Category Archives: Television

Netflix drops Quikster but Duane really doesn’t care

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I received an email today from the CEO of Netflix. How nice. Not long ago, I received another email from him, indicating that he was raising the price of Netflix by a LOT. And then he sent me another email explaining that he was going to be splitting up Netflix into Netflix and Quikster, basically forcing me to have to use two different services to get the same service I get in one place previously. And then he went on the news and started talking to Netflix customers like a mother talking to a five year old kid who doesn’t understand why mommy and daddy are splitting up, and then decides to explain it by saying that daddy is leaving mommy because you were bad.

Anyway, so this latest email was explaining to me that he decided NOT to split up Netflix into two companies, but sorry about the price increase. That’s sticking because Netflix needs to make a profit, and I’ve been getting too good of a deal from Netflix. Well, he was right. But when he sent me those rude emails a few months back, I did what came naturally. I cut off Netflix for good and decided while it used to be a good deal, I kind of wanted to do business with companies that don’t make me feel like a five year old kid. Yeah, I threw a temper tantrum, like a five year old kid. And I left Netflix. Not coming back, so their CEO can send me all sorts of emails about how he’s changed and isn’t going to hit me any more, but our relationship is over.

I moved on. It’s not me. It’s you. Sorry. And please stop hitting mommy. The neighbors are getting tired of banging on the walls.

50’s and 60’s Feminism and Revisionism On Television

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There seems to be an interesting dynamic showing up on television these days. The claim is that it all started with Mad Men, and then led to shows like The Playboy Club and Pan Am. However, I think reviewers are being a bit lazy in their approach, in that this revolution in programming started earlier than that, and we’re only see the second wave of what is most definitely going to be a norm in storytelling.

Some years ago, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) developed a brilliant show that dealt with storytelling by looking at the “earlier” days through the lens of someone from today. The show was called Life on Mars. It dealt with a police detective of today’s time who is thrown back to 1973, a time where Manchester was just beginning to experience its sexual revolution, where women were still police assistants, and cops beat up suspects to get confessions. Shortly after this, an American series, of the same name, arrived and tried to tell the exact same story but in New York of 1973. Almost identical, the American series dealt with the trammels of unrealized feminism and a new era that was about to emerge in America (or the world).

Then came a few other shows, which were rehashes of previous shows from the mid-period of television history, that somehow tried to incorporate this new sense of feminism with modern day thinking, which for some reason has never really worked. I’m talking shows like Charlie’s Angels (movies and then a very recently bad television show), Dukes of Hazard (a movie), Starsky & Hutch (a movie), the various remakes of Star Trek and then the brilliant redesign of Battlestar Galactica (which had its own sense of dealing with feminism in the 1970s).

But Mad Men is obviously the biggest elephant in the room when it comes to discussing reviving history (or rewriting it). The show is sometimes brilliant, and other times it is somewhat annoying. It deals with feminism by showing how badly feminism was actually dealt with, and strangely enough it gives the biggest womanizer Don Draper the venue to somehow be the launching pad for the first woman to be a Manhattan advertising professional. Meanwhile, it sticks us directly in the 1960s and shows us that America had a long way to before it was going to get much better (if it ever did).

Because of the success of Mad Men, it was only a matter of time before the major networks attempted to duplicate it themselves. The first entry into the new era was The Playboy Club, which has essentially been receiving nothing but bad reviews, mainly because it tries way too hard to be both sensational and a platform to reinvent history by making it somehow appear that Playboy was a part of the feminist movement, rather than a direct impediment to it. Playboy ushered in the sexual revolution that would come in the 1970s, but it did very little for women, other than produce a platform for women to be seen as sex objects and a vehicle to produce masturbatory fantasies for young boys for several generations. While history wasn’t being all that helpful for the women’s movement, Playboy didn’t exactly empower anyone either, although people like Hugh Hefner would love nothing more than to leave his mortal coil believing he convinced more than a few peolpe that he was the progenitor of women’s liberation rather than the abuser of it. Coming from a man who spent his entire adult life cultivating young women to be his sexual playthings, I’m sorry but I just don’t see the positive role he wants to inhabit.

Pan Am is the next development in the attempt to detail women moving forward in the 1960s. My first quibble right off the start is with history itself and the television show’s attempt to place itself in it. The story starts off by talking about an event that occurred during the Bay of Pigs, shortly before the events of the first episode. The whole aircraft on the ground scene seemed a bit odd as the events of that day detail something much different occurring than what the authors tried to make happen, that somehow Pan Am pilots were more involved with the evacuation than may have been. But again, it’s fiction, so that shouldn’t be too much of an issue. There’s also another moment where one of the pilots talks about a scientific principle that wasn’t really a part of common vernacular usage in the 1960s (and wouldn’t actually be used until about 2004), but that’s more a complaint about continuity and nitpicking than anything else.

