On Cable Television

Probably the best cable box replacement for your buck.
Love this little guy.

I'm trying to cut back on watching cable television. I was out of the game for a while, and then I discovered The Hub, which, late at night, is pretty much every badass cartoon show I watched from ages five to fourteen. It's a better way to fall asleep, even compared to dozing off to Food Network, dreaming only of eating bacon and beef.

See, I'm in the process of moving, and one of the easiest ways I can save money is to not pay out the colon for cable T.V. I'm not going to watch, except for a few hours a night and maybe one weekend day. Frankly, that's why I have internet.

Fiscal Planning Blog!

There is no reason to have cable T.V. A family splitting streaming-only Netflix and Hulu+ pays $15/mo. for a ton of movies and 90% of cable television, with backlog. I watched ExoSquad for god's sake. And you can get it on your T.V., your computer, or your phone/tablet. I'm tossing in Amazon Prime, and now I can rent/stream damn near anything for free or cheap, for only $39. (Amazon Student gives you free shipping but not streaming for a year, however it discounts the normally $79 Prime membership after that for up to three more years.)

So, basically, the only thing I can't watch is HBO, which my family never had anyway.

Oh, and of course there's still the wonderful Bangladeshi black market that is the Internet when I'm otherwise out of luck.

Oh, where will I get my local news?? I live outside New York. My local news is FOX 5. If I'm worried about the weather I'll look outside, check to see if I have a sinus headache, and maybe go to the local radio's website. I get my news from the BBC, tech blogs, and Jon Fucking Stewart.

The important part of the blog:

Not including my DVDs an Blu-Ray, I now have about four different ways to watch Firefly.


"You can't stop the signal, Mal."

Patty Mayonnaise: Race Warrior?

Girl, you knocked me to the ground. Bitches always be trippin'.

I've discovered one wonderful thing about becoming a responsible adult:

If you stay up late enough at night, there are plenty of old cartoons on television.

Admittedly, it's also kind of a curse, insofar as Transformers Generation 1 is pretty weak, as is G.I. Joe, Doug, Rugrats, Hey, Arnold! and every other show I can catch at 1 a.m. Up-shot: these shows were really straightforward about being preachy or, more often, a little racist.

Except when it came to race, surprisingly. I guess you could be a little culturally racist back then, just not racially racist. Point in fact: I just watched a few episodes of Archer. They openly say, "You're black…ish?" Granted, that's for adults, but adults who are my age and therefore remember characters like Suzie from Rugrats. Suzie was black. No one ever said anything, because it didn't matter to her character, but she definitely spoke and acted with a particularly … urban '90s flare.

Or, let's continue being forthcoming, Patty Mayonnaise was almost certainly at least a quarter black.

Listen, Doug was Caucasian. His dad was a little Jewish or Mediterranean, and his mom was so pink it's patently obvious she was Irish. Skeeter was clearly supposed to be African-American as far as style was concerned, but is dad was an angry, stout, German type. Beebe Bluff was a WASP, but purple, Roger was classic, middle-America green-trash hick, and the Dinks were also rather violet, and rich, so let's accept that they're similarly in vein with Beebe's heritage.

But Patty was orange. So was her dad. She definitely wasn't Hispanic, but she was by far the darkest character on Doug next to Skeeter, even though she and her father both had blond hair. Taking Skeeter into account, and her resemblance to her father, the most reasonable explanation is that Patty was the offspring of her half-black father and her either also half-black or otherwise light skinned, now-deceased mother.

Is this a big deal? Not in the slightest! But it's weird, in retrospect, to realize it was never addressed. The protagonist's love interest was a minority in their school, who at times faced discrimination, but only ever for being a girl, or talented, or too popular for her own sanity. Never because of her heritage or her paraplegic father. Did all the other Bluffington kids work through those foibles prior to the fourth grade?

Honestly, I'm pretty glad that race was never made an issue in Doug. It was entirely superfluous to the characters, which says a lot about race relations among the children in Bluffington. Maybe that's not how they did things in Bloatsberg.

Still, they made a big deal out of everything else, even the Beat(le)s. Just surprising they never tapped that well.

You know, like Doug obviously did after prom.

80s Cartoons Were Wonderfully Awful

"I FECKIN LOVE RUNNING THROUGH SPACE!
AND KILLING THINGS! AND SMOKING!"

