Tag: tv

On social media and kids’ shows

On By Luther M. SilerIn Television4 Comments

You may find this a useful post, or you may find it to be an excellent reminder of why thinking about, much less stressing out over, social media is an incredible waste of your time.  We’ll see.

Twitter has recently sort of upgraded its Analytics page.  They did it in a sort of annoying way, giving us a lot more granular data on how individual Tweets do, but removing the only feature I actually used Analytics for, which was to track day-by-day follows and unfollows.  They still haven’t put that back, which sorta pisses me off.

(Also: immaturity moment, because I need one: hurr durr he said anal.  That is all.)

Anyway.  I have, at this exact second, 1143 followers on the Twittermachine.  One of the things that the new Analytics page keeps track of is impressions for each Tweet.  An impression means that at some point your Tweet scrolled across the screen of somebody who was looking at Twitter.  It doesn’t mean that they read it, or clicked, or really did anything at all– it literally just means that it is at least theoretically possible that someone saw it.

With 1143 followers, after five or six hours most of my Tweets reliably have in between 60 and 80 impressions, assuming that they haven’t been retweeted by someone. This means that about six percent of my followers are going to see any given Tweet.  (Unknown: whether someone seeing a Tweet multiple times counts more than once.  I’m assuming that it does not.)

That is not very many.  You can increase the number of people who are going to see a Tweet with hashtags, which means that anyone who searches for that hashtag in the, oh, five minutes or so after you send it will see it, maybe.  In general, until yesterday, adding a hashtag or two would generally add thirty or forty impressions to a Tweet, and also seems to slightly elevate the chance that a Tweet will be favorited or retweeted.

This will seem like a change of subject; it’s not.  Bear with me.  I posited the following in the comments of my post about Curious George the other day:

Siler’s Law: as any discussion of children’s programming continues, the chance of someone making a disparaging comment about Caillou very rapidly approaches 1.

This genuinely is a law, guys.  It’s amazing how much people seem to hate Caillou, and you absolutely cannot talk about children’s programming without someone at some point mentioning what a terrible goddamn show it is.  It’s nearly impossible.

And my son has never displayed the slightest interest in watching it, so my wife and I have been spared this particular terror in our childrearing.  So, two nights ago, we decided that after we put him to bed we would deliberately expose ourselves to this terrible thing.  What the hell, I thought, maybe it’ll make for a blog post.

Heh.

Short version, because this isn’t actually the point: early Caillou is, indeed, completely unbearable.   Later seasons eliminate some of the stuff that makes the early episodes bad, but oh man are the early episodes bad.

While we were watching, I posted the following two Tweets:

As of this morning, with– and this is important– not a single retweet– these two posts have 1,707 and 1,714 views, respectively.

Not one retweet.

I posted this last night, when I discovered this phenomenon:

That Tweet currently has 1,039 impressions, with no retweets, and has only been online for about eleven and a half hours– most of which in the dead of night in the continental US.

What this implies is that there are an extraordinary number of people who, for some reason, are searching Twitter for the #caillou hashtag.

So I searched Twitter for the #caillou hashtag.  Something’s going on here, right?

Go ahead; try it yourself.  Long story short: shit still don’t make no sense.

And that’s why no one should waste time worrying about social media.

Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: CURIOUS GEORGE

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Television16 Comments

pds_16993268_curious-georgeThe boy has been diversifying his television viewing habits lately, there’s no doubt about that; we’ve moved away from talking crayons and melodramatic censors and onto a few different programs, several of which probably deserve their own entry here.  But Curious George is absolutely his current favorite.

Now, for the most part, I don’t mind this show at all.  I was a big fan of the Curious George books when I was a kid, although at the time there were only a few of them, and the show itself is not really that bad.  Eminent blues/zydeco musician Dr. John provides the intro music; William H. Macy did the voice-over for the first season; there’s some quality stuff going on here, and if you ignore the core ridiculousness of the show it’s pretty easy to get along with.

