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Futurama
1999 · TV series · 11 seasons
Created by Matt Groening
AnimationComedyScience FictionFantasy
The adventures of a late-20th-century New York City pizza delivery boy, Philip J. Fry, who, after being unwittingly cryogenically frozen for one thousand years, finds employment at Planet Express, an interplanetary delivery company in the retro-futuristic 31st century.
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279 comments on Hacker News
I managed to grab season 1 thru 10 on DVD for $15. Ripped them to storage, probably the best presentation you can get out of it.
But some of those old rips hold up. Not great but they will do.
A few years ago I did see a rip that pushed the limits of codecs. It was, at that point, every season of Futurama before Hulu brought it back but it fit on a single layer DVD. It was squeezed just a little too much as that was something like 100ish episodes. But neat to see.
“They have phones in booths now? Finally! I don’t have to lug this cell phone around.”
Hermes Conrad, Futurama Season 6, Episode 6: Lethal Inspection
To add onto these answers, there were some notable "outsider art" additions to math around this time.
A few months before this post, Futurama contributed a new proof to the mathematical canon (for "The Prisoner of Benda"), resolving the conflict of the episode.
Almost a year after posting this, a 4chan user solved a previously-unsolved superpermutation (combinatorics) problem in a discussion about anime.
I think everyone who has thought about math seriously has felt similarly to the OP. It was impressed upon me early on that there are combinatorically (hah) many combinatorics problems to be solved and that these were just a few.
> The AirKamuy 150 is a cheap pre-fab cardboard drone meant to die on the battlefield
Oh, that makes more sense. I probably watched too many episodes of Futurama for my mind to immediately imagine drones used by people to commit suicide.
Your explanation is just as good as the Fermi paradox. In Futurama, the Omicronians know about the Earth from old TV show signals, that's been constantly sent from Earth by then. Would any alien civilization have the patience to constantly send hello world for a millenia or maybe hundred thousand years.
Both assume that there _is_ some other life, but that it's hard to reach. We don't know if there is anything else.
Earth could be completely unique in the existence, even with all the endless multiuniverses. Mathematical propabilities are not proof that there _must be_ life somewhere else. The answer could just as well be '0'. Only life that was, is and will ever be. When we are eventually gone, that's it. No more life.
edit: sorry about the negativity in my reply; just pondering out loud :D
Good opportunity to dig out this popular Futurama quote:
> Didn't you have ads in the 20th century? Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games, on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No, sir-ee!
I quite enjoyed the original run of the docuseries "Futurama" on this concept.
Interesting that all those you specifically named aired on Fox, which is where Firefly aired.
Other science fiction shows Fox killed after not more than one season were The Lone Gunman, Harsh Realm, Minority Report, Second Chance, and John Doe.
Others did make it past the first season but not past the second, such as Dark Angel and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Even shows that make it longer often have trouble on Fox. Futurama for example was put in terrible time slots that often got preempted by sports which made it hard to grow its audience, and most of the time the creators had no idea if the current season was going to be their last. They had to keep trying to write season finales that would also be good series finales if they got cancelled between seasons.
They also do this to shows in other genres. Lucifer for example got cancelled after 3 seasons, with season 3 having ended on the biggest possible cliffhanger there could be for that show. That was very annoying.
My rule has now been for a long time that I will not watch any new scripted series on Fox that has any kind of ongoing story. If there are enough good reviews and word of mouth to make me want to watch it I'll wait until complete seasons are available on streaming, and then only if there exists some N such that if I watch to episode N and stop there won't be any cliffhangers or important ongoing story arcs open.
Yesterday I was just watching an episode of futurama where bender (the robot) “finds” his imagination and believes that he is a dnd character. He goes around Don Quixote style.
To defeat bender, Fry pretends to a destructive spell on him.
I couldn’t find the exact scene but…. https://youtube.com/watch?v=chjVoVcVi3A
I recommend watching _The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened_ [0]. It goes though how the comedy went from sharp an witty to laugh track quality.
Personally, the only show that was also focused on sharp and witty was _Futurama_. That show was able to retain it better through out the years. Every series finally episode was a masterpiece.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqFNbCcyFkk
Going back I dumped all the streaming platforms as most of their new programming was not at all interesting. Turns out I was watching reruns of shows I downloaded years ago that were still sitting on my server. So I made my own cable channel by dumping every downloaded TV show into a single playlist then turn shuffle on. I have a low power PC hooked to my TV running Debian. The power is low enough that I just turn the TV off and leave the PC running.
Since I mostly put the TV on to have background noise this solution works perfectly. It's really nice to turn the TV on and see random x-files, mst3k, max headroom, cowboy bebop, futurama, and so on 24/7. And most of it is in SD or ripped from TV/VHS which doesn't bother me at all, in fact, it adds charm and character via those artifacts of the past.
Yeah but I’ve seen a documentary, Futurama I think it was called, that showed the cognitive benefits of having worms.
The shark line is a quote from Futurama in an episode where an 80s corporate raider takes over Planet Express.
So was House MD (well researched). Or Mr Robot. Or Silicon Valley. Heck, even Futurama did its research to the point they proved a new mathematical theorem for a joke. But being entertaining is always the priority for a TV show. Sure, maybe talk with the creators and get their inputs and insights, but don’t base your opinions on policies so heavily on simply watching the show. They’re called “dramas” for a reason.
It is amazing how well Futurama has held up :-D
I recently watched an episode where there was a bit about "Don't date robots" and it had me absolutely rolling, but also hit pretty close to home in 2025
Futurama! Just watched that episode today.
By 99 it wasn't that bad. I remember screaming along with V.92 56k modems. Futurama episodes were about 50mb encoded as RealVideo and took a mere two and a half hours to download o.0
(and it really was v.92; I still have the double-bong towards the end of the handshake emblazoned in my memory)
I don't really know why that "understandable". We see this with so many TV shows and movie francises. There's a reason why there's only two seasons of The Office in the UK version, but it's just beaten to death in the US version. Same with The Simpsons, Futurama, Big Bang Theory, pretty much the entire Marvel francise, Star Wars, Jurassic Park and so many more shows and movies.
You just find yourself in the corner yield "Please stop, it dead! It's been dead for years!" For example Star Wars, that francise is completely ruined, but the fans are insufferable and just keeps pouring money into something that quite frankly sucks by now.
Why must everything be milked dry to the point where we start hating it?
I think that part is a reference to a Futurama episode where a holodeck malfunction materialized several villains, including "Evil Lincoln".
You're being downvoted for a bad read of the material. Any comparisons to God are intentional and deliberate - but mostly serve to knock God down a peg or two by grounding it in something plausible instead of the faith based miracles and straight up fantasy style magic from the Bible.
Futurama has a great episode where Bender meets God (who has merged with a computer) that tackles similar themes.
If you find this to be a harsh reaction, maybe consider how the wording of your initial comment is an effective provocation to anyone who doesn't share your belief system.
Perfect time to revisit the Futurama episode where Fry realizes he's rich. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JwkaLt9pf8
Yeah, I would also prefer to rename a smart house controlling agent to "robo butler 9000" just because its funny. I dont want a human slave. I want to feel like Im in a weirdly funny episode of Futurama
If data integrity is assured, and thus there is no change in the data to store/transfer, then that's the opposite of computationally transforming the data?
How do we see robot and AI and helping interactions in film and tv and games?
A curated list of films for consideration:
Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" or "The Modern Prometheus" (1818), Metropolis (1927), I\, Robot (1940-1950; Three Laws of Robotics, robopsychology), Macy Conferences (1941-1960; Cybernetics), Tobor the Great (1954), Here Comes Tobor (1956), Jetsons' maid's name: Rosie (1962), Lost in Space (1965), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), THX 1138 (1971), Star Wars (1977), Terminator (1984), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Flubber (1997, 1961), Futurama (TV, 1999-), Star Wars: Phantom Menace (1999), The Iron Giant (1999), Bicentennial Man (1999), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2003), I\, Robot (2004), Team America: World Police (2004), Wall-E (2008), Iron Man (2008), Eagle Eye (2008), Moon (2009), Surrogates (2009), Tron: Legacy (2010), Hugo (2011), Django Unchained (2012), Her (2013), Transcendence (2014), Chappie (2015), Tomorrowland (2015), The Wild Robot (2016, 2024), Ghost in the Shell (2017),
Giant f robots: Gundam (1979), Transformers (TV: 1984-1987, 2007-), Voltron (1984-1985), MechWarrior (1989), Matrix II: Revolutions (2003), Avatar (2009, 2022, 2025), Pacific Rim (2013-), RoboCop (1987, 2014), Edge of Tomorrow (2014),
~AI vehicle: Herbie, The Love Bug (1968-), Knight Rider (TV, 1982-1986), Thunder in Paradise (TV, 1993-95), Heat Vision and Jack (1999), Transformers (2007), Bumblebee (2018)
Games: Portal (2007), LEGO Bricktales (2022), While True: learn() (2018), "NPC" Non-Player Character
Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence
List of artificial intelligence films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_intelligence_films
Category:Films_about_robots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_robots
Category:American_robot_films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_robot_films
Doesn't even have to be something obscure. I asked one about Futurama a couple years ago and got a made up answer on multiple models I tested. I think I originally asked something about the line "we're exactly the same. I know all her moves, therefore I have the upper hand" because I couldn't recall it exactly so normal web searches were failing me. Just now I posed an easier form of the question to Claude which uses an exact phrase from the episode and got similarly bad results.
===
Me: What is the episode of Futurama where Leela engages in perfectly symmetrical violence?
Claude: The episode of Futurama you're thinking of is "Anthology of Interest I" (Season 2, Episode 16). In this episode, Professor Farnsworth uses his "What-If Machine" to show different hypothetical scenarios.
During Bender's segment titled "What if Bender were human?", there's a scene where Leela confronts a group causing trouble. One of them challenges her, saying "What are you going to do?" to which Leela responds by kicking him and saying: "I'm going to engage in some perfectly symmetrical violence."
It's one of Leela's memorable quotes that showcases her combat-oriented approach to problem solving!
===
That's completely wrong. It's from S4E15 The Farnsworth Parabox. And the line is "now, now, perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything", said by parallel universe Farnsworth.
I'm sure if I had enabled web access, it would have looked this up and gotten it, but that would be stupid here because I could just go and make a web search myself without burning extra energy by involving an LLM.
Oh there are certainly some excellent American comedy shows..
Seinfeld, Curb, Arrested Development, Modern Family, The Office (US), South Park, Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, Frasier, Fresh Prince, Friends, How I Met Your Month, Futurama, Simpsons (OG) and then there's not a lot more on the bench unless you include the lesser remakes of British shows.
A lot of them aren't funny or aren't satire.. just look at the Shameless remake - they turned that into a character drama when it was a sitcom.
America has more of a stand-up culture I feel.
I wonder if it's because the news in America is pretty much fiction that they basically don't have political satire as a genre outside of the topical news shows (Daily Show / John Oliver) which are honestly more like real news shows than comedy at this point.
I dub the distinction between a tablet and a laptop fake. Tbh they are running the same hardware. I started with Android and first things I did on my phones was to install terminal and ssh. Later it became impossible, because of the changes that were being imposed by Google ("for the sake of my safety").
What I valued Android over IOS was to have access to my files (like DVD-dumped futurama) that I could watch on them (I did it before it was trendy, before netflix came into phones, moreover before the data transfer got so cheap I could watch a whole movie and not pay through my nose).
On IOS it was possible though with VLC - I had to upload there my movies using HTTP server (yes - server had to be on a computer).
And then it began! You cannot listen to free spotify on your tablet the same way you got it on your laptop - you have to install an app and it will impose on you different limitations. HEY! This is the same thing as my laptop! HOW CAN YOU TELL!??? AH MY BROWSER WEASELED ME OUT?
Futurama delivery drones seem to be pretty quiet, at least. Even in the recent episode mocking Amazon. I guess we need to invent whatever gently humming propulsion hovering sci-fi stuff uses.
Buddy. You are seeing the future of the internet.
And after that, the future of film,as they figure out how to work around various rights.
I am here for it. Season 1 of Futurama, but live action with the cast and production values of the '77 Star Wars? It's coming. You wait and see.
The Futurama episode "All the Way Down" and the visual novel Anonymous;Code have the same premise, it's a fun one.
Or that one Futurama episode, "I, roommate"
https://theinfosphere.org/I,_Roommate
I immediately thought of that Futurama episode where Fry was looking for an apartment:
https://youtu.be/t69yuxD-iBU?si=Bm84ggtpIWwY0M3f
> If you like dank, fuhgettaboutit!
I still prefer to own movies I like and I have many of them. (no, not SO many as YOU have, my adversary). I think that having them will allow me one day to stop paying constantly more and more expensive subscriptions.
By the way, for me, the DVD standard was very strange. I think that the engineering industry works differently than IT/CS guys. They think of "a product" which consists of the medium AND the "protocol" i.e. file format in this case, and they are inseparable in their (engineers') heads.
When new codecs were created, the DVD could have been enhanced in terms of better quality, as normal DivX would allow maximally better quality on 4.7G (instead of 7GB available to DVD publisher). But when I am watching DVDs I find the low quality disturbing, and playing the interlaced movies (Futurama for example) without a decent player makes me nauseous.
I would even think of converting them and storing on my local cloud but without decent player (like Cyberlink which was removing the interlacing) this looks like crap... Also probably today some AI upscaling would be nice... but I think I am asking for too much...
The Problem with Popplers
Season 2, Episode 18
https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Popplers
Time is a great filter.
Was music in the '60s and '70s better than music today? Probably not.
If you were able to time travel back to then and listen at some random time to a radio tuned to a pop station you'd hear a lot of OK songs, a smaller number of good songs and bad songs, and a few great songs. Just like if you listened to some stream of a wide selection of recent music.
Is music from the '60s and '70s that you are likely to hear today better than most recent music? Probably.
Listen to an oldies stream and it likely is to just include those songs from then that were great or good, and it will be drawing from several years.
Same thing happens with TV. Old sitcoms like "Frasier" are as good as the best being produced today. Same with even older shows like "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "I Love Lucy". But there were a heck of a lot of other sitcoms from the same times that are almost forgotten.
With sitcoms the old sitcoms we might still see are probably more likely to be great than the old music we still hear today, because old sitcoms have an additional filter to get past. You'll probably only see them today if they had enough episodes to be worth syndication.
They typically show one episode a day and they want to be able to go several months before wrapping around. Even with having more episodes per year back then than we typically have now (~32 then, ~24 now) the show would have to last at least 3 years to get enough episodes for syndication. Many a show that was great or near great and would have become great in season 2 or 3 has been killed by its network for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the show.
(I no longer watch anything on Fox other than sports and reality shows because of that. After "Firefly", "Futurama", "Terra Nova", and "Lucifer" I learned my lesson. I don't care how great people say a Fox show is now, I will either wait until Fox cancels it and watch it on streaming if people tell me that it got a proper series finale, or I might consider watching entire seasons before that but only if those seasons ended at points that would be good stopping points. "Terra Nova" and "Lucifer" ended on huge cliff hangers).
This reminds me a Futurama quote: "Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century? Fry: Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky... But not in dreams."
I mean, I can always use pause and hope that my podcast player will remember where I stopped to be able to continue from that point later on. That's true. But why did I need to think about it in the first place? By running 4 episodes back to back I actually binge-played it without even realising. And, for me personally, no matter how good a show is (from Futurama to Black Mirror), once they start running consecutively, I start recognizing patterns and repetitions and it makes it feel stale a bit. Maybe I'm just old school where TV/Radio broadcast would force me to wait for the next episode, for at least 24 hours (or longer), which would make it feel fresh and make me really looking forward to continue.
Few months ago I watched Star Trek Picard season 3, and I remembered this principle and I paced it so I would watch one episode daily and I enjoyed it tremendously.
It's not that I didn't enjoy 29 minutes of episode 1 of The Multiverse Employee Handbook - I did. But, when the first 7 minute episode ended, I was thinking to myself "wow, this is great!", and I was expecting the podcast playback to stop leaving me wanting to look for more. But it kept going, and, 22 minutes later I was thinking " ah, cool, will definitely continue tomorrow". The wow factor was gone. That's like me giving you a delicious slice of cake, and, as you are still full of impressions about how good it was, I shove three more slices onto your plate. :) Now you're feeling like you're about to explode.
Anyway, looking forward to enjoying more episodes. Keep up the good work!
I didn't realize how much I would appreciate shuffle until i started using jellyfin.
I use it all the time for shows that have self-contained episodes (e.g. Futurama).
> I stick with h264 for the most part because h265 encoding requires far too much extra compute relative to the space savings. I can spend an hour compressing a file down to 1gb with h264, or I can spend 12 hours compressing the same file to 850mb with h265.