Where I have the biggest problem is with Pan Am’s attempt to reinvent feminism as some very present dynamic during the very early 1960s, when it basically wasn’t. The main character, the purser, seems to be the feminist “rebel” of the group, yet as much as they try to make her out to be that, she most likely would have been unemployed rather than the main player she is going to be written to be. And then there’s this whole espionage thread they have written into the series that seems kind of bizarre, as if the CIA was actively recruiting flight attendants to be their secret agents on flights. Okay, it could have happened, but it just seems a bit bizarre, knowing how the CIA works, or at least how it worked back then.

What concerns me most about this show is it is yet another attempt by Hollywood to rewrite history as being a lot more proactive towards feminism than it really was. As a matter of fact, Hollywood STILL has a long way to go as it would not surprise me if a number of actresses ended up having to sleep with someone to get the jobs they get on some of these shows, because that’s how Hollywood has ALWAYS acted. It would make me wonder how someone might feel pretending to be some enlightened feminist on a television show when she may have had to have done some very unenlightened things to get on the show in the first place. Yeah, there’s no evidence this ACTUALLY happens, but it is so engrained in the morality of Hollywood business that everyone somewhat expects that to happen, so it’s rarely even questioned.

What I would like to see is a show come along, like Life on Mars (the BBC version), that really examines the issues and doesn’t try to make it seem like we were historically more proactive than we really were. We did some crappy things in the past, and if we ignore those things, it only means we learned nothing from the experience, and we’ll probably do crappy things again in the future.

Monopolies, Greed and Treating Your Customers Like Crap

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This morning, I was about to leave my apartment building to head to work when I noticed an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper taped to the exit door for everyone to read. It was a message from the apartment complex managers, indicating that anyone who was currently using the video services of U-Verse by AT&T must discontinue using it immediately because they are in violation of the apartment’s “contract” with some cable service called Suite Solutions. Not being a user of U-verse, I didn’t give it much concern, but then it had me thinking. What if I was a user of U-Verse and decided to get my television programming that way? What if I decided I didn’t like Suite Solutions (which I don’t) and chose to get my television programming through my phone line? What right does some housing complex or some cable operator have to choose how you get your television programming?

For the longest time, I’ve been receiving flyers in the mail from AT&T, promoting U-Verse as the answer to bad cable companies, and I just ignored the stuff because, to be honest, I don’t think television is all that worth subscribing to in the first place. While some people remained glued to their television screens every night they get home, I don’t think I’ve turned mine on to television programming in over 8 or 9 months, so to be honest, I’m not even sure I even have a television signal these days. And honestly, I don’t really care.

But what started to bother me was this anti-business message that was being pushed on potential customers by the people who manage the place where I live. It’s one thing if Suite Solutions was a good company, but let me tell you about my experience with that company. When I first moved into my apartment over two years ago, I chose that company to get my television and Internet service. At one point, I remember counting on a calendar to see whether or not it my service was down more often than it was actually up. I paid for the highest speed service, and when it worked, my download speeds were atrociously slow. I remember beating a download with my cell phone once (which ironically never actually succeeded with Suite Solutions because the Internet crashed during the download and didn’t come back up for another three days).

This was the company that my housing complex thinks that I should be emboldened to because they signed a contract with them somewhere in the past. Now, I don’t mind this being an option, but if they eliminate all of my other options, so that Suite Solutions is my ONLY choice, I think we have a horrible problem that really needs to be solved by the SEC, the FCC or maybe Elmo and the other characters of Sesame Street (they are notorious for advocating for consumer rights in the fantasies I have about Elmo and the gang).

Of course, no story about monopolies should be complete without a little bit of irony. I mean, we are talking about some unknown cable company using its monopoly to cut out the little guy, specifically a little guy named AT&T, who happens to be going through a little bit of monopoly trouble of its own these days. Now that the government has stepped in and told AT&T that it is creating an unfair monopoly by trying to buy T-Mobile, does anyone see the ridiculousness of some small cable provider shutting out AT&T through its contracted monopolies? I’m sure there are some people who are thinking this is a good thing because they just hate AT&T, but when AT&T becomes your alternative source to a crappy choice, something’s seriously wrong with this picture. I mean, I’m not exactly the poster child, greatest fan of all things AT&T. Just last week, AT&T refused to transfer my Internet service (not U-Verse) to my new apartment because of some flag that showed up with an old bill for $189 that HAD BEEN paid over two years ago; unfortunately, because it was so long ago, they couldn’t find a record of the situation, nor could they offer any way of alleviating the problem because the situation occurred too far back in the past to be solved by any simple transaction (like me just giving them $189 to make the problem go away). That’s the kind of problem you get from a monopolistic company that is so big that it can’t handle its own financial problems that emerge from its own lack of correct record keeping (you can always spot this problem when some customer service person tells you: “There’s nothing I can do about it. The problem seems to be coming from another area of the company that doesn’t exist anymore.”).