But man, that core ridiculousness.  The show never gets into the fact that the Man with the Yellow Hat is a poacher who stole George from the wilderness.  Two of the main characters are scientists and they still insist on calling George a monkey when he is clearly an ape; he’s an orangutan, by the way– lots of people want him to be a chimpanzee; chimps are black and George is brown.  He’s an orang.  Deal.  The fact that most of the characters are cool with an ape being around and the fact that the city the Man lives in has no health department of any kind are also just sort of taken as given.  Also, sooner or later George is gonna hit sexual maturity, rip the Man’s face off, and masturbate with it.  That doesn’t come up often either.  As kids’ TV shows go, I can deal.

And then there’s Bill.  Bill is the one thing keeping this show from Sesame Street territory where I’m just as happy to watch the show all damn day as the boy is.  The Man’s job is unclear; it involves sciences somehow, but sometimes involves just impressing actual scientists with his ridiculous, childish drawings, and twice they’ve tried to send him into space.  At any rate, whatever he does, he has enough money that he has an expensive-looking high-rise condo in the city and a country house as well.  The country house, judging from the accents of everyone around and the amount of snow it gets, is in Minnesota, although they drive there from the city all the time and the city is clearly not in Minnesota and appears to contain Central Park.  But whatever, right?  Kids’ show.

When George goes to the country with the Man, he gets to hang out with Bill.  This is Bill:

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Bill fucking sucks.  I’ll get to why in a second, but let’s start with what’s interesting about Bill and to some extent the show in general:  Bill was white during the first season.  He’s now… that.  The show is really good about diverse casting, really; side characters are almost always people of color, especially in the city, and a number of the main ones, including Bill himself, are as well.

Right, though.  Bill.  Bill’s a bigot.  And he’s a bigot in an especially annoying way; he’s the biggest know-it-all on the show.  There is nothing in the universe that Bill doesn’t know more about than you do, and nothing that he won’t take half an hour to tediously explain, always arrogantly and frequently incorrectly, although the show doesn’t seem to recognize that he’s wrong a lot.

Bill is the only motherfucker on the show who doesn’t know George is a monkey.  Let that sink in for a second.  This know-it-all genius asshole doesn’t realize that that’s a monkey.

Well, okay, ape.  Still.

What does Bill think George is?  A “city kid.”

What’s a “city kid?”  An uneducated moron, apparently.  There is nothing– nothing— about George that Bill won’t immediately attribute to George being a “city kid,” and I think this is something that started out being intended as a cute affectation but after 630 hours of listening to him it’s actually a serious problem with the character.  He’s a huge fucking bigot.

George wants to sail a boat.  City kids don’t know anything about boats!

George participates in a corn maze.  Let me incorrectly talk about “maize” for ten minutes; city kids don’t know anything about vegetables.

George wants to enter his worm in a worm race.  City kids are too stupid for that!

The phrase “city kid” or “silly city kid” is literally probably 10-15% of Bill’s dialogue, which is a lot more than it sounds.  They won’t let him get through a scene without a “city kid” reference.  Now imagine someone substituting literally any other description of humanity in for “city kid”– “woman,” or “black person,” or “Latino,” or fucking anything— and you should see how goddamn awful the character is.

I like Curious George a lot.  But God do I hate Bill.

In which I parent effectively

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting9 Comments

10398420_1176432005526_3036154_nIt’s Friday, which means it’s Daddy Day; the boy didn’t go to day care today and he and I are spending the day together.  Which, so far, has meant flipping through cartoons and various animated things on Netflix while I have discussions with strangers on Twitter.

I am a lousy parent.

Good news is I’ve got all day today plus Saturday and Sunday to get about 2000 words out to hit my target for the week, so it’s not like I’ve got a ton of other stuff to do.  Maybe I go really nuts and not pay too much attention to things with screens today.  🙂

(Yeah, right.)

Oh, also: turns out my 20th high school reunion is this weekend.  I would rather be fed to sharks than go, but I’m really glad that I actually looked at the schedule yesterday, because I was considering taking the boy to the zoo with my parents tomorrow and one of the reunion events is tomorrow at the goddamn zoo.  So that could have gone quite poorly.  God, I hate that I still live in the town I grew up in.

And yes, I’m in that picture up there, but I’m not telling you which one I am.