FWIW, as someone who is a complete layman on this topic but has spent much of the past 6 months converting age-old videos to h265...
i have a pi5 where i queue up old videos into a RAM disk, it converts them to h265, and moves them back to the machine which uploaded them. It can take up to 2 days to compress any given video (depending mostly on the input format - old AVIs tend to compress in a few hours), but the space savings is _much_ higher than what you're reporting. The average size of my h265-encodes is anywhere from 1/3rd to 1/2 of the original, and 1/4th of the original is not terribly uncommon. That said: the input formats vary wildly, with possibly only a minority fraction being h264.
i've tried the same thing using a pi4 but it needs roughly 4-5x as long as the pi5. An 8-core intel-based laptop can do it in some 25% of the time of the pi5 but pulls a lot more electricity while doing so. So my otherwise idle pi5 gets the assignment.
My Firefly collection (14 tv episodes plus the movie) dropped from 8gb to 2.1gb. My Bob Ross collection (141 videos) went from 38gb to 7.4gb. 128 Futurama episodes/movies was cut from roughly 50gb to 21gb.
i was once asked why i didn't choose AV1 and the answer is simple: when i googled along the lines of "how to get the best video compression with ffmpeg" the most common answer was h265. Whether that's correct or not, i can't say, but it works for me and i've freed up the better part of a terabyte of space with it.
Also the writers famously created a mathematical theorem just for an episode of Futurama
https://theinfosphere.org/Futurama_theorem
Yeah, Futurama used composited 3D elements from the very first episode in 1999. The vehicles are nearly always 3D.
Not to be confused with the Futurama episode named after this theory, written by Bob Odenkirk, and that definitely lives rent free in my mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Santas
Looks like shots from a sci-fi horror movie. I wonder what we’ll find out when humanity eventually makes it to mars. If my Futurama watching history predicts anything, is that the martians won’t have a concept of property. Thus the colonization of America happens yet again …
We're about 10 years off from recreating that episode of Futurama where they drop massive ice cubes into the ocean to cool it down.
I started my familiarity with programming using a bunch of Micorosoft's products, but later was able to completely migrate away from them. Today, if I'm required to use a Microsoft's product, it's kind of like asking a North Korean who valiantly fought to get away from that cursed country to go back and live there again.
You see, my understanding of what's happening with MS is that their sales department is exceptionally successful, which lowers the requirements for everything else in the product. A particular quality of this sales department is that they rarely sell to individual end users: to be efficient, they sell to people who have absolute control over the end users, but are also incompetent when it comes to software. Think governments, hospitals, schools etc.
Another aspect of MS software is that they, internally, don't really allow anything that's not made by MS, and they are big enough for this policy to succeed. The unfortunate side effect of this policy is the Stockholm syndrome: MS developers not only get used to the MS tools, they genuinely seem to like the suffering incurred by using them. Another unfortunate side effect of this policy is that MS developers have no idea what normal users actually like. So, they are kind of like Bender (a robot, who has only a very faint idea of how humans eat) in the Futurama episode, where he enters a cooking contest. He then proceeds to put all kind of inedible components into his meals (but eventually wins by adding some LSD to the mix).
So... I will never touch any MS products with a ten feet pole, unless forced to by my employer. And if the employer goes as far as requiring me to use MS products a lot, I'll look for another place to work. My job today is quite meaningless, boring and I don't get to work with things I like or people I respect... but having to use MS tools for work would still be a lot, lot worse. It's a kind of a torture... well, of course, it's an exaggeration: it doesn't cause me physical pain, but it's a kind of frustration that makes me want to punch a wall every few seconds.
And to top it: using C# for anything is kind of like... starting a cooking recipe with "put a handful of chopped garlic into the pen". You just know it's either a mistake, or a prank, or total incompetence. You just don't keep reading after that line: there are plenty of recipes around, it's not worth your time to try to figure out why this one is defective.
In one of the Futurama episodes, Fry eats one of Farnsworth's mini mummies and Farnsworth is upset because he wanted to eat it. Fry said it tasted like jerky I think.
The finale Futurama episode deals with this very topic. Well worth a watch.
Any high marks Futurama may earn for its finale need to be halved by the episode providing the saddest kick in the bonch ever -- "Jurassic Bark" :)
Am totally imagining a futurama episode where everyone is trying to figure out what purpose the dodecahedron was created for and then Fry walks in and explains it was just a mass produced junk art like "live, laugh, love" made by Crate and Barrel.
LOL, I'm reminded of a Futurama episode from over a decade ago where one of the presidential candidates during the debate, when asked "Environment: Yes or No" replied:
Two words: Condor attack. Don't want that. Got to say no. It feels like "Condor" is a trigger phrase that's been around and programmed into people for years
With that title I think of the episode of Futurama where the brains were making everyone stupid.
Their "Morbo and Linda" there was a train crash today, the governor lady said send in more trains.
> I think we've largely forgotten what live over-the-air television was like for quite a few decades: TV shows and movies split up by blocks of 5-6 30 second ads, including ads for other shows later in the week. We'd either sit through them, bored, or find something else to do. (Or pause recording on the VCR. Heh.)
A big difference between those ad breaks and ad breaks today on many streaming platforms today is that there was coordination between the content producers and the broadcasters over where in the content the ad breaks occurred.
The content producers structured their programs so the ads would occur during good places for the viewer to take a break. Shows for 30 minute slots would be written as 3 acts and shows for 1 hour slots would be written as 5 acts. Sometimes the shows would even acknowledge this in the story, e.g., both The Simpsons and Futurama had stories where right at the end of the act a character says they are going to 2 or 3 minutes to think about some problem, and then it immediately goes into the ad break, and when it comes back the character has just finished figuring out the answer.
It was also easier to find something to do during a 3ish minute ad break than it is during the shorter ad breaks common on streaming platforms today. With a 3ish minute ad break when I was a kid, I'd just start reading a magazine or the day's newspaper. With short ad breaks there often isn't time to do anything meaningful. Even though the modern platform might have less total ad time, the total of "time actually watching the program" plus "time doing useful things during ad breaks" in an hour of watching for me was probably more for OTA back then than it is for many of today's ad-based streaming services.
Haven't we been inadvertently sending our terrestrial broadcasts into space for decades?
I remember a Futurama episode about aliens watching our TV programs.
There's the opposite phenomenon where, for instance, Legend of Korra was ordered as a miniseries then extended to a full show, resulting in some trouble in season 2's production.
Futurama might be the best at handling cancellations now, lol.
It's literally the same as that one Futurama episode where they clone celebrities on the internet
Is that the Agnew who was depicted as a headless body in Futurama (in an episode with Nixon's head)?
Its a nod to the Futurama episode ;)
>a short film I made to explore my fascination with artificial gravity in space.
I don't like how videogames have artificial gravity in space. It's a videogame, you can reduce the gravity to zero, instead we get the same gravity as anywhere else. I feel like Fry the first time he goes to the moon in Futurama.
Just potentially throw away hundreds or thousands of dollars in purchases for apps/IAPs and related things! FFS there isn't even a way to watch videos purchased on iTunes on Android so if I want to watch my copy of Futurama on a phone, it has to be an iPhone ( and for those in the U.S, "Movies Anywhere" doesn't exist outside it and I have no idea if that even applies to TV).
> In other words, after having wasted an ungodly amount of money trying to make pizza in the most complicated way possible, Zume decided that the best course of action was to just try selling boxes instead
Started off as a Futurama episode, finished off as a Simpsons episode.
I also struggle to sleep due to anxiety about what I could or should be doing. I started using a visualization meditation technique.
I don’t watch a wide variety of tv, instead I tend to watch my favorites over and over again so I have a pretty good visual in my head.
I have ripped the audio from my favorite shows and put them on random with a 30 minute sleep timer. I focus on visualizing the episode as I’m listening to it as that keeps my mind from wandering, but since I know the episodes so well it also isn’t a struggle.
I’m rarely still awake by the time it stops playing after 30 minutes. And if I am or I wake up in the middle of the night, I can just tap the button on my nightstand and it continues playing for another 30 minutes. No need to open my eyes or take off my sleep mask.
For reference my primary shows are futurama (original seasons), psych, and next generation.
I think we need to completely revisit the ownership model here. Kill copyright entirely. (I would vote for anyone-- up to and including Mike Pence-- who made this a major plank of their campaign)
We have at least one corner of the universe where we've defeated scarcity. We can't run out of music. Hell, we can't even run out of a specific recorded performance, if even the most trivial efforts of due-diligence backups are performed. We should be proud-- we're at least one step on the way towards Star Trek replicators and universal abundance.
But the current system is so tied to the idea of "markets" and "ownership" that only really make sense for scarce physical goods, that we ended up having to force everyone, under threat of law, to treat a limitless resource that's part of our shared cultural experience, like a rare physical widget that must be owned, sliced up, and sold under restrictive covenant.
We should be taking all the money going into the content business-- all the funds being spent on the production of movies, music, novels, art, potentially even software-- and use it to bankroll an enormous centralized endowment for the creative community.
This immediately silences all "but how will artists eat?" strawmen. Even if you're not a live-show performer or merchandising expert, you get paid by the endowment on a predictable stipend basis, rather than having to hope you can effectively monetize a package of "rights" while dealing with an industry full of middlemen out to rip you off.
This would ensure that many, many more artists can live their passion-- how many great but unknown bands could spend their lives touring, if we took the money that bankrolled Taylor Swift's tour and sliced it up into 50k-per-person-per-year grants? How many sculptors could we keep on the books for the price of one Anish Kapoor? It would also be interesting to compare efficiency of funds delivery-- replacing a bunch of for-profit publishers with a single cooperative or state-run entity probably results in more dollars actually reaching artists overall.
It also avoids the perverse incentives on the other side-- if you make one world-breaking hit, you can't ride it forever. Just because you sung White Christmas once doesn't mean you get out of ever having to work again. If we eliminate the opportunity to slice and subdivide "rights" to a work, then there's no incentive to hold back maximum utilization of it. Imagine the improved utility of modern content services if they can get legal access to all the things-- Netflix and Hulu would have to compete on the best infrastructure, UI and tooling, rather than "only we have Futurama".
> The Eternal Meeting
Sounds like awesome Futurama or Black Mirror episode.
> I’m really at a loss as to what point of mine you’re trying to refute.
I was interested in your proclamation that
> the idea of a single tuna being worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars is fantasy
It seems it's not a fantasy, and that it will become more and more common. That's what mitsubishi is betting on, and in essence what we've seen in Futurama's episode A Fishful of Dollars.
> You need to look at the typical price rather than some one-off maximum
Not if we're trying to determine if "a single tuna being worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars" is fantasy or not.
> They essentially are listing the largest bluefin tuna ever caught and using the highest price per pound ever
The table header (and referenced article) clearly states that those are "Max weight" and "Max price". Records.
> It’s several orders of magnitude away from $5,000 per pound
Sure. Even the OP you're reacting to is stating that prices are starting at $20 per pound. The same prices are in the article I've provided. That fishermen don't get as much is a sad reality of our system, so not at all surprising.
We jumped away from "free market principles" the moment we forbade copying of those past Futurama episodes for 90 years. There is nothing naturally scarce about copies of creative works; we impose artificial scarcity through a government-granted monopoly in order to allow the creation of those works to be funded through the sale of copies[0].
Having a government commission decide what is and isn't a reasonable price does smell of command economy, but creative works already exist in a command economy. The only difference is that you can't Disney Vault your shit anymore. Boo hoo. In my opinion, once you've sold your work, recouped costs, and paid everyone, you shouldn't be able to then pull the coin out of the vending machine and take works off the market. We give monopoly rights in exchange for creative works being made and publicly available, not for them to be made and then thrown into a fire.
My personal opinion as to how to fix this problem would be to authorize the Copyright Office to issue compulsory licenses to reproduce works that are over 10 years old and either are orphan works[1] or whose known owners are unwilling to license[2]. These licenses would only be issued to libraries - i.e. either government-run libraries or non-profit agencies with substantially similar goals to one, such as the Internet Archive. And if someone can actually assert both ownership and a pattern of ongoing licensing then they can cancel the compulsory licenses that the libraries get.
We can actually determine what a 'willing license' would look like by looking at comparable deals in a particular market. If whoever owns Futurama wants to charge $10,000 a view but Disney is licensing The Simpsons and Family Guy out to Netflix for a few pennies per view, then we can safely conclude that the $10,000/view price is there just to keep the work off the market. We don't need the Copyright Office to say "anything more than $X per stream is too much."
[0] This is not the only way that creativity could be funded, of course. But it's the only way that mainstream buyers of creativity are willing to participate in.
[1] Works whose current ownership is unable to be determined. A lot of the games that are legally unavailable in the VGHF study are unavailable because the owners went out of business and the rights are tied up between four different creditors who all don't know what they own.
>> If something is not legally available then copyright law ought to make it eligible for free distribution.
Ok. Past Futurama episodes are now $10,000 per view. That is still available and not an absurd cost (just ask anyone dealing with with patented technology). So we would need some sort of commission to decide what a reasonable cost should be, which would be a quantum leap away from free market principals.
Corollary question: How many films and TV-shows are now not legally available?
Streaming and on-demand content delivery, rather than purchased physical copies, does the same damage to other content as to games. Per internet traditions, the porn industry is leading the way. No doubt the copyrights to millions of porn films belong to long-defunct studios, leaving no legal access. Today is it porn, tomorrow it will be the older Futurama episodes.
But industries want this state of affairs. Any time spent with old content is time not purchasing the new content. To keep the content creation industry going consumers need to forget past material. Want to watch old Simpsons episodes? Want to play the original Civilization? No. Those are dead. Here are some new versions.
Sounds like an episode from Futurama...
Futurama had an episode about that!
"I understand how the engines work now. It came to me in a dream. The engines don't move the ship at all. The ship stays where it is and the engines move the universe around it." ―Cubert Farnsworth
https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Matter_Engine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RtMMupdOC4
Futurama is one examples. Ads usually kick in on a cliffhanger or to emphasize a punchline. This was a popular narrative technique back in the day. It might be why sitcoms worked fine for decades but never really carried over to the VOD era.
Not ads, but the best example of a dramatic interruption are the first two seasons of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, where the hero is screwed and then it cuts out into the Roundabout song. This is a lot less dramatic when you can just binge watch things and don't have to wait a week for the next.
Whereas Netflix shows tend to fill it with fluff, things like side drama, background stories, and redundant plot elements. I know I can skip the ad, but I don't really know if I can skip story details. I end up watching something like Squid Game on 2x speed.
Back in the day, we named the computers of our customers by tv shows or movies (futurama) and the disks inside them after the characters (fry, zoidberg, etc.). Worked well.
The concept isn't new, 20 years ago Futurama had this public info film about the dangers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ6knaienVE
I believe that we watched the same Futurama episode.
I experience something similar, but it seems to have more to do with *how familiar* I am with the song. If it's something I've never heard before, it's much more distracting- even if it doesn't have words. On the other hand, if I've listened to it a lot, it seems to have the opposite effect, and helps me concentrate.
I get this when trying to fall asleep, too: I can't fall asleep while watching something new! But give me an episode of Futurama I've watched about six hundred and thirty-two times, and I'll be out like a light. :)
That being said, this site is interesting because the speech is somewhat less distinct and has the odd cadence of aviation radio. I'll give it a listen for awhile and see if I get the same effect as you.
I think it goes a lot further back, one semi-serious data point: the "Chamber of commerce runs Atlanta" meme was satirized by the TV show Futurama in the year 2000:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deep_South_(Futurama)
https://youtu.be/LeYihjMo0Bk
I'm not sure if that's the case or not.
In 2017 I could ask Google which episode of the Futurama was the one where the save the planet from a trash ball, and it could answer the question in natural language.
I suspect that Google X has had these, and other capabilities for a while even if they've never been shipped in any specific product. Or how about Duplex, where Google could call a restaurant to make a reservation, including negotiating times? That was also like 2017-2018.
These are only the public, polished, productized ideas. Google has bard, a response to chat gpt, probably only because they didn't realize that people actually wanted a chatbot. I think it was a product failure. How quickly they responded with something similar I think shows you this tech exists inside Google already.
Remember, OpenAI was created in part to help make AI accessible to people outside of Google/Microsoft. Who knows what's going on behind closed doors.
I’ve always thought this same thing about UBI. Like that episode of Futurama where every citizen gets a $300 bill from the government and in the background of the scene right after they announce it, you see the 99 cent store sign being changed to the $299.99 store.
https://youtu.be/X_HyY-8dQJA
Agreed. culitho wasn't an English word until nVidia marketing extruded it into the world.
In my defense, I was trying to vaguely reference the Problem with Popplers episode of Futurama but failed.
It's like I've stepped into an episode of futurama!
I guess Futurama is a documentary now
https://youtu.be/0SYpUSjSgFg?t=66
My go-to is Futurama episodes...
