I'm sorry, but it's been a rough week and besides, I couldn't find anything to write about. I had to apply for disability, found and subsequently lost a freelance job captioning videos, and my wife got sick.
If you're a regular reader of this blog (there might be at least one between the 3-8 views on each of my four articles) I apologize for the lack of content this week. Hopefully, I'll have something good by next Thursday.
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
Thursday, September 19, 2019
A Legendary Site
Once upon a time, the internet wasn't the endless public playground that we begrudgingly let consume our life enjoy today. As a clueless kid in the early 2000s, using the Internet was like being adrift in the ocean, or maybe lost in an unfamiliar city. I found websites either by word-of-mouth, seeing somebody else using a site at the library, or searching things I liked in Google and just scrolling for hours.
Being shuffled from state to state in my early youth, it was hard to find friends. There was no continuity; every year or two we would pack up and move, and I would never see the majority of those people I knew ever again. Combine my lack of deep ties and my own unwillingness to meet my mom halfway on things, I ended up spending a lot of time indoors. My free time was usually split 50/50 between reading physical books and spending time on the Internet or otherwise using the computer.
As I mentioned, there were few agreed-upon "hubs" for the Internet in the 2000s. There was MySpace, but I was too young for that. Instead, the Internet as I understood it was segregated into many, many small groups centered on specific interests. A lot of the ones that I visited were fan-made websites for video games. One such website was The Sacred Realm, in my opinion the greatest fan site of all time, and nothing you could say will ever convince me otherwise.
It's clear to anybody who looks that The Sacred Realm is a labor of love. Unlike today, when the largest websites are made of and given value by user-submitted content, websites of the past were largely authored and administrated by one person, or a handful of people at most. Rather than copy-pasted from official sources or built from a template, much of the content on The Sacred Realm was handwritten by the site's owner-operator, Lysia.
Here's a brief section she wrote about the infamous CD-i Legend of Zelda titles:
This website fueled my addiction to the Legend of Zelda series like nothing else. I knew about the Zelda games for the Phillips CD-i before they were YouTube memes, before YouTube was even around. I devoured fanfiction and wrote dozens of my own stories, usually no longer than a page and written with equal parts poor grammar and wish fulfillment. (Why would Link and Zelda be listening to Franz Ferdinand and dating characters from AdventureQuest? I didn't even know back then, much less now.)
My friends, such as they were, were typically wealthier and had a seemingly constant stream of new purchases (games) to talk about. They were less than impressed with my dedication to The Legend of Zelda. While other kids were catching the newest Pokemon and drawing that pointy S design on anything that held still, I told anybody who would listen about how I'd finally found an Ocarina of Time ROM and was stuck on the first dungeon. In other words, I didn't have a lot of friends.
Sadly, all good things had to end. One day, I went to visit The Sacred Realm and it was just... gone. All the fan fiction, all those loving hand-written descriptions, the files for download... all gone.
It's said that The Sacred Realm "merged" with Zelda Universe, but really I don't see it. Zelda Universe is a fine site, don't get me wrong, but it has a much different focus and feeling. It doesn't have articles and bios for every character in the series, or hints and tricks for the games written from the webmaster's own experience. The content it does have is great, but it can never replace what The Sacred Realm meant to me.
Just like The Sacred Realm, there really is no resolution to this blog article. One day it was there, and the next day it was simply ended. Almost all of it was saved by WebArchive, but it's not the same; it's a museum piece now, a vision of how the Internet once was. Those warm golds and browns, those unfinished stories, those articles and book scans... They're a vision of how I once was, when I was little and the biggest concern in my life was downloading the trailer for Twilight Princess, a game that I wouldn't have a chance to play for almost a decade after it released.
Nowadays, it's hard to imagine the fate that befell The Sacred Realm happening to a website that anybody majorly cares about. Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and so on are all owned by gigantic corporations. They wouldn't vanish on you one day like mist in the wind; they might change hands, update their looks now and then, but it seems like they're in for the long haul.
Lysia, if you're somehow reading this: I want to thank you for a big part of my early childhood.