So, I ask, are monopolies good or bad for consumers? So far, my experience with them has been nothing but negative. You constantly hear economic pundits talking about how monopolies are good and how they drive innovation (or some other big proclaimed statement that has no basis in reality), but how do they really help us? Okay, there is one area, and that’s price, in that a company with a monopoly has the ability to lower the prices by handling all of the means of production and distribution, but how many times has that monopoly also gone the other direction, to where the only source of a product decides to raise its price because it realizes that no one else can fulfill the need? We’re kind of seeing that right now with Netflix, that erroneously thought that it was a solitary producer of content services so that it could pretty much do whatever it wanted to do by raising prices and splitting its company into two so it could eventually raise prices at its own leisure (possibly by raising it twice as much, as both companies can now raise prices as the same time, and thus, increase profits twice as fast). But what really happened was that Netflix realized too late that its customers WERE its product, not just the users of their product, and without customers, they have no income. I expect to see Netflix become the next Myspace in an era of Facebook.

For me, I have no real solution other than to boycott all of the products of companies that are hostile towards customers, which is why I gave up on Suite Solutions shortly after feeling like I was being cheated month after month. Fortunately, I am not a consumer of U-Verse, so I don’t have to worry about this proclamation from the emperor, but at the same time it also keeps me from ever wanting to do business with Suite Solutions again because instead of trying to compete with AT&T by providing a great customer experience and a good product, they decided to go the punitive route instead.

That companies never realize this strategy is a blueprint for failure is a footprint that forever haunts me. There’s a reason that message was tacked on our door like Luther’s 95 Theses. The company is failing to attract and keep customers, so it needed to crack down on anyone who decided to use alternative choices. Unfortunately, that strategy rarely brings in new customers or business. Instead, it leads you closer and closer to becoming obsolete. That this is 2011 and a company still doesn’t understand that is ridiculous. But why innovate when you can demand business? Need I say more?

Netflix is starting to realize you can’t be a people business & piss off your customers

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Netflix is in a bit of a bind, but you wouldn’t know that from paying attention to anything the company is saying. Earlier in the year, they came up with the brilliant idea of raising their prices by cutting their services in half and charging customers for both (where they used to get both for the same price). Customers got angry. Netflix acted like the knowing parent, coddling children who are upset that they weren’t chosen for the football team (or to be cheerleaders). Customers got pissed because they really don’t like being treated like children when they’re actually customers.

I kind of got pissed, too. The patronizing remarks from Netflix’s leadership surprised the crap out of me to the point where I decided that if it benefited me in the long run, I’d jump ship at the first opportunity. I, too, hate being treated like a little kid, even when I might act like one.

To see it from the viewpoint of all of the analysts, the same point keeps being made: If there’s no viable alternative to Netflix, then Netflix can pretty much crap on its customers, and it’s still going to be all right. The more you read of this kind of stuff, the more you start to wonder if the reviewers are in the same world as the rest of the people who happen to be customers of Netflix.

What no one has addressed, and I find this probably the most significant factor, is that Netflix offers a service that is a luxury, not a necessity. As most Americans are seriously aware of economic constraints in a recession era, the idea that streaming video and mailed dvds are an added luxury might just be enough to cause a potential customer to think that perhaps the money might be better spent on other pursuits. After all, no one really needs movies and television shows. They’re nice and fun, but they are entertainment, not food staples or part of one’s housing needs. On the whole Maslow heirarchy needs thing, Netflix comes long after most of the other needs and desires have been met.

And that’s what I’ve started to realize recently. As I watch through the fifth season of Star Trek Voyager, a series I’ve seen a long time ago when it actually aired on television, I realize that I don’t really need to watch it. It’s an interesting way to occupy time, but I have computer games, writing, my health club membership, an untapped drug habit I could start at any moment, and all sorts of other activities that have been available a long time before television ever emerged. I could even watch network television (or whatever is on the free cable I receive). The need for Netflix is pretty low on the overall scheme of necessities.

