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Rick and Morty
2013 · TV series · 9 seasons
Created by Dan Harmon, Justin Roiland
AnimationComedyScience FictionFantasyActionAdventure
Follows a sociopathic genius scientist who drags his inherently timid grandson on adventures across the universe.
50 positive12 negative3 mixed93 neutralfrom 158 commenters
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181 comments on Hacker News
They are not "poorly industrialised", they are the other half of industrialisation. Think of the Rick and Morty episode where they split themselves into good halves and bad halves.
Except it's not really a mechsuit; inasmuch as it is, it's more like an Evangelion: it's got bits of people's souls floating around in there; it only works well with a high synch rate with the user, which is difficult to achieve consistently; and sometimes it pops off and does its own thing anyway.
And the way you achieve and maintain deep knowledge of the shape of the output you want is... well, to write and test it yourself. LLMs are a cognitohazard. If you aren't accustomed to programming without them (or even if you are) it's hard to see the line between using them to remove drudgery and relying on them to think for you.
The Whispering Earring story reminds me of that episode of Rick and Morty in which Morty gets a piece of crystal embedded in his forehead which allows him to perceive the moment of his death; he then begins steering his actions towards the future in which an elderly Jessica (his crush) tells him she loves him as he dies, down to individual articulated phonemes and muscle actions. In the end, it's revealed this future is not what Morty had hoped for.
I think the Rick and Morty episode mathematically proved the futility in trying such an exercise.
Reminds me of "Total Rickall"(Rick and Morty: Season 2, Episode 4) which itself is probably a retelling of a retelling of a retelling of a retelling.
The closest show/cartoon for this I can think of is Rick and Morty Season 7, Episode 10 - "Fear No Mort." In that episode, Morty gets trapped in a fear-based "hole" where he's forced to confront all his deepest anxieties and insecurities. The whole point is that he can't escape by running away or pretending to be someone he's not. He has to face his fears directly and accept his true self, flaws and all. It's only when he does and accepts himself as he actually is, that he's able to break free.
That episode really got to me. Every time the screen goes dark and transitions to Morty realizing he's still trapped in the hole, something inside me freaks out too. It's like the show is forcing me to realize I'm not actually confronting these truths in my own life. I'm probably still in the hole, aren't I?
I don't have kids so I never thought about it from that angle, but I really dislike how yell-y so many modern animated shows are. Couldn't make it through a single episode of Rick and Morty.
I'd never thought how it might impact kids, but now that you mention it, I can only dislike the trend more.
One of my other favorite piece of media is the intro of a Rick and Morty episode parodying the plot of contact. Highly recommended.
Welcome to the future, where the notion of "classics" is just a point in the memetic information manifold:
https://x.com/theo/status/1973167911419412985 (Music video with Sam Altman as Skibidi Toilet)
This is pretty fun.
These keep getting wilder and wilder:
https://x.com/MatthewBerman/status/1973115097339011225 (Kinda gross)
https://x.com/cloud11665/status/1973115723309515092 (Japanese)
It can do cartoons:
https://x.com/venturetwins/status/1973158674899280077 (Rick and Morty)
https://x.com/TheJasonRink/status/1973163915476611314 (Family Guy)
https://x.com/cfryant/status/1973162037305024650 (Family Guy Horror)
Incredibly convincing anime:
https://x.com/fofrAI/status/1973164820863262748
Minecraft meets GTA:
https://x.com/Angaisb_/status/1973160337752121435
Super Mario in the real world:
https://x.com/skirano/status/1973184329619743217
Super solid looking movie trailer:
https://x.com/jasonjoyride/status/1973142061114335447
Damn:
https://x.com/theo/status/1973210960522559746
There’s a good Rick and Morty episode with a similar premise: a crystal that shows how the user will die in the future. Morty uses it mindlessly to guide him to the fate he thinks he wants, but there are some unintended consequences.
https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Crystal
Not that story specifically, but maybe a modern reinterpretation of it was [this episode of Rick and Morty](https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Crystal).
Rick and Morty episode (season 2 episode 6, 'The Ricks Must be Crazy') where it turns out rick has created a whole universe inside his spaceship battery who's whole purpose is to produce energy to run his spaceship. A scientist within this microverse creates a miniverse ....
I'm curious what happens with output. Is it one line per each computer you've connected to or does it get merged until it diverges, kinda like in that Rick and Morty episode with timeline splits?
"Any portrayal of a husband" on TV?
Comedies often have some mockery built in, and comedies aimed at kids in particular like to take shots at authority, but there are a lot of examples I can think of in just the general-TV-millenial-vibe-y things I've watched over the past couple of decades. More than the "bumbling dad" type, I'd say, from things I've seen in the zeitgeist (I guess one recent super typical example is Rick and Morty, though everyone sucks there):
* Arrested Development: Michael is the most competent of the bunch. His father was also quite competent, if an asshole and eventual criminal. But, you know, that put the "sit" in sitcom...
* Luke from Gilmore Girls is pretty consistently more sane than Lorelai, turns out to be a good dad too IIRC; other fathers include a loser and a number of very successful businessmen, teachers, etc.
* King of the Hill: doing his best, often the most sane of the bunch
* Bob's Burgers: haven't watched a ton of this but from what I've seen Bob is a goofball but respectable and wholesome, kinda a Hank Hill. Not a lazy Homer
* Parks and Rec: Ben Wyatt is a pretty positive character
* Brooklyn 99: Terry is practically a superman of competence and seems to hold is own with his wife and kids. Holt is a supremely competent husband. Boyle is a goofball generally and in dating, but that does not really extend to his eventual marriage and child, where he seems to be doing quite well.
* Schitt's Creek: Johnny is the competent center of the family surrounded by comically exaggerated crazy wife + kids
Dramas seem even further away. Where do Breaking Bad or the Sopranos land?
There was another website which let you find movie quotes. You search for quote and it brought up small clip where characters are saying that thing you searched for. Had very similar UI, can't find it. Edit: probably https://clip.cafe/ there are few others too
There is another one which is like a Netflix of subplots extracted from movies. I remember it had lots from Rick and Morty. Because Rick and morty keeps bringing up random subplots never to discuss ever again.
There is another website which is a gif database of awesome shots from movies etc. It's like a reference database of camera work.
Will list when I find these urls.
If I could actually buy movies and TV shows for download I would; I buy all my music as sites like bleep.com allow you to easily buy mp3s, probably thousands of dollars over the years. I've tried buying shows a handful of times before. But I travel a lot and they're geolocked - WTF can't I watch my fully paid for episodes of Rick and Morty on youtube wherever I happen to be?
Since studios have made purchasing impossible, I don't, and I don't give them any money via streaming services either.
There is one exception I can think of: https://www.teamstarkid.com/ They've made their (awesome!) musicals available for purchase, with a true video download. So they've gotten a well-deserved $50 from me.
I'm okay with compatibilist deterministic free will theories like those from dennet or tegmark.
Those say that free will is possible if a being establishes a computationally independent substrate and uses that to compute optimal choices for a self model.
This relative computational independence is the best we can hope for, and I believe the resulting freedom is strong enough to explain our subjective experiences of feeling like we're freely choosing. All we're doing is scoping out our possible actions, and picking one that lines up with our self models. And that matters because it's as free as we can be, and it improves our survival ability beyond than of a being with no protected internal model.
My real concern, if reality is just a bundle of all possible existence states threaded together, is that there might easily exist very scary and unpleasant states of existence, and it might be possible to subjectively encounter those states in a way that is terrifying and causes huge amounts of suffering.
The universe where things happen in different times and for clear physical reasons seems less likely to expose us to terrible irrational cosmic horror, compared to the random bundle of all possible chaotic states.
In the universe I'm proposing you might accidentally create a portal to a sub universe of hellish demonic entities. Those things exist already right now in parallel with you and they want to be where you are, like on a Rick and Morty episode!
I would honestly prefer to be in a less cosmically terrifying and alienating universe, if possible! Perhaps the universe is just very very big, but not a jumbled multiverse where everything is happening all at once.
Could be our universe and timeline is a boltzman universe/boltzman timeline embedded in some large timeless crystalline state space.
That would kinda suck, because we'd be static crystals. But from the subjective perspective of a self aware sub crystal is maybe not so bad. Perhaps reality is malleable and magical.
For instance it might be possible to travel to other universes. From the global view, we have multiple atemporal subjective timelines, with subjective agents popping out of one reality and into another thanks to some crystals and magnets with special geometries. From the subjective view, you have a Rick and Morty episode
Frankly reading this was lovely!
It could make a part of a Rick and Morty episode or similar.
the lava lamp bit reminds me of this episode, which actually did influence my perspective
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ricks_Must_Be_Crazy
> In the episode, Rick and Morty go inside Rick's microverse car battery, an entire verse that generates electricity to power Rick's car, unbeknown to the citizens of the microverse. Zeep Xanflorp, a scientist in the microverse, creates his own microverse, thus stopping the flow of energy to Rick's car.
I hold views in both sides here. I teach computers at an elementary school on Thursdays, and my kids go to that school.
As an educator I see an impact of absences even in this fun class that kids want to go to and there isn’t a grade. We generally have a 1-2 or 1-2-3 approach to teaching something. That is: teach it one week, then review it, then teach or review it again the next.
When someone is out for two weeks they just don’t learn that concept and then later on need specialized attention to be caught up. Or in the case of larger class sizes or multiple kids out the whole class either has to be slowed down or those kids get left behind.
That to me is the bigger problem: absences change the velocity of the class and make it harder for not just the kids that are absent.
On the other hand: I wish school life was more flexible so I could take my kids to more life experiences. Grand parents live an 18 hour drive or an 18 hour flight away. We ski. We travel. And we value school.
I wish there was an easier “if you are out for this week, then here’s a link to the remote curriculum”, but as a teacher, it is the difference between supporting a fully remote office and a hybrid one. It’s more work and teachers are already overworked and under paid compared to the value they have on society.
During covid we had all remote school and while the outcomes of my kids suffered the flexibility was nice. I wish we, as a society and nation figured out how to find a way to make that work instead of going “back to normal” and learning/changing nothing.
For instance: I imagined a nationally backed “remote school” any student could optionally attend on a week they are sick or out. With both live remote lectures and pre-recorded content. Maybe parent guides for some homeschooling. Or if students are lagging behind in that model, maybe sunmer school becomes more normal (or some other creative solution).
It’s a bit like that Rick and Morty episode where he is in the VR game. “ What's this, you beat cancer and then went back to work at the carpet store? Boo.” We lived through Covid and then collectively decided to go back to the carpet store.
Wasn't this a Rick and Morty episode?
Apologies for the long quote but this goes some way in covering it;
>As fan communities now have endless forums and formats to debate and discuss, there’s been a shift from simply being a fan of something to somehow assuming ownership of it. The combination of Reddit boards and social media means internet die-hards begun viewing their roles not as passive viewers, but as active policers. Some critic doesn’t like the latest Marvel film that you’re pretty sure you’ll love? Get ’em.