I recently went channel surfing and found something called "The Hub," which at midnight at least showcases Generation 1 Transformers episodes backed up by original G.I. Joe. Basically, it's my childhood mornings and I couldn't be happier.

These characters talk about murdering the hell out of each other, though. Every six seconds, Galvatron is demanding they kill a Prime, or Dr. Mindbender is working with deadly neurotoxins.

And copyrights? Well, they were at least kind of alluded to. Mostly they were just thinly veiled. Example to both of the last points: A James Bong knock-off who looks exactly like Burt Reynolds of 1984 just entered a mobbed-up ritzy club called "Ritzy Club." Then he made references to smoking and hit on a woman by pandering and treating her like a child.

Oh, and no one writing these shows has ever heard of the concept "Show, don't tell." In their defense, animation was really really hard. I mean, you had to pay a Korean studio to draw all those little pictures. Better to just reuse footage of a head nod an have a bunch of words spoken off-camera, then show someone diving from an explosion. So, really no change. Except now it's a Korean computer studio.

Of course I also watched Mighty Max last week and it was exactly the same, so maybe I just love really lame TV regardless of age, so long as they straight-up try to murder characters left and right. That's sure improve the Disney Channel.

On Furries

I asked a furry today what her fox tail was made of.

Don't ask me why I was talking to a furry. That's not the point.

No, you don't need to know. It's no one you know, alright? Not some sordid thing a mutual acquaintance hides from the light of day. I swear we've known at least one person you walked around in high school with a faux tail clipped to their belt loop, so this certainly isn't some great thing you need to focus on, it was just some furry girl and that's not important.

Jesus, yes, a her, alright? I was talking to a person, yes, on the internet, who happens to be a low-grade furry. Come on, this is not that big a deal, let's be mature about this.

No, I was not hitting on furry girls. I don't cruise the AOL Instant Message chatrooms looking for vulnerable 16 year old Arkansans who got really into anime last year. There's an internet. Let's just accept that on it you will meet some really interesting people and some of them will be really gross and some of them will be really boring and sometimes you just meet someone interesting enough for a good story, and let's leave it at that, okay?

Anyway, it turned out her tail was real fox, which I think is pretty fucked up, like killing your own spirit animal, or something.

I mean, think about it, we keep lists of the only human beings to go around wearing human skin. We write books about them. Movies are made and remade to scare us. Students get their doctorates for studying these lunatics. What kind of psychotic furry goes around wearing real dead animals?

Maybe it's revenge-motivated, like the guy who goes vegetarian because a carrot killed his father.

Tangent: go watch "Some Like It Hot." Great movie.

Maybe that one fox did something really really bad to her. Maybe he cheated on her with Minerva Mink. I wouldn't be surprised, that chick was pure sex down at the Warner Bros. lot, back in Burbank. I'm sure the furries were lining up around the corner to get at a piece of that between takes on the Animaniacs set.

Oh, don't look at me like that, I know damn well you only watched Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers for Gadget and her little purple jumpsuit. And don't think I've forgotten about Roxanne and "A Goofy Movie."

You ain't got a leg to stand on here, pal. Just remember that.

Adventure Time!

Happy Sunday! I've been wanting to do this ever since I came across "Adventure Time with Fiona and Cake," and thought I kind of like it better than "Adventure Time with Finn and Jake."

Time Travel Without a DeLorean

I am a complete sucker for time travel/alternate reality plotlines. I'll watch damn-near anything if it's got those elements. It's how I ended up seeing pretty much every episode of a couple Star Trek shows over the years. It's just something about causality. I need to know that every event had its cause somewhere in the story. If it's not there, I'm pissed.

Which is why I end up avoiding a lot of time travel shows/movies. I find out how the time travel works and if it doesn't hold up, I bail. I save myself the mental acrobatics of trying to explain "science is magic."

When I first saw "Donnie Darko," I didn't read, watch, do, or really think of much of anything else for 18 hours. However, eventually I got a handle on it and it made sense. Even if the answer was "God said so," the logic worked.

I go back to other bits and I'm legitimately pissed, sometimes:

Terminator - perfect sense
Primer - perfect sense
Donnie Darko - insanely complex but deceptively simple and perfect
fucking Dragonball Z - almost makes sense
Star Trek - like 80% of the time, including the new movies

Back to the Future … internal logic error.