Didn't realise this was a common coping mechanism till I asked around and both my brothers do it (Adult ADHD diagnosis) and one friend (Also diagnosed).
Reminds me of the story of Noah's ark.
(Shudder) I just imagined a sci-fi world in which this yacht is built and there are groups of feuding subcultures that live in different parts of the yacht.
Feuding, sort of like that Futurama episode where Bender gets lost in space and ends up hosting a civilization of Lilliputians.
I predicted a lot of Season 2 during Season 1, though I was called a bit of a quack for it at the time. I don't think they tried to complicate it because of people solving the Season 1 puzzle box, I think they picked too esoteric of a plot framework (lost books of the bible/biblical "fan fiction") at the start of the series bible and S2 was always the planned consequence of S1.
I blame Neal Stephenson for this, both in why I spotted the things that I did and where a lot of S2 came from even though it felt so left field for the average viewer.
(I tend to refer to S2 as the "Futurama's Robot Church" season and think it makes a lot more sense when you see it as a struggle between the Robot God and the Robot Devil, and the Robot Devil is not who most people think it is despite S1 laying out a lot of hints.)
Does that robot planet episode exist? It clearly exists in Futurama, just wondering wether that was inspired by Star Trek, or rather by that Star Trek pitch document?
Like that episode of Futurama where Fry gets fancy space underpants inserted into his dreams. This paper is for sure the foundation for that.
I joined HN 10 days before you did (back in 2013)… Your account age of nine years gives you no more authority than mine (or an account age of nine days). You’ve been here as long as I have - there is one dang. You’ve exercised your downvoting ability. Fair enough.
On HN and elsewhere in my > 20 years in the broader technology community I’ve noticed substantially higher interest in “golden era” Simpsons, Futurama, etc. In my experience and understanding they are part of our culture.
I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call a reference to a single line in an episode that aired in 1995 “Pop Culture”.
I simply added context because a reference to a 27 year old episode from a series that seems to have been well respected in the technology space should not be completely lost on a younger generation of HN readers that don’t recognize it (likely because they hadn’t been born yet).
You are being obtuse.
The point here is that someone shouldn't be able to decide, in the course of 5 seconds, to engage in a permanent decision like this.
The reason being, that people make mistakes in the course of 5 seconds, that they regret.
So, instead of that, we should be pretty sure before allowing people to make such permanent decision.
Such as, for example, by having a doctor talk to the person.
This is why the OP mentioned the TV show Futurama.
Because in the comedy TV show, people could decide in 5 seconds to do that.
And the reason why it was in a comedy TV show, is because that is bad, and absurd, and that's why it is funny.
Animated movies that I often rewatch (in no particular order):
- Spirited Away
- Grave of the Fireflies
- Finding Dory
- Up
- Tokyo Godfathers
- Akira (NOT the English dub, which completely changes the story and dialogue for the worse, and for no good reason)
- Mononoke Hime
- Ghost in the Shell (the original one)
- My Neighbor Totoro
Animated series I'll rewatch:
- Guardian of the Sacred Spirit
- Castlevania
- Futurama
- Archer
- Arcane
- Cowboy Bebop
- Ergo Proxy
- The Dragon Prince
- Hakaba Kitaro
- Star Trek: Lower Decks
This is an excellent comment that really does distill down what an EM is supposed to be.
As someone who's been on all sides of this (currently an EM, been a tech lead and an individual contributor in the past), I really think there is a lack of understanding among large parts of the tech community about what engineering managers do. A good manager's first and primary responsibility is to reduce chaos for their team. In an ideal world you won't even know I'm here, because I am shielding you from all the stuff that is going on further up in the company and clearing out obstacles so that you can work without interference.
Good managers reduce chaos, bad managers create chaos. In my experience, engineering managers are a lot like all other employees: you have a few outstanding performers, a significant number of average/acceptable/mediocre managers, and some number of pretty bad ones. The difficulty comes in knowing which type you have, and often that only becomes clear when a manager leaves. Either a new EM makes things better, or things get dramatically worse because a good EM is no longer helping the team.
It's like that Futurama episode where Bender meets God: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
Season 3, episode 2 of Futurama.
One of my favourite Futurama gags is the opening caption of S07E25 - "Stench and Stenchibility" which reads “Not the Episode with the Dead Dog” in reference to S04E07 - "Jurassic Bark". If you’ve not seen the latter I highly recommend it, the former quote does not prepare you for the emotional gut punch.
I quite like these little sideswipes on old technology in pop culture. Like the Futurama episode that reveals Bender is running on a 6502.
I also have a very old pi hooked up to my other TV that is non-networked, and just plays random futurama (Original run only) episodes. No need to decide what to watch, my TV only plays futurama :)
When I was a kid I'd watch Futurama on DVD with commentary and think "Wow I bet one day I'll be able to pause any movie and click on anything and get all the info about it." I can't believe we went the opposite direction.
I can imagine a Futurama episode where they put giant bubbles in space and they end up burning everything on the planet like ants under a magnifying glass.
"he sells soil infected with hookworms so that you, too, can get infected by hookworm"
Well, when Fry ate the truck-stop egg-salad sandwich in a Futurama episode the worms he ingested really helped him, so sign me up!
Which episode of Futurama is that from? ;)
I have a good friend, in the US, with a Ph.D. in math. It seems like there is no job he can _not_ do.
Consulting for oil/gas/drilling as they always need analysis.
Financials.
Data analytics (of any kind).
Physics labs/research labs.
Manufacturing (optimization problems, efficiency problems, actual problems <snicker>)
Have you thought completely outside the enclosure?
Sitcoms (look at the people on Futurama or Big Bang for example)
Porn (how _would_ you figure out the volume of that thing??)
Entertainment (Bill Nye the science guy, rosetremiere the math is near!)
Sounds like the plot of a Futurama episode...
Last year I humorously told my 7yo kid that Santa Claus died of COVID. Already before COVID though, we had the Christmas tradition of watching Futurama's "Xmas Story" episode, pretending that Santa has been replaced by a murderous robot who kills people during Christmas day.
It's all a matter of perspective. In our case, we've replaced mythology with humor and subversion - I prefer the latter to the former, and the kid fully embraced it (making the Futurama episode our tradition is their idea) :)
This sound like a great idea for Futurama (TV show) episode with Bender (the robot).
Futurama can still get pretty meta. The first five minutes of the last reboot were about how those responsible for their cancelation were ground into Torgo's Executive Powder.
I think a better example of a return to straightforward comedy would be the King of the Hill reboot.
Also kindof wild to think of telling 1997 me that there would be new episodes of Futurama and KotH 25 years from now.
X2. The movies and then new seasons were okay, but in a different way where they kind of seemed to be caricatures of the original run.
Jurassic Bark is always the mentioned best episode with Futurama, but it (and Luck of the Fryish) is just so sad. Not that they aren't good episodes, but the Luna Park episode in season 1 (with Bender assaulting the mascot, the "moonbillies"), then Bender getting hooked on electricity in Hell is Other Robots and even Mars University with Gunter's classic line (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uqjv0mHpapk) are all great. Godfellas and Pharoah to Remember are also underrated.
Out of curiosity by "Futurama Series Finale" do you mean Season 4 or Season 7?
Seasons in futurama are variable - Disney puts it as 10 seasons, with the films being season 6
There were great episodes in the post films, on the whole id put 95% of episodes as good or excellent, very few haven’t stood the test of time, before or after the films (although I wasn’t too keen on the films themselves, especially the undoing of Jurassic Bark)
A lot has happened in the science, and space technology sphere since 2013, should be great to mine that in new Futurama episodes.
I don't know,towards the end ( season 7?) I felt that the makers of Futurama lost interest in the series.
For the sake of correctness, Tranquility Base is not where the museum is built upon in Futurama S01E02; you must be misremembering. In fact, the moon landing site is considered lost at the beginning of that episode.
When it's later found in the episode, it's found with the lunar ascent module still attached. Because the astronauts ascended in this module, only the descent modules should be there, so you might at first think that this is a blatant mistake on the part of the writing staff and you might hope someone was fired for that blunder[1]. However, if you pay close attention, there's a plaque behind Leela while she's in the ascent module that states "Lander returned to this site by the Historical Stickler's Society."[2]
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTxw5nQX7SA [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/futurama/comments/91kssj/i_didnt_want_to_be_a_stickler_for_historical/
Black Santa Claus is so much more kind and forgiving than Robot Santa Claus!
https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Robot_Santa_Claus
>"You DARE bribe Santa?! I'm gonna shove coal so far up your stocking, you'll be coughing up diamonds!" ―Robot Santa Claus
>"I know he is, but I have no choice. I'm already running late, and if I don't complete my BRUTAL rampage, well, it just wouldn't be Xmas." ―Robot Santa Claus
>"Nice try! But my head was built with paradox absorbing crumple zones." ―Robot Santa Claus
>"Your mistletoe is no match for my TOW missile!" ―Robot Santa Claus
>"Time to get jolly on your naughty asses!" ―Robot Santa Claus
>It is unknown how Robot Santa enacts surveillance upon the entire population of Earth but it is probable that he uses "Mom's Old Fashioned Surveillance Unit".
>Robot Santa was scammed out of his "Naughtiness List" in "Bender's Big Score" and this made him quite upset because he wanted to cause discontent with the information on the List.
>Robot Santa Claus has a bunch of Native Neptunians working in his workshop on Neptune but the Neptunians can be confused with Elves because they're underfed due to not turning a profit because Santa doesn't give them a paycheck.
>He may have been inspired by the robot Santa seen in the Simpsons episode "Homer's Phobia"
>If you think about it, maybe the Robot Santa Claus is right to consider all the inhabitants of the earth as bad and not a programming error, since throughout the series you can see how in reality all the characters are selfish and bad. (This was worded terribly!)
>Due to him, Xmas has become warped from its original holiday meaning.
While introducing the mathematic proof in the show is cool, this exact puzzle also came up in an episode of Stargate SG-1 season 2, which predates this Futurama episode by about 10 years.
https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Holiday
See the last few paragraphs of the plot summary.
I wonder where and when this puzzle was first pondered? Is it a sci-fi adaption of a classical math problem?
And as per usual, there’s a futurama episode covering the bee dance: where bender, with his fantastic dancing skills goes out to communicate with space bees.
This reminds of that episode from Futurama where Fry has a nightmare but was actually an ad for underwear.
So if I hear the opening bar of either The Simpsons or Futurama, I can absolutely tell if it's been pitch shifted, even slightly. Some episodes of Futurama have a slightly sped up opening theme to make up for the episode being a bit too long.
This clearly requires the ability to distinguish absolute pitch, but isn't this something most people could do?
It’s like that Futurama episode where Fry had to teach the future how to generate trash in order to build a garbage ball to save the planet. In the future, everything was recycled, including Bender. They thought Fry was the weird one of having the concept of “throwing things away.”
Leela : Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?
Fry : Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
Futurama was so ahead of time it's scary.
Interesting. I don’t know about Fox news, but I do know some secular non-Christians that were using it that way.
Edit: Oh, and the Futurama episode. Does that count as Fox?
There was a good Futurama episode about that. The Professor got ahold of a new microscope that let him see down to the smallest particle, and from that he discovered the unified theory.
He won the Nobel prize, but was tremendously unhappy. For, with no more questions to answer, what was the purpose of living?
Fry then asked a question in his savant way: why is the unified theory what it is, instead of something else?
The professor then realized there was another question to ask, one that would take decades to answer, thousands of postgrads, and flaming dump trucks of grant money. He was happy again.
“And, now that I've found all the answers, I realise that what I was living for were the questions!”
(Futurama, Reincarnation, 2nd part)
> For example in the JJ Abrams movie Star Trek Into Darkness we see the Enterprise operating at depth in an ocean, then dramatically zooming away into space.
Subverted in Futurama: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GDthiBGMz8
Ads don't have a place practically anywhere. They are annoying in the OS, and also annoying on the websites, in between movie scenes, on the side of city buildings etc either. Reminds me of the Futurama scene:
Fry : So, you're telling me they broadcast commercials into people's dreams?... But how is that possible?
Professor Farnsworth : It's very simple. The ad gets into your brain just like this liquid gets into this egg. Although in reality it's not liquid, but gamma radiation.
Fry : That's awful. It's like brainwashing.
Leela : Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?
Fry : Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky... But not in dreams.
True, I must confess to only having watched one whole episode of the Simpsons start to finish, as the humor never seemed to click for me. I always much preferred Futurama.
There's a Futurama episode that anticipated this. Fry eats an egg salad sandwich from a truck stop restroom vending machine and acquires a parasitic worm infection that gives him super powers.
Pi is a good psycho-thriller, but the maths aspect is weak and physics is nonexistent. If anything, it is more religious (namely, Jewish) than scientific.
Math here is used more as a way of showcasing the main character's madness than actual mathematical thinking.
It you like maths, you may want to watch Futurama, especially the "The Prisoner of Benda" episode, where they made an actual theorem just for the episode, and the formal proof can be seen on screen for a short time.
> 1. Nuclear has much worse failure modes.
Do you have a source? There's plenty of larger fossil fuel catastrophes that just aren't well known because they are in third world countries, so who gives a fuck, right? [0] (note that this is 1700 square miles) I'm not sure this point if about environmental damage or human not being able to live there damage. If the former, I think climate change is a pretty apparent counter point. If the latter, well the size of that is largely political but you can think of it as an unexpected opening of a national forest. Sure, sucks for humans, but all the trees are great for climate (hell, killing humans is great for climate, but that's not popular).
> 2. Advocate like to talk about reprocessing as a solution to the waste problem.
Reprocessing isn't necessary. There's little reason to with our current industry, and even France's. Storage is easy. You place it on site. We have a few hundred years to figure out deep geological repositories (which I also advocate for plastics, heavy metals, and other non-degradable toxic substances). We just don't have enough and it isn't dangerous enough for this to be a problem. Nuclear waste is hundreds of thousands of times smaller than other energy sources (500,000x less than coal). You all act like this is a problem that only nuclear has. It isn't even close to being the biggest perpetrator. It is a good criticism, but if you are only applying this criticism to one product I'm not convinced it is a concern you actually have but rather you're just holding "enemies" to higher standards.
> 3. Separately to spent fuel, you also have to store enrichment byproducts (eg UF₆, UF₄) that have their own problems
This is a restatement of 2 unless you're talking about weapons, which my response would be that you clearly do not understand the difference between weapons and reactors. As a side note, understanding this difference is key to understanding the Iran Deal and why no one is concerned that they produced more enriched material than the deal allowed (i.e. it was a political gesture and could only be a political gesture).
> 4. Stored nuclear waste is a security issue
And? It is stored on site. Energy production plants of any kind are a security issue.
> 5. Transportation of fuel and spent fuel is a security issue.
See 4.
And congrats, you hit 5/10 of the common myths[1].
Now if you said that nuclear power plants were too expensive, we could have a real discussion and there would be differing opinions based on different criteria and hopeful/naive projections. But we can't even have that conversation if you aren't willing to just google the opposition's answers to your questions that have been continually asked for decades. I'm just reminded of this Futurama episode (which I just noticed makes a flat earth joke)[2]. We don't need more Dr. Banjos.
[0] https://medium.com/@renegadeinc/the-amazon-chernobyl-6309a19c27b7 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikneKQAeUp0
[1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-wastes-myths-and-realities.aspx
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-RUHhCzgxI
Multiple Futurama episodes got tears out of me. I think it's a normal and natural thing to be touched by a piece of media to the point of tears. I've watched them again in fact.
How I loved Futurama! Much like with the Simpsons, it will helpfully provide a quote for anything, and its hyper focus on scifi and adventure made it more interesting to me.
Though I'm a fan of the first "age", before the movie(s) and cancellation. I heard bad things about the later seasons, and don't want to taint my memories of the show by watching them.
> Sounds like a great backdrop for the next dystopian sci-fi film.
Futurama Season 1 Episode 8, "A Big Piece of Garbage": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Big_Piece_of_Garbage
> The 2010 episode of Futurama titled The Prisoner of Benda centers around a machine that swaps the brains of any two people who use it. The problem is, once two people use the machine to swap brains with each other, they cannot swap back.
> In this article, we present a new proof of this theorem and also a generalization of it to what would happen if, instead, the machine swapped cyclically the brains of p characters, where p is prime.
I agree. (Edit: to add to this, I've always thought that the third-last episode of Futurama, 'Murder on the Planet Express', was a return to form and reminiscent of the heyday of the show).
On the subject of tv shows, ‘Peep Show’, the British sitcom, also had a very strong final season and final episode.
I wouldn't quite say that. The US imports virtually no live-action series or films from foreign language countries, and relatively little even from other English-speaking countries. So we extrapolate the tastes of the entire country from what is a relatively small market share.
Imagine trying to judge US culture solely on the basis of shows like The Simpsons, Futurama, and South Park. These aren't low-quality shows, but they're also nowhere near fully reflective of the entertainment that people consume in the US.