Being shuffled from state to state in my early youth, it was hard to find friends. There was no continuity; every year or two we would pack up and move, and I would never see the majority of those people I knew ever again. Combine my lack of deep ties and my own unwillingness to meet my mom halfway on things, I ended up spending a lot of time indoors. My free time was usually split 50/50 between reading physical books and spending time on the Internet or otherwise using the computer.
As I mentioned, there were few agreed-upon "hubs" for the Internet in the 2000s. There was MySpace, but I was too young for that. Instead, the Internet as I understood it was segregated into many, many small groups centered on specific interests. A lot of the ones that I visited were fan-made websites for video games. One such website was The Sacred Realm, in my opinion the greatest fan site of all time, and nothing you could say will ever convince me otherwise.
 |
| The site as it looked in 2009, saved by WebArchive. At this time, it was still called "Legends and Adventure." For simplicity, it will be called The Sacred Realm henceforth. |
It's clear to anybody who looks that The Sacred Realm is a labor of love. Unlike today, when the largest websites are made of and given value by user-submitted content, websites of the past were largely authored and administrated by one person, or a handful of people at most. Rather than copy-pasted from official sources or built from a template, much of the content on The Sacred Realm was handwritten by the site's owner-operator, Lysia.
Here's a brief section she wrote about the infamous CD-i Legend of Zelda titles:
Nintendo would rather forget that these three games ever existed. I haven't actually played them myself, but I have seen videos of the gameplay, and screenshots, and they really are very ordinary, especially compared to the Nintendo Zelda games. If you think that the Link from the Zelda cartoon series was annoying, he's nothing compared to the Link in these games."They really are very ordinary." When talking about the CD-i, that's a phrase that could only be written before the invention of YouTube Poop.
 | |
| The main page for Link's Awakening. All of this was written by Lysia, rather than copied from the manual or another website. |
This website fueled my addiction to the Legend of Zelda series like nothing else. I knew about the Zelda games for the Phillips CD-i before they were YouTube memes, before YouTube was even around. I devoured fanfiction and wrote dozens of my own stories, usually no longer than a page and written with equal parts poor grammar and wish fulfillment. (Why would Link and Zelda be listening to Franz Ferdinand and dating characters from AdventureQuest? I didn't even know back then, much less now.)
My friends, such as they were, were typically wealthier and had a seemingly constant stream of new purchases (games) to talk about. They were less than impressed with my dedication to The Legend of Zelda. While other kids were catching the newest Pokemon and drawing that pointy S design on anything that held still, I told anybody who would listen about how I'd finally found an Ocarina of Time ROM and was stuck on the first dungeon. In other words, I didn't have a lot of friends.
Sadly, all good things had to end. One day, I went to visit The Sacred Realm and it was just... gone. All the fan fiction, all those loving hand-written descriptions, the files for download... all gone.
It's said that The Sacred Realm "merged" with Zelda Universe, but really I don't see it. Zelda Universe is a fine site, don't get me wrong, but it has a much different focus and feeling. It doesn't have articles and bios for every character in the series, or hints and tricks for the games written from the webmaster's own experience. The content it does have is great, but it can never replace what The Sacred Realm meant to me.
 |
| Another fansite I frequented around the same time as The Sacred Realm. It's still up but apparently abandoned. Note that php error, and that "Save GoldenEye" button leads to a defunct petition website. The FAQ was last updated in 2006. |
Just like The Sacred Realm, there really is no resolution to this blog article. One day it was there, and the next day it was simply ended. Almost all of it was saved by WebArchive, but it's not the same; it's a museum piece now, a vision of how the Internet once was. Those warm golds and browns, those unfinished stories, those articles and book scans... They're a vision of how I once was, when I was little and the biggest concern in my life was downloading the trailer for Twilight Princess, a game that I wouldn't have a chance to play for almost a decade after it released.
Nowadays, it's hard to imagine the fate that befell The Sacred Realm happening to a website that anybody majorly cares about. Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and so on are all owned by gigantic corporations. They wouldn't vanish on you one day like mist in the wind; they might change hands, update their looks now and then, but it seems like they're in for the long haul.
Lysia, if you're somehow reading this: I want to thank you for a big part of my early childhood.