In which I’m still pissed (the HIMYM post)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Television7 Comments

ending-040114I’ve been threatening this post for forever, so I may as well go ahead and write it, especially since I’ve had time to calm down a little bit and so the word “motherfucker” will probably not appear in this post 200 times, which it certainly would have had I written this the day after the show aired like I originally intended to.

Let’s start, though, by talking about why I was still watching the goddamn thing.  I’m 38 years old, which puts me a year or two older than most of the characters and probably right around Barney’s age.  My wife got me into watching it early in our relationship, when the show was still in is infancy.  Lily and Marshall got married in 2007; Bek and I got married in 2008.  Our son was born in August of 2011; theirs in May of 2012, which means their TV pregnancy happened right after my wife’s real one.  In some significant ways these characters’ lives have paralleled our own.  It tends to create a bit of investment in a show.   There has only been one other program– and that’s in my entire life– that I jumped into as early as I did on this one and stuck with through to the end: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, interestingly also starring Alyson Hannigan.  Walking Dead might eventually count.  That’s gonna be about it.

This sense of loyalty is probably the only reason I managed to stick it out through this season, which I have more or less hated from the beginning.  For those of you who don’t watch the show, the entire final season took place during, oh, maybe the week or so leading up to Barney and Robin’s wedding.  Every damn episode.  I swear there were episodes that took longer to air than the events they described took to happen, which meant that they dragged out a wedding that they started teasing two seasons ago for, literally, months.   The only thing that kept me going was the occasional glimpses that they gave us of Ted and The Mother’s future together; we saw him propose to her before we actually saw them meet, for example.  Cristin Milioti was amazing as The Mother, and the way they doled out “…and that’s how <character> met your mother” moments throughout the season was great.

And then the finale came along and blew it all straight to hell.

Let’s do this with bullet points:

  • They spent the whole season going practically minute by fucking minute up to Barney and Robin’s wedding, and they were setting scenes at that wedding as early as Season 7.  Their fucking marriage lasted twenty fucking minutes of screen time.  Fuck you, show.  (At this point I realize that getting through this without tons of swearing is still going to be impossible.)  And for those of you who are going to go the “But marriages break up! It’s realistic!” route: fuck you.  The show was set in fucking New York City and had like three black characters with speaking roles in nine years, one of whom was another’s father and none of whom managed to show up in more than fifteen out of over two hundred episodes.  Fuck “realistic.”  Three fucking seasons put into this goddamn wedding and it lasted twenty minutes.  Fuck you.
  • They killed the mother off.  Here’s the thing, guys: you could have gotten away with this.  There have been hints since the beginning of the show and there was a moment two or three episodes before the finale where “she’s dead” was basically the only sane conclusion to draw.  But they killed her off as a fucking afterthought.  We don’t see Ted having to mourn her; we don’t see him and his kids come through that.  It’s just “Oh, right, she died, remember?” and there’s not a trace of sadness from any of them about it. Oh, that was six years ago.  Mom?  We hardly even remember that bitch.
  • And the worst thing of all:  We’ve just had the perfectly-realized “Ted meets the mother” moment that we’ve been waiting to see for nine. fucking. years.  And the kids tell Ted that, well obviously this whole story was about you wanting to go back to fucking “Aunt Robin,” and Mom’s been dead for six years anyway (fuck that, mom had been dead for five minutes) and, ah, fuckit, go screw Aunt Robin; we’re good.  Fuck that.  Fuck that so fucking hard I can’t even stand it.  How the fuck did the actors not riot at this bullshit?    They recorded the ending nine years ago?  Who the fuck cares?  It sucks, shoot another one.  I don’t give a fuck if the kids are older now.  Put ’em in the same fucking outfits and use the same “make people look younger” bullshit tricks you’ve been using for nine fucking years.  No one will fucking care.
  • No, really, this “six years” thing is utter bullshit.  They had less than five minutes of screen time between “this character you’ve fallen in love with over the last season and have been waiting for for nine years is dead of, well, something, we didn’t bother coming up with any details” and “It’s aaight, Dad, go fuck this other ho.”    Fucking asshole show.
  • Robin, meanwhile, has apparently had no fucking changes in her life whatsoever since divorcing Barney.  Despite the show repeatedly showing us that she’s a big jet-setting anchor now, she apparently lives in the same goddamned apartment she did at the beginning of the series and once again has– again, despite being out of town all the fucking time, so often that she had to divorce her husband and no longer sees any of her friends– seven or eight dogs.  Any of you fuckers remember the dogs?  Ted’s allergic.  They made a huge plot point early in the series about Robin having to get rid of her dogs for Ted.  But, hell, I guess she’ll just do that shit again because this fucker’s outside her window waving around a fucking blue french horn again.  Robin’s single, obviously; there’s no chance that she developed her own fucking life after leaving the McLaren’s crew behind, none at all.
  • And, worse?  Ted and Robin haven’t been a thing for years, and the show has gone to pains repeatedly to show us that Ted and Robin were not and never are going to be a good couple.  Not to mention spending the last three seasons leading up to her marrying someone else and putting Ted together with the woman who was supposed to be the love of his life.  But nah, fuck all that, we filmed five minutes of footage nine fucking years ago so everything in between now and then has to have the reset button hit on it.  Be happy!  These characters who are terrible for each other are together again!  Until 2015, when “How I Divorced Your Stepmother” starts airing because, oh, yeah, right, Robin and Ted want completely different things from their lives and always have.  And Robin and Ted apparently haven’t fucking seen each other in six years and guess what, motherfuckers, people change.  Unless the writers decide they can’t.