I’ve only caught a few episodes of Futurama, so I hunted this one down on Hulu to watch it tonight.
Wow. Brutal.
Then I read that piece, and read the comments on it, and cried some more, and then found this one.
https://tv.avclub.com/1804382181
I have no words.
So the AV Club did a thing where they retroactively watched + reviewed all the Futurama episodes, and I think about their review of, you know, that one, Jurassic Bark, an awful lot. Not just because that episode is so emotionally devastating or because the review does justice to that and is emotionally devastating too, but because of this bit:
> I said “Jurassic Park” is manipulative, and I stand by that; the way the episode exploits its flashback structure to build to the most devastating possible conclusion is about as subtle as that Sarah McLachlan SPCA ad. Acknowledging this isn’t the same as criticizing it, though. Manipulation fails when it becomes noticeable, and when the audience resents the efforts made to drive them towards certain feelings. [...] Clumsy manipulation reveals a certain unearned arrogance, even contempt; look how easy it was for me to trick you, how vulnerable you are to control. This episode is more about empathy, and that ending — that uncompromising, agonizing ending — has no contempt in it. Just the knowledge that these things happen, and that we have to live with them.
https://tv.avclub.com/futurama-jurassic-bark-crimes-of-the-hot-1798184247
I would imagine Asian culture doesn't help with this at all, where you're expected to build your empire through career and education (the 996 rule where you work 9am-9pm 6 days a week, as Jack Ma would put it) while suppressing the rest.
I'm also surprised something like this hasn't come out of Japan already, but then again Japan doesn't have as large of a gender imbalance as China does due to the One Child Policy.
On an unrelated note, this also reminds me of the Futurama episode where people start downloading celebrity personalities into robots, and a sex education video scared teens into saying that "robo-sexual" relationships were shunned and did not advance the human race.
> People act like "doctor knows best; don't question their wisdom; they have their secret sources of information and you need not concern yourself with that"... yet I as a patient would like to know about all the options on the table available to me so I can do my own research.
[edit] Nobody's making the case this information should be secret, just that it shouldn't be delivered directly to your face during episodes of Futurama. If you want to know what your options are by all means, pick up the pharmacopoeia.
I made this argument recently -- in Canada, DTC advertising of prescription drugs is illegal, too. Has been for years. There's a reason physicians go through years and years of medical training, and its not least to be able to identify and manage side-effects, drug interactions and perform appropriate diagnostics. You spending 30 seconds watching an ad are not ready to self-prescribe Skyrizi or Oxycontin.
Doing it wrong could lead to death, dependency, or in the case of self-prescribing antibiotics, community issues in the form of antibiotic resistance.
This is something you need to have a minimum basis of knowledge to interpret and understand, and pharma companies are taking advantage of a knowledge gap to push drugs circumventing the professionals. It's people who know more than you taking advantage of the fact you don't to make a buck.
The same argument could be made of drivers licenses, right? Well I know how to drive, so what business does a cop have telling me I need a license or to go to traffic school? The answer is simple: you can harm yourself or others if you don't know what you're doing, and the decision is made at the population level.
Plus we're dreadful at self-administering medicine. 75% of American adults take some form of multivitamin or supplement. Most supplements are useless or harmful [1] and multivitamins are associated with an increase in all-cause mortality [2,3].
Let's leave the medicine to the medical professionals, yeah?
[1] https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-oil-scientific-evidence-for-nutritional-supplements-vizsweet/
[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/1105957
[3] https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/152/2/149/87699
Sorry, I mean Slate Star Codex's point 5 addresses your point 2. I communicated that poorly.
Incidentally a nice (rather amusing) example from pop culture of the "landfills are filling up and we'll soon drown in trash" meme is Futurama episode 'A Big Piece of Garbage'* (S01E08) It's essentially a parody of that NYC trash barge incident and the movie Armageddon.
In media, ſ (long s) is often used to signify a heightened version of the American colonial and American Revolution periods.
The latter-day Futurama episode "All the Presidents' Heads" uses it as joke a couple times when they time-warp during the American Revolution.
I know the Futurama episode "The Sting" explores this idea.
Just makes me think of that Futurama episode where the robotic wash bucket switches bodies with Amy...
What you want to do reminds me of an episode of Futurama. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL7e05pClKM
This fact is used to great comedic effect in a Futurama episode. (S01E12)
Well, according to the documentary Futurama, we'll have them by the 31st century at least.
Sounds like a really boring, less threatening, version of of a strange quark.
It seems like it would be more likely they'd consume themselves if they're able to consume matter so indiscriminately... The amount of matter inside two or three of them waiting to be digested would be game for any of the other little shits to devour.
It also can be see in an episode of Futurama where Bender multiplies turning all the liquid on earth into booze, and then consuming it all. Which is probably about as close to real as this idea will ever be...
Oh, Futurama had an episode about something like this [0]
Eventually the clones turn all the water in the world to alcohol!
[0] https://theinfosphere.org/Benderama
Probably inspired the ending to a classic, sappy Futurama episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Bark
That sounds very much like the plot of the first episode of Futurama.
I’ve seen this Futurama episode...
IMHO, the problem with Netflix is: 1. Too few shows that I actually want to watch: The office, Futurama etc are no longer on Netflix 2. The original content is very hit and miss, and mostly misses. By the time I find out about a series and start watching, they cancel it. They need to realize that it takes time for people to find out about series and at times it can take two to three years. You can do agile dev with content 3. Binging one or two series is fine, but there is very little "weekly programming".Sometimes, I just want to catch one episode of something a week 4. The movie catalog is abysmal, with the exception of the Monty Python stuff 5. The UI is just actively hostile. Let me set my defaults across all shows (no intro, thirty seconds between shows etc)
- Avoid all screens / blue light at least a half hour before bedtime
- No phones in the bedroom
- Eliminate light sources in the bedroom.. blackout curtains help a lot.
- No coffee after 2pm
- Lessen your daily stress as much as possible. (everyone is different so this is tough to generalize)
.. one thing that also really seems to help is listening to something while falling asleep. especially, and probably most importantly, something that you've already listened to many times before.
i'm a very light sleeper, and i thought this would never work for me, but it totally does.
I know friends that fall asleep with episodes of futurama or the office playing in the background. I usually choose foreign language audio books that I've listened to many times.
The listening takes your mind off whatever is keeping you awake, and the fact that you've listened to it many times before keeps you from needing to pay active attention.
These days I don't even set my audible sleep timer for more than 15 minutes.
- Last tip is to make sure you have a routine. If you're not going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, it's difficult to develop a rhythm that your body will adjust to.
For me it's the difference between connected smart and autonomously smart.
An example might be something like Google Glass and how augmented reality is being considered as a product offering. All of the scenarios are along the lines of "And you will be able to spot your Uber from a distance whilst getting discreet notifications from your contacts" which are inherently all connected services, offering data enrichment to third parties with a side effect of some convenience to you.
Compared to an augmented reality story that if it were fully autonomous and independent would require an abundance of sensors and near real-time processing such that it could do things like edge highlight for the sight impaired, colour correction for those impairments, or as enhancements of human capabilities like being able to see in parts of the spectrum not visible to the human eye.
The obsession with connected and data is leading to the Futurama episode where they connect to the internet and fight through adverts and it is firmly dystopian, whereas autonomy could lead us towards Geordi La Forge's visor.
And I'm already thinking how in the UK the Hive API went down a few weeks ago and resulted in no-one being able to adjust their thermostat.
I agree with your argument and I highly suggest Brenden O'neils argument on offensiveness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA
At one time, advocating for gay rights or saying god doesn't exist was considered offensive. Only two decades ago, major television networks wouldn't allow jokes critical of Christianity to remain advertiser friendly. A recent episode of The Simpsons had Jesus beating Homer with a sign that said "Love" (standards and practices from 20 years ago wouldn't allow 'Jesus' to even be said in a comedy, which is why "Great Zombie Jesus" was cut out in later edits of the Futurama episode Atlanta).
It is offensive speech that has lead to civil rights, gay rights and independence from autocracy. What is and isn't offensive tends to change over time.
Good episode of Futurama, Season 1, Episode 8:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Big_Piece_of_Garbage
* Futurama - S01E06 - Didn't you have ads in the 20th century? - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g
Leela: "Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?"
Fry: "Well sure, but not in our dreams! Only on tv and radio...and in magazines...and movies. And at ball games, on buses, and milk cartons, and t-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky. But not in dreams! No sirree."
Reminds me of an episode of Futurama.
https://theinfosphere.org/The_Futurama_Holiday_Spectacular#Act_I:_Xmas
I'm so grateful for the parent commenter who looked at the VoxEU source, because it helped put things into perspective.
A 5% earning increase isn't too surprising, given that the land claims and other investments are still respected today. It's a bit like Fry's bank account on that early Futurama episode. Those 600 years were a battle between compounding interest and regional turmoil/uncertainty. It's pretty cool that the holdings still have a legacy while not stifling all social mobility.
I can't find the clip at the moment, but I recall a Futurama episode where the professor finally unlocks the last secret of the universe and gets really depressed that there is nothing else to do.
Fortunately, he realizes nobody knows why the universe has a limited number of things to discover...
This is lampshaded in the Futurama episode "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings", when Robot Devil complains about Fry's opera, saying that "you cannot make your characters just say how they feel. That sloppy writing makes me so angry!" (Quoting from memory.)
It started out pretty weak, but I think it's fair to admit it got a lot better by the last 3 episodes or so when it got a little more invested in the characters.
But the real test has been the fact that I haven't bothered to watch it again. I'd rather watch "The Simpsons" or "Futurama" for the N plus 1th time.
This is a really interesting point.
I think there's some truth to the claim that Family Guy cut in on the "cartoon family relationships" and "cartoon family slapstick" markets, but I'd never quite grasped why the attempt to branch out failed so badly. Now that you point it out, Family Guy even did politics and current events (or at least picked at South Park's scraps), but it never really went in for the sort of quieter, knowing satire you see in The Onion.
That was something the Simpsons had gotten huge acclaim for (e.g. "Marge Vs The Monorail", "Last Exit to Springfield"), so it was an obvious place to look for a niche. But that's also really hard to maintain. The Onion itself has always had a lot of mediocre content, but that doesn't need to animate it's content and doesn't ask you to stare at one bit for 30 minutes straight. Heck, SNL has one of the best comedy writing teams anywhere and it has some seriously weak moments that need to be offset with celebrity guests, music, and rapid sketch changes.
The other thing that strikes me is that the near-realism of the Simpsons constrains the satire. Futurama's take on the 'eyePod' was hilarious, but the reason it worked so much better than the 'myPod' was that the sci-fi setting let them take the topic ludicrously far. "You Only Move Twice" (the supervillain Simpson's episode) was excellent and arguably satire, but it was also at the upper edge of how wacky the Simpson's universe ever gets. By Season Eight or so, it feels like The Simpsons had done a first-rate episode on almost every piece of small-town and nuclear-family life worth parodying, and couldn't break out of their constrained focus or their realistic setting far enough to find new fertile ground. Meanwhile, Futurama got to play around with Nixon and Mom's Friendly Robots and alien invaders and anything else that came to mind - plus with no one else in the sci-fi cartoon space they could save the satire for when they had something excellent to do.
I have the opposite experience. I find the Comedy Central reboot episodes, for the most part, to feel strange and 'off'. I can't even put my finger on it. Even the animation seems wonky to me.
Eh, to be honest, the movies weren't great, either. Seasons 1-4 really were kind of 'Futurama's run, I guess.
I think it's because South Park has always been a vehicle to comment, usually specifically, on current events and popular culture. The world of South Park is really a sandbox for Trey and Matt to caricature whatever they're choosing to ream on that particular week.
The Simpsons, Futurama, when they address these kinds of issues, they feel like they're 'reaching' for it. Or, worse, just 'not trying'.
Someone else here mentioned The Simpsons, and the Family Guy, were much better at the time that they focused on the struggles of the families themselves.
I believe that this is because unlike South Park, where, even from the name, the town itself seems to be the focus. Which allows it to be moreso whatever they want it to be.
'The Simpsons' and the 'Family Guy', are meant to satirize, or at least revolve around, the daily struggles of the 'American Middle Class Family'.
When they don't, and they reach for 'current' events, which often usually feel dated by the episode release due to the extended 6-9 month production period, they seem stale and unfunny. South Park's 6-day production period, awesomely described in the fantastic documentary 'Six Days to Air', allows South Park to comment literally on things that happened the day before. It's incredibly hard to make that feel 'stale.' Really, worst-case scenario, South Park just doesn't seem 'funny' enough sometimes (this season hasn't been great), but definitely never 'irrelevant'.
The early seasons and episodes of the Simpsons are timeless. Many of them could've happened any time over the last three or four decades.
• 'Homer's Enemy' (S08E23) - A new employee at work gets jealous of Homer's 'easy' life.
• 'Mr. Plow' (S04E09) - Hijinks occur when Homer and Barney start competing snow removal businesses.
• 'Homer the Heretic' (S04E03) - Homer decides he doesn't need to attend church any more, and Marge doesn't like the example that demonstrates for the kids.
• 'You Only Move Twice' (S08E02) - Homer is offered a new work opportunity in a 'perfect' town. This episode does involve satire, but James Bond is such an old trope, and the films are still coming out, therefore it doesn't seem 'stale'.
None of these classic and fan favourite episodes rely on tropes of the era. They're still as funny today as when they were released. (Especially 'You Only Move Twice'. What a gem. Oh, Scorpio.)
Futurama, as well, does best when it focuses on it's sci-fi premise. It's supposed to be the future. We don't need comments about Apple products in there, we want the mind-bending 'Rick and Morty'-level plots of 'Roswell that Ends Well', or the genuine moments of emotion like Fry's dog at the end of 'Jurassic Bark'.
Again, it seems like early seasons of these cartoon sitcoms have a habit of sticking to their initial premise, and maybe perhaps the creator's visions. There's tons of reasons for this, but in 'The Simpsons' case, the death of Phil Hartman in 1998 drastically affected the show as a whole. I think a lot of the spirit was lost along with him. RIP, Troy McClure.
> Classic Simpsons would occasionally get a bit satirical or referential (like when Bush Sr made a guest appearance), but modern Simpsons seems more satirical than not. Episodes like the one featuring the "MyPod" with "Steve Mobs" basically had my eyes rolling into the back of my head. That's such low-hanging fruit that they're picking it up off the ground. It's not even good enough to be considered sophomoric.
And the Futurama take on this was just as bad (and I love Futurama). IMO, South Park is the best at doing this kind of satire... I can't point to exactly why, though. Being on cable allows them to push edgier jokes, but I'm sure it's more than that.
I wonder how much of that was a format issue, though?
The Futurama movies were definitely weaker than the episodes, but I remember the Comedy Central revival being better than most or all of the movies. Maybe not up to their Season Four heights, but definitely enough better to make me think the movie style was causing them problems in either writing or editing.
Futurama got cancelled and they made 3 straight to DVD movies which was supposed to be 26 episodes worth of content, and IIRC you could see it, each "movie" had 4 stories. The bad thing was, the humor got so so bad, with predictable lame one liners (Big Bang Theory-level lame). I wonder what sort of groupthink thought those jokes were funny, and what sort of dynamics the early Simpsons/Futurama writers group had to be able to output high quality humor...
That reminds me of the first episode of Futurama. Leela is talking to her boss and on the wall is the poster of the sad hardhat guy with the slogan: Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
3000 years in the future and it's still pretty much the same.
Reminds me of this Futurama scene:
[Fry and Leela after Fry had an advertisement in his dream]
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
If this technology gets refined, this might even be a reality in what, 50 years?
Reminds me of Futurama's commentary on "Ads in the 20th century": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g
"Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky." (And that was in 1999. The 2018 version would have to be extended: "And in our email, and in the Windows start menu, and in our phones, and on shopping carts and subway turnstiles, and maps, and video games, and in photo albums, and even inside of other ads. And the ads watched you as much as you watched them. But not our dreams.")
It's counterintuitive but a pretty well-known phenomenon. The finest cartoons provide a unique window into some aspect of human culture. The Simpsons, Futurama, King of the Hill—they all were entertaining, but the best episodes talked about something serious under the guise of humor. Science fiction is the same way. Star Trek isn't about aliens; it's about us.
Futurama had an episode with endless dichotomic debates where anti-evolution would require proofs of smaller and smaller genetic gaps.
I've been trying to go to sleep earlier for a little over a week now (I used to sleep at about 3AM-5AMish and now I'm sleeping at about 9:30PM-10:3PM0ish now). My sleep plan is turn off all the lights, open up my laptop about 30 minutes before I try and sleep and watch an episode or two of futurama on 1.23x speed. I've been getting to sleep every night since on my target time despite being on an Adderall prescription. Futurama really helps for some reason. I'm trying to build it up to the point where I don't need to watch any show to get to sleep early, but I'm not quite at that point yet.