Thursday, September 12, 2019
Star Trek: The TV Show For Today
Star Trek is perhaps the first TV franchise that tried to demonstrate social issues via a metaphorical framework. (I'm not a huge 60's TV buff, so you'll have to forgive me if I'm wrong.) Moral issues surrounding pacifism ("The Arena") proxy warfare ("A Private Little War") and even environmental concerns ("The Devil In The Dark") may not have been the order of the day on Star Trek, but they were undeniably present throughout the series. Show creator Gene Roddenberry said:
While Roddenberry was concerned with network censors, Star Trek's basic premise is actually a perfect fit for the traditions of classic sci-fi. Star Trek first aired in 1966; Orwell's anti-totalitarian 1984 was published in 1949. Frank Herbert's Dune, with its then-radical ecological perspective and spice as an allegory for oil, came out in 1965. The classic silent film Metropolis, for all its clumsy naiveté, still attempted a relatable, socially-conscious story in 1927.
None of this is to diminish Star Trek's accomplishments; rather, it places the show in an important context. All the same, it's interesting to look at what had, at the time, been cutting-edge social and political commentary.
For all the goofy, campy adventures that Kirk and Spock embarked on, there were equally as many that could be considered morality plays. "The Doomsday Machine" revolved around a giant robotic space ship that destroyed planets; the crew speculates that this is all that remains of an ancient civilization, having deployed their equivalent of the atomic bomb. "A Private Little War," mentioned above, shows the destruction of a peoples' way of life by the introduction of new, modern weapons--perpetrated by both the Federation and the Klingons, standing in for America and Russia in a metaphor for the Vietnam War.
Of course, Trek's commentary isn't always on the mark. The second season episode "The Omega Glory" features perhaps the worst plot twist in all of Star Trek, revealing that the warring "Yangs" and "Kohms" featured in the episode are actually yankees and communists, having emerged on their own on an alien planet--complete with their own Pledge of Allegiance, American flag and Constitution. Wrap your head around that one.
As Star Trek evolved with spinoff series and films, so too did the questions it tried to answer. The Next Generation featured episodes concerning assisted suicide in "Ethics," veteran health and PTSD in "The Hunted," and even the pain caused by a broken home, seen through Worf's interactions with his estranged son Alexander. In at least one case, the series predicted a social issue that wasn't on anybody's radar yet--video game compulsion. The episode "Hollow Pursuits" sees recurring character Reginald Barclay withdrawing from work and social life, instead preferring to live out power fantasies in the holodeck.
As the questions evolved, so too did the answers--and not always for the better. In my opinion, "The High Ground" takes an almost comedically centrist stance on the issues posed by terrorism. In the climax, Beverly Crusher protests "You didn't have to kill him!"--referring to a man who had repeatedly threatened to kill Picard and was about to do so before being killed himself. The conclusion of "The Hunted" sees the crew simply beam up and warp away at the end, leaving the Angosians to deal with their traumatized veterans--no suggestions as to how. In the episode, it's presented as a matter of simply unplugging a computer chip; this makes the whole story entirely less applicable to real life, and is just one example of the saccharine, idealistic view that broadly characterized The Next Generation, especially in earlier seasons.
Things would change with Deep Space Nine, the third live-action Star Trek series. Continuing the Cardassian subplot introduced in later seasons of The Next Generation, the series dives into complicated topics like racial nationalism, war crimes, religious sectarian violence, an unofficial "deep state" within the Federation, and even genocide. Rather than ideal scenarios contained to one episode, Deep Space Nine revisits these themes time and again via the overarching story of the Dominion War, and neither side comes out clean.
Rather than using science fiction to soften, obscure and bowdlerise the issues being discussed, Deep Space Nine treats the Star Trek universe as a backdrop on which to paint a picture of the real world. "In The Pale Moonlight" sees Sisko commiting a number of increasingly desperate and immoral acts to bring a new ally into the war. In "It's Only A Paper Moon," Nog escapes to the holodeck to cope with a traumatic injury sustained in a previous episode. Although not entirely realistic, it stands head and shoulders above "The Hunted" in portraying psychological trauma.