So, I’ve been thinking that once Voyager’s run is finished (there were 7 seasons), I’m dumping Netflix completely. You see, Netflix has this belief that people will “respond” by switching to either mailed disks or streaming only (what they wanted in the first place), but there are 12 million people who may choose my option: Cancel completely and never come back. I was charged my first increased charge this month, and while I can afford it, I’m still angry at Netflix for the way it treated me as a customer. Because of that, I, like I’m sure many others like me, will dump Netflix and wish them well. They’ve already indicated in all of their press releases that they could care less whether or not I stay with them (because they expect to make bank based on the rest of the people who will be unwilling to jump ship). Well, fine. I just suspect that they haven’t read the tea leaves well enough to understand that when you cut out your bread and butter, you sometimes go without food.

But what do I know? I’m just a stupid sheep guy who Netflix doesn’t take seriously anyway.

It Doesn’t Matter Who Wins Miss Universe–She’s Still Not Going to Date Me

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"First the crown, and now the possibility of a date with Duane? Does the wonderfulness never end?"

The news is in this morning. Miss Angola Leila Lopes is now Miss Universe. For those of you from the United States, which means we have trouble finding the United States on a map of the United States, Angola is located in Africa. That’s right underneath Europe, which is right next to a large body of ocean called the Atlantic, which is named after the record company of the same name.

I’m sure a lot of you are wondering how someone from Angola won the Miss Universe pageant, while a lot more of you are wondering who the hell even cares about the Miss Universe pageant any more. You see, for most liberal women, the idea of a pageant is horrific, a place where Neanderthal men point at women with boob jobs and measure their respect by how well they fill a swimsuit, pretending to care about their answers to important philosophical questions like, “And how would you make world peace happen in our life time?” Most people have stopped finding the Miss Universe pageant to be socially and intellectually relevant, even as the pageant swears the whole institution is a scholarship competition designed to “enrich” women.

Now, I don’t really care about the argument any more than I care whether or not Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Magazine is a good or a bad thing, mainly because the magazine, and its dinosaur of an owner, stopped being relevant sometime back in the 1960s, when other thinkers came along and proved that you could make the same point without requiring a girl to take off her clothes so guys would pay attention to what someone might have to say.

Beauty pageants have stopped being relevant a very long time ago, yet they still maintain a presence in our society because people are still Neanderthal enough to think they’re important. And unfortunately, you can’t just blame horny guys for keeping them active. Whenever some woman thinks to herself that “I’m pretty enough” to be in that magazine, or on that stage, then you automatically set up a paradigm where other women will find themselves having to compete with them, even if they swear they’re not interested. You see, the whole human race is built on the concept of competition, and as the players in this race, or game, we all are active in deciding what contest is the one that maintains relevance. I’d like to think that we’ve evolved far enough that the Miss Universe competition is outdated, but we still maintain an importance on this event so that the woman who wins will still manage to maintain a career of successes based on her placement in this contest. Forever, she will be linked by how she sashayed down the runway in her swimsuit, and the rest of us our responsible for how that continues to play out.

What we really need to decide as a society is what do we consider to be relevant enough to put one person above another when it comes to our social Darwinist ideals. If we consider intelligence the most important, than our supermodels should be the smartest men and women available. But let’s be honest with ourselves. We don’t put smart people higher than anyone else. We put rich people (usually men) on a high pedestal, and even if their ideas are idiotic, like those spewed out there by Donald Trump every time he tries to pretend to be significant, and we put at the top of the spectrum attractive women who throw their sexuality at us on a constant basis. And it’s not just at the top of the pecking order we do this because think of every time you’ve gone to a bar, social club or any place where mating rituals occur. Those were the dynamics that fed the engine that caused most of the hooking up to happen. I see it on social sites all of the time, and so do you.

Which means that when it comes down to it, no matter how smart I might be, no matter how many great ideas I might have to make the world a better place, or even how many great novels I might churn out for the masses. In the end, because I’m not filthy rich or insanely attractive, my place on the pecking order is pretty damn low. Yet, because I am part of this human race, I am required to try to fit into the competition as well, even though I recognize that for the most part the dynamic offers me table scraps and a continuous series of disappointments, as not everyone is born with the attributes that gives them immediate success and gratification.

So, having said that, let’s give our congratulations to Leila Lopes, whose name we will not remember in a few days from now (or a few minutes after I press SEND). With that said, she’s still miles ahead of the rest of us in the grand scheme of things.