What? Back to the Future doesn't make sense? How is that even possible? They have Mr. Fusion. They have instant hydrating Pizza Hut. They have flux capacitors. Their time travel is so simple Christopher Lloyd drew it on a chalkboard with three intersecting lines. What has gone wrong here?

Here's my rant of nerd-logic:

There are only three types of functional cinematic time travel: Donnie Darko Time Travel, Terminator Time Travel and Dragonball Z Time Travel.

Everything you do to branch off from the
original timeline circles back to nullify
itself. Life continues as-is.

Donnie Darko Time Travel: Whatever it is you do that changes the timeline was always supposed to happen. Predetermination is the case, and the only times you can violate this is when "God" or something similar says you can. In fact, *SPOILERS* the way I understand the movie, the whole thing is God saying, "Man, I wish I could give this troubled boy some happiness before he dies." Then God gives him the ability to violate predetermination, creating a tangent universe in which he gets to be happy for about 3 weeks until this improper universe caves in on itself and the kid dies happy in bed, killed by the one thing to survive the tangent universe's brief existence and destruction.

Primer explained it much better: You decide to go back in time so you turn on the box (because it can only send you back as far as the box was turned on, since there wasn't working a time machine to exit from before that). You kill 3 hours doing whatever, researching how to change your world, perhaps. Then you get in the box and move backwards in time for 3 hours, exiting the box right after you turned it on. You go out in the world to change history, while your former self is sitting at home figuring out to do just that. After three hours, he goes back in time and becomes you from 3 hours ago and the box shuts off, closing a loop paradox-free.

Terminator Time Travel: You go back in time, you change something, but you don't really know until the thing you supposedly avoided doesn't happen. Terminator seems to indicate that some things have to happen, but that's likely more the "inevitable downfall of humanity do to the species' own hubris" than true predestination. You can totally alter the How and When of these things occurring. That doesn't preclude things in the future from causing events in the past via time-loop, but "No future but what we make," still can hold true at other times. There's one timeline, and you're in it, baby.

Interestingly, Terminator actually follows Donnie Darko logic, while T2-T4 and The Sarah Connor Chronicles follow Terminator logic proper. In T1 the very act of sending a robot back to kill John Connor's mom results in a future soldier being sent back to save Sarah Connor and (no *SPOILER* here unless you're maybe 14) father the future savior of humanity. In T2, they don't so much avert Judgement Day as they push it back. T3 keeps the timeline moving ahead without altering much history, however various support leaders to John's future resistance are killed as young adults, so the future is likely altered somewhat. T4 verifies this, as well as the idea that the future is drastically different from the one Kyle Reese originally came back from.

And Sarah Connor actually did a great job on the concept if they had only cycled back into the main continuity in the last 5 minutes of the last episode from season 2, but instead they borked everything by setting up a third season and getting canceled.

Star Trek follows the same rules. Something from the future can alter the past in such a way that it would never go back to alter the past, but that's okay because it's now in the "present" and untouchable by whatever temporal shitstorm rewrites history. Voyager ended with just such a 'paradox' and J.J. Abrams kicked off a whole rebooted franchise with that logic.

Dragonball Z Time Travel: Amusingly, Dragonball Z followed the same basic idea during one of the late-middle-ish story arcs, but with the twist that multiple timelines exist concurrently and there's not much you can really do about anything in yours. Here, time machines are also technically dimensional transports. Two of the characters' kid ("Trunks") comes back from a post-apocalyptic future to change history and does, however even after he theoretically fixes it, he returns to his timeline to find nothing has changed. This is actually a legitimate time travel theory: that you can do whatever you want in the past because you can only ever travel to an alternate reality past. Grandfather Paradox doesn't work if it's not technically your grandpa.

This is almost the same as Dr. Who, except the Doctor really doesn't give a shit about what he does to any particular timeline. Like Trunks's ship, the TARDIS keeps its occupants outside the timestream and thus immune to alteration.


Here's where Back to the Future pisses me off. Doc Brown clearly shows what's going on in Part II:

It's the alternate-concurrent-timeline again, except only from the perspective of someone from the original history. When they changed 1955, 1985 got tweaked and no one knew the difference because it was never any other way for them, except for Doc and Marty who only experienced the original timeline and were protected from being overwritten by being outside the rewritten era.

