Behold! New icon-age. When I renewed my paid account (the same day it lapsed) I sprang for more icons. Now I have so much room to expand its terrifying.
While I was standing in the shower this morning waiting for full consciousness to come upon me, I found myself thinking about the RIAA. I know, its easy enough to forget about the RIAA (except when
some quirky news story comes up) but the fact remains that they're still out there, merrily suing people people and trying to cram the digital djinni back into the bottle. And it occurred to me, in true Sam Kinison fashion, that it was a lot like in the book of Genesis.
You see the RIAA acknowledges that illegal digital music is out there, all over the place, just waiting to be downloaded -- ripe, as it were, for the picking. And although the RIAA is certainly annoyed at the hapless users doing the downloading, they have discovered they have very little legal recourse against them. The people they can pursue and punish, for the most part, are those people who upload to P2P networks rather than downloading from them; they're after those people who push content rather than those who receive it.
And that's like looking at Adam & Eve in the garden of Eden, their chins still wet with the Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and blaming God for making the tree. (No, its not blaming the Serpent. Leave the Serpent out of this. In this metaphor the Serpent is just your goofy friend extolling the virtues of free illegal music downloads.) Which is not an argument without merit in my opinion. But I was briefly amused that the RIAA, in their struggle for the moral highground, could from an allegorical point of view be seen as making war on God.
Was that random enough for you? No? Good. Because its time for my second edition of Because Its Wednesday.
Now, last week I said that there was really no commentary I could make on the sublime Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon columns that would add to them in any way. And that's still true, really. But do yourself a favor, if you haven't aleady. Go
here, and read, and when you've finished that go
here. Sample the hillarity.
This week the darling Ms. White brings us
a pretty snarky meta-analysis of Full House sparked by Orson Scott Card's review of Serenity. Before I say anything else, allow me to acknowledge that I think her snark is dead-on, and pretty funny, too.
Now, for me, Full House falls into a very particular category of shows. All of ABC's TGIF lineup, at least during my early adolescence, were actually in the same boat. These shows occupied a sort of nebulous space in between Scooby Doo and the shows I would actually watch and enjoy as a young adult. I use Scooby Doo in the general sense here. Scooby Doo is representative of a certain type of show you watch endlessly when you're a child, and find completely enjoyable and fulfilling. And then one day you sit up and realize that every single episode is exactly the same, and this is actually boring drivel. And then you change the channel, and you can never go home again.
Full House is representative in much the same way. When the revelation hit, it was a bit more subtle, a bit more shaded, but it shared some essential characteristics. Every episode of Full House was not, in point of fact, exactly the same. Things changed, albeit at a glacial pace. Children grew older, adults changed jobs, new characters (other than Scrappy Doo -- don't get me fucking started on Scrappy) could even be introduced. And while the show had a certain essential same-ness, it was that meaningful 5% less formulaic than shows in the Scooby Doo category.
And the revelation, when it hit, was that the show was still crappy. Its amazing to me how much utterly mindless pabulum I used to watch (and OK, let's not kid ourselves, still watch -- but its different pabulum now, and I know what it is when I watch it). The end result with the Full House category of shows was exactly the same as it had been with the Scooby Doo category. Seemingly overnight they went from cherished to completely unwatchable. There was even the same period of hanging on, clinging desperately and trying to recapture the magic only to discover that innocence lost is lost for good.
I don't especially lament the ability to really enjoy an episode of Full House these days. In order to do so again I'd probably need some form of lobotomy, or at least severe head trauma. But its interesting, because as far as I know the next major category of shows in which I got that invested can be epitomized by the WB flagships Dawson's Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And y'know what? I'm still in that place, mentally and emotionally. But thinking about it gets me worried that one day I'm just going to wake up and not enjoy them anymore, either.