Too Much Information About the Sex Lives of Creepy People

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Today, on the front page of CNN.com, I saw stories that wanted to tell me that Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriend reveals that Hugh could only last two seconds, and then a follow-up story where Hugh says women think he’s a great performer in bed. Uh huh. Right under that, there’s an in depth interview with a young 16 year old girl who talks sex with her 51 year old, creepy husband actor who dated her when she was way too young to even know how to spell the word “consent”. Personally, I think she probably still can’t but that’s another story completely.

Why is the news constantly trying to push stories on me that are designed to creep me out? Yeah, I can ignore these things, but I can’t seem to escape them because they come on the news constantly, and they show up everywhere else I look. And then people want to talk about them. At what point do people start to realize that an aging, oversexed man whose claim to fame is smut magazines isn’t a story because he somehow bamboozled yet another 21 year old blond bimbo into thinking he’s the cat’s pajamas, or that he wears cat’s pajamas, or she wears cat-like pajamas because they turn him on, or whatever.

Look, I understand the media in the United States is overly consumed with sex information and somehow thinks that the fact that they don’t have any relevant news to report means that somehow they’re going to have to run with the “sex sells” as a substitute. But some of this stuff is really inappropriate, and I don’t even mean on a prurient level. I just mean that some stuff really should be private and left in that area. When I first discovered that some aging actor married a 16 year old girl, I was somewhat disgusted, but I pushed the story aside, thinking, “well, it really doesn’t have anything to do with me, and people do what people do.” But then the media keeps throwing it back at me, as if I’m supposed to care, or that somehow because I’m human I’m supposed to be involved, or get involved.

Please stop. I don’t care. I don’t want to be an accomplice to this story. I understand that sex sells, but at some point somebody in the media has to be able to tell a colleague, you know maybe we shouldn’t be running this trash as news. If it’s news, great. But if the purpose is to try to shock people who were minding their own business, it’s the news equivalent of terrorism. It’s done to disrupt, shock and cause people to change their normal routines for the sake of some hidden profit. If I was interested in stories about older men with children, I’d seek it out on the Internet like everyone else, at least until Chris Hanson caught me and embarrassed me on national television. If I seek it out, let me be ashamed. If you throw it in my face, don’t be surprised if more and more people who were oblivious don’t start seeking it out themselves because you helped them get used to it.

Some Thoughts on Current Events

Business, Economics, Education, Memoirs, News, Politics, Relationships, Social Networking, Technology, Television

Okay, haven’t done a recap in a bit. And I’ve been kind of busy, so here goes:

1. News of the World. Okay, I don’t know an easier way to say this, but I’m finding the whole situation with Robert Murdoch and his evil empire to be somewhat hilarious. Yes, he’s evil, and his empire is evil. And they’ve been discovered to be doing evil things. Not really all that surprised. He wants to own the world, and when you want to own the world, chances are pretty good that you don’t care who you destroy on the way to doing it. Some people are glad this has happened because they are liberals and hate Murdoch because he’s anti-liberal. I’m not like that. I just find it hilarious. I do want to add, however, that I think Rebecca Brooks, the one who lost her job because of being Darth Vader to Murdoch’s Dark Emperor, is kind of hot. I’m just saying….

2. Charlie Sheen is going to have a new TV show. I don’t care. Didn’t watch his old show. Won’t watch his new one. Next story.

3. Rebecca Black Has a Follow-up Song to “Friday”. Never heard “Friday”. Don’t care that she has a new one. Basically, someone who was ridiculed for a really bad song has managed to create a music career out of the ridiculousness and now wants to be taken seriously. But she wasn’t taken seriously before. Next story.

4. Universal pulled the plug on Dark Tower movies. Ron Howard was going to direct Stephen King’s epic series about Roland the Gunslinger. Was looking forward to it. Now, I’m disappointed. I’ll move on now….

5. Reporters Are Trying to Find out Where Casey Alexander is Hiding Out. Really? Get over it. The story of the century (or the last few months) is over. Move onto something else. Isn’t there an ambulance somewhere that can be chased?

6. Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez crashed some wedding. Supposedly, Bieber’s song was playing so loud while they were driving by that he went in and became a part of the wedding party celebration. First, I was thinking my first act as the groom would have been to deck the guy for showing up at my wedding. The second thought was to immediately not get married because my future wife decided to play Justin Bieber music at my wedding reception. And then I realized that if they were listening to the twirp, who cares? They were probably overjoyed to see him, much as I would be if Shania Twain showed up to my wedding (assuming she didn’t show up to be IN my wedding as the bride). So I really shouldn’t be commenting here.