Yeah, I’m still mad.  Fuck this show. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.  Assholes.

 

On perspective

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Teaching5 Comments

I was gonna rant about the HIMYM finale tonight, but one of my DC kids got hit by a car today.  She’s in the hospital.  (A few things broken, currently in the “could have been way worse” stage of “bad.”)

Not especially in the mood any longer.  That doesn’t mean I won’t be tomorrow, but… nah, not today.

So. Fucking. Angry.

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Television14 Comments

2uhc0hlSo here’s the Facebook status I just posted, and I don’t post statuses on Facebook:

Realistically, I have to have hated something more than I hated the How I Met Your Mother finale. But I certainly can’t think of any examples right now. Fuck you, show.

A moment later, someone asked me for details, and I responded that it would take a very long and VERY profane blog post.  Right now all I want to do is repeat the phrase fuck you, show about ten thousand times.

Realistically, again, there has to have been a television show that made me angrier than the HIMYM finale just did.  Can’t think of one of those either.  I’m literally too angry to talk about it.  Which is surprising, because normally when I’m this fucking pissed off about something writing helps.

You may have a motherfucking barn-burner coming tomorrow, is what I’m saying.

Fuck you, show.

Creepy children’s programming review: Color Crew

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Reviews14 Comments

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So this “Color Crew” program is the new shizz around here for some reason.  TV for little kids is always deeply weird on one axis or another; this may be the weirdest program he’s ever wanted to watch, with the possible exception of “WordWorld,” which isn’t allowed into my house any longer.

Color Crew is the story of ten crayons.  The ten crayons are basically identical except for Purple, who is high as hell, and Green, who is… special.  The intro song sets up the basic premise of the program:

See, the whole thing is about competing for the hat, which has magical powers and allows the Color of the Day the power of speech.  The crayon’s only allowed to say its name, though, so it’s not actually that great as a superpower.  The crayons all hop around and compete for the honor of wearing the Hat, which always goes to the fourth crayon in line, a fact that they seem not quite bright enough to have figured out yet.  Then that crayon and the crayon to its left get to go color a picture.

Coloring a picture is very exciting!  The pictures exist in a  weird world without perspective, though, so it’s entirely possible that the piggy bank on the bed is 2/3 the size of the entire bed, or the two cherries on a plate are going to be the same size as the entire piece of cake on the plate next to it:

maxresdefaultNote the relative sizes of, say, the two oranges, the frying pan, and the carton of milk.  Which is, inexplicably, on a plate.  Somewhere underneath them will be some built-in shelves each holding a single carrot.