These episodes are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Deep Space Nine. Kira openly despises "collaborators," Bajorans that aided the Cardassians in the occupation--yet eventually learns that her own mother was a collaborator, too. Gul Dukat, the primary antagonist of the series, has a warped fixation on Bajor; he despises Bajorans as "soft," yet constantly seeks their approval after his brutal occupation of their planet. An outlaw group called the Maquis is made up of Federation colonists stranded on the wrong side of the border by a peace treaty gone awry. While there are still heroes and villains, every character and organization in Deep Space Nine has skeletons in the closet.
Since then, Star Trek's dealings with real-world topics have largely been hit-or-miss. Voyager, the follow-up to Deep Space Nine, tends to focus on more orthodox, totally fictional plots. Although it has some decent qualities, it relied overmuch on time travel as a catch-all solution in many episodes and suffered from a highly variable quality of writing. Enterprise returned to the adventure-of-the-week format of The Original Series, but concluded after only four seasons. I haven't seen Discovery, but plot summaries I've read seem to tell a story about generally seeking peace without drawing any specific parallels.
With Star Trek: Picard having recently wrapped up filming, an animated comedy by Rick and Morty writer Mark McMahan in the works and a host of other rumors to keep fans speculating, only time will tell if the franchise will return to classical sci-fi, using the future as a lens for the present, or continue with action and adventure-focused plots that rattle no cages and may seem safer to Paramount and CBS executives. Whatever happens, everybody will have their favorite series; there's a Star Trek for everybody.
"[By creating] a new world with new rules, I could make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, politics, and intercontinental missiles. Indeed, we did make them on Star Trek: we were sending messages and fortunately they all got by the network."
 | |
| Mining destroys the Horta's natural habitat, forcing it to retaliate. Image owned by CBS. |
While Roddenberry was concerned with network censors, Star Trek's basic premise is actually a perfect fit for the traditions of classic sci-fi. Star Trek first aired in 1966; Orwell's anti-totalitarian 1984 was published in 1949. Frank Herbert's Dune, with its then-radical ecological perspective and spice as an allegory for oil, came out in 1965. The classic silent film Metropolis, for all its clumsy naiveté, still attempted a relatable, socially-conscious story in 1927.
None of this is to diminish Star Trek's accomplishments; rather, it places the show in an important context. All the same, it's interesting to look at what had, at the time, been cutting-edge social and political commentary.
For all the goofy, campy adventures that Kirk and Spock embarked on, there were equally as many that could be considered morality plays. "The Doomsday Machine" revolved around a giant robotic space ship that destroyed planets; the crew speculates that this is all that remains of an ancient civilization, having deployed their equivalent of the atomic bomb. "A Private Little War," mentioned above, shows the destruction of a peoples' way of life by the introduction of new, modern weapons--perpetrated by both the Federation and the Klingons, standing in for America and Russia in a metaphor for the Vietnam War.
 |
| Kirk and Spock discuss the irony of a nuclear explosion saving the day in "The Doomsday Machine." |
Of course, Trek's commentary isn't always on the mark. The second season episode "The Omega Glory" features perhaps the worst plot twist in all of Star Trek, revealing that the warring "Yangs" and "Kohms" featured in the episode are actually yankees and communists, having emerged on their own on an alien planet--complete with their own Pledge of Allegiance, American flag and Constitution. Wrap your head around that one.
As Star Trek evolved with spinoff series and films, so too did the questions it tried to answer. The Next Generation featured episodes concerning assisted suicide in "Ethics," veteran health and PTSD in "The Hunted," and even the pain caused by a broken home, seen through Worf's interactions with his estranged son Alexander. In at least one case, the series predicted a social issue that wasn't on anybody's radar yet--video game compulsion. The episode "Hollow Pursuits" sees recurring character Reginald Barclay withdrawing from work and social life, instead preferring to live out power fantasies in the holodeck.