>And this curious urge – worse in the sci-fi and superhero genres and infinitely worse in young male fans – has reached its nadir in the young, male sci-fi fandom of Rick And Morty.
>Even mentioning the show my colleagues at GQ provoked a response of mild disgust. They hadn’t seen it, one said, but had always been put off because of the fans. I know exactly what they mean. And it has only gotten worse.
>When, in a joke in the third-series premiere, Rick says his whole motivation isn’t to avenge anyone’s death, but was instead “driven by finding that McNugget sauce. That’s my series arc”, referring to a promotional Szechuan dipping sauce that McDonald’s used to sell in the late 1990s for a promotional tie-in with the movie Mulan, the fans took him at his word and the very next day began online petitions to demand its return. McDonald’s, never one to bypass free PR, announced a few months later the sauce would come back for a limited time. But it didn’t have enough for the demand, so the fans then protested – online and in person – and, in some cases, the police were called. To repeat: McDonald’s dipping sauce.
>If sauce entitlement is one thing, the fans took it to a whole new level by the end of the third series. The Rick And Morty writing room had always been a bro club and so creator Harmon had hired some new female comedy writers to even out the imbalance. The fans, convinced they were the cause of what they saw as a dip in quality in the third series, went after the new female writers online individually, abusing, threatening and slandering them on Twitter and creating Reddit threads just to smear them. They even doxed them, publishing their personal information online.
>And don’t just take my word for it. Even Harmon despises this sector of his own fandom.
>They want, he told Entertainment Weekly, “to protect the content they think they own – and somehow combine that with their need to be proud of something they have, which is often only their race or gender… I’ve made no bones about the fact that I loathe these people. It fucking sucks.”
The full article: https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/rick-and-morty-fans
In germany, Rick and Morty on Netflix still only goes to Season 6. But Season 7 was out long ago ... (and it was worth pirating it).
I tried to watch Rick and Morty season 6 here in Australia, only to find that half of it was on one streaming service, a quarter on another, and the rest not available at all. They make it impractical to obtain legitimately and then complain when we pirate.
Is there a reason we should care about his belief regarding this? Putting aside that smart people in one realm are often quite irrational outside of their expertise, e.g. Isaac Newton being super dedicated to alchemy, Jack Parsons at JPL believing he could summon demons, there is also a quite obvious limitation to this line of evidence. I have very good reason to believe I'm going to survive the next five minutes. That doesn't mean I'm going to "survive" in the sense that we care about regarding why religions draw people in, that is, even conclusive proof we survive past bodily death doesn't make us immortal. An immaterial soul that lingers to experience more stuff for another 20 minutes hardly makes a difference, but even if we can conclusively prove near-death experiences are real, that's all we'd be proving.
Same thing with the ontological argument. Even if you can convince yourself the universe must have some kind of intelligent creator that made it on purpose, that does not imply this creator has any kind of human-intelligible personality and monitors or cares what we do, let alone that it must be the Christian creator or any other specific religion's idea of what a god is. Ironically, my wife put on just this morning an episode of Rick and Morty in which Morty gets trapped in the Roy game and Rick has to go in and convince everyone they're in a video game and are really part of a larger reality, which was meant to be a parody of religion. That is, their universe truly did have an intelligent creator, but they were NPCs in a video game and the larger reality is they were really a 14 year-old boy in the real universe. We have no particularly good reason to prefer a priori Christianity versus Hinduism versus we're all 14 year-old boys trapped in a video game just because we're convinced we have a creator and some part of us survives death in this particular simulation. Notably, the real Morty is still going to die in the real world.
I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of where the value in streaming services lies from the perspective of old world media giants. The majority of people who buy streaming, I suspect, are interested mainly in the conveyor belt of diverse and engaging content. Sure I whack an episode of Rick and Morty on via Netflix once a month, but 90% of viewing is of new serialized content.
Disney naively thought they could just serve up old classics while wringing the life out of Marvel and Star Wars IP and people would happily continue to pay. But the IP dilution and very real costs of beaming 4K video around the world on demand don’t mix well together.
Meanwhile Netflix has built some of the most sophisticated production tooling in the world, and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has.
It’s a classic story of a tenant mistakenly believing the landlord has it easy - so they abandon their sublet and try to build a mall from scratch - the models are vastly different, and perhaps in this case, lethal.
It’s like the night people episode from Season 6 of Rick and Morty
Watch it if you want to see how good of an idea it is to be able to work in your sleep
This remind me of the rick and morty episode, keep summer safe.
https://youtu.be/hguiN8oo0dI?si=8SWsnCMkjZ5bYLH9
Rick and Morty was the rare quasar in a mess of warm gas.
And I say "was" because it fell off a cliff after season 2.
As for "everything everywhere all at once". Quite meh. Turned it off halfway.
This reminds me of the absolute amazement and wonder in the faces of people who are tricked in older movies or video clips, sometimes with simple or outright ridiculous tricks (by today's standards).
It's not a great example (and the best I have on hand)... but the Rick and Morty episode where Morty meets the Knights of the Sun and similar groups from other celestial bodies shows elements of this as well.
I have the impression people on average were way more gullible the further you look back in time. I wonder then if LLMs suffer from a lack of data about such cases that may have been common in the past but became obsolete before the internet became mainstream.
What we see is another layer of cleanup of older media, where large amounts are culled from the next generation's minds, but some will still remain. The culling first gets rid of chaff, and eventually just leaves the very best examples of old art. You can watch black and white movies on streaming services today, and the average quality is going to be extremely high, as all but the very best has been washed away.
My teenage son and his friends don't just look at current media, but old one too. Kids born in 2010 that just realize there was some great music in the 70s too, and that today decide that some old videogames are still worth playing, while many have aged way too poorly. Some will get remade, maybe badly, and other parts abandoned.
Monty Python's sketches are still funny to them, but the media is relatively low quality, and that style of humor has already been absorbed into the comedy corpus. Something as absurd as the parrot sketch wasn't just funny, but also felt new to many audiences. Today you find absurdity even in something like Rick and Morty, just in faster packages, relying less on repetition to try to elevate the bit. Trying to hammer at the core joke 8 times in a row is out of fashion. Now the repetition comes with longer spacing, or from different directions: See how meme images work.
It easily could be. And according to the simulation hypothesis (by Nick Bostrom), it is the most probable thing actually.
P.S. There is also a hilarious Rick and Morty episode about a car battery universe: https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Microverse_Battery
>But yea, it's well designed, so it's supposed to be "hard to believe".
It's so "well designed" that it makes no sense :) Reminds me of Rick and Morty's heist plot developed by that robot. At the end of the day you can come up with endless conspiracy theories and plots if your imagination is good enough and you watched all the Mission Impossible movies, and then then when people question it you just tell them "it's so well thought out that it's hard to believe" and you win every argument.
Why is it so hard to accept that Snowden really walked out with confidential info and sent it to the press out of his own accord over his own worries of privacy violations he was in charge of? The simplest expatiation is usually the right one, no need to come up with false flag spy plots.
FFS, some teenager working for the Airforce leaked military intelligence on the war in Ukraine on some Discord server just to win an online argument. Do you think that was some false-flag op too? Intelligence blunders happen all the time, it's a wonder we don't get even more leaks.
That’s a Rick and Morty episode
That scenery looks like something from a Rick and Morty episode.
Rick and Morty did an episode on this idea.
Dinosaur Utopia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNvsF1jToJQ
> There are thousands of people with middlebrow blogs out there, why the focus on slatestarcodex?
It's got to be the distance between the quality/tone of his writing and the quality/tone of his fansplainers on HN, no?
See also:
* Rick and Morty episodes vs. Rick and Morty subreddit posts
* David Foster Wallace's oeuvre vs. Those who emulate his writing on forums
* Dream Theater vs. the Dream Theater fan who just asked me if I've ever heard of Dream Theater
These particular objects of admiration seem to generate fandoms which are a) ready and willing to educate anyone on the relevant subject matter, and c) sure seem like they only know the relevant subject matter-- if at all-- through that particular niche object of admiration.
Personally, I find that a) people don't like having other people's arbitrary hobby horses explained to them, and b) people really don't like it when the figure out that the explainer seems to be living vicariously through a second-hand explanation of the thing they admire.
I mean, I just can't imagine someone saying, "Hey, that's a fun/witty blog. I should deanonymize the author and ruin their practice." However, I can see that happening after the Nth encounter with a slatestarcodex fan.
Not to say it's fair. And personally, I enjoy both Dream Theater and conversations with their fans. But a few sentences in, those fans probably can tell that I've listened to way too much music and they quickly get off their hobby horse. Others who aren't as musically inclined probably get an unsolicited earful of an unhealthy obsession.
Wasn’t this foretold in the Rick and Morty Episode “Pickle Rick”?
Dan Harmon is a great storyteller, but this system, and indeed all these "universal story structure" systems all either:
1) Are so generic they doesn't say anything useful (like a horoscope which fit everybody).
2) Only matches some select stories.
A good litmus test is if the system is compatible with Shakespeare's Hamlet. Given how populuar and well-regarded the play have been for centuries, we can safely say it is the system rather than the play which is at fault if the play does not fit the system.
We immediately notice that Hamlet does not "Then return to their familiar situation", since he dies (along with most other characters). Also it is not really clear he have changed. Indeed, the genre of tragedy does not match the requirement to have the protagonist safely home in the end, so Romeo and Juliet is also out. These are not obscure examples, these are the most famous and well-regarded plays in the English language.
TV-shows like Rick and Morty does tend to have the characters safely home in the end, so they can start in the "zone of comfort" in the next episode. On the other hand the characters rarely change. Even if they learn some lessons, they have usually forgotten them by start of the next episode. So I'm unsure if the system even matches Harmons own writing.
> unless you stretch it beyond all reasonableness).
Im gonna give you a spoiler, he does.
Dan Harmon's sotry circle is how he wrote most of the episodes of Community and Rick and Morty, and tbh he uses it to great effect even when he tells anecdotes and stories (he famously played a DnD campaign where he would meta roleplay to add necessary steps to the circle to make the stories more compelling even if they were not the best strategy at the moment).
Due to his adherance to his own method, he sees it everywhere, to the point where most of us would be squinting to see what he even means.
Its just a framework and he really likes it. Essentially the same as a dude who really likes one programming language and uses it out of place, in a terribly complicated place because he just really likes it.
Ok, this is a very good take even though I disagree.
The main issue is you can't have someone whose supposedly a sex offender, working with others and just ignore that he's a sex offender. Also, Rick and Morty is ultimately a piece of entertainment, and it's hard to be entertained if the guy writing jokes is allegedly gross and aggressive.