7. The Debt Ceiling. They’ll either come to an agreement. Or they won’t. I’m going to assume that they’re still going to collect my taxes and that we’ll still be at war with countries I don’t want to be at war with. So I really don’t care. I’m not important enough so that anything I do is of any concern to them, so I”m not really concerned at anything they do either. For them, it’s a tragedy because they’re the ones with the money, and they’re the ones who stand to lose a lot. For me, I stand to go from being kind of poor to being really poor. Not going to make much of a relevant difference. I’ve stopped being significant a long time ago. Come to think of it, I never really was.

8. Apparently US students still suck at geography. This caused me to pull out a map to see if I could figure out where the US was to see how close it was to Michigan, just so I could get an idea of where this place might be. Couldn’t find it, so I assume it was probably some small country somewhere unimportant.

9. Google and Facebook appear to have changed their relationship status to “It’s Complicated”. Ironically, that’s my life status as well.

10. Number 9 was really my last item. I just like having 10 items whenever I can.

Saving Private Netflix…and dealing with cheating whores

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In the movie Saving Private Ryan, there’s a scene where Tom Hanks, playing the special ops captain who has just risked life and lost really good men, tells a young Private Ryan that he’d better do something great with his life, like invent a new brand of toothpaste or something, something to have made the sacrifices of his men worthwhile. And the young private, now grown up, asks his wife if she felt he contributed something important to the world, and she tells him he has. And all I was left thinking was, that captain played by Tom Hanks wanted something a bit more, not just that Private Ryan would make some family happy, and to be honest, I never really felt that Private Ryan lived up to the expectations that Tom Hanks’s dying character really demanded.

I’m kind of left with that same feeling when I received an email from Netflix yesterday informing me that it was going to be raising my rates 60 percent to give me exactly what I have always been receiving. In other words, rather than raise my rates AND give me a little more value, they’re giving me exactly what they always give me, and charging me more for it. Not very impressive.

And that action has caused all sorts of backlash from the community that makes up the customer base of Netflix. You see, they tried to do this a long time ago, and it failed miserably. Some years ago, they tried to raise rates BIG TIME, and most of their customers revolted. I did, too. Instead of quitting Netflix, I decided to switch from three DVDs at a time to 1 DVD at a time. The result was that I ended up paying less than what they were receiving from me before the change. A month or so later, Netflix completely reversed course, lowered their rates back to the original amount, and then people started to come back; I personally went back to my 3 DVDs a month.

Recently, they quietly raised prices on us. Not a huge amount, but enough to be noticeable. I thought about leaving but then just decided it wasn’t a big enough increase to cause me to leave. Kind of like the frog in a warm pot who doesn’t jump out even as the water slowly begins to boil. The slow burn and the slow increase of heat remains comfortable until you cook to death and die.

Well, this change is much different. They’ve decided that they want to be a mainly streaming company now, which is not what they were designed to be in the first place. There’s a whole lot of literature in Economics 101 about how a company shouldn’t change what it does best or to try to do more products than it is known for, but Netflix has always felt that it could buck the trend and win the brass ring no matter what it did. Rather than just increase rates, they’ve decided to charge people for both streaming AND DVDs, where they used to be lumped together in the past. I think they believe that people will respond by dropping one or the other, but I don’t think they realize the real implication, and that’s that they’re about to lose customers forever. I’m not talking about people getting pissed and changing their options until Netflix backs down. I mean people leaving in droves and being so pissed at Netflix that no turnaround will cause them to come back.

That’s where I am right now. I’m in the middle of watching Rescue Me through streaming, and when that show finishes its run (in other words, I get through the last season), I’m ending my Netflix subscription forever. I haven’t really watched any DVDs in a long time, having held onto the same ones for a long time, so that’s not a big deal. And I’ve never been all that much of a fan of their streaming service as most of the choices have been crap, and when I have watched something, half of the time the connection is not good enough to where I’m constantly watching a smooth experience. The continuous buffering thing gets old, and I won’t miss that.

What Netflix doesn’t seem to get is that they are not part of a necessity for most people. Television and movies is a luxury, and to be honest, I really won’t miss it all that much. Yeah, I could go find alternatives to seeing the same programming, but most of it has generally been crap. Every now and then a good show comes on that I’ll watch through its run, but quite often almost everything I watch has been a waste of time. Movies are almost always a waste of time because Hollywood has been making nothing but crap for years now, and for the five movies I’ve enjoyed, I’ve probably watched a hundred I didn’t. The odds just don’t make it worth it.

