I think I really like My Little Pony:Friendship is Magic. It has a surprising amount of amusement quality and adorability, without being a girl-show. Lauren Faust, who worked on Powerpuff Girls and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends is behind this show, explaining a TON about the quality of the content.

But all this means now I have to confess to not only totally loving Lady Gaga and Fashion Police, but My Little Pony. I know the American male is supposed to have a very fragile concept of his own gender and sexuality, especially if you ask women. But damn it, this show is great. Yes, it’s My Little Pony. But it also had a motherfucking MANTICORE show up.

This show needs watched more often. By everyone. It’s so good it had to be banned from 4chan and SomethingAwful’s discussion, lest it take over again. That’s all the endorsement I needed!

I’m talking to you, MSNBC. It’s not a “special New Years Eve marathon of Lockup” when New Years Eve is on a Friday. The same day you always run Lockup for hours upon hours. Just like you have for some inexplicable reason this whole damn week, rather than rebroadcasting anything like you normally would. What airtight contract exactly did the production company get that makes you run the entire series at least twice a month? And if there isn’t one, what the fuck are you airing this for still, along with the rest of the terrible weekend programming?

In the “this is not news” category, local Fox affiliate is doing a recap of their favorite videos of the year. Oh, and it’s with awful clown car music. Nope. Nothing annoying here. No need for the original sound or context of the video at all, let’s just play some awful circus music and run the videos at double speed instead. And they did for several minutes. I don’t know who just put together the video recap footage that aired at 9:45 pm tonight, but I hope they didn’t get paid for it.

Running all the footage at 2x+ speed is annoying enough, playing awful clown car music just turned it from a bad waste of airtime into the desire to shove pencils in my ears to provide some relief.

Instead, I turned the channel and wrote a complaint letter; I’m not sure I’ll ever turn back to the local Fox news, for fear of someone deciding to go for a sequel.

If you have a monopoly, what’s the best way to make more money? Why, to try to compete with another monopoly’s product by changing your own, of course!

That’s how TV executives think. CBS, for example, owns Monday Night. Great for them, stick with it, keep the ratings, right? Oh. No? Take your best show and move it to the spot with the most competition on Thursday night, and add one of the anticipated shows to that same timeframe, ensuring both get lower ratings and less revenue than they would have where they started? That makes perfect sense!

Idiots.

People cannot watch two things at once. Granted, they can generally record two things, but when you move to say, Thursday, you’re going up against three things as is. Two shows are NOT getting watched. At most, you’re going to have an equal amount of viewers to what you had on the previous night, more likely you have less. Less viewers, less ad revenue. What’s the point of this gamble, again? You won’t come out ahead, you’ll likely come out as a loss. It might feel nice to take away viewers from the competition, but they’re doing the exact same to you, and now you’re potentially giving up the night you own, at least that slow. Lost viewers there, less profits for you.

A lot more piracy, though. If you can’t just record the show you want, afterall, and it’s not on DVD, why not just download it? Do consider that one, networks executives.

Not according to the jingle. Those folks forgot the last “s.” Really. They sing “one eight-hundred em ay tee tee arr-eee esssss” repeatedly.

You’d think a jingle writer would get it right. I mean, the company name is right in front of him isn’t it? On his desk, with the proposal and what the company wants.

“1-800-Mattress wants their phone number included three times, and the company name twice”, for example. But nope. He was clueless, and the end result is a commercial with the misspelled jingle and a note below the phone number.

“Drop the last S for savings.”

I can’t make this shit up.

It turns out the hardest part of not having a television (due to the sound outputs failing) isn’t not watching TV. Nor is it inconsistent access to one’s console video games, though that too perturbs when the Ace Combat bug bites.

Rather, it’s the silence. Even when I’m playing games on PC I tend to have the TV tuned into MSNBC during the non-Lockup hours, or Cartoon Network/Comedy Central late at night, when a man gets his Futurama/Daily Show/Venture fix. I absolutely Ozymandias when I’m working, and while I can set something playing via Hulu or Netflix instant queue, it’s just not the same. For one, the speakers are a shared resource. For two, I don’t have speakers. Well, I do now, rather had to get them as falling asleep whilst wearing headphones in bed just doesn’t end well. But that means two active sound devices, splitting audio sources, etc. Pain in the ass.

I also keep thinking “It’s too quiet. I’ll turn on the TV”, or I glance over and notice the darkness in the entertainment center, indicating a lack of powered televisions. Then I notice I can see into the entertainment center, indicating there IS no TV, after I reach for the damned remote which isn’t there anymore.