And the allegations are still just allegations, but from what I'm hearing they seem likely to be proven. If the charges are dropped I would argue Roiland should go back on the show and everyone should apologize. But even without the full picture he needs to at least temporarily step back because the toxic culture is still there; most people simply can't work with someone who they suspect what Roiland is accused of, and the trial is going to conclude and we will get a better picture eventually (and at least for the latter probably very soon).
In fact it looks like Rick and Morty is continuing and people are still fine with the earlier episodes fine even though much of the show is Roiland. That is applying nuance. And I agree that it won't be the same, but it's not going to be the same anyways.
I learned about Flanderization [0] on HN recently and was surprised to read that Rick and Morty is a show that consciously tries to avoid it.
Honestly, I think they’ve done a pretty good job and as a result the show still feels fresh and entertaining in the 6th season. But I imagine that’ll be quite a bit harder without Justin.
Whatever they were doing they had a formula for making some dang good tv. R&M is far better than any other adult cartoon I’ve seen, to the point that I think it might be one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen.
Here’s to hoping that Justin gets in a better spot, and the next few seasons of R&M don’t pull a Game of Thrones.
[0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanderization
Super depressed and toxic and always right. He's shown as being that way because he understands the world better. The show might not praise him directly, but until the most recent seasons (where they appear to be trying to undo some damage) it consistently showed that he is a more effective person because of it.
Another example of the subversion that reinforces this "truth = negativity" moral:
(Spoilers)
The episode where they're trapped in the house with shapeshifting memory-modifying aliens pretending to be loved family members. Traditionally you would expect such a problem to be resolved through the power of love, or some other positive quality that bonds the family in a way the aliens can't fake. Rick and Morty inverts it and the problem is solved through the power of resentment. The message is clear - reality is ugly and messy and painful, and "love" is a powerful illusion created to fill a biological purpose, and you should be suspicious of it if you want to act rationally, which you should. Admittedly, the Mr Poopybutthole denouement partially redeems the episode by subverting its own point and cautioning against taking it too far, but the same message crops up too often in Rick and Morty to be ignored.
I think the moral and message and consequences are stronger in Rick and Morty than your usual sitcom.
Your usual sitcom the heroes are infallible and get at most a slip on the wrist. Here the narrator is saying, this anti hero is so bad he could literally destroy the whole world. He can't undo his mistakes because some mistakes are beyond even his abilities to undo.
We're resetting the situation because that's what sitcoms have to do, but it's the opposite of a happy ending. That's the message I got at least. Similar to the vat of acid episode. That actions have consequences and not all mistakes can be corrected.
It's actually the normal sitcom heroes that get away with everything by virtue of plot armor or plot ingenuity, while Rick and Morty cynically reset it because the show must go on, while hinting strongly that this is the only reason it's allowed and consequences were as real as they could be.
I would say it's more a deconstruction of fiction, generally, rather than subversion of sitcoms. Most plots are decidedly non-sitcommy.
I would also say Dan Harmon's previous work on Community is so filled to the brim with meta-analyses, parodies, homages, and self reflection that it's probably more him than Justin on the writing side.
I'd ALSO say that I don't think Rick and Morty suggests Rick's behaviors or beliefs are praiseworthy. The dude is super depressed and toxic. Including of course the episode in which his toxicity become manifest.
I'm not sure if this is meant to be sarcastic (I'm not familiar with Million Dollar Extreme), but in any case I want to draw attention to a particular piece of subversion that encapsulates everything good and bad about Rick and Morty.
(Spoilers)
In the very first season, there's an episode where Rick reluctantly helps Morty attract his crush with a "love potion". Now this is obviously messed up, but it's a classic trope that pops up in all sorts of mythology. We've all seen it and we know how it goes - generally it blows up in some sort of monkey's paw way and the offenders get some sort of poetic comeuppance, lending the story a satisfying resolution and a clear moral. Rick and Morty goes out of its way to subvert this - it blows up alright, we saw that coming a mile off, but everyone in the world except the protagonists are gruesomely affected. And they don't resolve the problem, they run away. With no negative consequences for them whatsoever. They get to keep living their lives as before, while their original family and everyone else they knew continues to suffer horrifically offscreen. Sitcom does not reset. Morty is traumatized and Rick just shrugs. The end.
This is a shocking thing to see on TV. It sends all kinds of terrible messages. And perhaps that's the very reason why it was so captivating, why Rick and Morty felt so fresh. It was making a very clear statement that in the RIck and Morty universe, normal dramatic tropes don't apply. Poetic justice can't be relied upon, just like in real life. Anything can happen.
I don't think he's replaceable. It's like house of cards without Kevin Spacey. Actually even worse, one of the best episodes was an episode completely voiced by Justin, of an entire society, and he managed to play so many different personalities of the same character. Never seen this level of voice acting.
It was pretty obvious that he's got issues. Had a scene where a writer literally confesses that he has bad tendencies and channels it all into his work (the gazorpazorp episode).
It's kind of sad that society and cancel culture don't allow bad people to do good things. If those were workplace allegations you really can't let someone like that work, but that's not the case.
I'm all in favor of him both losing most of his money to compensate his victims and continuing to work on Rick and Morty. But society can't handle nuance, and the mob judges people instead of actions. Literally nothing good happened as a result of this cancellation. Just blind mob justice.
People aren't black and white, bad people can do some good things and everyone sins. He deserves a punishment fitting his crime, and the purpose of the punishment isn't vengeance. If an action is good there's nothing morally wrong with letting a bad person do it.
The key to the success of Rick and Morty is that it's a very subversive show, sometimes to the point of being disturbing. Its embrace of comedic nihilism undermines classic sitcom tropes in much the way The Simpsons did when it was new. I always got the impression that this stemmed in no small part from Justin Roiland. It's not exactly a surprise that someone with so little regard for social convention turned out to have untenable personal attributes, but I wonder if Rick and Morty will continue to have "bite" without him.
That said, if it also results in the exorcism of Rick and Morty's more toxic subtexts ("it's fine to be an asshole if you're smart" and "most people are dull and provincial and their concerns deserve ridicule"), it's probably a net win. We shall see.
I mean, Rick and Morty has made many jokes about not wanting to be a show about progressing the canon. It’s probably the worst possible example you could choose for this concept. Most episodes are deconstructions of other works and they seem to prefer it being that way. I do too.
I’m still laughing at the concept of a deconstruction of homages to die hard. I love their perspectives on writing.
Sort of a tangent, but related: I read a lot of serialized fiction and it suffers from the same problem that there's an implied contract the creator will take the consumer through a complete story arc. But authors struggle with both writing new episodes and attracting readers, and unless they build enough viewership it's possible they'll lose motivation and just stop writing.
To protect yourself from this, it usually pays to either read stories from authors who've finished work in the past, or wait until they're done. Too long between episodes, or frankly lots of "slice of life" (cynically read: the author hasn't plotted anything out and doesn't have a plan to create and resolve conflict, so they just putter along) and most readers will lose interest.
Anecdotally this is why I stopped watching Rick and Morty even prior to the various revelations about the authors. They shed enough momentum that any interest in the characters or universe was lost. And R & M is a good example of what happens when there's no planned plot line: you end up with filler episodes like "Intergalactic Cable" where the author just riff randomly.
For people who remember Babylon 5, there was a great deal of excitement in part because the arcs were all pre-planned which some viewed as a positive because there was no danger of the show just turning into episodic and formulaic exploitation of a known set of characters and places. We used to have TV shows just stagger on until cancelled, with showrunners hoping to be the next Simpsons, Star Trek or Stargate writer and now we're at the other extreme that if audiences don't show immediate and sustained engagement, the show (at least on Netflix, HBO MAX, etc) is doomed.
Chernobyl is terrible. Anti-nuclear and anti-soviet propaganda disguised as a "true story". I can't stand movies and TV shows who claim to be historically accurate while being almost completely made up.
Rick and Morty is also bad. After two episodes I was already bored of the shtick.
Fargo is by far the best series on that list. Seasons 1 and 2 are incredible.
Clerks - $27,575 [0]
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night - $56,000 [1]
Butt Boy - $100,000 [2]
The Blue - <$100k [3]
Call Me Brother - <$100k [3]
Frances Ferguson - <$100k [3]
Greenlight - <$100k [3]
Love in Dangerous Times - <$100k [3]
Man in Camo - <$100k [3]
I'm going to stop now but I hope I've made my point. I've watched many of the above. I've heard about most of the above.
Your tone is pretty snarky so I'm not sure if it's worth responding but here is a list of TV shows, all within the last decade, that I believe are exceptional and not limited to "just the Sopranos":
* Chernobyl
* Rick and Morty
* True Detective
* Fargo
* Severance
* 1883
* Mindhunter
* Westworld
* The Knick
* The Peripheral
* Succession
* Years and Years
* Orange is the New Black
* Halt and Catch Fire
* Insecure
* Watchmen
* Atlanta
This is only from 10 minutes of searching. You'll note that many of them are produced, directed, written and star high profile artists. The subject matter that they deal with can be done at a pace and care that's impossible to do with a 2-3 hour movie. The quality of the above series or mini-series was virtually non existent, maybe with some very few exceptions, before 2000 and only began to pick up pace in 2000 to 2010.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerks_(film)
[1] https://byrdtheatre.org/news/2019/10/a-girl-walks-home-alone-at-night-brings-beauty-to-vampires/
[2] https://www.cautionspoilers.com/film-reviews/butt-boy/
[3] https://musiccitydrivein.com/2021/02/19/film-threat-award-this-announces-2021-indie-film-nominees-for-drive-in-event-virtual-ceremony/
> "Surely," a triceratops says, "there was some point between gunpowder and... something called Amazon Prime... that you folks had to think, 'Are we supposed to be running a planet? Wouldn't we rather make Marvel movies?'"
https://www.looper.com/1047273/rick-and-morty-season-6-episode-6-recap/
Elon just craves attention, and he’s rich enough that he can get it wherever he wants. One day he wants to be a character on Rick and Morty, so they accommodate him. He wanted to be on SNL so he inexplicably gets to host and star in an episode. He wanted to be on the Twitter board, they don’t accomodate him, so he stages a hostile takeover of the company. Not to mention the cave incident where he tried to insert himself, was rebuffed, and then tried to ruin someone’s life.
There’s a clear pattern of Musk forcing himself into places he doesn’t belong and no one wants him, and it never ends well for anyone involved.
It's not "big" like climate change or space exploration, but it seems pretty likely that within the next ten years it will become possible to simply write a script and have it rendered into video/audio format, i.e. I write a Rick and Morty script and automatically render an episode with quality and voices similar to the real thing.
This will lead to an explosion in content that dwarfs the present "peak" TV.
The most amusing thing about this is that every recent development in both real science and science fiction for the last decade is something that Rick and Morty itself did first.
All you did was...
"Write an algorithm based on two heist movies I slept through and used it to automate a joyless process you call art? Yeah, I really did, didn't I?"
