguised parable storyline about refugees.
How and why are E-'sports' now a thing as well? (I maintain that if you can hold a pint whilst doing it, and/or hold a conversation, it's not a sport. And yes, I'm looking at you, too, pool and darts)
I actually even have a VR headset (bought in 2019, prior to banishing). It's semi-fun... for a bit... until your neck hurts... or the battery runs out... and provided you can quietly ignore the niggling feeling that it's reprogramming your brain... and persist with it long enough to break your motion sickness reflex... But the overwhelming feeling I got from it was malaise. You finish some 'play' time on it and feel depressed. It's really weird, must be something on the etheric level whereby it slightly sucks the life out of you (and I played it with Wifi off - gods only know what effects a microwave emitter an inch from your brain will have long term). I did used to use it for a pretty good boxing simulator game (which, despite being made by one guy in his spare time and which sells for about $10, is better than 90% of the other games on it) for a while, until old Marky Z decided to make everyone log in with his stupid site every time you switch it on. Yeah, no thanks.
Something to consider as well - all big-budget TV, movies, games and influencer vids are made by multiple people, to cater to certain demographics. In the same way that putting every child in the same class at school does not magically make the dumb kids smarter, that demographic will inevitably be set to the lowest common denominator (even if we are to disregard any malevolent intentions of dumbing down the populace). In addition, being made by multiple people, editors, etc the shows will be "designed by committee", which is a sure-fire way to get a compromise of a product which thrills no-one, but also offends no-one, regardless of its nominal shock factor.
(There is a parallel here with the bit in Faust, where he summons a demon, who explains that he is still in Hell, and never left - one sinks down to the level of TV)
Like the boxing simulator I mentioned above, videos, games, etc made by one or two dedicated people as a labour of love, tend to be much better, even if by their nature, they will not be to everyone's taste. A bit like books! Or songs. Or a painting. (And so on)
I listened to an interesting podcast the other day which said the average 'cut' on a TV show is only 4 seconds. So the scene completely changes every 4 seconds! And people's attention spans have reduced by 150% since the start of a study into it in 2011.
Mr. Crow
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I also had not heard of that Tool song. Totally on point.
You grew up in the UK, right? Did they ever make you watch videos in school? I swear they did that to us all the time, and some of them were hilarious because they were ancient and propagandistic stuff from the 1960s and 70s. (this was during the 80s)
Interestingly, I found out years after the fact that my arrangement of a traditional Irish song had gained some popularity in a Skyrim mod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBvLHrHfFtk
I cannot play games because they make me motion sick. VR? LOL nope. What is shovelware?
"the shows will be "designed by committee", which is a sure-fire way to get a compromise of a product which thrills no-one, but also offends no-one, regardless of its nominal shock factor." This is exactly what happened to pop music, and is likely exactly why so much of it sucks.
Not surprised about the shortened attention spans. I thought I had concentration problems back in the day -- my brain was always trying to fly somewhere new. It's so much worse in kids these days!
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(Anonymous) 2023-02-23 05:21 pm (UTC)(link)Yeah, I used to like the Vicarious song a lot back when I was a disaffected teenager. I don't know if you listened to it as well, but the riffs are pretty good and the drumming on the whole album is amazing (albeit a bit weird and experimental) - I read into it and the drummer was trying out a load of African circular drumming techniques.
Yeah, we had video time at school here too. It tended to just be at lunchtimes when it was raining too much though, and the teqchers didn't want to get wet. Usually it was just some decade-old movie on a steadily dying cassette tape. There were a couple of indoctrination-style ones called "Earthwatch" and things though. The real propaganda videos were a bit before my time - look up "British public safety videos 1970s" if you like - those were the kind my parents grew up watching at school! If you can find it on youtube, there was a spoof series from the early 2000s called "Look around you", which is very funny.
Huh, that's cool about the mod - I'll check it out! Mods were the best bit about Skyrim, but Bethesda (the publisher) decided people were having too much unauthorised, and crucially, free, fun and so blocked them from working in an update. Le sigh.