Anyway, as you can see, the Color of the Day gets to color some of the things in the picture!  This is very happymaking for everyone involved, and the crayons get rather indecently excited about it.  Like, there are crayon boners going on, I swear.  Sooner or later, though, the color of the day will stop shrieking his name over and over again and get a liiiitle bit too excited and color something the wrong color.  Objects in Color Crew world, you see, can only be one color, ever, and the other colors will tolerate no bending of this rule.  The mixture of horror and sadness on the face of the other crayon when something gets mis-colored cannot be expressed properly in language and must be seen to be believed.

And then the sinister purpose of the second crayon becomes apparent.  He’s the enforcer.  He’s there to make sure the rules get followed.  He’s there to summon the Angry Eraser:

The Angry Eraser is a terrifying mixture of a shop teacher from a 1970’s teen movie and Adolf Hitler.  He exists to destroy art and color and is perfectly happy with his role as Pure Evil.  He glares hatefully at the miscreant crayon, destroys their horrible mistake, and then grins like a fucking pedophile maniac and skids back off screen.  At which point the Color Overseer recolors the deviant portion of the page and everyone gets back to work.  Sooner or later all of the crayons zoom in, at which the picture unaccountably becomes colored with markers instead of crayons:

babytv4greenThe whole thing is weird and creepy, so naturally my kid loves it.  How long until he can watch Walking Dead with the wife and I?

 

In which two thumbs up, would watch again

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Television5 Comments

UnknownThe boy has abruptly shifted his educational TV priorities in the last few days, suddenly becoming an ardent devotee of PBS Kids’ Dinosaur Train.  I can’t say I mind; I’ve seen every episode of Sesame Street aired since 2008 fifteen times by now and something new is hella welcome.

If you’re child free, like a sensible person, or your kids are older than toddler age, you might not be familiar with the premise of this show.  It’s a fascinating mix of science and nonsense; the idea is that the orange tyrannosaur in the middle there, whose name is Buddy, because of course it is, was randomly discovered in the pteranodon nest along with the three baby pteranodons behind him, and when they all hatched at the same time Mama pteranodon just sorta shrugged and decided she had four kids.

One of whom is supposed to eat the other three.  Plus her.  And daddy pteranodon.  There is an episode where Buddy discovers he’s a T-Rex, right?  He discovers that he’s supposed to be a carnivore (he eats “carrion,” which is an undifferentiated lump of meat-lookin’ stuff not unlike what Chicken McNuggets are made of, which begs the question of what the hell he’s been eating since hatching) and that he’s eventually going to be very very big.  Left alone is the fact that he eats other dinosaurs.  The episode we just watched featured the kids talking to an ankylosaurus who declared that his heavy armored plates were to keep him safe from other carnivorous dinosaurs “who might want to hurt me,” and the phrase, “…like you” was conspicuously omitted from the end.

Also, there is the titular “dinosaur train,” which is full of all sorts of dinosaurs and travels around to “T-Rex Town” and “Triceratops Town” (probably not their actual names but you get the idea) and apparently travels through time as well– they actually acknowledge that they’re heading to the “Cretaceous Age” or the “Jurassic Age” from time to time– technology that I’d love to have access to.

The thing, though, is that everything else is awesome, and it ain’t like I’m enough of a dick to actually be offended by the show using Buddy as a non-homicidal protagonist; it just entertains me.  They don’t skimp on the complicated names of the dinosaurs (there’s a funny bit at the end of each show where they show four or five kids trying to pronounce the names of things) and they manage to pack a legitimately impressive amount of scientific information into every episode.  Plus there’s a guy who calls himself Dr. Scott who shows up at the end of every episode who is either an actual paleontologist or an actor portraying one who gives two or three minutes of detailed information about the dinosaurs that were portrayed in the episode.

And then there’s “Point of Fact!” guy, who wins the show.  Sometimes “Point of Fact!” guy walks through a drawing of a door on Dr. Scott’s stage and declares that, as a Point of Fact, no, hadrosaurs did not actually arrange concerts where they played their fluted crests, as portrayed in the episode you just watched.  This always terribly disappoints the children listening to Dr. Scott, and then he follows up with a related actual fact and makes them happy again.

And then– and I swear this isn’t a joke– PoF Guy goose-steps his way back off the screen.  It’s ridiculous.  And hilarious.

Dinosaurs, science, goose-stepping Nazi pedants.  Everything I want in a children’s show.