Looks like some TypeScript around hyperd and docker:
https://github.com/codius/codiusd
So who wants to let others host some arbitrary code execution Docker containers in their datacenter for some crypto currency?
I think back to the episode of Futurama where they go fishing in the middle of the ocean, and Bender asks if they're in international water. Then he radios a boat that comes picks up a package from him and he says, "Guess what you guys are now accessories to."
Man, this is literally my Plex library. <15 shows that I ever enjoy watching (ATHF, Mr Robot, The Wire, Sopranos, GoT, Squidbillies, House, King of the Hill, Silicon Valley, Buffy, Futurama to be exact.) They still take up a full 1.5TB because I like to get the highest quality rips possible.
Some shows like House I have edited personally to create 'binge versions,' with the intro and outro cut out, with only special episodes that have special endings or intros included. Saves a good chunk of time with House and The Wire when I rewatch them. I wish a lot of other people did this as well. Instead groups stick to following scene rules that leave us with ugly formats, poor management and naming schemes and more. They were created for a different era.
Maybe I'll try to put it out there.
but you, like me (with the exception of super hero movies... my guilty pleasure. They've taken the place of Star Wars) are probably old (Futurama was a tip off). And by the very definition of old, not the future. To quote Invader Zimm, "Go die now." =)
I guess I just hope both Netflix and Hollywood step up their game, I'm pretty bored with both of them. I don't really care about super heroes, or watch kids dancing, or another stupid Adam Sandler movie. But I burn through the handful of Netflix shows I really like in a day or two, and then spend months in between them hoping they bring Futurama back.
> "Looting" of companies by their management is starting to look like an increasing problem.
I think it's been a problem since the 80's. When I look at management pay issues and corporate raiding that was the era Buffett began talking about it if I remember correctly. Futurama even made fun of it indirectly in an episode.
I actually have a "whitelist" in advance of things that I'm allowed to procrastinate on. HN is on the whitelist, as well as Indie Hackers and Twitter (my Twitter is more a chore than entertainment).
Other things were calming games like Transport Giant, Stardew Valley, Recettear. Some TV series too, mostly cartoons like Futurama and Adventure Time. Don't do Rick & Morty, too addictive.
That way, even when I'm wasting time, I feel somewhat satisfied with the entertainment I get. A lot of entertainment doesn't actually raise your "fun" bar, YouTube being one of them.
The argument against this article reminds me of the notoriously tear-jerking Futurama episode in which Fry tells his dog to wait outside the building for a moment. Fry accidentally cryogenically freezes himself while in the building and wakes up in the future, but his dog had waited there for his owner for the rest of his life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XECQApj9IJs
I do and I'm far from a videophile, but I do have a nice big TV that I sit rather close too. It's a nice to have, but at times it's a really nice to have, especially for things like blockbuster movies.
Two other areas I find it really critical are sports (not a favorite topic around these parts), watching the silky smooth world cup stream in 1080p a few years was breathtaking, another one is animated shows. It seems unintuitive and I have no idea why, but something like futurama is much better in 1080p.
Somewhere between Armin Tamzarian, the first season of South Park, the first season of Futurama, and the first season of Family Guy.
The Silver Age ended when The Simpson's Movie came out. Almost no animated series survives the first movie intact.
I find certain familiar TV shows playing at moderate volume can greatly help my own problems getting to sleep. For me it's Futurama, 30 Rock, Star Trek: TNG, and Good Eats. All things I can consistently enjoy watching over and over, with a minimal amount of high dynamic range (i.e. no shouting), and things that don't surprise or grab attention. Sleeping with a partner that has trouble getting to sleep at all with something on has made things a little more difficult.
That's step one, step two is getting to sleep at the same time every night, taking care to _not_ stay up into the early hours or sleep in, and general human maintenance. It's still not perfect, or sometimes even very good, and I'm afraid it'll always take care unless I make lifestyle choices that make me always tired.
I understood your joke. I was making a reference to a famous episode if Futurama.
I can't bring myself to clickbait genuine science and math.
> This is called the first Futamura projection.
I read that as "Futurama" at first and was confused trying to figure out how that TV show was related to interpreters and compilers.
Reminds me of the Futurama episode where Fry purchases 100 cups of coffee and momentarily has super human hummingbird-esq abilities.
Ok Google, show me Futurama from Netflix on living room. Ok Google, fast forward 27 seconds.
As soon as they get the ability to play specific episodes (it knows what you're asking, it just can't do it yet) and hook it up to the knowledge graph? Ok Google, show me the Futurama episode where Hermes loses his job on living room.
This reminds me of the Robosexuality episode of Futurama: http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Robosexuality
It seems like these sex dolls are basically the (extremely primitive) precursor to the sex robots that are likely in the future.
You can extend this logic indefinitely. From the Futurama episode I Dated A Robot:
> All civilization was just an effort to impress the opposite sex.
I suspect it's meant to be a reference to a Futurama episode and meant to denigrate Apple somehow?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GklO9RIj0JA
Plex has shuffle functionality. Go to Futurama, hit shuffle, and it'll play for days without touching it. Even if you want them to play in order, if you hit play on the show or season instead of a specific episode, they'll play automatically after each other. No stopping every 22 minutes.
What I want that Plex doesn't already to is to be able to define TV-like channels.
I have 6 Resident Evil movies or 100 episodes of Futurama and I want them to play in a loop on their respective channels, and when I tune in whichever one happens to be "on" is what I watch, even though it's the middle of an episode/movie. DVR-like functionality where I could "rewind" back to the start of a 30-minute buffer would be good. Pandora-like skipping would be good. But those features wouldn't be essential, compared to creating the programming grid.
I still want what Plex does and what Streama does, to navigate to a specific movie or episode and start it manually. Sometimes I watch media because I want to watch one specific thing. But often I just want my favorite media on in the background while I work or do other things. I don't want to navigate through a library of 200+ titles to pick just the right one or a pseudo-"random" one.
Is there anything that would let me do this?
Futurama had a fun episode that dealt with this.
https://theinfosphere.org/2-D_Blacktop
For those that don't recognise this, it's an ASCII quote based on an animation/scene from a Futurama episode entitled "My Three Suns"
http://www.tv.com/shows/futurama/my-three-suns-1540/
The planet in this episode is surrounded by three Suns, each of which has a different hue, and the play is similar to the astrological signs that exist here on Earth.
(And I for one appreciated the ASCII animation attempt)
David X. Cohen, the Futurama executive producer who also holds an MS in computer science from UC Berkeley, wrote an episode called "The Why of Fry." It involved some time travel, which I always think of as self-referential.
South Park definitely set a precedent. There was also a very active community of sharing MPEG1 recordings of Futurama in the warez 'scene' from the very first episode which aired in March 1999.
Isn't there a Futurama episode about this? Did my brain mis-fire or did I read this and think "The Finglonger" for a reason?
The saddest futurama episode ever.
Only seen it once, it made me feel too depressed.
bravo good sir :)
I need to go back and screen which of futurama episodes are ok-enough for a 9 year old...
Futurama has noted the rising academic bar. From Season 1, Episode 11, "Mars University":
Fry: Good old Coney Island College! Go, Whitefish!
Leela: Don't take this the wrong way, Fry, but you don't seem like the educated type.
Fry: Oh, yeah? [He takes a piece of paper out of his pocket with "Notice of Failure to Graduate" written on it. The CICC logo is a Ferris wheel.] Read it and weep. I'm a certified college dropout.
Leela: Please! Everyone knows 20th century colleges were basically expensive daycare centres.
Farnsworth: That's true. By current academic standards, you're merely a high school dropout.
Fry: What? That's not fair. I deserve the same respect any other college dropout gets. By God, I'm gonna enroll here at Mars University and drop out all over again!
Leela: You won't last two weeks.
Fry: Aww, thanks for believing in me.
http://theinfosphere.org/Transcript:Mars_University
Futurama and the Simpsons are really the main shows this applies to, as in both the opening credits have been made to be a feature of the episode.
Simpsons have of course taken it far more extreme than Futurama, by making the sofa gag into an at time extremely elaborate part of the show.
That really only became possible when they decided to auto-play new episodes, which is a bad feature in general. There are quite a few shows with really nice music videos in their ending credits. Shrinking the video to the size of a postage stamp and kicking me into a new episode is a rather annoying.
They also have a terrible habit of skipping the opening credits. The credits are often funny or beautiful. Every time I watch Futurama, I need to start the show and then rewind back to the beginning to see the opening joke. It's like VHS all over again.
Opps. I'm ranting. You know, I never noticed how much the interface annoyed me until I stopped to think about it.
I have this habit of saving articles which takes longer than 2 minutes to read to my Pocket(any other reading app for you) and I go through the list while I commute.
Other than that, I like to watch 20-25min TV Shows ( Older ones like Futurama, or Rick and Morty ) if I don't want to read.
Here in Germany we used a salt mine to dispose of our nuclear waste, which backfired, to say the least. [1]
How big the eventual costs (the article speaks of "at least €4 billion ($5.3 billion), but more likely somewhere between €5 billion and €10 billion") will be is uncertain, and I can't back this up by any real evidence, but my guess is that those who profited from the waste disposal might not be the ones paying for the clean-up.
This all makes me think of the Futurama episode "A Big Piece of Garbage" [2]:
>The others quickly dismiss Leela's concerns that the new garbage ball will return and destroy a future generation. Professor Farnsworth replies that it will not be for hundreds of years, presumably by the year 4000, prompting Fry to say "That's the 20th Century spirit!"
[1]http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-weighs-options-for-handling-nuclear-waste-in-asse-mine-a-884523.html
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Big_Piece_of_Garbage
No. Yes. Yes. No. :)
The meme background of e.g. not sure Fry doesn't substantially detract from the value of an episode of Futurama. The video reposts by various radio stations are exactly the same as the behavior in question.
Anyone remember the futurama episode where they found a huge pile of garbage floating in space launched by earthlings in the 21st century? Of notable items there were loads of AOL discs.
http://theinfosphere.org/Giant_ball_of_garbage
I hope the rest join him. Its a sad show now, with the occasional funny episode that reminds you of how all the episodes were. If all the voice talent left tomorrow they'd have to fold. Heaven forbid, giving it a planned send-off with dignity instead of milking and producing a less quality product year after year until all of its goodwill is gone.
Television, you just don't know when to quit.
Or do something risky like move the show up 20 years to the future they sometimes show where Bart is a divorced dad with two boys and Lisa is married to Milhouse. There's some amusing territory there, especially the Futurama-esque absurdism like when Homer bought the first hover car, which predictably was full of bugs, loud, and just a terrible vehicle.
People won't do this for GoT in particular as the opening changes episode to episode and gives you a preview into the locations that that episode will deal with. A lot of people enjoy the openings and pay attention to them.
I liken it to the Simpsons or Futurama in the sense that things subtly change (e.g. locations which are destroyed in the show, are destroyed in the opening, and such).
If you want a more 'fun' take on it, look at the Futurama episode A Clockwork Origin. The professor litterally 'seeds' a planet and it evolves following the basic evolutionary process of earth.
Compartmentalizing for this really only needs to happen if you are in the group where the Bible/whatever is word for word acurate. If you think it's a guide book and 7 days really isn't seven Earth days but some description of time passing, God "guiding" evolution still makes sense.
"but it's so cute..." /s
Reminds me of a Futurama episode...
But pretty much everytime men introduce new species in an ecosystem,it seems to have dire consequences. Which shows that ecosystems relies on a delicate balance.We often think we're in control of all this,but not really.
Maybe it was a USB Emily Dickenson, or even worse, a USB Slavoj Žižek?
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/gdc-panel-tackling-the-emily-dickinson-license/1100-6120167/
>Will Wright, the creative mastermind behind SimCity and The Sims, spoke last, charming the crowd with a fluid mix of academic design insight and brash humor. "I'm convinced that if she was alive today, she'd be an Internet addict," Wright began. Citing television show Futurama as a key influence, Wright presented his idea for an Emily Dickinson desktop agent. Wright explained that, like a mix between Tamagotchi, the Microsoft Paper Clip, and Seaman, the Dickinson agent would be moody, portable, dependent, somewhat annoying, and observant of all your computer-based actions.
>Wright envisioned that the agent could be sold on USB memory sticks, in order to cleverly "backdoor" the program to unsuspecting customers. "USB Emily," as Wright dubbed the agent, would then interact with the user via IM, e-mail, and pop-up messages. USB Emily might snoop into the user's programs and documents in order to find keywords to comment upon or send poems about. Over time, the user would "slowly bootstrap a relationship with her."
>Referencing some of the emotional problems from which Dickinson suffered, Wright explained, "I want to put the player in the role of her psychotherapist." In one scenario, the player might help USB Emily through her problems and eventually befriend her. But in the two "degenerate cases," USB Emily might either become romantically obsessed with the user (a reference to her often erotic poetry) or fall into a suicidal depression (in which case the program might delete itself).
http://games-beta.slashdot.org/story/05/03/10/1723254/emily-dickinson---the-game
>Will Wright's was the final design up for consideration, and was a truly inspired idea. It included such charts as the one to the left, showing the overlap between Emily Dickinson readers and GTA players.
>Then he put forth his goals. He wanted to have the mood dependency and portability of a Tamagotchi, the helpful/annoyance of Clippy, and the relationship and creepy aspects of seaman.
>What he came up with was USB Emily Dickinson. The game would be a small program bundled with a USB memory drive, which is now a large business and an almost impulse buy. The "Emily" program would sit on the drive, and would occasionally interact with you in order to begin to derive an emotional relationship with you. * These interactions would include Instant Messaging, email, and interruptions while writing. Over time, the program would develop a model of behavior depending on how you'd interacted with it. Will's thought was that, while you could eventually get her to a stable state it was more likely that she'd become romantically obsessed with you, or suicidally depressive. In the latter case, he said, she would have the option of deleting herself off the USB drive.
>To respect the license idea, again, Wright opined that the program could be adapted for any famous figure, and to have many different USB individuals operating on the same computer. If you had enough ports you could even have them interact with each other through natural language generation. Thus, you could slot drives to view a conversation between Marx, Twain, and Homer Simpson. While all of the ideas were stellar, Wright took home the first prize for the second year in a row.
This happens in the pilot episode of Futurama.
There's an episode of Futurama where Fry drinks 100 cups of coffee, and experiences similar hightened sensations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Hundred_Big_Boys
I remember as a kid the sudden collapse. It happened really fast - in season 8 it's a solidly good show, and by season 11 it's unwatchable. I'd always assumed that the best of the team switched gears to work on Futurama (which came out during this period).
For me the final nail was Saddlesore Galactica. At the time I had no idea that there was all this drama between writers and fans in the newsgroups, as I'm sure most fans were similarly unaware. So there's this episode that seems to be deliberately, aggressively bad. That seems to revel in its absurdity and clumsiness. And it delibrately lambasts itself as "worst episode ever". I had no idea that this was some kind of in-joke "gotcha" against the newsgroup - at the time I'd assumed they were just celebrating all their own bad ideas as a gag theme episode.
In hindsight it looks like they tried to mock the "comic book guys" of their fanbase and instead seemed to just prove them right. It's almost a sort of drama-queen meltdown, not something you'd expect from a group of professionals. And following Saddlesore, this new almost deliberately bad flavour of writing became the new normal, so it didn't even stay the "worst episode ever".
Saddlesore Galactica and the following episodes were the shark-jump moment for me.
One could be charitable and take this as a Futurama quote. Zapp Brannigan did say "without further adieu" (episode 1ACV10).
Besides the fact that the creator(s) are clearly geniuses, I think a big part of the awesomeness of the show is that those creators are abstract people. One example was when Finn (the human) suggested that they should pretend to be defeated by a tiny little army of little mushroom people because he pitied them and wanted to give them confidence. To this, Jake (the dog) said something like "no way man, it'll ruin my stats".
Or NEPTR's "You cannot tell, but I am giving a thumbs up." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTTplK3kin8
In other words, the humor/atmosphere is much geekier than what you'd expect to find on a television show. The only other show I remember with this aspect is Futurama, except that Futurama is overt with its jokes, whereas Adventure Time has many shades of subtlety.
This is a great example of how to lie with statistics, or what someone can claim by applying just college-level statistics. Those trend lines are completely worthless.
See the trend lines for Futurama: http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0149460 The difference between all the episodes make having a "trend" very doubtful. Especially season 5 is a wildly varying season where if you take one episode away the line would completely flip.
Much the same can be said for The Next Generation http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0092455 where you have basically clouds where seemingly at random a line is drawn through it.
Yes, I know there are statistical methods for determining trends, but without data on their accuracy they are pretty much worthless. And you really should use a threshold for those accuracies if you're presenting this kind of data to a very wide audience.
|More seriously and with (slightly) less snark, I'm always shocked when I surf the internet at work with no ad-blocker. Pop-ups, irritating garish backgrounds, "content" plastered everywhere, and of course, annoying video ads. Its like a bad episode of Futurama; some horrible dystopian disfigurement of the internet.