Except since he and Marty were not in the DeLorean when Old Biff went back to 1955 and changed history again, they shouldn't have been protected because they didn't time travel until after that. In fact, the entire universe should be written over, but it's not. Instead it's still in place because Marty and the Doc are going to reverse the changes in 1955, but they won't know to do it unless they try to go back to a time after 1955 first and see some changes.

So it's a predestination loop.

Except, in Part I Marty almost fades away because his parents don't get together, until they do and he doesn't. So clearly Marty can be erased, even if he was going to have fixed everything.

Add to that that the present is changed at the end of I and artifacts from the present and future erase in the past and present respectively when Marty changes events, and it looks like there isn't predetermined causality, even though there has to be for the rest of the story to work.

Basically, there's causality when they need special effects and plot twists, and there isn't when it would benefit the characters.

And if Marty tweaked 1985 so his family was better off and Biff was a tool, why would he befriend Doc and end up going back in time at all? Shouldn't there be an extra Marty? Did they just kill him to make sure? Unless Doc, guided by the fact that they did do all that, coerced that Marty into going back in that timeline as well, with the intent of preserving it exactly as it happened to him/in the movie. That would work, but then there would be an extra (third, really) Marty in 1955 who would arrive in the same place and time as Movie Marty, either merging with him or blowing up the universe in the exact paradox Doc always warned him about.If they merged, that'd alter the movie and screw with the timeline again in and infinitely recurring loop of subtle differences, or Original Marty takes precedence over all paradox Marties because he is "Original" and thus somehow more Universally valid than his accidental offshoots.If traveling outside your timestream makes you immune to all temporal anomalies save complete erasure, as long as you're not in your preferred chronological place, that's a pretty sweet superpower to have, especially since everybody ages while they're time traveling and then returning to the same day they left.

So yeah. "Magic."

On Skunks

While I was dogsitting for my dad last week, I came back to the house to find a friendly visitor in the front yard. No, it wasn't the well-meaning but overly personable mentally challenged guy from down the drive; yes, it was a skunk as the title suggests.

At first I just kept approaching the thing. I was busy, still singing in my head from the drive up with the wind in my face and a blaring radio. Then I realized there was a critter in front of me.

First thought? "Oh, aren't you cute! What the hell are you?" This is a fair question. This wasn't the kind of skunk you see in movies. With it's tail down and fir immaculately groomed (and without his Winter plump), it just looks like some kind of skinny, black ferret. "What are you doing eating our yard seeds in the daytime, little ferret?"

About then process of elimination as to hat this odd little thing was started to pick up. I examined the adorable little hands and the shorter fur and the long snout, and I reached the conclusion "skunk" right as I caught a glint of white on its tail.

And yet I'm still an idiot.

Next thoughts? "Oh, awesome, I'm so close. That thing is really cute! It looks like that pink-nosed skunk bitch from Bambi. What was its name, again? (It was "Flower.") I wonder if I can pet it. I wonder if someone lost it. People keep skunks as pets. They just get them de-scented-"

"FUCK SHIT ASS!"

There's a reason people have to get their pet skunks de-scented. Suddenly everything about what skunks do when they're scared came back to me, but, not surprisingly at this point, it never occurred to me that my respect for all cuddly mammals and general suaveness might not placate the skunk.

I figured I wasn't scared of him, he shouldn't be afraid of me. We're both critters. If I can go about my day without bothering him, he should respect that and do the same. We'll be buddies.

Finally this train of thought seemed what we'll call "stupid." I wondered if I could just get passed the skunk and into the house on the walkway. There was a good four or five feet of space. As I inched forward in a very purposeful but oblivious manner, Mr. Skunk raised his tail an almost imperceptible degree higher and stopped chewing the seed he had found.

Remembering that skunks can shoot a concentrated stream of stank accurately distances of up to ten feet, I slowly backed away and waited until my not-friend went back to his nuts and seeds.

I ended up getting inside by taking a wide arc around the little guy, well out of ass-stink range, all the while not pointing in his direction, trying to reduce the amount of fear pheromones I was pumping through calming exercises, and just generally giving off the air of an animal that came across another animal it knows and doesn't want to bother.

Only later did I remember: I fucking hated Flower. Little pink-nosed bitch ruined my concept of Pepé Le Pew for me forever. Looking back on it, I'm pretty sure she was just constantly rolling ecstasy. Nothing always that happy.