As the questions evolved, so too did the answers--and not always for the better. In my opinion, "The High Ground" takes an almost comedically centrist stance on the issues posed by terrorism. In the climax, Beverly Crusher protests "You didn't have to kill him!"--referring to a man who had repeatedly threatened to kill Picard and was about to do so before being killed himself. The conclusion of "The Hunted" sees the crew simply beam up and warp away at the end, leaving the Angosians to deal with their traumatized veterans--no suggestions as to how. In the episode, it's presented as a matter of simply unplugging a computer chip; this makes the whole story entirely less applicable to real life, and is just one example of the saccharine, idealistic view that broadly characterized The Next Generation, especially in earlier seasons.
 |
| Worf and his son have a complicated relationship, which continues into Deep Space Nine. |
Things would change with Deep Space Nine, the third live-action Star Trek series. Continuing the Cardassian subplot introduced in later seasons of The Next Generation, the series dives into complicated topics like racial nationalism, war crimes, religious sectarian violence, an unofficial "deep state" within the Federation, and even genocide. Rather than ideal scenarios contained to one episode, Deep Space Nine revisits these themes time and again via the overarching story of the Dominion War, and neither side comes out clean.
Rather than using science fiction to soften, obscure and bowdlerise the issues being discussed, Deep Space Nine treats the Star Trek universe as a backdrop on which to paint a picture of the real world. "In The Pale Moonlight" sees Sisko commiting a number of increasingly desperate and immoral acts to bring a new ally into the war. In "It's Only A Paper Moon," Nog escapes to the holodeck to cope with a traumatic injury sustained in a previous episode. Although not entirely realistic, it stands head and shoulders above "The Hunted" in portraying psychological trauma.
These episodes are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Deep Space Nine. Kira openly despises "collaborators," Bajorans that aided the Cardassians in the occupation--yet eventually learns that her own mother was a collaborator, too. Gul Dukat, the primary antagonist of the series, has a warped fixation on Bajor; he despises Bajorans as "soft," yet constantly seeks their approval after his brutal occupation of their planet. An outlaw group called the Maquis is made up of Federation colonists stranded on the wrong side of the border by a peace treaty gone awry. While there are still heroes and villains, every character and organization in Deep Space Nine has skeletons in the closet.
 |
| The leader of the Dominion suffers from a disease Starfleet engineered to wipe out her race. |
Since then, Star Trek's dealings with real-world topics have largely been hit-or-miss. Voyager, the follow-up to Deep Space Nine, tends to focus on more orthodox, totally fictional plots. Although it has some decent qualities, it relied overmuch on time travel as a catch-all solution in many episodes and suffered from a highly variable quality of writing. Enterprise returned to the adventure-of-the-week format of The Original Series, but concluded after only four seasons. I haven't seen Discovery, but plot summaries I've read seem to tell a story about generally seeking peace without drawing any specific parallels.
With Star Trek: Picard having recently wrapped up filming, an animated comedy by Rick and Morty writer Mark McMahan in the works and a host of other rumors to keep fans speculating, only time will tell if the franchise will return to classical sci-fi, using the future as a lens for the present, or continue with action and adventure-focused plots that rattle no cages and may seem safer to Paramount and CBS executives. Whatever happens, everybody will have their favorite series; there's a Star Trek for everybody.
Thursday, September 5, 2019
Springerfield
When I came home from the hospital after my stem cell therapy, I had to stay at a large hotel-like guest house with my mother. There were a number of reasons, but the long and the short of it is we could not avoid eachother for several, several weeks. It was an amazing house in a beautiful part of town, but being trapped in ~300 square feet with somebody that already somewhat drives you bonkers will fray anybody's nerves.
A lot of this had to do with cable TV. I'm a person who can entertain myself for hours with one thing, whether it's a book, knitting, videos, etc. Mom, on the other hand, gets bored very easily. It's just the kind of person she is. Since neither of us were interested in getting lost in the big city trying to find some fun, this meant Mom watched a lot of YouTube and especially television.
Mom doesn't really tend to like casual, funny or uplifting TV. I had to ask her to stop watching Forensic Files, because hearing every detail of horrific murders and violent sex crimes for hours on end started to bother me around day 10. (Mom also refuses to wear headphones.) After that, she started watching the next thing down on the grand tier list of all TV shows: Jerry Springer.
I'm not a bleeding-heart, but something strikes me as intrinsically wrong about the Jerry Springer show, and all other shows in that genre such as Dr. Phil, Maury Povich, Steve Wilkos and so on. A stern older man in nice clothes talking down to young people doesn't strike me as good TV. It gives people of my mother's generation and earlier a thing to point to and say "See? Kids these days are ruining this country with their drugs and hip-hop and pre-marital sex, back in the 50's/60's/70's we would never __________."