- Rick Sanchez
Just watch episode 6 of season 6 of Rick and Morty for the answer.
> ... And ultimately, the story, characters, and writing can matter more than the art.
That is a highly subjective conclusion, and worth consideration.
I still remember watching Ren And Stimpy as a kid, and later Invader Zim and have a way of recalling the skits/ gags in a way that I can only due to those shows hook was the art: mainly because how remarkable it looked for it's time. Ren and Stimpy was something like a cross-between Dali and Goya surrealism (specifically the grotesque works when they did close-ups) that to this day stand up; I recall they sold the rights and it was on some other channel when I was in university on cable tv and it looked like a badly made knock-off as a cash grab so after the short lived nostalgia you realized how bad it was because they didn't take the time to do it like in the 90s.
The same can be said about the Nick era plot/art of Vasquez's work with Invader Zim, it looked like the harshness in his comics and the later Netflix stuff (while more advanced in it's appearance) suffered so much,
And then their were the early Rick and Morty eps where both the art is mediocre and generic, and even the characters are clear back to the future rip-offs but the plot and story and execution is so well done that it doesn't need a huge art budget (the Unity episode specifically).
Agreed. I run that same setup on a Synology NAS as well, but hassle-free, it ain't. Full coverage doesn't even exist anyway. Unlimited + 2 block accounts still misses plenty of Rick and Morty episodes, for example.
That said, this setup has allowed me to cut out Netflix. I still pay for the Hulu/Disney package for live sports and some animation shows that aren't available on Usenet forums.
This is a moral question, but the answer doesn't really matter because there's a more important issue that preempts it, which is that you're ignoring a signal that if these these things aren't worth your money they're probably not worth your time either.
I'm no fan of the companies involved, or their policies, or even copyright law as it stands, but I've gotten to a point where if something entertaining isn't worth the price, I just don't buy it. I have no "right" to watch a TV show that some monopoly is infringing upon.
We all have so many things competing for our time and money, take advantage of that. If Rick & Morty isn't worth $40 to you, spend that $40 and those 20 minutes on something of better value.
And yes, I still watch TV, though far less (2-4 hours/week) than I did before I adopted this thought process. And yes, I do watch, and pay for, Rick and Morty :D
> so to watch a 20 minutes animated show I’d have to take a +40$ subscription.
You can buy season 6 on Apple TV and Google play for $19 according to this site: https://www.justwatch.com/ca/tv-show/rick-and-morty/season-6
Why not just buy the Rick and morty episodes or seasons, for example, on iTunes/appletv?
I like how you use one difficult example (Rick and Morty) to justify a wholesale move back into piracy.
I use a Roku. It has all the apps. Sometimes I forget what show is in which app. JustWatch is helpful. I can legally buy Rick and Morty season 6 from iTunes. I’m laying in bed and could buy it in about 15 seconds.
If there was no such thing as piracy and streaming services were free then dealing with all the different services would be a mild nuisance. IMHO people pirate primarily because of money. Everything else is just a weak attempt to morally justify something they know is wrong.
At the very least pay for most of your content. Don’t pirate everything just because that one anime from Japan you love is hard to legally pay for.
Actually you can get Rick and Morty legally in Canada via StackTV on Amazon channels for $12.99/month if you’re an Amazon Prime member.[1]
You can also watch episodes in the Global TV app, but you do have to have a subscription to Global TV to watch those, though it is often included in basic packages that start at $25/month ($15 for Alt TV) as CRTC mandated that channels be made available a la carte with a cheaper “Starter” package.[2]
That said the cheapest (legal) way to get Rick & Morty is to record it yourself over-the-air for free given that Global is a nationally broadcast TV channel, for now. Edit: Actually, I’m not sure this is still the case.[3]
1. https://www.adultswim.ca/where-to-watch/
2. https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/television/program/alacarte.htm
3. https://blog.fagstein.com/2018/11/13/corus-asks-crtc-to-shut-down-44-global-tv-transmitters/
Meh, maintaining the fully automated TV show downloader I used to use was a pain in the butt and it was always having some issue or another. I'll gladly pay the $100 or w/e per month to avoid it, and I haven't had a problem like yours where something I wanted to watch wasn't available.
As I get older, I find myself more willing than before to trade cash for time, and this is exactly one of those scenarios.
Rick and Morty came close, but Youtube TV taped the episodes for me so I watch them there.
TV show character (Rick and Morty)
I vote for subtitles as an over-40. I started literally requiring subtitles due to the presence of children (whom I dearly love) in the house and all the other various household sounds like kettles boiling or dishwashers or washing machines or toilet flushes or whatever the fuck else.
But I can't go back. I've re-watched movies with subtitles and found explanations of things (non-plot critical, but contributory or interesting) that were previously drowned out by mumbling or poor mixing or just not having the volume high enough to vibrate the foundations.
Subtitles explain all!
(I actually find it's harder to multitask if I'm watching a show, because I need to read the screen - this isn't necessarily a bad thing if it's a show I've actually chosen to try to watch).
P.S. 2nd episode of the latest season of Rick and Morty has an ... interesting ... differentiation between the subtitles and spoken words for one specific word starting with c, in which the subtitle was the original, category* 0, word, whilst the obviously replaced word also started with c but is a somewhat more acceptable category* 2 word.
*categories made up by me on the spot.
Rick And Morty really took a nosedive for me the last couple seasons. It's always just been a fun-when-high recycling of Star Trek episodes and well-known sci-fi ideas to me, but it always had its own style, clever writing and great acting(especially Sarah Chalke).
Lately the writing has felt a lot lazier, and I guess they ran out of good Star Trek episodes(understandable since none have been made for almost 20 years now...) to "steal" because a lot of the episodes felt like gimmicks based on some action anime I never heard of, fucking Ocean's 11, superheroes, dragons(seriously?), etc.
Is Flanderization just synecdoche - where one attribute becomes the reference for the whole, or is it a new co-oridnate on the spectrum of metonymy and simile?
The comment about Rick and Morty actively avoiding the flanderizing of their characters seems a bit off, as the whole season 5 finale was the flanderization of Morty, where he (a version of him) self actualizes as blandly malevolent, likely acting on urges that Rick identifies a few episodes prior in Morty's weak dad (Jerry) as not nice, but predatory:
> "You act like prey, but you're a predator! You use pity to lure in your victims! That's how you survive! I survive because I know everything. That snake survives because children wander off, and you survive because people think, "Oh, this poor piece of shit."
If they were avoiding flanderizing Morty, they would seem to have just backed right into it.
> if you know how to use AI to cut that cost, I'm all ears.
A social media account with a couple million followers i.e. https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/?hl=en
> Also: Al Pacino will want his money if you use his name, even if he is not actually acting in the movie.
The creator doesn't need Al Pacino. I'm not following this one. Rick and Morty doesn't need Angelina Jolie
> Reality is that there's plenty of ideas, true, that would not make any money though.
Plenty of websites, 99.999% of them don't make any money. I definitely still think the easier it is to make a website the better.
> Rick and Morty costs 1.5 million dollars per episode and from what we've heard from director Erica Hayes, a single episode takes anywhere between 9 and 12 months to create from ideation to completion
If that includes marketing and advertising, that's amazingly cheap. Cut the creation time down to a few weeks, throw in a few product placements, post it on your social media/youtube/etc and you have your own movie studio.
Sounds like the "interdimensional cable" bits on Rick and Morty. Reportedly the co-creators would get back-out drunk and improvise the shows. My favorite is house hunters international, where ambulatory houses are being hunted by guys with shotguns.
https://screenrant.com/rick-morty-interdimensional-cable-episodes-improvised/
> So if there are plenty of ideas and not enough money,
big chunk of the budget is spent on marketing.
if you produce something that nobody watch, it's like the sound of the tree falling where nobody can hear it.
if you know how to use AI to cut that cost, I'm all ears.
Also: Al Pacino will want his money if you use his name, even if he is not actually acting in the movie.
Reality is that there's plenty of ideas, true, that would not make any money though.
Studios don't like to work at loss.
Rick and Morty costs 1.5 million dollars per episode and from what we've heard from director Erica Hayes, a single episode takes anywhere between 9 and 12 months to create from ideation to completion
I always had the crazy idea of "infinite entertainment": somehow we manage to "tap" into the multiverse and are able to watch TV from countless of planets/universes (I think Rick and Morty did something similar). So, in some channel at some time you may be able to see Brad Pitt fighting against Godzilla while the monster is hacking into the pentagon using ssh. Highly improbable, but in the multiverse TV everything is possible.
Now I think we don't need the multiverse for that. Give this AI technology a few years and you'll have streaming services a la Netflix where you provide the prompt to create your own movie. What the hell, people will vote "best movie" among the millions submitted by other people. We'll be movie producers like we are nowadays YouTubers. Overabundance of high quality material and so little time to watch them all. Same goes for books, music and everything else that is digital (even software?).
Yeah but they're pushing it to do this. The plot is human-generated. And in any case it passes the buck onto the inside universe to come up with the excursion that escapes endlessly outward.
It's a little like Rick and Morty. I think they have an episode about this with energy, infinite recursion then something happens then you get excursion.
Rick and Morty is good for a quick relax for 20 min after dinner, another might be good for thrills for longer time, how about a documentary the next day? It's easy to pick shows that match my interests and fits my taste, but they are scattered across platforms if they are available at all.
Unsubbing for shows feels wrong. What if I just want to watch a pilot? I'm not that calculated to manage my subscriptions based on a schedule.
What if friends come over? Sorry, no Netflix since yesterday :)
I wouldn't, but when providers are randomly removing shows and movies it's really annoying. For example Netflix just removed Rick and Morty in 16 countries and a few more pending. Should I just subscribe to another provider because of that, jump between apps or rely on a good old and convenient technology which has everything (torrent)?
So... something reminiscent of Pickle Rick, from Rick and Morty? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickle_Rick)
Spoiler: Rick lands himself in a pickle, and "lacking any means of mobility, he bites the head of a cockroach and walks upon its back by stimulating its brain with his tongue. After assembling more cockroaches into a crude exoskeleton, he sets up a lab and upgrades to a powered exoskeleton made of rat corpses."
Fun episode!
This is through rose-coloured glasses because I was at the right age for Seinfeld to be televised during my defining youth period - where music, movies, TV shows, etc. are remembered fondly forever.
I've recently watched a few Seinfeld episodes again, after a long Seinfeld-hiatus and a lot of TV experience throughout that time, and Seinfeld as a TV show holds up magnificently today. The density and weaving of the story-arcs is unbelievably clever, but also consistently unbelievably clever through so many episodes.
Seinfeld makes most other TV shows seem boringly linear, even 20-odd years later.
Rick and Morty is competitive with Seinfeld on density of story-arc, and that's saying something.