For the longest time, I’ve stayed with Netflix more out of nostalgia than anything else. It was convenient and comfortable. That’s it. It hasn’t been that useful. Years ago, when there were lots of things in my queue, it was wonderful. But years later, I’ve gone through my queue, and where I used to have blockbusters in it before, I have mostly second rate choices that were put in there and constantly pushed to the bottom of my queue so I could watch stuff that seemed more interesting. With that to look forward to, Netflix doesn’t offer a whole lot of wonderful things for the future.

So I’ll be dumping them like a girlfriend who has been cheating on me for years, and I’ve just been too busy at work to sit down and explain to her that we need to see other people. Well, the rhetorical job just told me to take my vacation, and I’m realizing I now have to spend a week with the cheating girlfriend, and the girl next door has been giving me the eye. Okay, it’s a bad analogy, and unfortunately all it does is remind me that I don’t actually have a girlfriend, and even worse, a social life. But at least I won’t have Netflix either. I’m dumping that cheating whore.

The Killing–a television show that almost gets it right

Television, ,

I watched the first season of The Killing, and for a show that started off so well, I can’t help but wonder what went wrong. It started off as a Twin Peak-ish kind of show where a young girl is murdered (the girl who shows up in so many television shows these days, from Heroes as Claire’s twisted roommate to Californication as the underage girl who seduces David Duchovny and then steals his manuscript, publishing it as her own), and the detectives spend the first season trying to figure out who did it. But as so many others have already pointed out, the biggest problem with this show was that they created two characters for the detectives who have to be the most incompetent investigators in the history of detective work. There were so many times where I sat, thinking, “really? That’s the direction you’re going to take in this investigation?” It was like they hired a bunch of office workers who have never seen the inside of a police department, other than one on TV, and then gave them detective badges, letting them loose on the streets of Seattle. And then because that wasn’t good enough, they had to hire an entire city of incompetent police officers to follow their lead, doing even worse so that the two really bad detectives might actually appear to look good.

What’s sad is that I saw the ending of this first season coming from a mile away. Granted, I didn’t peg it until the final episode, but that’s not really my fault. The writers were making this shit up as they went along, so that there would have been no way to figure out the whodunit because even the writers had no clue.

For most of the story, they focused on an obvious actor as the main suspect. He’s the guy who played the antagonistic leader in the television show the 4400. He’s a great actor, and he pulls off all of the nuances really well. But because the writers generally didn’t know where they were going, his ability to go all across the map acting-wise only made the show that much more frustrating to watch.

The problem with the writing is the inconsistency. An example was the last episode where the former drug addict police officer “figures out” that the mayoral candidate (the 4400 guy) has a thing for brunettes, showing a newspaper article where the picture has all of the man’s previous affairs, and they’re all brunettes. It’s pointed out that he is compensating for the loss of his wife, who also looked just like these women. What no one has pointed out, including the stupid police detectives, is that the mayoral candidate’s main squeeze right now is a beautiful blonde. So his “usual” type is not the usual type he has been having an affair with the entire series. It’s that kind of inconsistency that stems from convenient writing that is badly orchestrated. It’s why the show has suffered so much.

There was one episdode that was so obviously filler right towards the end. The detectives are investigating a possible connection to a casino, and then out of the blue the female detective’s son comes up missing, so they spend the entire episode looking for her son. No further investigation. Just looking for the kid. And bonding. And doing all sorts of dramatic element stuff that should have been conducted much earlier in the series, not in one of the last episodes. And then at the very end of the episode, they throw in a “oh here’s some information about the case in case you forgot there was an actual murder investigation going on”.

The sad thing is I think I’ve figured out who is responsible for the murder. The girlfriend of the mayoral candidate has so easily betrayed him to the point where it feels like she’s probably killed the original girl in jealousy (thinking he was having an affair with her, which he probably was). I wouldn’t be surprised to find out in a strange episode involving a dancing dwarf in a red motel that his current girlfriend used to be a brunette in an earlier period of her life who had an affair with him as the brunette but because she changed her hair, he doesn’t recognize her as the same person, and this is how she is getting her vengeance.

Sadly enough, I don’t think I’m that far off when it comes down to crunch time and the writers don’t have any more of a clue than they did the week before.

When it comes to issues of sex, America does not understand redemption

Education, Movies, Music, News, Politics, Religion, Television, , , , , , , , , ,

I’m not one to latch onto another story and then write about it, although I admit there are a lot of bloggers who do that sort of thing. But this was one issue that I found to be so significant that I felt that it needed further attention, and perhaps even more perspective. An article appeared today in Salon.com that contained a personal narrative from Melissa Petro, a woman who had previously outed herself as a former sex worker and stripper before becoming a school teacher. As a result, she was hit hard by the conservative channels of the press, and then right after that by practically every other channel of the press as well. Even the governor felt it necessary to chime in demanding that she be fired. In all, she was completely railroaded out of the teaching profession, and by reading her personal story, you can also get the sense that she pretty much has a difficult time today of getting a job anywhere.