I've always been lucky that I don't get much motion sickness, but when I first tried the VR headset, it gave me the cold sweats, a headache and 3 hours of nausea. I only persisted because I really like puzzle games, and there was one called "The Room", which was actually an amazing experience in VR (I also love the real-life "escape room" games, and it's a lot like that) There was also a fun Viking-themed drumming game. I can only imagine how bad VR would be for anyone who gets motion sickness on regular screen-based video games. It really messes up your dreams as well - a zombie game gave me zombie dreams for weeks afterwards. Much like violent music and violent movies, violent video games obviously make people violent and crazy as well, as I knew full well as a disaffected teenager watching horror movies whilst playing first person shooters and listening to death metal. But under no circumstances would I have told my parents that, and instead pointed them towards the many spurious studies, presumably funded by video game companies, showing "no link to violent behaviour". (I should point out I never acted on these thoughts, but it probably messed me up psychologically for quite a while) All that being said, there are some genuinely good games which have profoundly affected me - as I was trying to wean myself off them, I got into what are known as "walking simulators" - low-stress, semi-puzzle games with nice visuals and interesting themes. There was one called "Everybody's gone to the rapture", which had beautiful graphics, a really cool premise/storyline and a haunting operatic soundtrack which fitted it perfectly (the game was written and partially sung by an opera singer).
Shovelware is an amusing term for low-quality software produced in bulk - it was coined by video game magazines in the late 90s I think (who, ironically, added to the problem with free games and demo discs on the magazines!) and refers to software effectively sold by weight rather than by the unit - the idea being that there is such a quantity of them that they must be moved with the aid of a shovel, like bulk aggregate. As someone who has really vivid mental images, the term conjures up the scene of a miniature wizened old train stoker tossing shovelfuls of CDs into the ears of some video gamer like coal, and it still makes me chuckle. The term came back into use for the games that often come as part of bundles on games platforms these days - you buy a bundle cheaply which has maybe 2 good games and about 15 more which never get played, as they're terrible. It's the only way a lot of the indie games companies are still in business, as much like books, films, music, etc, it's almost impossible to get enough publicity as a small company due to the sheer number of games out there, so you get a few high-budget lowest common denominator big players (who strictly pander to The Latest Thing and corporate agendas - apparently the Call of Duty series gets funding from various alphabet agencies as well) and the smaller companies who have to focus on quantity over quality and pick over the scraps. Sturgeon's law in action.
But yeah, it's no wonder kids have anxiety and ADHD these days... Wonder what the rates are like among the Amish?
Mr. Crow
no subject
Vicarious is a beautiful piece of artwork! Thanks for introducing it to me. There are some of my students who are into darker music who might want to sing it.
That's so sad that Bethseda cut off the opportunity to make mods. From what I saw of the Skyrim mod I was unwittingly part of, people loved the mod more than the original game. Maybe that's why the company got so insecure about it.
LOL no link to violent behavior. I never would have known about any of that stuff about torture or murder without TV and movies. Like you, I had the three extra brain cells NOT to act on it, but it's not like I grew up in a war zone where violence was normal.
Thanks for that definition of shovelware... that's funny. I tend to like those bargain bin games because some are the rare sort I can play without getting sick. Gardenscapes is one puzzle game that is basically a bunch of offensive and lame stereotypes of British people. But there are also no first or third person walking scenes, no spinning around to shoot anything, and no jumping or flying.
One really sad phenomenon I have been witnessing of late is early and persistent addiction to electronic games among children. There are the usual adult men (and not entirely young ones, either) who have zero social life except for gaming. All of their friends are online, namely the random people they meet in multiplayer games. More disturbing is the inroads being made among young girls. When I was 12, I was wholly miserable but at least I had enough reserve brainpower to read, to walk in the woods and research herbs, to learn how to bake from my mom, to draw and paint, and to hike and swim. The socially inept 12 year old girl of today becomes engulfed in the world of Roblox, and that virtual world is all she thinks about 24/7. It is all she looks forward to and all she cares about. It gets worse though, because there are game apps for three year olds. I have seen toddlers cry and throw tantrums when told they must wait to play a game on the mobile phone. Coronatarianism already turned Generation Z into soon-to-be hikiko mori. Gaming culture ensures the next several generations after them will turn into dependent adult parasites.