(all of this is subjective, and, as I disclaimed above, through my rose-coloured glasses memory of Seinfeld)
Rick and Morty did something similar in the episode "Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat". Morty got ahold of a crystal that showed him what his final moments would look like, and the vision updated as his actions changed his future.
If they were indeed a perfect replica that fact wouldn't matter. They wouldn't know if they were a replica, you wouldn't, and only a 3rd party could ever tell you they weren't the person you love. At that point learning whether or not this person standing in front of you is a replica can only harm either party. Would you really subject yourselves to that information if it could only hurt someone you objectively love? It's not a light choice to be considered selfishly in a vacuum, because even if they are a replica they're still perfect and a person you genuinely do love. Why on earth would you want to learn something that would make you not love them, that would alienate them from their entire sense of self? Even if is the truth, nobody stands to gain from the information. So long as neither of you can tell the difference, the truth doesn't doesn't matter. Pretty sure this exact subject comes up in like 2 or 3 episodes of Rick and Morty.
This feels like a Rick and Morty episode to me. They just reinvented cash money, with extra steps.
Only, without the oversight of a central bank.. Without the means to keep the exchange rate in check. They can't change the rate of interest or anything else.
So far with crypto the only use cases seems to be criminal. To buy illegal stuff and for ransomware. Maybe it could be useful in countries where the currency is devalued like some in South-America. But then all the extra steps seem to be a big hurdle to me.
Someone enlighten me on the merits of this idea.
Rick and Morty S02E04, totally recommended if you haven't watched and want to get entertained in this topic in a fun way.
No one else thought of Rick and Morty and the Thanksplotation Spectacular Episode?
> Are you really that shocked if we reframe this as you not enjoying a game that started out as a niche Half-Life mod, but enjoying a television show made by the most popular television network amongst young adults?
No, I am okay with that :). There are some niche things (the OA, Dishwasher vampire smile) I definitely like and some popular things I really dislike (GoT and Stranger things come to mind). On that note: no one around me (IRL) seems to like Rick and Morty :(.
> That the only stuff you like is American, while the stuff you dislike is entirely foreign, shouldn't come as a surprise, either. Pop culture isn't global, not yet.
Well, for what it's worth I am neither American nor living in the US :). At the moment I am into scifi german tv shows (Dark and Tribes of Europa) (buuuut also waiting for the new Star Trek Pike TV show while snobing Star Trek Michael).
Rick and Morty fakes a lot of its depth with nonsense technobabble, akin to Evangeleon's biblical references which are largely nonsense.
The good bits of Rick and Morty are very short, maybe 1-minute sections of episodes. Morty's relationship with Planetina was one of the deeper moments of all of season 5, except it is summarized in maybe 90-seconds of story at the most.
And its really not much deeper than "some eco-friendly people turn out to be eco-terrorists", and that's enough to ruin a relationship. Yeah, sucks for Morty, but... its not exactly a particularly deep message (deep in the context of the rest of the show, yes. And I definitely enjoy those kinds of moments. But something needs to be longer than 90-seconds of story for me to call it "deep", especially compared to other things I've seen)
----------
I dunno, as far as technobabble / nonsense words go, I prefer Evangeleon from that perspective. There's a lot to be said about Shinji's exploration of his depression (caused by Gendo, his father's, obsession over the Human Instrumentality Project).
Rick is just a toxic asshole that the show forces you to watch. Someone like Morty should have run away / cut Rick out of his life a long long time ago. At least in Evangelion, Shinji is actively trying to cut out the entire mecha-project out of his life (running away multiple times), but since Shinji is one of the few candidates who can pilot the mech, he's forced back into the job over-and-over again (unlike Morty who seems to just be this passive guy who is needlessly picked on by Rick for 5 seasons).
If nothing really matters, then Morty could just leave and that's that (and the fact that this hasn't been explored across ~5 seasons shows the limitations of the relatively shallow, episodic format... forcing Rick and Morty to be friends again by the start of the next episode to keep things serialized). What makes Shinji's situation unique is that Shinji's worth as a pilot is more than he gives credit for, and each time he tries to leave, a disaster occurs. Each time Shinji does fight, a disaster also occurs by his hands. So Shinji's confusion and depression is far more understanding.
Ex: Shinji's relationship with Toji evolves over a few episodes, and is deeper than all 5 season's of Morty's development.
Shinji is forced to pilot the mech in episode 1. Shinji's inexperience with the mech causes collateral damage, and Toji's sister gets trapped in the rubble. Toji bullies Shinji until Shinji saves him in the next fight, as Toji didn't realize the issues of being a pilot. The arc culminates as Toji himself becomes a pilot, and Shinji is forced by his father to destroy Toji's mech. Shinji is being forced to follow Gendo (his father's) plans as scripted out by "The Dead Sea Scrolls" (aka: technobabble), but the important thing is that Gendo's ambition for the project is so great, he's willing to traumatize his own son over it. Shinji x Toji's relationship is just one sacrifice Gendo makes, and Shinji's depression goes even deeper because of it.
There's a little bit of gender role in there:
Male assholes (ex: Rick from Rick and Morty, Nolan's Batman, Downy's Iron Man) are fun and interesting to watch. Female assholes are much, much harder to write (Amanda Waller, Suicide Squad, seems to be the best written one in recent films?)
I guess there's explicitly "female" movies, like "Devil Wears Prada" where that kind of behavior is more acceptable (Miranda Priestly plays the role of asshole boss).
But maybe the "formula" for what audiences accept just hasn't really been figured out yet for female characters. You certainly can't just take male-oriented tropes and try to apply them to female-oriented characters.
HBO Max has more and better content than any of the other ones you listed.
* I watched the new Dune on it, a bunch of other new movies are there
* most (all?) the Cartoon network stuff like Rick and Morty is there
* all the HBO content is there, Jon Oliver, GoT, etc.
* it passed the Matrix test. (1. I want to watch the original Matrix. 2. I searched for the Matrix and clicked the result. 3. It streamed the Matrix to me.)
* that crazy Ridley Scott series with those shrieking harpies that fly around asploding the hell out of atheists
* HBO has a track record of producing high-quality content on subscription model. If they win the streaming wars they are the least likely to do annoying ad-support bullshit dark patterns (like those ads shoved in the middle of a fucking scene on some ad-supported services now)
Edit: reworded so I only use the adjective "fucking" once when referring to ad-based streaming services
This is one of those examples that actually allows me, as a white male living a life of privilege, to come remotely close to understanding the trivialising power of a 'label'.
I'm an atheist, but my atheism is my own.
And, in that, I realise that the number of degrees of freedom of an atheist are only slightly greater than those of a devout religious type, in that there are almost infinite things that "label" doesn't define, whilst a very limited number of things (1 for an atheist, a few more for a religious person) that a label does define.
You are an atheist. You are a catholic. You are a woman. You are Japanese. Few words, but even less meaning.
I just (re)watched the space snake episode of Rick and Morty last night:
“Imagine being a racist snake. Hey, other snake, I hate you because you’re the wrong colour snake!”
All the stuff from before you were born is curated for you by society. It's pre-filtered, the cruft has been removed and for the first few years of your life you have no control over the filter.
Then, as agency is attained, you get increasing exposure to the great unfiltered, and you find hidden treasure and trash and you learn what you actually like and dislike - in preparation for the filter you apply to your own children - which helps to define you, to yourself.
Then you get a job, partner, mortgage / rent, kids, and, just the requirements to being able to afford all that goes with that, removes the time required for 'agency' and so you're locked in a fairly tight decade-era of culture for the rest of your life unless you actively choose otherwise; seeking out the alternative, following rabbit holes, opening yourself to the full spectrum of colour that is within surprisingly easy reach, following threads that your natural tendency for the easy path would be to drop.
Most of my favourite music that I listen to now is recent. My old favourites are from when I hadn't heard my new favourites. Some of my new favourites are contextual around life stages and activities I hadn't reached or participated in earlier.
I missed Mad Men, tried to start it a couple of years ago, realised it's 92 hour-long episodes, and worked out that I didn't have the enthusiasm for it after getting through a few episodes because the combination of my friend-base and entertainment value I was getting from it didn't add up to being worth 92 hours of my time.
Recently watched Berserk upon the recommendation of a work colleague. Worth it.
Squid game, worth it. For me anyway.
Live action Cowboy Bebop, enjoying it a couple of episodes in, will continue.
Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em. But first, you gotta know yourself.
Listen to music you don't like to better calibrate what you do like. Watch the occasional blockbuster movie to help your appreciation for real film.
Can't see, hear, taste, or do it all, find your own channel but make sure to rub up against the edges regularly enough to determine if you need to change channels but didn't realise it yet.
Culture is about stories from which life lessons are learnt, and there are a lot more TV shows, movies, and songs than there are life lessons, so as long as you check those edges occasionally, you'll be pretty well covered.
The Wire destroyed and rebuilt my view of the world, and work, and government, and leadership and morality. The song King Kong as covered by Tom Waits recalibrated my musical brain (which was already uniquely calibrated by Mr. Bungle in the late 90's), The Mighty Boosh and Rick and Morty have been journeys into imagination like I never dreamed.
No. There's not too much culture.
> 1. I still don’t know very much
> “How can you not know what BGP is?”
I learned a while ago that answering someone who asks you "What is X?" and replying with a phrase similar to the above is probably one of the worst ways to broach the subject. It comes off as questioning the person's intelligence/knowledge.
Instead try to see it as a teachable moment. If it is something you think is cool and/or you are passionate about, you should be excited that you can show your friend/coworker something really cool. ie: "I've never seen Rick and Morty", "You are absolutely going to love that show. I know what you will be binge watching this weekend!"
Anyhow, to put it bluntly, don't be a dick about it.
ive read ij, with the footnotes and it took me so long I think I forgot some of the first part of the book while reading the later part. I enjoyed it kind of like a tv series but with so many episodes I forget the first season but kept watching.
So on one hand Ive heard the hype, and it was good...but I wonder if it was shorter it could have had a bigger punch (like 1984 or something else) and while typing this I wonder if this tv show analogy ( Rick and Morty comes to mind) is a kind of good analogy? Or maybe im a philistine...
I was almost going to buy the Pale king today but ill get it soon and start reading it.
I really hate it that when I'm digesting an episode of Rick and Morty I have to scramble for the remote or I'm watching some completely uninteresting series about a family in the 19th century or something. I just want the end screen and sounds to finish and then turn off the telly and go to bed. In stead I feel slapped in the face.
Consistently my watching experience ends with (increasingly large) negative feelings. How can that be a good choice for a company offering watching experiences?
Rick and Morty and the Meaning of Life by Daniel Jeffries
https://hackernoon.com/rick-and-morty-and-the-meaning-of-life-6640df17e263
A blog about meaning of life and its purpose using clips from popular shows and movies. I have re-read this piece several times and I come out with something new at the end of each read.