Recently, I was browsing Reddit. I deactivated my account long ago when I got sick of the same old memes and "discussions," but occasionally I like to kill time by checking out some old haunts. I check the front page, some technology subreddits, some related to video games, and... r/trashy. The subreddit's own stickied post, written by a moderator, says: "/r/trashy is a celebration of trash: people, things, media, etc. that boldly and shamelessly violates social conventions and cultural norms. Satisfy our voyeuristic drives by sharing trashy images, videos, stories, and fashion. All forms of trash are eagerly welcomed."
Reading the posts on this subreddit, I was forced off my high horse and faced with a conundrum. Why do I love seeing pictures and videos of people drinking while pregnant, urinating in public, fighting in Wal-Mart, defacing art and generally being disgusting, offensive human beings... and yet goofy, light-hearted Jerry Springer is what sets me off? Some fully-clothed "strippers" having a staged slap fight is Sesame Street in comparison.
There isn't any closure on Reddit, unless a commenter chimes in with a news article. You look, say to yourself "that's horrible," maybe leave a comment, then you move on to the next one. Nobody announces "You ARE the father," there's no jeering crowd or jilted ex running backstage to cry. No staff roll, just the knowledge that somewhere in the world, somebody changed a diaper on a store display or wrote political graffiti on a goddamn crab.
So why do I do it, and why is it "better" in my mind than trash TV? I'm not entertained, or at least I'd like to think not. But if I don't find some enjoyment in it, then why do I go down the rabbit hole every other week? I asked my older brother for his opinion and he offered that, while different, Jerry Springer and r/trashy fill the same needs for different people.
It makes sense to me. I'm not a fan of theatrics or unnecessary showmanship. In the time it takes to watch an episode of Springer, I can watch my fill of street fights and ugly breakups on Reddit with time to spare. Comparing Dr. Phil to something I might look at is like comparing Operation! to an anatomy textbook. I want the gritty details and I want them now, not scrubbed clean, neatly packaged and handed to me by CBS. It's not realpolitik.
That still leaves the question of why I look in the first place, even if it disgusts me, upsets me or makes me angry.
I tend to view myself as humble, but the truth is I think of myself as "better" than almost all of the people who end up on the front page of r/trashy. You can talk all day about the intersection of drug use, poverty and poor education in practically any area in the United States. I certainly did in a number of college classes; there's an example of my privilege right there. I'm not a bad person, nor am I ignorant; I know some people weren't "raised right," given the same sort of societal training that I was. I know hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people have it infinitely worse than I could ever imagine, right here in my own country.
But to a certain degree, I think there's some schadenfreude in all of us. A paper by the American Pychological Association titled "Self-Esteem, Self-Affirmation and Schadenfreude" found that "the misfortunes of others can evoke schadenfreude because they provide people with an opportunity to protect or enhance their self-views." In other words, watching somebody be publicly shamed or ridiculed (say, via a post on the Internet) for something that that damages my ego gives me gratification. Put even simpler, r/trashy reinforces that my behavior and morals are correct and good by putting counterexamples up for everyone to laugh at.
So when I laugh at some people brawling at a Chuck E. Cheese, I'm not laughing at the fight itself, or the fact that people think it's okay. I'm not exactly lording it over them that I know not to do such a thing. The shared understanding that such behavior is not okay is just comforting, in a strange way.
Image credits:
Lucky Strike ad: Silberio77 [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]
 |
| The view from my hospital room during the therapy. Mom was here too. |
A lot of this had to do with cable TV. I'm a person who can entertain myself for hours with one thing, whether it's a book, knitting, videos, etc. Mom, on the other hand, gets bored very easily. It's just the kind of person she is. Since neither of us were interested in getting lost in the big city trying to find some fun, this meant Mom watched a lot of YouTube and especially television.
Mom doesn't really tend to like casual, funny or uplifting TV. I had to ask her to stop watching Forensic Files, because hearing every detail of horrific murders and violent sex crimes for hours on end started to bother me around day 10. (Mom also refuses to wear headphones.) After that, she started watching the next thing down on the grand tier list of all TV shows: Jerry Springer.