Now, I’ve written before about how I used to go to school with a lot of women who were sex workers while paying their way through school. At San Francisco State University, in certain disciplines, it was practically a right of passage. I couldn’t tell you how many friends I had who used to ask me to come see them dance as a stripper because at the time they were actually proud of what they were doing. Not all of them were, of course, but at one point in someone’s life, there is a sense that this is a perspective of freedom that not many other occupations can allow.

Unfortunately, that occupation is now competing against the sense that mainstream America has that anything involving sex is bad. And if you happen to work anywhere near children, it’s almost a given that you should be tarred and feathered and run out of town like the wandering gypsy you are. I won’t even get into the dichotomy issue of how most of the clients of these women tend to be the same men whose wives are horrified that these women did what they did; there’s always this sense that these “bad” women come from some place that has no interaction with the rest of society. And once they show up, they have to be run out quickly, or little Johnny might grow up to be a bad person, or might be forced into sex with her, or whatever bizarre hyper-fictious ridiculousness seems to be the fear that emerges in these situations.

The simple fact of the matter is, these women are all products of our society and civilization. They were churned out by the system at one time or another, and if we all want to go into this “they’re all bad for doing what they did” then we should take some sort of responsibility for putting them into those positions in the first place. We can’t have the luxury of just assuming that people are bad by nature, and therefore it was their fault that they chose to do those kinds of jobs that the rest of ridicule and condemn.

But even saying that, there’s an immediate assumption that stripping or sex work is bad. Is it really? What is so wrong about someone who does that sort of activity? What makes that person any less “moral” or less worthy of normal civilization than any woman who has carnal knowledge with a man as part of a relationship? Discounting the whole “it’s only okay in marriage” sort of nonsense that predates 1950, “moral” people don’t really make all that much of a fuss about people who engage in sex in relationships with each other. Granted, they don’t wanted specific details, but they really don’t care. So why is someone who is engaged in this activity on a normal basis considered someone to be less worthy of belonging to our daily civilization?

Over the years, I’ve known a lot of women who existed as sex workers. For a time, I got my start creating web pages for professional dominatrices, mainly because they were the ones who really fed the business back then when the Internet was started. Strangely enough, my main clientele were professional dominants and churches. And quite often, the references I received crossed both demographics (meaning that quite often my professional dominants contacts came to me from the web sites of churches I created or maintained, and the other way around as well). We’d like to think there’s a serious disconnect or separation between both avenues, but there isn’t.

What’s really concerning parents these days is not the sex worker “problem” but the belief that sexual activity is starting with people at a younger age, and they need a criminal to point to in order to feel better about the situation. But the reality of the situation is that by compartmentalizing sex outside of acceptable parameters, we make it so that younger people see it as something to explore out of the attention of parents, and then families pay for the consequences. Most young people are getting their sex information by watching Hollywood and the music industry sexualize every woman who has anything to do with entertainment so that the expectation is that it’s something good and to be pursued. There is absolutely no connection between a stripper and a music starlett, yet conservative media condemns the stripper and hypes the product of industry. Yet, if you really think about it, the stripper caters to a clientele that is strictly adult, whereas the music industry and Hollywood will take anyone with access to an MP3 player or a dvd player.

And with all that said, I’ve kind of wandered off the topic of the original person herself, Melissa Petro. In her own words, she actually felt herself empowered by her experience as a stripper and sex worker (well, more as a stripper than as a sex worker as she didn’t seem to say too many good things about the latter). Unlike most stories of sex workers, we’re told of horrible conditions and how they were forced into the experience. She came to it on her own, and it was a productive environment for her until she found her way out. And then she made something of her life, becoming a teacher who works with children.

We should have been congratulating her, not condemning her. If we accept the erroneous argument that sex work is bad, she got out of it and came back to us to live a more productive life. She should have been the poster child for how to win through horrible circumstances. But she wasn’t treated that way. She was eventually fired, and she has little recourse of ever working again, in any job. Her own narrative explains how she moved in with her boyfriend to survive.

What bothers me most is that no one else seems bothered by this. We’ll go on with our lives and criticize her for having made the mistake of revealing her past to the rest of the world. In other words, her was a teacher giving us a teaching moment, and none of us learned a thing.