I’m annoyed by a lack of constant news input, but looking for streaming options. I’m more annoyed by the overall silence, which my brain actively protests by constantly reminding me “It’s too quiet. It’s too quiet. It’s too quiet” as I try to work.

I need to lighten the picture unfortunately, of all the pics I took, the clearest was the darkest for some reason, and you can’t see the grey/awesome Jeffersonish sideburn curve even. But for that I have to spend 4 hours reinstalling CS4.

Until then, this is good enough!

I totally need to Photoshop in a blood eye, too.

I never thought I’d really learn anything from MSNBC’s weekend programming that would be of use. You know how it is, right? Lots of sensationalist fluff pieces about various kidnappings and murders combined with 12 straight hours of Lockdown a day. Okay, aside from some prison terminology and culture, and the “holy shit, prisons in the rest of the world treat you like a human being because they’re not for profit” realization of the international episodes, you don’t pick much up.

Turns out, though, that sometimes things you didn’t expect to need in your life are useful. Today, I had to take a birdbath.

A birdbath, in prison, is where you don’t want to use the communal showers, so you use your sink, usually with some tubing if you’ve got it to direct water onto you. If not, a cup, some rags, whatever you’ve got does the job. I had some washrags and some towels, which I set on the floor beside my shower.

Why, you ask? Because somewhere in the last day, a clog went vesuvian. I can tell by the lint and hair that stuck on the bodywash scrubber thing, which is about a meter off the surface of the tub, and these were on the upper half. The rest of the tub was laden with stubble that had made it down a sink drain, and hair that had made it down…well, I guess any drain. So, “YUCK” is the keyword here, and as much as I wanted to clean it, I had class in an hour. No time to properly clean a tub that bad. Not to mention the potential a clog still lurked, waiting to come up any of three possible exits in the house, or to simply not let the shower drain properly, thus submerging my feet in nastywater.

Oops.

So today, I took a birdbath. Getting the soap and water on is pretty easy, frankly. Getting the soap off, that’s the part that takes time. You don’t really feel particularly cleaned, but hey, next time I’ll get a stool and go full Japanese bathhouse on it. Today I made due, and I did pretty well.

Tomorrow, though, I’m going to scrub like I’ve never scrubbed before. After drain snaking the shower, of course, to remove what clog may be left. Ick.

Me? A big ol’ nerd slacker? Work at Hollywood Video? Oh yeah. That was the majority of the clerks at that chain, in fact. Slacker nerds who’d watch Justice League and The Lion King on the TV.

Because the company screwed us all over by withholding raises, constantly cutting hours, etc., two main things happened. One, people stole a lot of stuff. Mostly concessions, the irony being that if they paid us the extra dollar an hour they were supposed to, we’d have just bought the drinks. But they didn’t, and they never refilled the water cooler, so we just took them.

Second, we screwed off all the time. We made shit, messed with shit, and watched a lot of DVDs instead of cleaning.

One night, my friend Haru and I were bored and because the district manager was coming around a lot lately, we were limited on our viewing options. The official rule was nothing over PG, and nothing that’s not animated. We’d already seen enough Pokemon and had been watching Lilo and Stitch anyway, but we felt like a change.

“Hahaha, dude, look! Garfield and Friends! We should totally ironically watch this”, I declared. “Oh wow, yeah!” says Haru.

See, here’s the thing. As a kid, I really liked Garfield. Maybe it’s because I had the older collections, the ones with Lyman and Jon’s sad, sad life, and where Garfield was an exceptionally fat fuck who didn’t even stand on two legs. But I knew in retrospect, it was pretty bad. At least the show was. Hit or miss with the comics, I’ll say, to be nice and because hey, sometimes they were funny. Not so much these days.

And we made a sport of bad movies and TV there, because sometimes that’s all we had to watch.

Haru and I both ended up physically ill that night, so much so we almost had to close the store early. It started around 10-15 minutes in, just after one segment of Garfield and Friends followed by one US Acres. We turned it off, I got a pizza from the Little Caesar’s in the shopping center, and we were okay. Nobody else who came in that night got sick, before or after, even other employees who hung around a while, as we were all wont to do because it was a fun place when you’re not working.

Just the two of us, watchers of Garfield.

The lesson we learned is that TV really can be bad for you, but it’s the quality, not the quantity.

They’re presenting it as the adaptation of life, and people learning to live within the twilight bands and probably underground like we’re Twi’leks or something, but guys, it’s been done before, and in a WAY more awesome way by Mr. Ryan North via T-Rex.

Click it for the full comic! It doesn’t fit in my meager central column, T-Rex cannot be constrained by these proportions!

PS, Dinosaur Comics are awesome in general.