As the CPM (money you receive per thousand views of an ad) of internet ads has plummeted over the years, sites are resorting to larger and more annoying ads because they pay better.
|And the other thing that gets me is why don't government/private business install ad-blockers by default?
Ad-blockers are a legal grey area. You are costing the service provider valuable resources without giving back anything in return.
"Facebook says it is taking steps to ensure video ads that appear on its site “are as good as other content people see in their News Feeds.”"
My buttocks randomly bouncing up and down the keyboard could produce better content than most of the stuff I saw on my news feed when I was on facebook, so that's not exactly going to be difficult...
More seriously and with (slightly) less snark, I'm always shocked when I surf the internet at work with no ad-blocker. Pop-ups, irritating garish backgrounds, "content" plastered everywhere, and of course, annoying video ads. Its like a bad episode of Futurama; some horrible dystopian disfigurement of the internet.
I honestly don't know how people put up with it.
And the other thing that gets me is why don't government/private business install ad-blockers by default? For these large corporations or institutions, I imagine a significant percentage of bandwidth is wasted on "content" (and i use that word in its loosest possible sense) no one really wants to access...
Relevant Futurama Quote:
"Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"
"Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree."
If you are an engineering manager, you can see huge gains in team satisfaction and productivity if you are cognizant of issues like this.
My suggestion is to take the time to understand each member of your team, then create various interactions that can foster teamwork, satisfaction, etc. This can include:
+ Lunches or dinners - Going out to a restaurant together can give your team a reprieve from the stresses of work, while strengthening bonds. This tends to work best with extroverts. Dinners work best for singles and lunches work best for people with families (who may have to go home to a spouse and kids).
+ Movies - If there's a movie that most of your team wants to see, treat them. This may give introverts a more comfortable setting, since not everyone likes team lunches & dinners. I sometimes reserved a dark conference room and played episodes of Futurama (or some other TV show my team wanted to watch) during lunch, which worked just as well.
+ Outings, activities - Not everyone may enjoy a particular activity, like a hike or indoor rock climbing gym. But you can offer various activities to your team as opportunities to get to know one another. Don't make those who cannot or do not want to get involved feel ostracized, however. Make these optional events.
+ Code reviews, paired programming, tech talks, hackathons - These exercises not only strengthen the skills of your team, but improve team bonding as well. And chances are, all of your developers want to improve their own skills, so any chance to do that is a good thing.
+ One-on-ones - Sit down with each team member and have a chat with her/him. This is not easy for every engineering manager, as it requires skills in listening, empathy, conflict resolution, etc. The goal here is to truly listen. If something is bothering your developer, chances are you'll be able to pick it up here, giving you a chance to resolve it before it becomes a major issue. I've had developers tell me they felt like these chats were therapy sessions, though I did my best not to make it feel so clinical (in some cases, these chats were over coffee, ping pong, a walk, etc). The point is, listen.
There are many more that I've forgotten and I'm sure you've done (and please do share!)
I never had a problem with attrition by employing tactics like these. And I don't mean to imply that no one on my team had depression - I am not a licensed therapist and make no claims that I can diagnosis this condition. My point is just that engineering managers who actively cultivate a supportive environment may reduce the likelihood of depression and foster greater satisfaction and productivity.
Also try this:
"Futurama holiday" shows one results which has the word "Episode" in the description. Try "Futurama holiday episode" and you get no results.
Why wouldn't I want the people who made a product I like to be compensated? You might argue that the actual creators of the show or whatever get a small percentage of the cost of the box set, but that's more than nothing.
It's funny that you brought up Futurama, which is a show near and dear to my heart. I loved that show when it was on Fox and I bought the box sets for every season after they came out. So did a lot of people. The DVDs sold so well (not to mention that the healthy ratings rebroadcasts were getting on Adult Swim) that they made several direct-to-DVD movies. Those sold so well they made several more seasons of the show.
Futurama is far from the only show to be saved by brisk DVD sales. If counterfeit DVDs were tolerated, if nobody bought the first run of DVDs and the direct-to-DVD movies, the show probably would have died.
(The fact that the latter seasons kinda sucked isn't important...)
The point is, if a content creator makes something I like then I want them to be compensated. Buying counterfeit DVDs costs me money but the buying power of that money does not go towards supporting the stuff I like.
I don't think the current generation of Simpsons writers would be the best group of writers to put this comparison to, but rather to the writers of shows like Futurama (which as I'm sure many devotees will know, consisted of a staff of mathematicians that actually developed proofs for plot continuity and one-offs).
Though, I don't think mathematicians really is the ideal here (hell, I'd even go one further and put magicians ahead of mathematicians). I prefer Conan O'Brien's observation that comedy is most similar to music and how musicians often make good comedians (and why stand-up comedy is inundated with musical comedians http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musical_comedians). Because comedy is about character, point of view, timing and rhythm more than it is about formula.
There are plenty of comedians out in the world that make a living having read their share of formulaic stand-up books, tell their lazy formulaic jokes, get their easy laughs, collect a paycheck and burn out into obscurity or languish in D-List infamy. Or more relevantly, write mediocre episodes of an animated sitcom that stopped being funny 12 seasons ago aimed at a fan-base that watches out of habit.
Mathematics can provide the latter, but the former takes an approach that goes beyond the mathematical. That isn't to say that great mathematics can't produce great material, but like the mathematics of the Eulers, the Pythagorians, the Euclids, The Turings, and so many others, it takes subverting the problem at a slightly different angle.
Could have just been an oversight, there's quite a lot of them in Futurama when you look closely. They often change history to match their own story at the time, like Leela's mother originally had normal arms rather than tentacles in the earlier episodes.
Except Bender's serial number is very clearly stated in "The Lesser of Two Evils" as 2716057. Don't know why the author says otherwise.
See http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Bender (and I just checked the episode myself and confirmed it.)
Since they are including TV shows, how could they have missed Futurama? Episode 6ACV10, "The Prisoner of Benda" involved a machine that could swap the minds of two people. However, it turned out a given pair could only be swapped once. So if A and B swapped, and then wanted to swap back, they could not just use the machine together again. They would need to find some intermediate bodies to swap through--but then those people might no longer all be in the right bodies, and they would need to find some intermediaries, and so on. Thus, the question arose if, given a group of people who have done assorted swaps, is it always possible, with the help of a finite number of volunteers, to get everyone back to their original body and also leave the volunteers in their original bodies? And if so, how many volunteers do you need?
The Harlem Globetrotters are called in to help, and they prove that any group of swapped people can be restored to their bodies with the help of two volunteers. Their proof of this appears on a blackboard in the episode, and it is fact a correct proof.
Furthermore, not only is it correct, it was a new result, proved by Futurama writer Ken Keeler (who has a PhD in mathematics). This is, as far as anyone as been able to determine, the first and only time that a new theorem has been first published as part of a TV show.
Details, including the theorem and proof, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner_of_Benda
The whole concept reminds of the Futurama episode 'I dated a Robot' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Dated_a_Robot)
It satirises this idea rather well.
This reminds me of a Futurama episode: http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/EyePhone
Have you by any chance seen the Futurama episode "A Big Piece Of Garbage"?
A few points:
Onkalo is in Finland, and the storage facility is ONLY for waste from Finnish nuclear plants. It also isn't complete as far as I'm aware. I see that Sweden are also building the same style of storage facility in Östhammar, but I don't see any similar construction going on in the USA, France, UK, Japan etc. It may be happening, but there definitely isn't a lot of press about it. This leads me to agree with the grand-parent's point about honesty. Surely, if this form of storage is actually a solution, everyone would be doing it and advertising loudly that they were.
Secondly, the KBS-3 standard's final step involves storing the waste for 100,000 years! And, according to the Wikipedia article on it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBS-3, linked from the article you provided the URL for) there were some questions raised about the copper capsules used as one of the storage layers, and the fact that the Finnish company building the Onkalo facility (Posiva, owned by the 2 main players in Finnish nuclear plants) seems to be being duplicitous in the way these questions are being dealt with. From the article "independent research conducted in Finland has supported the results of Szakálos's group. However, in public, Posiva dismissed the independent research in Sweden and Finland, referring to its own safety studies."
So, to quote the grandparent comment, "As long as the pro-nuclear crowd circumvents addressing those concerns ... I'll be on the anti-nuclear side."
I'll give a dissenting opinion. I've loved the Comedy Central reboot. The material is quick and snappy in a way that the earlier seasons weren't, packing in rapid-fire jokes. And it still consistently throws in bits of real science and mathematics, like the famous brain-swapping problem and solution. The movies were uneven, but season six hit a new and sustained peak starting with the fourth episode.
I often felt like the earlier seasons got too caught up in their own worldbuilding and forgot the funny. "The Why of Fry" was my personal least favorite, retconning the entire premise of the show and Nibbler's nature, and straining on a single joke of Fry's stupidity for the entire episode. Other low points included the forced Amy-Kif relationship that had little comedy content and less meaning, Leela's retconned family, and any time filled by Zapp Brannigan's one-note attempts at jokes. Futurama can't credibly do gross-out or shock humor in a world where Family Guy cranks it up to eleven every week.
Futurama is best as a joke turbine playing off the future setting, and IMO strains for misguided impact whenever it brings up how Fry's family lost a son. I never bought in to the heartstring-tugging. The characters are too broadly drawn and fantastical to care about, unlike the Simpsons. The Comedy Central seasons seem to have figured this out, realizing that it's too late in the game for any more meaningful character material. Instead, the show has seriously stressed the pacing and density of the comedy, which for me really shines now.
Indeed: I've only watched a couple of episodes, and never got into it. But I was fascinated to read about the "Futurama theorem".
Agree, Futurama's last season was quite unentertaining. Not as funny, and too focused on the emotional stuff, which was more effective being spaced out.
I think that the 'Fausto' episode, finale of the S05, was by far the best ending Futurama had.
I'm as big a fan as anyone, having watched Futurama since day 1. I was lucky enough to randomly bump into Billy West at Comicon 2010 and nervously muttered how much I loved Futurama, and he was especially gracious, saying fans like me were the ones who brought it back.
That being said, I felt that the new episodes never captured the quality of the original run. They tried too hard at tugging at our heart strings and never really felt legitimate, unlike the episodes like "Luck of the Fryish", "Jurassic Bark", etc. I thought the last season was actually bad, and the plots never made any sense, so I guess it was about time for it to end its run.
I hope some company will pick up the whole producing team and will continue series. Even though someone can say quality of "after movies" episodes wasn't as high as "before movies" but it's still the best western world animation there is (considering South Park decline). Also, Futurama's main theme has been my only cellphone ringtone for many years :)
> But if I had to pick one that idea laser-focused itself directly into my brain, it would be from “The Late Philip J. Fry”.
This is the first episode I watched start to finish. I never really got into Futurama from just passively watching it but this episode also stuck in my mind, it was fantastic. Although the author's book may have been used, the influence of the episode was Poul Andreson's Flight to Forever[1].
[1]http://theinfosphere.org/The_Late_Philip_J._Fry
You know, I somewhat think this is because fans distrust the fate of what will happen to futurama. However, if it were picked up by another party which produced smaller amounts and for quality, Futurama could continue forever. (I'm thinking mini-series 4-7 episodes a season).
I think the biggest problem tv-media is the hiatus, the blanks between seasons cause an eraser from the general public. If they good give a consist stream of content, fans would be much more in-tune with it, and less to forget about.
> Wonder what else is up for the next couple of days.
I think the answer to that can be found by watching Futurama episode 64, "The Why of Fry".
I'm reminded of the Futurama episode where Fry drinks 300 cups of coffee, and suddenly the world appears to slow down around him.
When the whole trend of "irony has only one meaning" start? Every dictionary I've looked at includes something like "incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result" (I've got an old Webster's New World from the 40's that gives the example "it was an irony of fate that the fireboat burned and sank, which is exactly the kind of thing that a certain type of person claims is "coincidence, not irony").
Is it all down to that one episode of Futurama?
The idea of Google Glass throws up a few red flags for me...
1) Safety - For some reason thinking about a wireless device strapped in a stationary position on my head brings about heightened concerns of the long term impact of having a electromagnetic field being constantly generated next to my brain... Thinking of horror stories from when cell phones first came out.
2) Safety again - The static position of the glass directly over just one eye makes me think of Steve Martin's downfall in The Jerk. If people are actually wearing these things all the time, I would be concerned with how something that you're constantly having to readjust your focus to see with only one eye may cause a disparity in vision. Of course google could adjust the focus of the glass to be some arbitrary amount of feet out to help with focusing but this seems like it would make for less usable space on that tiny screen and still doesn't address the long term effects of having something statically in the field of vision of only one eye.
Both of these may very well have been exhaustively researched and or studied by Google but I think that with the semi-controversial design of this computer, Google might put an "Is It Safe?" section to their marketing material explaining how they've addressed safety concerns.
Also, in regards to privacy... As some have mentioned the concerns of being video taped while in the presence of wearing Google glass may prompt a lot of businesses/agencies to disallow their use while in their establishment with signs posted on the door. I don't think jewelry stores or banks or other security prone establishments would want people to so easily be able to comprehensively case the joint with almost complete anonymity. Plus fears of an Orwellian future where everybody is watching everybody for some unknown third-party viewer would not be unfounded.
Aside from that, I don't really see the value in Google glass. Perhaps it's just the way they've marketed it.... but it just looks like a cell phone that's been moved to your eye. I really don't need to start seeing POV films of people eating dinner or highlights from a drunken night out. The glass does not seem to offer much more usability than a smartphone and some duct tape for POV filming. Not to mention that I believe Mom may have already patented this idea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaHUpWuqNHY (Futurama)
Is this the forward time machine episode??
I love futurama more than any man could love any tv show.
I just registered, selected some shows then on the home page all 6 episodes of futurama are marked as "watched". why?
also: is it possible to delete my account?
The following probably won't see the light of day-- few of my posts here seem to, for whatever reason. And it's not a lengthy diatribe on reasons for living or reasons for suicide. Much smarter men than I have written on that subject, both recently and throughout recorded history. If it's in such words you find your personal solace, please disregard what I have to say. I never found any solace in it, though; I don't believe in Epiphany Theory.
Currently 24, I've dealt with depression and suicidal thoughts on and off for 4 or 5 years now. That heavy depression where you don't take care of yourself, don't shower, don't brush your teeth, you eat just enough to stay alive (I once subsisted on 2-liters of Mountain Dew and 99-cent bags of Utz cheese puffs for weeks-- dropped my deuces like a wood-chipper). You avoid going to sleep because after 31 episodes of Futurama, all you can think to do is watch a 32nd. You avoid waking up because you don't want to...be alive.
You shut yourself in, you stop going to class, you don't answer anyone's phone calls, you cut yourself off from the outside. You set yourself up to make it as easy as possible. How can your parents miss you if you haven't talked to them in weeks? If anything, you tell yourself, the fact that their calls have gone from hourly to daily to weekly is a sign that they've almost let go...can't let them in now, or it'll be too hard for them when you're gone. Emotionally hard, anyway. Really, they'll be better off with me out of the picture. Everyone will. I'm doing everyone a favor--Mom, Dad, my brother and sister, my friends who obviously just pity me, everyone.
That was me 3 years ago. Today I'm happy! :) I'm fine. I'm doing awesome. I don't attribute the turnaround to blog posts, I attribute it to taking my goddamn anxiety medication. Consistently. Every freaking day. If you forget, fine, but take it the next day, and the day after, and keep freaking taking it. It helps. Take your meds, everybody. Give it a shot for a couple months and see if things change. If you still feel down, go back to your psych and tell them, and they'll prescribe something else. Epiphanies always feel like the answer, and meds feel like the enemy, but do everyone who loves you a favor and give them a shot. Please.
I mean more like "People who pirate your show also pirate Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy, but of the people who pirate Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy, there's more pirating of Futurama than your show." or "Though you think your show appeals to Friends fans, the people who pirate your show tend to pirate 2 Broke Girls more significantly than they pirate Friends."
Even more interesting to me are the surprising highly trafficked music and movies that are long out of print. Might be a good indicator of when to bring them back, and what fora to announce that in.
Oh boy, that almost sounds like a real-life Futurama episode in the making.
I have 400 laserdiscs and 700 DVD cases (some are TV shows with multiple discs or films and their sequels). I stopped buying DVDs many years ago, but then again Netflix hasn't been acquiring recent films either - one example article http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/02/02/netflixs-lousy-selection-of-movies/
I also haven't had TV service since 2003 and don't torrent or similar - all my viewing has been by buying DVDs, seeing things at the cinema/on planes etc or on Hulu.