Its like "rick and morty season 5" returns
Number of episodes: 8 No. of episodes: 6
garbage in garbage out
Amusing that Captain Planet is on there twice. For what it's worth, Rick and Morty just did a gender-swapped Captain Planet tribute episode a few weeks ago, and they run on AT&T-owned HBO Max.
Because you should immediately mock anyone who might enjoy Rick and Morty and get that happiness feeling when someone recognized the quote from the show they watched which is fairly typical for any film or show someone has watched. Because everyone who watch that show think it's strictly limited to only high IQ individuals and watching, enjoying that show is a clear indicator of higher intelligence.
Rick and Morty is available on HBO. It's also on Netflix, but they don't have season 5 yet for some reason.
> Passive Media Consumption is Fundamentally Bad.
Sounds like the guy just overdid it. Like anything else, movies/books/games can be enjoyed in a healthy way, or can turn into an addiction. When I consume too much, it makes me feel pointless and hate myself. When I consume from time to time, in a limited and healthy amount (like a weekly episode of Rick and Morty or Dimension 20) - it makes me happy and adds to my life.
When the consumption tunrs into an addiction, you keep seeking the joy you felt when you watched your first few great movies/episodes, and then you run out and start scraping the bottom of the barrel, naturally the quality of the available entertainment declines, so you end up feeling like the author does.
Just take a break, watch fewer movies, new amazing ones come out all the time, now more than ever, just not as often as once per day. Find a healthy balance between consuming and creating, and you'll enjoy both again.
This situation resembles more that one episode of Rick and Morty where Rick changed value of blemflarck[0] from 1 to 0.
[0]https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Blemflarck
> given the subject matter I have to think of Rick and Morty's 'Ants-In-My-Eyes Johnson' skit, itself the product of an improv session.
> given the subject matter I have to think of Rick and Morty's 'Ants-In-My-Eyes Johnson' skit, itself the product of an improv session.
Yes, and the Interdimensional Cable bits//episodes are them getting stoned and riffing, then animating.
Source: have been high
I do both. And movies. If it’s not worth reading or watching a second or third time, it wasn’t worth it the first time. I read Hamlet every year or two. It gets me every time. I’ve seen the Maltese Falcon about five times, and it still amazes me with its perfection each time. I’ve seen the Pickle Rick episode of Rick and Morty three times, and I fully intend to watch it three more times. Pure genius. Anything good has layers and details that usually can not be fully appreciated the first time through. Do you only listen to a song you like once?
It is a joke related to the episode 9 of the first season of Rick and Morty, where Jerry (the dad of Morty) does not want to change his belief concerning this fact he learned in highschool and make a big fuzz about it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S4E2ZuPCBG0
I agree with your core sentiment on movies - but I couldn't disagree more on the topic of TV having reverted to the mean.
It may not all be "Sopranos", but I've seen so many TV shows in the past decade that have pushed boundaries and delivered experiences that frankly, have hit me much harder than almost any movie - and certainly much harder than pre-netflix era TV.
I know everyone has different taste, but I think we've seen a lot of maturation in the past decade specifically in the form of more interesting TV anthology series / single-season narratives (True Detective, Fargo, Watchmen) and dark-ish comedies (Rick and Morty, Barry, American Vandal, Succession). I think networks in general are giving show-runners more space and budget for trying weird stuff, because even if they end up with a show that's too niche for a general timeslot - there's at least the possibility of selling it to a streaming service later (like Arrested Development, The Expanse, and Community did).
The Black Mirror episode is actually closer to a different holodeck episode (they made a lot of them) called Hollow Pursuits, where an introverted engineer creates simulated versions of his crewmates in order to act out his fantasies.
I don't know if Star Trek invented this particular subgenre, but there are a lot of modern examples that seem directly inspired by Star Trek episodes. In addition to Black Mirror, the Rick and Morty episode M. Night Shaym-Aliens! has a lot of similarities with Future Imperfect, another simulation-within-a-simulation TNG episode.
I watch a lot of both American-made movies and TV shows as well as a lot of Japanese anime.
One thing I find curious is how different the models for time travel usually are.
In American media, it seems more often than not, time travel is modelled as if the past and the future are simultaneously existing parallel worlds, where the future is affected by the past in "real-time", e.g. Back to the Future's Marty gradually fading as the chances of his birth diminish, or Timeless's people in the future "watching" people arrive in the past and making sure their own team leaves "in time" to catch them.
These models don't really offer a solution to the grandfather paradox.
In anime however, time travel is near universally modelled with timelines, where time travel essentially creates a new parallel world each time. If you travel back in time and kill your grandfather, you simply create a timeline in which you were not born, but can continue to exist, because you are from a timeline where you were born.
I'm by no means suggesting that either model is unique to America/Japan (Rick and Morty for example uses the branching timeline model), I just find it interesting how they differ.
That does not align with my experience. On Christmas 2019, I recorded an album [1] of 9 "Snake Jazz" songs, each 30 seconds long, as a joke on a Rick and Morty episode. Published the album on CD Baby, and had them distribute it on all available platforms. Publishing cost me 80$.
Now, about a year later, I have earned 0.47$. 0.33$ of it come from Spotify, where I raked up a full 131 listens, averaging at 0.25 cents per listen. 0.25cents * 1e6 would amount to 2500$, which is admittedly still not much, but two orders of magnitude off from what is reported here.
That being said, I believe the main source of revenue for bands has been concerts in recent years (not 2020 though), with ever-increasing prices charged for live performances. I gladly accept that though - it is quite appealing to cut out the middle-man that were Music Studios up until the early 2000s.
With the barrier of entry to record an album ever-decreasing (using a Roland Octacapture, Reaper DAW, a Shure SM57 and lots of sweat you can get far), pretty much anyone can record an album in decent-ish quality in the comfort of their home, there is no more appeal to pay expensive studios to do a recording for you.
[1] https://music.youtube.com/browse/MPREb_2nw3eEydV25
Here “alt” is being used as an abbreviation of “alternate” - I am pretty sure it’s not proper English, just flows better if your going to have to use the word a lot.
I really like how the TV show Fringe named some of the alternate versions of the main characters - Walter and Walternate (short for Alternate Walter), Olivia and Bolivia (short for Olivia-B), etc. though many of the characters didn’t lend themselves to that naming or their alternate counterparts weren’t remarkably different.
Then Rick and Morty came along and there were so many alternate universes they just gave them all numbers - and added the twist that you never know which Rick from which universe your watching in any given episode which also conveniently explains away any continuity errors (sorry nit-pickers) and creative license needed for a given storyline.
But he mentioned "Rick and Morty" and Monty Python. I myself didn't even see a single episode of "Rick and Morty" until last December when I binged them all at my brother's place. Yeah, I had heard of it, was vaguely aware of the memes, but paid it little attention. When I did finally watch it without having previously been bathed in the hubbub surrounding it, I found it at times darkly funny and deeply touching.
I remember that season 2 of Rick and Morty seemed to as well, at least when it first came on Hulu
> Imagine being invested in some story and only receiving 8-10 min of it every week
I agree with all your points except this one. Rick and Morty is essentially 20 minute episodes released weekly, after commercials. If you took out long pauses, transitions, and other filling, I'm sure you could get it down to 15 minutes of punch. I'd add a lot of video creators like game of zones, alt-shift-x, theinternethistorian, also fill the punch of 15-25 minute content released weekly/monthly, are ravenously popular.
There is room for ~10-20 minute content but it may be harder to market/monetize.
This is why I decided a few years ago to not ever even start watching new series. I hate the cliffhangers; I hate the one-episode-a-week shit; I hate the split seasons; I hate the waits even when the series is probably coming back. Best to wait for something like Breaking Bad to finish its entire run, and read how everyone liked it, including the ending, and then start watching the first episode. There is an overwhelming amount of good content from the past, more than I will ever be able to watch.
ALTHOUGH. Rick and Morty hooked me anyway. Love that show, and so pissed at how long it took to finish out this past season when it was delayed.
It's like the Rick and Morty heist episode.
It reminds me of Rick and Morty episode, when they created cronenbergs from the humanity by applying cure which was a mix of different animals DNA. Shark included
If you've got adversaries doing a sun swapping attack you are in a Rick and Morty episode not the real world.
I can't swear Google has never known one my phone numbers in the many, many years I've had an account, though they don't have one recorded now. However I can tell you with certainty I have three WebAuthn authenticators, and no SMS-style 2FA authorised on my Google account now.
> but the drug has subjectively halted YOUR movement of time, you can now logically be in this state for an eternity/infinity
Someone told me the story of a guy that smoked DMT, was out for 15min and when he woke up he said he was never doing it again. He experienced living as a different person for 60 years, having a job, getting married, a whole life.
It reminds me both of the end of the movie Contact and of the game in Blips and Chitz (Rick and Morty).
The episode of Rick and Morty about Unity has a race war based on nipple shape.
But if you want a really interesting thought experiment consider what would happen if other species of humans than sapiens would have survived along us. Would the Declaration of Independence start with “we the people” or “we the sapiens”? Would the myth of Christ be that he died for sins of men or some specific subset of humans?
But really I don’t see much of a problem with race both being a social construct and a biological reality in the sense that we are talking about two related but separate phenomena. Socially, race is a construct. The idea that judging by your skin color or shape of skull we can tell how smart or virtuous you are is bogus. A lot of people have tried to justify science behind it and all of it has not been science. Scientifically we have a number of genetic differences that can be traced between different origins of our genetic trees. Some of these are inconsequential like some people having straight hair and others having curly hair. Others are more impactful like ability to metabolize lactose as adults. Or susceptibility to heart disease or certain cancers. The kicker is that it is easier to tell the public “if you are ethnicity X you might want to get your heart checked out 5 years before another ethnicity because statistically it’s more beneficial that way” than to say the same thing as “if you have genes A, B, and C”. When my doctor tells me that because I am Easter European my cholesterol is more likely to be elevated, I don’t take offense to that.
Having said all that, don’t use “blacks” or “whites” as a damn noun. That isn’t ok.
+1 this could easily be the story line of a Rick and Morty episode or any of the other similar off the cuff shows that are popular right now. I think that will be one of the main profit streams for things like this, you can get the weird wild stories that don't really make sense but are interesting enough that who cares and you don't have to associate your network with eccentric individuals that attract malcontents.
It's like in Rick and Morty episode where Scissorshand says "you can run but you can't hide" and the run ends with "since when we take advice from this guy"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5g7Z1qC7-k
I think calling copyright infringement stealing is a hyperbole. They are very different things. Sometimes it's more than an inconvenience, though. At the present moment in time, I have no way to legally watch all but 3 Rick and Morty's episodes from the latest season (episodes 6, 7 and 8). And that's a brand new show. Don't get me started on older movies/tv shows.
We have the technology to allow everyone to have access to any film produced that we still have available in some format, but the distributors/copyright holders just can't organise themselves to make this happen, but instead give us a broken experience. I see projects like popcorn time pushing the boundaries a little bit, trying to make the problem evident.