I'm not a bleeding-heart, but something strikes me as intrinsically wrong about the Jerry Springer show, and all other shows in that genre such as Dr. Phil, Maury Povich, Steve Wilkos and so on. A stern older man in nice clothes talking down to young people doesn't strike me as good TV. It gives people of my mother's generation and earlier a thing to point to and say "See? Kids these days are ruining this country with their drugs and hip-hop and pre-marital sex, back in the 50's/60's/70's we would never __________."
 | |||||
| Harmless old-timey fun. Young people can cherry pick too. |
Recently, I was browsing Reddit. I deactivated my account long ago when I got sick of the same old memes and "discussions," but occasionally I like to kill time by checking out some old haunts. I check the front page, some technology subreddits, some related to video games, and... r/trashy. The subreddit's own stickied post, written by a moderator, says: "/r/trashy is a celebration of trash: people, things, media, etc. that boldly and shamelessly violates social conventions and cultural norms. Satisfy our voyeuristic drives by sharing trashy images, videos, stories, and fashion. All forms of trash are eagerly welcomed."
Reading the posts on this subreddit, I was forced off my high horse and faced with a conundrum. Why do I love seeing pictures and videos of people drinking while pregnant, urinating in public, fighting in Wal-Mart, defacing art and generally being disgusting, offensive human beings... and yet goofy, light-hearted Jerry Springer is what sets me off? Some fully-clothed "strippers" having a staged slap fight is Sesame Street in comparison.
 |
| Sample r/trashy post. Took a minute to find a good example that wasn't NSFW. |
There isn't any closure on Reddit, unless a commenter chimes in with a news article. You look, say to yourself "that's horrible," maybe leave a comment, then you move on to the next one. Nobody announces "You ARE the father," there's no jeering crowd or jilted ex running backstage to cry. No staff roll, just the knowledge that somewhere in the world, somebody changed a diaper on a store display or wrote political graffiti on a goddamn crab.
So why do I do it, and why is it "better" in my mind than trash TV? I'm not entertained, or at least I'd like to think not. But if I don't find some enjoyment in it, then why do I go down the rabbit hole every other week? I asked my older brother for his opinion and he offered that, while different, Jerry Springer and r/trashy fill the same needs for different people.
It makes sense to me. I'm not a fan of theatrics or unnecessary showmanship. In the time it takes to watch an episode of Springer, I can watch my fill of street fights and ugly breakups on Reddit with time to spare. Comparing Dr. Phil to something I might look at is like comparing Operation! to an anatomy textbook. I want the gritty details and I want them now, not scrubbed clean, neatly packaged and handed to me by CBS. It's not realpolitik.
 | |||
| Someone with a smartphone and no shame is better than TV in my opinion. |
That still leaves the question of why I look in the first place, even if it disgusts me, upsets me or makes me angry.
I tend to view myself as humble, but the truth is I think of myself as "better" than almost all of the people who end up on the front page of r/trashy. You can talk all day about the intersection of drug use, poverty and poor education in practically any area in the United States. I certainly did in a number of college classes; there's an example of my privilege right there. I'm not a bad person, nor am I ignorant; I know some people weren't "raised right," given the same sort of societal training that I was. I know hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people have it infinitely worse than I could ever imagine, right here in my own country.
But to a certain degree, I think there's some schadenfreude in all of us. A paper by the American Pychological Association titled "Self-Esteem, Self-Affirmation and Schadenfreude" found that "the misfortunes of others can evoke schadenfreude because they provide people with an opportunity to protect or enhance their self-views." In other words, watching somebody be publicly shamed or ridiculed (say, via a post on the Internet) for something that that damages my ego gives me gratification. Put even simpler, r/trashy reinforces that my behavior and morals are correct and good by putting counterexamples up for everyone to laugh at.
So when I laugh at some people brawling at a Chuck E. Cheese, I'm not laughing at the fight itself, or the fact that people think it's okay. I'm not exactly lording it over them that I know not to do such a thing. The shared understanding that such behavior is not okay is just comforting, in a strange way.
Image credits:
Lucky Strike ad: Silberio77 [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]
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