And once I did sign up for Netflix I did catch up TV shows (eg the new series of Futurama). Out of your examples I already own BSG on DVD. The others don't really interest me as I'm not a particular big fan of them. (I'm British and have lived in the US for over a decade, but my tastes don't really go for the things you list.)
To be clear there is a heck of a lot of stuff I did want to watch. When I first signed up for Netflix I spent several weeks typing things into their search engine only to get responses along the lines of available for mail order only, or doesn't exist. Following recommendations etc did mean I ended up with a queue, but it is mediocre stuff. So I gave up and read more books instead.
Two random content examples for you. Try to find "Northern Exposure" (TV series) or marvel at how Netflix thinks Keanu Reeves has only ever done 6 films.
I would not be hirable there. I have had the misfortune of only working at jobs where there has been (1) a lot to do, (2) much of it very interesting, and (3) the quicker it gets done the better. Trying to throw in any significant open source work on top of this would push me past the burnout point.
When I get off work, I sit down on the couch, put on something relaxing on the TV (Science channel, Discovery, History, Nat Geo, etc. or a sitcom or Futurama, Simpsons, or South Park), and then pull out a math textbook or a theoretical CS book or an interesting research paper, and work on expanding my theoretical knowledge. I've also added a lot of Udacity and Coursera to the mix.
(I assume it goes without saying that I also waste a vast amount of time on Reddit and HN...)
Black hole version of inception! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/
Actually, this is much to complicated for my feeble mind. I am sticking with the "Parallel Universe Box" from the Futurama series (http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Parallel_Universe_Box). It makes my head hurt less.
"I imagine that even if a hyper-advanced Evil Empire wanted to vaporize a planet completely, it would be more efficient to push it off its orbit and into the sun than it would be to build a steel planet with a massive energy beam. And that's still ignoring all the other problems physics has in store for a planet-sized object that can be steered through space, enters other solar systems, and gets close enough to a planet to blow it up."
That would make for a particularly funny episode of Futurama. I could see some race destroying planetary systems using big planets and gravity to sling other planets into their suns. And only the Planet Express crew could stop them --- and maybe Zapp. <Kiff sigh />
"three-dimensional warfare (not even thinking about the wormhole at this point) in space?"
... well... if you take Star Trek seriously, for some mysterious reason, space battle in their universe isn't actually 3 dimensional. At best it's 2.5, taking place on a two-dimensional plane with a few hundred meters of play in the third. Also, everything takes place at what would, even with modern military hardware, be considered point-blank range. Not only is Star Trek combat modeled on naval warfare, it's modeled on 17th century naval warfare.
To your next paragraph, I would point out that we are following the elite of the elite. Sisko is the officer, out of all the presumably billions-if-not-trillions of people in the Federation, who is considered most suitable to be in charge of an incredibly strategic station. Odds are he's not a typical sample of humanity, nor any other officers there. I suspect our best officers today similarly do not "waste" much time either.
Otherwise... I'm a big fan of taking canon "seriously" and trying to work out how it could actually be working. I particularly enjoy playing this game with Futurama, something you're not "supposed" to do that with. But having spent some time on Star Trek, I find it's really, really hard to square the stated philosophy of the Federation with what seems to be the reality of the Federation. It just doesn't make sense. Even such old chestnuts like "Why did the Enterprise actually carry families?" are old chestnuts precisely because it really, honestly doesn't make sense. Starships are blowing up all the time in Star Trek, usually not even due to hostile action (or at least, conventional hostile military action). And I just find that in the end, there's no practical way to actually put together the pieces into anything like a coherent whole.
Almost as if Star Trek was written over the course of decades by dozens upon dozens of writers mostly focused on how the current episode will turn out.
Don't forget that this was the era when Fox also cancelled Family Guy and Futurama. Both of these series were able to be resurrected due to their DVD sales and syndication numbers. Fox made a lot of mistakes during that time, but were just learning about the secondary sales potential for their shows. I'd like to think that a similar set of shows would be able to stick around longer now. Those shows were able to be resurrected easily because they are animated. Firefly, not so much. But another show (Arrested Development) cancelled by Fox in that era is getting resurrected by Netflix, which while not straight to consumer is more direct than through the studios.
Also, Joss Whedon (and the rest of Hollywood) I think learned a lot about distributing directly to the consumer with Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog. I think that this grand experiment was a good template for future direct-to-consumer productions.
Unfortunately, you still have to deal with the problems of initially funding large movies. I can imagine a system where instead of having dedicated studios, you have smaller one-off production companies. These companies would then be funded VC style by funds that seek to mitigate their risk by diversifying their pool of movies. You could fund a few flops, so long as every now and again an Avatar comes along.
I've been re-reading the Gervais Principle series[0] recently, so I can't help but to construe both the original essay[1] and this response in terms of Sociopath, Clueless and Loser dynamics.
The original essay could also be called "A Loser's Guide To Careers" -- it's a realistic assessment of the options and opportunities offered to most engineers. It recognizes that most readers will be, in the grand scheme of things, on the short end of the stick and will have relatively little to bargain with. Accordingly, it dispenses cold, rational advice for how to best bargain with that limited leverage.
Both the Sociopath and the Loser are realists, it's only that the Loser has little meaningful leverage; he accepts this and so makes the best time-money bargain he can negotiate.
The Clueless, however, is clueless -- he would like to believe he is making a difference by keeping his head down, working hard and following the rules; instead, he is setup to be a mediocre middle manager at best, and a scapegoat at worst. And this essay could best be called "A Clueless Defense." That is not meant to slight any of Jacques technical achievements or prowess. Instead, I apply the term "clueless" here to mean that Jacques is being hopelessly naive. This essay is essentially a celebration of Jacques refusal to accept the situation in which he and other engineers find themselves: a world where those who hold the largest stakes (in any venture we choose to participate in) generally have no clue what value we provide and are incented to reduce our stakes.
(Yes, there are exceptions, even successful ones, and I think I work at one of those. But I don't blindly believe it, and I wouldn't bet my life or my family's future on it.)
I could write a lot more about my feelings on "I am a programmer,": I don't like it. I've already said that I find it naive and I don't want to cause unnecessary offense. Still, I commend Jacques for writing it at all and there's no reason to alienate him in disagreement, because it's an honest expression of his feelings. But I do want to say that, as a worldview, the idea of it being useful for understanding the trajectory of your career... well, I'm reminded of a line from the Futurama episode "Love and Rocket":
"Oh I would dearly love to believe that were true. So I do."
(And also -- the original essay has nothing to do with job titles.)
[0] http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ [1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/
Ahh, haha. I see. I've watched certain movies and shows that I found profound without tripping (surprisingly the most profound thing I've watched is the Futurama episode, Godfellas). I've done many many artistic things, drawing, painting, etc. We built things with legos before. Listened to different kinds of music. Played with animals (I swear my dog could sense something was up... never seen him in such a lovey mode). Once I mixed highlighter fluid with bubbles and created a "universe" on the wall in our basement (no windows, and all black lights at the time). I've done the mundane like play video games (went for an hour in GTA-IV sailing out to sea.. it never ends). Played music alone and with friends (recorded some). I've tried reading books. One time I took a programming quiz because I'd forgotten to and it was due within the hour (extremely hard). One of the most profound things I did was go on a several hour walk through only back alleys with friends and reflected on urban decay. There's more, but thats the best I can think of off the top of my head.
(For anybody curious, this is a reference to an episode of Futurama, which was an homage to the Star Trek episode. In Futurama "V-GINY" is the result of an FCC "v-chip" which was mounted on a space probe coming back to earth to cleanse earth or "inappropriate content". You can read about this, here: http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/V-GINY)
There is an interesting social accountability aspect to working in a coffee shop, for me at least.
I work best with something playing in the background. A movie, some futurama, some always sunny in philadelphia, etc. Or I work best with 30-40 minutes of code code code code followed by a few minutes of playing minecraft, or reddit, or facebook, or something, followed by more coding.
When I'm at "work", in my office, I can't really just zone out and play futurama on one of my monitors. That would be totally inappropriate, and I would probably get called out on it by one of my coworkers.
And if I'm at home, I have the dog wanting to play, or the roomate wanting to go out, or a really awesome stereo begging to be played with, or a garage full of DIY projects...
The coffee shop is right in the butter zone. I would never sit there for 8 hours watching Futurama, but I don't feel bad if I watch a bit of it. The pressure to not look like an idiot is enough to keep me focused, and the freedom to do whatever I want helps keep me relaxed.
It's perfect. This is made better by the fact that my local coffee shop has nice little works-spaces for people to use.
(If you're a Phoenician, the coffee shop I'm talking about is Xtreme Bean in Tempe)
IMO English language gets in the way a lot here.
Teaching my then 4yo the decimal system I dropped in some binary, in a similar way to this class - except for him we called it "robot language". He knew it from watching a few (PG!) episodes of Futurama. Hey, if Bender talks it then it's cool and that's enough to spark some interest.
I try to get him to interpret 12 as "one ten and two ones" or "one ten and two more" and say then they we just call it 12. In the same way 1100 in robot language is "one 8, one 4 and 0 twos and 0 ones".
When I'm president of the world number-names are up for reform!
Actually that's the strange thing. She's learned not only the specific funny quotes but she uses them in situationally-correct instances. When crashing two cars together, "Buckle your sphincters!". When I pull her out of the tub and she can't see because her massive amount if hair is in the way, "My lawyer will hear about this!" When she wants to make us laugh she puts both her claws up in the air and goes for a Zoidberg scuttle.
I've had to defend the fact that I let a three year old watch Futurama many a time. Mostly to people who would rather I show things like Dora (I don't like my kid yelling at the TV) or movies like The Little Mermaid (truly horrific from viewpoint of relationship modeling). Admittedly sometimes my kid walks around quoting Bender "Ass Ass Ass Ass Ass!" and it might one day get sent to the Principle's office but she also admires female star ship captains, recognizes hard work (fry and the holophoner), and naturally distrusts cephalapod doctors. There are a lot more issues I hope she can start to pick up like the value of friendship, that math is awesome and to never be without your doomsday device "for duck huntin'!"
Sorry for the tangent.
Reminds me of an episode from futurama: "Attack of the killer App!"
For some reason it reminds me of this dialog from an episode of Futurama
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
I want to reward the author(s) and encourage them to create more works.
I have purchased all the Futurama movies. A new season of the TV series was then released.
OTOH, the government should not protect flawed business models for 95 years at a time.
You should watch the demo of their product. This is like the future Cory Doctorow spoke about in "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." Augmented Reality overlays business cards, presentations, twitter and facebook feeds, last.fm playlists, and other data around people's faces.
Combine this future with the eyePhone episode of Futurama and pretty soon you have "whuffie" numbers showing up in augmented reality next to people in the real world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom for more details.
Nope. I hate the new Futurama episodes.
I agree. Like everyone else I was really excited when the new series was announced but the jokes and characters feel like they've been written from bullet points on a whiteboard. Bender steals, Amy is sexy, etc.
But what bugs me the most is that South Park already did it. These episodes seem to close with some life lesson the writers feel we need to learn. Even South Park is getting ridiculous with it's preaching and Futurama should just stop trying.
The first couple of episodes in most series are a little weak. I mean, Futurama's already back in pretty good form, especially after the low point that was most of the movies.
While I think this season's not as good as seasons previous, I also think you're being too harsh--and I think the quality of writing is getting better.
The Late Philip J. Fry (the time machine one), as you admitted, was hilarious. They worked in references to piles of classic science fiction movies; the show covered time travel, theories of the nature of time and the universe, paradoxes, and predestination; and the writing was tight and funny. So we seem to agree that one was solid.
A Clockwork Origin, two episodes later, pulled together the panspermia hypothesis, the debate between intelligent design and evolution, the singularity, and clear send-ups to Second Variety and Planet of the Apes.
Proposition Infinity was more a political than a science fiction episode (and we had those in the earlier seasons, too--the garbage sphere, the women's planet, etc.), but I thought did a hilarious send-up of Proposition 8, religious responses to homosexuality, San Francisco gay pride parades, and so on.
And while I agree that episodes from this season are in general more vulgar than average from previous Futurama seasons, I also think you're viewing those seasons through rose-colored glasses. The sex in this episode was no more explicit than Fry and Leela in Tales of Interest, Professor Farnsworth's seduction of Mom in Mother's Day, or half a dozen other episodes, and while I thought the third episode of the season (Attack of the Killer App) was disgusting, I don't honestly think it was more disgusting than Fry and the Slurm Factory, where it's revealed that Slurm is slug poop.
Futurama's always mixed highbrow with lowbrow. I agree they've gotten raunchier, and I think it hurts the humor. But I think writing the whole season off as a loss is extremely unfair.
That is interesting as the only episode I actually liked was the bender and hermes adventure (minus some jokes in the beginning).
I think comedy central has pushed them or they feel the need to be more like comedy centrals raunchier comedies and that just isn't futurama.
The movies were also by far much much better than this new season and they weren't as great as the old episodes which are still fun to watch once in a while, kind of makes me sad but it is also somewhat expected.
While I appreciate the authentic geekiness that infused that episode, the new season of Futurama (and indeed every Futurama production since the last season of the original run) has lost its feel for dialog, most of the spark between the original characters, and its sense of which gags to work into the storyline and how. It's also become much more "blue", and in a much less subtle way (sex was always a subtext of its humor, but was usually handled far more gracefully --- like in the episode where Fry drinks the emperor).
I've been very disappointed by the new season. The only episode I found to be watchable was the one with the time machine.
eyePhone was not a problem in the episode because of context, which is missing from the clip. In the interest of keeping the internet green, let me recycle what I wrote in the reddit discussion of this:
Spoiler alert. This post mentions elements of the episode that are not in the clip, and so could be mild spoilers for those who have not seen the episode.
There's no particular reason to believe Apple had anything to do with this. I'd guess it was initiated either by Comedy Central or by the Futurama producers, for comedic reasons.
One of the themes of the episode was to parody the iPhone, using a phone called the eyePhone. If you watch the episode, you'll note they are careful to make sure than when they introduce the eyePhone, you see the word eyePhone written, so you can tell they are saying "eyePhone", not "iPhone". Then when we see how the eyePhone is used, we see why it is called the eyePhone.
Having the viewer know that it is eyePhone, and it is installed in the eye, is important. It's what makes the difference between a funny parody and a dumb heavy handed commentary.
In the original clip, note that there is no place that the word eyePhone is written, and there's nothing that indicates the phone is installed in the eye. Someone seeing that clip who has NOT seen the episode therefore might think they are saying iPhone, and think its a dumb heavy handed clumsy commentary, and be disinclined to watch the episode.
Hence, they edit the clip to take out that element. Now the clip shows the viewer only things that are understandable and funny without needing context from earlier in the episode. The clip thus has a chance of fulfilling its intended function of getting people to watch the new Futurama episodes.
The story reminds of the Futurama episode where Bender meets god.
I think about this all the time. 2 boys 3 and 6 yrs old. I cringed a bit when I saw the title because it made me think of the term 'alterna-dad' and of a style of parenting in which children become accessories and 'buddies' to their extended adolescent parents. Sport matching mohawks, etc, etc.
But the article was nothing like that. It is short but the feeling I got was of true exploration and of forging a real relationship. (Another HN post of the past few days talked about how you have +/- 10 yrs to connect with yr kid). It also reminded me (as other posters noted) of that SouthPark where they all play WOW and meet Randy in game. Or the classic 'Chinpokemon'. Two really well done episodes - in both cases parents wade through unfamiliar territory to meet their kids and understand them better. Not simply ban the game.
There is danger in letting your chidren do certain things. The impulse to bubblewrap them is strong. I catch my breath everytime they do things like walk with me out on our balcony (17th floor), ride the scooter in the skatepark, climb on the rocks in the park across from our apartment, etc. But I consciously hold myself back - watching them but not rushing in to stop them. This week end my 3 yr old got punched full in the face by a 5 yr old. I held back for a count of 10 to let him deal with it as he wanted to and then comforted him a bit and broght him back so he could feel safe playing around this kid.
The point is to show them experientially that you trust them - and that you are in the background to help them if things get scary. I felt that vibe from this writer and applaud that.
In truth I have no idea of what I am doing. I use my intuition as a guide and hope I am right. What he says about the ESRB is spot on. If - as a parent - you need a school, govt agency or rating agency to tell you what is safe for your kid - then you are screwed. You need to go through it with your child and see for yourself.
You can get good advice from individuals - teachers, other parents, certain writers - but not from agencies and bureacracies.
As a parent dealing with impact of media in general is a challenge. For the past 2 yrs we went off cable tv and started to rely completely on the internet/ public library/ netflix for movies etc. I have held off on getting Wii/ x-box, etc in favor of PC based games. They have both watched tons of anime and comics (particularly stuff like Miyazaki Hayako (sp?) and the Avatar series). They both love Futurama - which might be too adult at times for them. I will have to explain 'death by snoo-snoo' one of these days.