I, for one, would like to see the copyright law reviewed. It could require you to pay part of the profits from the derivative work to copyright holders, but not give the copyright holder the power to prevent you from distributing it, for instance. That could would allow netflix, apple tv, etc to have pretty much whatever they wanted in their collection.
A lot of good series have this "open sandbox" format where the context of the show is just a vessel for whatever story the writer wants to tell.
Examples:
* Star Trek Holodeck * The various worlds in Sliders * The infinite worlds in Rick and Morty means there are no limits to what can be written in. * In Community, in a lot of episodes Greendale magically transforms in whatever setting is needed for the story: a court room where the murder of a yam is debated, a western/space battlefield where players duke it out for a grand prize, an entire city made of pillows and blankets, a zombie infested Halloween party etc.
The upside is anything goes, the downside is the perceived lack of consequences (especially in the extreme case of Rick and Morty).
> The system can't handle crowds. Second Life is divided into regions 256 meters on a side, and starts to slow down when more than about 40 users are in one region.
Can't remember which one episode it was, but "Rick and Morty" have definitely played out this scenario when Rick was kidnapped by aliens and they tried to trick him into disclosing some recipe for instant travel/teleportation fuel. It was a mixture of "Inception" and what you wrote.
Like the Turing Test computational attack from Rick and Morty.
Rick speaking to a crowd of hologram characters: Everyone who's first name starts with an "L" who isn't Hispanic, walk in a circle the same number of times as the square root of your age times ten! - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3333830/
This is fascinating. I don't know all the terminology perfectly, but I get the gist. I love how transparent and ingenious they are.
(BTW did anyone else think of the Rick and Morty episode where Rick builds a "perfectly flat" platform for Morty to experience?)
There's certainly a lot of boring, formulaic content out there. I recently watched Easy Rider and season 4 of Rick and Morty and in both cases my phone was left on a shelf and forgotten for hours. Yesterday I tried to watch the first episode of Witcher and it just wasn't my thing, I was fiddling with my phone after 10 minutes. (YMMV obviously)
I watch new/good things like I'm watching a movie. Dark, silent, uninterrupted. I spend maybe 2-4 hours every week watching shows like this. Things like Game of Thrones or Rick and Morty come to mind.
Then there's background watching, which usually means re-watching something I've already watched. I'm almost always using a second screen during this time. This is probably more like 15-25 hours every week, maybe even more when I work from home. I get a significant amount of my work/chores/tasks done during this time.
I try to use DDG as my default but it's so awful at knowledge-graph questions. I find myself using !g for knowledge queries before even attempting it.
An example would be something like "Rick and Morty episodes." I know google will give me a list with recent/upcoming episode names and air dates for pretty much any show. DDG will link me wikipedia and fan wikis. I make a "<show> episodes" query anytime I want to know when the next episode of something is released.
DDG's knowledge graph (and/or query parsing) is just so limited I skip it anytime I think google will be able to produce the answer directly. Similarly, there are things I'm confident asking a voice assistant, and there are things I won't even bother trying. If it's something I'd ask an assistant, I'm skipping DDG.
You should check out the latest episode of Rick and Morty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Seat
> the nihilistic will to power of the terrorist
I hate a poorly thought out reference to Nietzsche.
I used to be a big fan of Fight Club when I first saw it in high school. Then at some point I started to realize what the author did, that the fanbase was toxic, and it started to impact my appreciation of the movie.
I've noticed the same thing with other pieces of media, most recently Rick and Morty. I like the show a lot, but I've found, particularly online, the fanbase is pretty toxic.
So you want to watch the same shows and movies over and over?
When I listen to music I usually want a large percentage of that music to be stuff I already know. Of course I like discovering new music but, at least for me, probably > 50% of the time, maybe 90% of the time I'm playing music I know.
Conversely with Netflix I always want somehting I have never seen. Less than 2% of the stuff I watch on Netflix (or any other similar service) is stuff I've viewed before, maybe even less. Off the top of my head the only thing I've ever viewed more than once on Netflix is Rick and Morty.
Something that worked for me was playing a TV show that I've watched to death (Archer, Community, Rick and Morty.) on my phone. Listening to a story that I already know occupies my brain just enough to let go of my own worries, and since I know the end of them all, I don't have the need to sit up and wonder what's going to happen next.
Kind of the opposite of what they recommend (completely silent and dark room) for so-called "sleep hygiene", which, when I practiced it, only served to keep me awake longer.
Reminds me of Unity from that Rick and Morty episode https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Unity
You are describing the Rick and Morty episode with the Devil to a t. “Let’s just pay at this store, you don’t pay with money evil laugh.” “You pay with curses right?... I’ll just get them remove at Curse Purge Plus!”
I went to (a lot) of school for science and engineering. I’m on the internet all the time. I’m hip to this. I know I should be blown away by this kind of thing, but this, and the recent black hole pic for that matter, don’t do it for me. A really good movie, band or even a show like rick and morty will. I’m terms of science/engineering - the theoretical work or ingenious experiments do it for me. I guess what really amazes me is pure novel/creative thinking. The application of that thought is just a lot of work - and unless it’s s moon landing or nuclear fusion or curing a major disease or something like that I’m just like whatever.
Used to do this until I stopped needing to. A consistent bed time plus Rick and Morty/Venture Bros./Archer, just going from season 1 episode 1 on down the list, and then restarting once I got to the last episode at some point.
Worked very well, but I think if I tried it now, I would have a more difficult time sleeping with television playing in the background now that I no longer sleep this way.
> That observation results in what we call the whirly-dirly corollary (named after an episode of the cartoon Rick and Morty)
Hoo, boy
Also: If your wonderful new metric gives every planet the SAME closest neighbor, then maybe its not a meaningful metric.
Most rick and morty episodes are deconstructions of popular tropes, so yeah
I'm just amazed somebody can come to this conclusion.
20 years ago you had to go to the shop, buy ONE film for $15 from a limited shelve, bring it back home, put it in a device you bought specifically for that film format and that does only that, navigate through a dubious UI, be forced to watch ads, then eventually get to the film. If you didn't like it... too bad.
Now for the same price, you have access to thousand of movies __and__ TV shows. No ads. Instant watching. Most of them were release on TV or on theater so basically same quality than other channels.
And people complain ?
I mean I do think the general level of quality of movies and TV shows is going down, but it has nothing to do with netflix. The good/sucks ratio is plummeting much the same on every medium (and I think it's because of us voting for crap with our money, like for most things in our society).
Well, I guess it's beautiful some people arrived at such a level of comfort in their life that they consider that amazing commercial offer to be not up to their standard.
> PC propaganda
While their original content do try to target specific niches including PC and SJW trends (it makes sense IMO), there are plenty of excellent content on netflix that don't follow this trend. Just opening my front page: Ajin, Rick and Morty, black mirror, battle royal, altered carbon, lastman, dirk gently, breaking bad, american beauty, pulp fiction, drive, trainspotting, house of cards, david chapelle, mad max furry road...
Yes, things like Sabrina, disenchantmenent, etc are pandering to a certain crowd. So what ? You can just click on something else. There is a lot of something else.
Without Stan Lee the comic book business and super hero movies wouldn't be the same. There also would be no Rick and Morty and other shows.
Yeah I don’t think this author has any idea what he’s talking about. His argument basically is that real-time animation and motion capture will, what, replace what Disney and Pixar are doing?
What people like this don’t realize is the degree to which every iota of detail in a Disney (Pixar, Dreamworks, Sony, etc) production is art directed and stylized. Every shot is cheated to camera (meaning the poses don’t necessarily read well in 3D, but look spectacular/have clear posing to the locked camera), at least to some degree. That’s why these movies are so fun to watch. Even something like Rick and Morty has stylized animation and it’s own particular motion language. To think you could replicate this with generic asset libraries and motion capture is beyond ignorant.
It’s particularly frustrating as somebody who once was a professional animator to hear this guy talking about how this technology will revolutionize the field, casually mention that he was “considering becoming a professional animator” - and then you look at his work and he has such limited knowledge of the craft. It belittles those who have devoted their lives into mastering this deep skill.
It's interesting how in filmed stories there are the 2 main types - movie and tv series, where the shorter movie seems the more serious/central/important/prestigious etc form, the opposite of the situation with short story/novella vs novel. That's just from the historical accident of people seeing movies in cinemas, and series on TV, I guess.
70min movies can work fine - the 68 min Detour (1945), one of the first noirs, doesn't seem too short at all. Rick and Morty at 22 or so minutes does more than most 1 hour tv shows - an hour at that pace might be too much. Also, it seems that in the first decades or 50 years of cinema, plenty of 10 and 70 minute stories were shown, but recently you get the 'main feature' and nothing else.
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.
>What about Rick and Morty, an incredibly popular TV show among many groups of people? Nihilism, self-awareness, and breaking the 4th wall are basically trademarks of the show.
See: "most banal of sources". Rick and Morty is a case study on this exact point. A perfectly plausible commercially packaged shadow of reality. I wouldn't be so elitist as to call Roiland a hack, but he is working firmly within "what was and is". He is not showing us an envisioned possible future, or exploring any novel ideas. It's just riding the last dying gasps of postmodern existential angst that was drilled into our heads by The Simpsons and Family Guy. Perfectly competent as a work of commercial entertainment, but not original art to be studied critically.
>"people who produce the cultural material which academics and non-academics read, watch and listen to
both academics and non-academics watch/see advertising, they see memes, many of which are highly self aware. What about Rick and Morty, an incredibly popular TV show among many groups of people? Nihilism, self-awareness, and breaking the 4th wall are basically trademarks of the show.
Also as I stated, postmodern concepts like simulacra and hyperreal are more useful descriptors than ever.
I agree with some of your points but I don't think that deconstructioning the pieces of the project is a panacea. What frequently occurs when that happens is that you get distributed work along with distributed responsibility. Then whenever anything goes wrong or needs to change, there is no one who can make it happen.
You get team A who needs team B to make a new api, but they won't do it till they get a new device because their kpis don't improve for any work they do for team A, so HR needs to be involved the do hiring but they need to talk to accounting to approve the budget and on and on and on.
If you've ever seen Rick and Morty, the episode where aliens have accidentally pulled another character in and the leader is trying to find out why, when every department blames another and he says "oh, so it's nobodies fault" is a perfect example of most large projects
Hi HN, I've been working on this project for the past few months. It's a website that allows movies and TV shows to be explained frame-by-frame. To see some concrete examples check out:
Citizen Kane explained: https://www.spoiled.tv/orson-welles-citizen-kane-explained
Rick & Morty explained: https://www.spoiled.tv/rick-and-morty-pilot-explained
The hardest job has been adding more spoilers (which I'm very much still doing) because it's hard transcribing them from Wikia or IMDB and finding the correct timestamp. Please let me know what you think!