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(Anonymous) 2023-02-25 12:47 am (UTC)(link)I really liked your song from the Skyrim mod by the way - I ended up reading more about the mod, and the creators must have put a *lot* of time into it. It's fully voiced and scripted, with new environments, characters, items, cutscenes and everything, and fits into the lore of the game. Nothing like the janky 'approved' mods which are the only ones allowed on it now - like new hats for your horse for £5 and that kind of trash.
This was the song I particularly liked from Everybody's gone to the rapture by the way:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2_vT4cxX9RE
(It makes more sense in-context, but as a spoiler: it's set in a sleepy English village, where some astronomers make contact with an intelligent pattern of light. The light tries to communicate back, but disintegrates everyone in doing so, making them part of the pattern. You go around finding out what happened to everyone over the course of a day, which fades to sunset and night - this is the music of the end credits)
And haha, don't worry, the Brirish are basically a lame and offensive parody of themselves most of the time!
If you do fancy a good, weird, slightly creepy and occult-themed set of puzzle games (no spinning or flying required!), check out the Rusty Lake series (and you'll also find out where my pseudonym came from!)
Yeah, amongst my colleagues I've noticed that too. One colleague used to get Lego models delivered to work for his son, then I noticed he'd stopped doing so for a few months - apparently his son had got into Fortnite, and that was now all he was interested in. 3 years later... he was still just into Fortnite. And Roblox seems to be really popular with people's daughters as well - apparently their friends go on there, so they go on there, and so on... The worst thing about video games is that you rarely improve anything about yourself. I can semi-justify the boxing sim, Viking drumming and puzzle games I've mentioned above, as it's at least a simulation of a real-life skill or requires some brain power (without having to get punched in the face, buy a drum kit or spend £20 a go at an escape room), but what do you learn in Minecraft, Roblox or Fortnite? How to yell at other teenagers?
Mr. Crow
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I remember those. Some of them were truly frightening, like the one about the danger of drowning in unknown deep waters and another about the perils to be found on farms, where a group of children playing gradually shrinks because they're being killed by things like drinking chemicals they found in a barn or being run over by a tractor. Most of those films would need trigger warnings if they were shown today, though a few were funny like the one about decimalisation, 'Granny Gets The Point' or something. Showing my age a bit there, ha.
At school, video hadn't been invented yet but we were occasionally shown 'Programmes for Schools' on the school's one small portable tv, but that only happened two or three times a year. They were solidly educational and not too awful, though I admit I cannot recall what a single one of them was actually about, just vague impressions that it might have been geography or chemistry. I was probably looking out the window rather than the screen, which would be typical.
Thinking about it, I pretty much stopped watching tv in the 1980s when I was studying and the student house I lived in didn't have a tv and no one was bothered about it. I find them ugly and intrusive in rooms and the little I've seen of what's shown on them is garbage. The delivery is unbearable, with so much waffle and emoting from the presenters. Please, just give me a decently written article instead. And, y'know, I liked the old-style delivery of the 70s and early 80s, it was factual and to the point like this one (https://youtu.be/3q-qfNlEP4A) from 1978 about the quick-clay landslide in Rissa. Everything is so wonderfully dated, almost quaint by today's standards, but it is informative and no one is trying to be passionate about anything or feigning excitement. From time to time, someone will loudly insist that I watch whatever they're currently enjoying and I last tried this in 2010, watching on IPlayer, but only lasted six minutes. I can still hear the presenter's voice - the programme was 'Spring Watch' and they were looking at black bear cubs in Minnesota or somewhere. There was a typical black bear scene of mother bear lounging on the forest floor while her two cubs play in a nearby tree. Then the narrator's voice comes in and she oh so very earnestly and breathily intones 'Two cubs, in a tree, shivering'. At that point I thought 'Nope, can't do it!' and have never looked back. I realised that I just don't want this stuff in my head and prefer my own thoughts and real images of what's about me. I enjoy my imagination and the pictures it draws in my mind as I read, so resent being intruded upon by fakery on a screen.
As for video games, I've never played one and am happy to keep it that way.
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It was waning when I started studying magic seriously in 2020.
I do watch videos of people playing Doom, one of the classic games from the 1990's. I find I can't watch videos of games from the 2020's. I think that is starting to move backwards in time as well.