My older son has learned to really enjoy some of the games that an Ubuntu distribution has to offer - things like Wormux, OpenSonic, BattleTanks. He has looked over my sholder as I have played some of the Doom emulations on the android or the Quake-like games on Ubuntu.
From hacker news I found out about the Wolfire free bundle and he fell in love with the Samorost series. He cried when it was done and drew a big picture of what he thought the next episode should be.
More recently on my wife's computer (WinXP) I downloaded Steam and setup the free version of Portal and bought a Tower Defense game to play.
Every time we take the subway or wait somewhere my wife and/or I whip out the gPhone and let the two of them play android games.
We try to limit this to certain times of the week etc. because of the vague fear that media will completely saturate their lives.
It is not the violence alone that gives me pause. I knwo experientially how absorbing a good game is (thinking of days past playing Half-Life or Diablo, etc).
I want them both to enjoy good media and I am loosely overlapping anime, movies and games because I feel like there is power in the imagery of soemthing like Half-Life or Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke" which affects you deeply.
What often pisses me off are crappy movies in which the point is simply to sell a lifestyle. I hate movies like "Shark Tales" or "Madagascar" and I cant say exactly why. There are funny bit parts but the whole thing feels like it is in the service of what the philosopher Adorno referred to as the "Culture Industry". I find those movies more disturbing than somethign with more overt violence.
In a very interesting way I think this goes back to Plato and his fear of 'poetry' by which he included dramatic arts. It was the fear of the power of images. We have reached the point where video games and anime have reached a complexity and depth of imagery that they have a life of their own.
I know myself that these things affect me differently. I am trying to see through my sons' eyes to see how they are affected. At times it feels dangerous - like letting them speed ahead on their little bikes on the city sidewalk - but what this guy is doing is right. Watch them in the background, ready to bolt after them - let them know that you trust them and that you are there to help deal with the scary parts - let them experience it and learn from them as they reflect their experience back to you.
Plato on images: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/
Culture Industry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry
Futurama proposes a different reasoning for the inevitably changing human-robot ratio (I couldn't find a clip of it, so.. use your imagination):
Fry: Well, so what if I love a robot? It's not hurting anybody.
Hermes: My God! He never took middle school hygiene. He never saw the propaganda film.
Farnsworth: It's just lucky I keep a copy in the VCR at all times.
[He presses a button and a film title, I Dated A Robot!, appears on the screen. In the movie a couple sit in a cafe and stare into each other's eyes. A narrator walks into the scene.]
Narrator: [in movie] Ordinary human dating. It's enjoyable and it serves an important purpose. [He turns the table over and a crying baby appears. He turns it back again.] But when a human dates an artificial mate, there is no purpose. Only enjoyment. And that leads to ... tragedy.
[The woman behind him turns into a blank robot and the man downloads a celebrity onto it.]
Billy: [in movie] Neat-o! A Marilyn Monroe-bot!
Monroe-bot: [in movie] Ooh! You're a real dreamboat, (mechanical voice) Billy Everyteen.
Narrator: [in movie] Harmless fun? Let's see what happens next.
[The scene cuts to Billy's bedroom where he kisses the Monroe-bot. His mother walks through the door.]
Billy's Mom: [in movie] Billy, do you want to walk your dog?
Billy: [in movie] No thanks, Mom. I'd rather make out with my Monroe-bot.
[Enter his dad.]
Billy's Dad: [in movie] Billy, do want to get a paper route and earn some extra cash?
Billy: [in movie] No thanks, Dad. I'd rather make out with my Monroe-bot.
[The girl from the cafe, Mavis, walks in.]
Mavis: [in movie] Billy, do you want to come over tonight? We can make out together.
Billy: [in movie] Gee, Mavis, your house is across the street. That's an awfully long way to go for making out.
Narrator: [in movie] Did you notice what went wrong in that scene? Ordinarily, Billy would work hard to make money from his paper route. Then he'd use the money to buy dinner for Mavis, thus earning the slim chance to perform the reproductive act. But in a world where teens can date robots, why should he bother? Why should anyone bother? Let's take a look at Billy's planet a year later. [The scene changes and a foam hand rolls across an empty football field.] Where are all the football stars? [The foam hand drifts across an empty laboratory.] And where are the biochemists? [The scene changes to a split screen of human and robot couples making out on beds.] They're trapped! Trapped in a soft, vice-like grip of robot lips. All civilisation was just an effort to impress the opposite sex ... and sometimes the same sex. Now, let's skip forward 80 years into the future. Where is Billy?
[The scene changes to a post-apocalyptic world. Billy is an aged man but still with his Monroe-bot and still making out with her.]
Billy: [in movie] Farewell!
[He dies.]
Narrator: [in movie] The next day, Billy's planet was destroyed by aliens. [A fleet of flying saucers destroy buildings with laser shots.] Have you guessed the name of Billy's planet? It was Earth. Don't date robots!
[A "Don't Date Robots!" caption appears on the screen and the movie ends. The Space Pope is displayed on the screen with "Crocodylus Pontiflex" written around him in English and alien.]
Announcer: [voice-over; in movie] Brought to you by the Space Pope.
(stolen from http://www.futurama-madhouse.com.ar/scripts/3acv15.shtml )
I am reminded of an episode tagline from Futurama - "Not a Substitute for Human Interaction" (S2E19).
There is a subtle Futurama joke about P=NP in one of their episodes (the size of the books on the shelf):
http://www.mathsci.appstate.edu/~sjg/futurama/futuramatalk10min_files/Slide0002.gif
This is probably great for him, I rarely watch TV anymore, but I still watch a lot of series on DVD and such. However, in the space of 60 minutes, I can (for example) watch 3 episodes of The Simpsons or Futurama, not the 2 I'd get on TV.
I probably still watch the equivalent of about 3 hours of TV a day, just it's compacted into 2 hours. The other hour I can read a book, and a lot of the time I leave shows running on my media server just for some background noise.
I hate radio DJ's, so quite young I picked up the habit of using TV not radio as a tool for background noise. It's probably a bad habit, but I find in residential areas (I grew up in the quiet of the country) I get highly distracted by noises outside.
It is a compelling argument that if you dropped the 3+ hours of TV a day, you could make an extra $10K on minimum wage (here in Canada it would be about $16K on minimum wage). However, this advice might work great for one person, however if everyone in the country suddenly decided to cover 30+ hours a week of extra work, it would probably further collapse the economy. There's not enough jobs to go around the people we have already, if people suddenly double their hours then lots of people would likely loose their job.
That's actually a good question. I watch a limited number of shows, and I wonder if simply buying the DVD's of a program would turn out to be cheaper than actually subscribing.
Edit: I mean I've seen boxsets in BestBuy for as little as $25 and they're shows I watch.
If I had all the series of Simpsons, Futurama, Mythbusters, Family Guy and American Dad I believe from then on I believe I would rather use the monthly subscription fee (about $150 here for all the channels we want; TMN is great to have as they're free of charge for a monthly fee, I get all the recent Stargate and Dexter episodes and most of the big movies not too long after they're out for rental) for buying more boxsets and movie rentals.
I'm not a big fan of capitalism, but if it's OK to borrow money¹ and buy stocks with the hope of profiting on their sale, then it's just as OK to borrow stock and sell it with the hope of profiting when you buy it back again. If there's a problem with short-sellers trash-talking perfectly sound companies, there's at least as much of a problem with investors overhyping unsound companies.
Remember the valentine's episode of Futurama? Bender is selling roses and when he knows that Fry is over a barrel he hikes the price incredibly saying that demand just skyrocketed.
I haven't seen the episode but from your summary it sounds like Bender is doing what economists call "rent-seeking", profiting from his monopoly power (if Bender didn't enjoy any monopoly power then Fry could have just bought roses from someone else). I don't see where Paulson was rent-seeking; he was buying and selling in a market where there were lots of other people going after the same securities.
¹...and of course with our fractional-reserve currency system, in a sense, the vast majority of money is borrowed money.
I don't care that much, but I can see why people might. He didn't create value. Like, when PG creates something, it adds a certain value to society. Even when PG puts money behind a firm like Disqus, he enables value to be added. This guy didn't create any value or enable value creation. He just saw a situation he could take advantage of.
The banks had created value, but not as much as everyone had thought and he took advantage of that. It's part of our system and that's fine and all, but it certainly isn't something I'm going to be all, "that's the way to do it!" He didn't do anything wrong. He played by the rules from what I know.
However, he really took advantage of something in a way that raises moral questions. Remember the valentine's episode of Futurama? Bender is selling roses and when he knows that Fry is over a barrel he hikes the price incredibly saying that demand just skyrocketed. Yeah, it's how our system works and I don't really disagree with your sentiment, but it still leaves me feeling a little gross about him as a person. Capitalism allows you to act without regard for morality so long as it's within the law and that's fair game. Doesn't mean we need to like the people who do act that way.
Somewhat related: They made a WarGames sequel. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0865957/
I don't know of any hacker-related movies specifically, but I'd note a few sci-fi movies that inspired technological creativity: Flubber (the hovering robot), I Robot, Ironman. Also Futurama, in a somewhat different way.
There's a Futurama episode that addresses "Humans dating Robots"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Dated_a_Robot
Thank you. I thought the episode was pretty funny, but I couldn't think of how to explain that to someone so determined to dislike the episode that he had to explain joke-by-joke why he didn't think it was funny.
I'll just add that I particularly enjoyed the 1984 parody. There is a fundamental difference between merely referencing the commercial (as Futurama did) and the irony of recasting Steve Jobs as the giant talking head.
Yech.
The jokes didn't refer at all to the things that make people use Apple. It took the fact that Apple was popular and actually makes good-looking products, and used that as the basis of insults. That's the laziest sort of humor: joking without actually providing criticism.
It starts with the fake names. Mapple and Steve Mobs. myPod and myPhone. These aren't funny. The Simpsons could absolutely just use Apple's name and get away with it, if it's obviously parody. That joke adds nothing, and therefore by the rules of comedy ought to be removed. Anything bad brings down the good things.
Lisa runs into the store and points out Apple products and a parody of the Genius bar, which has never been funny. Apple Geniuses don't let the title go to their head, really. I've dealt with them a lot. They're smart and fun and they know what they're talking about, and they're perfectly willing to admit that Genius is just a bit of silly marketing. So that's another bad joke. Then we see the requisite "Comic Book Guy is sloppy" joke: predictable and not funny. That's the first 20 seconds.
Now we see Homer begging to get a computer. How is that funny? The Brainiac tells him that it's powered by dreams and imagination. I guess that's supposed to be a joke about how Apple is all talk and no play? Because that's not something that Apple's ever done, and they keep getting made fun of for it, and it's a lazy joke. Sample page: http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/. Apple markets its products only by mentioning features. On the splash page alone it mentions four things. If you talk to a genius, they are entirely pragmatic: they tell you exactly why Apple computers are better than other ones. This is another lazy, unfunny joke that only works if you already dislike Apple, which is the easiest audience on the planet.
The joke about a glowing computer being turned off - what the hell does that mean? The Wii glows when it's turned off. My Mac doesn't do anything when it's off. In fact, Apple computers tend to have fewer blinking lights than other computers. So there's another lame joke, and we're 40 seconds done with this shitty set of jokes.
The iPhonies is clever, but it's false. People don't get headphones to pretend like they use Apple products. Nobody does that. Furthermore, a cheap iPod shuffle costs less than a hundred dollars. Apple isn't pretentious and rich. It's high-end, and very rarely makes low-end products, but it's usually got surprisingly reasonable prices. So there's a bad joke based on a false premise that nobody actually believes.
Now we have a lengthy Krusty sequence that's unfunny. Seriously, now The Simpsons is like Family Guy. It makes stupid, irrelevant cameos just to carry the joke along. The difference is that Simpsons cameos are all Simpsons characters, and none of them are funny.
Krusty's comment about small movies: I saw the first season of Lost on my iPod on an airplane, and the screen worked for me. Plus, when you put a movie in your iPod it means you also have it on iTunes, on your computer, so it's a win-win. Apple's been steadily increasing screen size: look at the iPhone and iPod touch. Oh. We also get a tasteless Jewish joke here.
Steve Mobs appears, and people say that he's a genius and knows what they want. I guess this is supposed to be a joke. But from my experience, Jobs comes up with pretty ingenious products and they tend to be ones that I want. How is this funny? I like my computer, my iPod, and the iTunes music store.
Steve Mobs calls himself "insanely great." Jobs, on the other hand, is rarely self-masturbatory like that. So it's another joke that plays to Apple haters with no context. Next comes Bart, who gets to insult people and call Mac user losers. He also says that Jobs is gay. That's not only poorly stereotyped, that's crude and offensive.
People don't get Mac products to look cool. They get them because the Mac is incredibly delightful to use. I love my Macbook. It's an amazing tool. I don't care what people think about it: I care what I think about it. And I love it. I also happen to be straight.
Comic Book Guy reenacts the 1984 commercial, which is nice, but Futurama did it much better. The Simpsons is stealing from its child shows.
Then there's a pointless joke about how Jobs was fired and brought back. Yeah, because Apple culture just hasn't changed since then, and because Apple had the same image in the 80s that it does now. Jobs began the current Apple feel when he returned, and he's introduced good product after good product. The firing joke is a slightly higher-scale stupid joke, but it's a stupid joke.
Earbud-flaying. Not funny. Bart trying to escape with a computer. Not sensible, not funny.
The twins make a "hate Lisa" cameo. Yawn. They don't like her music. Yawn. They like her for her myPod. Kids don't actually... do that. iPods are so incredibly commonplace nowadays. There's a joke to be made about that. It wasn't made.
I love Itchy and Scratchy, but they're out of good ideas for them. And this one was extended way too far. See? Even the not-anti-Apple parts are bad.
The myBill is an outdated joke and it's been fixed. And what's the joke? That Apple charges 99 cents for a song? That's pretty cheap. 1200 dollars for 1212 songs is a good deal. But no: it's funny because Apple products are extremely expensive, right? 1200 dollars is so much! Never mind that buying the same amount of songs, say, as CDs from Wal-Mart would cost much more.
Also, buying songs from iTunes adds itself directly to your credit bill. You're charged instantly. No bill. That's the iPhone's thing.
The USB drive bit is clever. The underwater headquarters? Not so much. It's cliche and stupid. The big joke is that Apple has made the name Cupertino famous as where Apple comes from. There's a joke to be made there. This doesn't make it, because it's funnier to think that Steve Jobs is underwater like every other rich person on The Simpsons.
Steve Jobs is Googling himself! Never mind that Google loads fast and the page jobs is looking for has already loaded, so the delay is only there for the "requisite punch line set-up time" that makes jokes less funny. Or that Jobs has never been an attention-getter. He wears the same outfit every day! He's quietly married and his kids stay out of the news! Again! This is only a joke that's funny if you know nothing about Apple and already hate its products.
Steve Jobs knows all the Apple product users. Not sure why this is unfunny.
"Our real policy is no refunds." Only, Apple does offer refunds, for a long time after purchase. And Lisa bought 1200 songs! Why does she deserve a refund? This is blind Apple-hate without any reasoning.
The final joke enforces this. Lisa's in an iPod costume handing out flyers. Apple doesn't do this. Never has. Its entire thing is rational minimalism. It's why Geniuses aren't given specific tasks and are allowed to just wander the store. It keeps their morale high and helps customers. So this is just a bad joke based on a premise - Apple says think differently but doesn't actually think differently - that doesn't exist. Apple does think differently. So there's another bad joke.
This is terrible writing. It's the worst Simpsons clip I've ever seen. And I'd think that if they were bashing Windows in the same way.
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I love anti-Apple jokes if they're well done. The "Don't Get A Mac" video still cracks me up. I think that most anti-Apple jokes, however, are crude and poorly-done and just attempts to play up to people who hate Macs already. The Simpsons should be better than this.
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Also, this isn't at all relevant hacker news, and it's not that intellectually interesting.
I think the article gets it wrong at the end. Family Guy got resurrected because Cartoon Network's Adult Swim played the old episodes almost every night. This got a lot more of Family Guy's would-be target audience interested in the show. It was that interest that woke Fox up to bring back Family Guy.
The same thing is happening now to Futurama. The formula appears to be to put shows on networks during time slots where their target audience already is and where it doesn't have to compete with unrelated content. Who knew?
Great point... The roles are VERY different:
In film, the voice actor is often used for marketing (ie Jack Black in Panda kung-fu film)
In TV, they tend to really drive the show (Family Guy, Futurama, etc)
In video games, it's a complete non-factor unless you're John Madden.
Futurama! That's counts as a sci-fi show, right? It also has sweet tech, like the smell-o-scope.
Ooh, and Chappelle's Show. That's a great tech show. The Haters is Time have a time machine, and then there was that episode where Chappelle visited the interwebs and punched out the spammer. That was awesome!