Such as being subject to the whims of random administrator/moderators and whatever random set of principles they wished to apply to their users.
The most striking example I can remember was with Rick and Morty creator/writer Dan Harmon using mod powers to edit a forum user's posts to publicly humiliate the user until he/she left the forum. This was a forum for the monthly short-film festival Channel101-- a forum that is no longer alive, but it appears someone kept some of Dan's insults from that thread[1].
But that pales in comparison to more technically-oriented forums and mailing lists where insidious forms of passive-aggression flourished. These include:
* making the new user feel stupid for failing to comprehend the poor documentation or poorly considered forum guidelines
* making the new user feel stupid for asking a question and failing to read a relevant footnote from a message posted three years ago with an unrelated message topic
* endlessly blathering on about top-posting, asking-about-asking, proper quoting, on-topic vs off-topic, reading-the-stickies, formats for uploading images/attachments, instead of making the software better so that humans don't have to deal with that bs. (The same way git makes it so that humans don't have to bicker about who gets repository permissions)
* telling a user they will be ignored, then mentioning in a meta-discussion about the forum who is ignoring whom
* other users rationalizing the behavior of trolls because those trolls were veteran members
* general lack of mentors to help new users (if the purpose of the forum was to be a sort of community)
There are of course exceptions. But I still remember the feeling of just crossing my fingers in the hopes that my query about a technical topic wouldn't trigger Socratic bombs from a forum's resident jerk.
Stack Overflow proves there's a way to at least a way to discover and read relevant responses without that pain. I have no idea what the antidote to Facebook/Google is. But pining for single-point-of-failure, buggy backends serving up poor UIs with content that cannot easily bubble up to a wider audience isn't going to help.
And forget the anti-social part-- you can't even technically achieve the spirit of such forums today because sock puppets and Sybil have become so sophisticated. Unless we confine ourselves to topics so ineffectual that nobody on the internet would ever decide to hate us.
[1] http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Dan_Harmon/Quotes
More like the rick and morty episode with the sexbot...
"I Dated a Robot" actually has dating in it.... if we had a human or near human AI datebot that would be quite different since whilst you won't be participating in the continuation of the human species at least at that time you would also not be losing any social interaction skills.
This could be nothing and this could be the same thing as the rage against hustler in the 70's and internet porn in the mid 90's but for someone who grewup with every nasty available when I tried one of the higher end recent VR porn productions on my Oculus the feeling that you get from it is quite different.
I've tried VR porn as a joke like 1-2 years ago when the Google VR stuff started and back then it was pretty garbage it was mostly just barrel projection of a standard porn scene that wasn't shot with the intention of VR. The new stuff is shot with proper cameras, uses 3D audio and it's just creepy how convincing it has gotten so far despite the major drawbacks of the current VR headsets.
At the current rate, it'll take the better part of a century for Rick and Morty to count up to a couple hundred episodes and get stale like its forebears have.
> I have to force myself to do passive things like watching TV. Even then, I need shows that are 'active', like Rick and Morty or Game of Thrones, where I can reverse engineer characters, think up conspiracy theories, or do something.
I watch Game of Thrones with the fan-made slippy map open on my phone. And documentaries with Google Earth open. :)
No, they mean the characters. Virtually every character on Seinfeld is a nihilist. Nobody on Seinfeld --- with the possible exception of Jerry's parents --- cares about anybody or anything. Susan dies from licking poisonous envelopes and they all go out for coffee before George tries to hit on Marissa Tomei. Jerry's girlfriend gets Jerry to care about things for half an episode, turns into an anti-Jerry; the episode resolves itself with Jerry being shocked back into normal Jerry by George temporarily revealing his own emotions. Or, just compare Kevin, "The Bizarro Jerry", to Jerry himself.
It's a profoundly nihilistic show, in a way that Rick and Morty doesn't even really touch.
Rick can travel between dimensions and meet infinite alternate Ricks and infinite alternate Mortys. The show informs us that he knows any one Morty or any one Beth doesn't actually matter. And Rick still occasionally cares about them. The subtext of Rick and Morty is almost anti-nihilist.
The nihilism in Seinfeld is presented realistically and non-fantastically and is so unsettling that people have a hard time even recognizing it for what it is.
> You want a really nihilistic show? Watch Seinfeld.
Eh? Do you mean nihilist in the (meta) sense that the show "is about nothing" and has no inherent meaning? Because none of the characters on Seinfeld strike me as nihilist either.
That's not to say I disagree with your point about Rick and Morty having nihilist characters; I don't think Rick is a nihilist, but I also don't think nihilism translates well to film and television. It's difficult to maintain compelling character development that can bring in a large viewership if a character is truly nihilist, in my opinion.
For my purposes I don't believe it's enough to have a character profess adherence to existential nihilism - I don't agree a character is nihilist unless they also act like it, and that is fundamentally difficult to do convincingly. I very often see writers use stoicism, ruthless utilitarianism, (dysfunctional) cynicism and even atheism as proxies to demonstrate a character is nihilistic, but none of those really hits it on the mark. I consider it like free will: you can make extremely compelling arguments that free will (in the sense of the capacity for non-deterministic decision making) simply doesn't exist (or is at best implausible), but there's not really a convincing framework for altering your behavior even if you claim to believe that. This is unlike atheism or agnosticism, which do have clear behavioral proxies when you abstract them away from considerations of intrinsic meaning - simply don't participate in religious communities, gatherings or activities for its own sake.
I kind of agree and disagree with the criticisms in this thread. For a while in season 2 I didn't watch much of the show for pretty much the reasons given here. Nevertheless, I watched a good bit of the first and third seasons, including the [IMHO excellent] finale of Season 3 that prompted Elon Musk to get into a twitter discussion with the show about singularities and partying like Kurt Cobain. [1]
Rick and Morty are, I think, intended to be more archetypes rather than actual people most of the time, although sometimes their humanity (particularly Morty's, which is leveraged for comedic effect) shows through. Rick is definitely shown to have something of a softer side that he keeps deeply hidden.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15424659
Rick and Morty has a lot of "bad" episodes IMO, where there's nothing in them except Rick being an annoying jerk.
I was forced to keep watching since a group of my friends continued to watch Rick and Morty regularly, and I can definitely say that some episodes are way better than others. "A Rinkle in Time" (Season 2 episode 1) was mostly great episode for instance, and I can recommend it as one of the best that Rick and Morty can offer.
I haven't seen all of Rick and Morty: there may be some other really good episodes in there. But I've only seen maybe... 6 or 7 episodes across S1 and S2 (and I haven't seen any of S3). I recognize that Rick does occasionally care about Morty, but seriously, his treatment of Morty is downright abusive in the vast majority of episodes.
The fact that Rick saves Morty on some episodes doesn't change the fact that Rick's treatment of Morty is incredibly unfair.
Rick And Morty has a great number of good "science" jokes, but really its more about general Sci-Fi tropes. (Time Travel, Multiverses, Clones, Aliens, and Androids aren't really "science" as much as they are about "Science fiction")
But the hardest thing for me was to get used to the straight up nihilism of Rick. True, there have been plenty of Nihilistic "protagonists" in other shows: Peter Griffin in Family Guy, Eric Cartman from South Park, Homer Simpson (depending on the season of course).
But Rick is different: while the other characters are arguably Nihilistic due to ignorance, Rick purposefully and specifically pursues the "I don't care" attitude and gets away with it due to his intelligence (while other characters in other shows seem to get away with it due to literally dumb luck).
That difference continuously pisses me off in Rick and Morty, and as such its difficult for me to enjoy a lot of the episodes.
Nothing against the fanbase or anything: I recognize that Rick and Morty is a huge following, and the enormous lines at McDonalds for the special Rick and Morty Sauce just a few days ago demonstrates that Rick and Morty are the new "mainstream" cartoon. But its apathetic and malicious main character really grates on me, and I personally an unable to enjoy it as much as everyone else seems to.
Rick and Morty already showed us that we're in a simulation within a simulation (possibly within a simulation) [1], duh.
/s
1. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3333830/
If you believe the README.txt files of downloads from The Pirate Bay, there exist some amazing video codecs that are so new and advanced that they can actually play episodes of Rick and Morty that haven't even been released yet! It's almost as good as inter-dimensional cable TV. And they are totally free: you just have to download and install some binary codecs from some Russian web site before watching the video.
Hollywood just has 2 hours- and in those two hours cant win against the great novel story tellers of our times- tv-series. So they made it rollercoaster rides - filled with sfx and instant soup stories. Which just is not the value, people now are used too. The irony is that rick and morty like animated series show- that you can squeeze incredibble stories into the smallest format. You just have to be willing to risk it. But hollywoods movies have become to big to whale.
> deliberately harmful speech
So there is harmful speech. Thanks.
> Otherwise South park / Rick and Morty could not exist.
South Park is freely shown on TV stations in basically any country that has enough of an audience to make economic sense. Every single one of those countries has more restrictive laws regarding hate speech, yet they also seem to have the capability to distinguish between a TV show and and armed mob with swastikas.
Or the Season 3 primer of Rick and Morty where Rick invents a fictional backstory with the secret the federation was looking for replaced with exploit code.
Yes of course.
Rick and Morty covered that in this episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CyMqQBO8w
Is "Anatomy Park" a Rick and Morty reference? http://rickandmorty.wikia.com/wiki/Anatomy_Park_(episode)
Oh it'll spawn a whole genre. Having written several scripts myself I've naturally been fascinated by the political machinations going on over the last couple of years, but the #1 difficulty (besides the constant flow of new events that Change Everything) is the sheer outlandishness of it all. I guarantee you that if I had a time machine and went back two or three years into the past with a hot script, virtually everyone in Hollywood would shake their heads and say 'too many unlikely plot twists, nobody would buy this, go take more writing classes until you understand causality, pacing, motivation, character arcs, and real life, kiddo.'
A common refrain among both my movie biz friends and political scientist friends these days is 'I'm living in a fucking cartoon.' Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. At this point Rick and Morty comes off as a bit unimaginative.
The very premise of a great Rick and Morty episode [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/embed/l2bU_tOREos?vndel=watch&vndapp=youtube_mobile&vndclient=mv-google&vnddnc=1
It actually reminded me of Rick and Morty Season 2 last episode.
Sorry I wasn't clear -- I always plug it in when I'm at my desk, and I'm hardly ever away from my desk for more than 4-5 hours. So I know it works that long at least. Past that... I mean I haven't deliberately not plugged it in just to test...
I got through a movie and a handful of Rick and Morty episodes while on a flight... Drove home from the airport late so I just went to sleep... hit the "Lower Power Mode" warning as soon as I opened it the next day. It wasn't plugged in that night... Battery life seems reasonable. It doesn't seem amazingly better than my old MBP.
You should scrape a bit and populate this for TV shows. Neither "Rick and Morty" nor "Line of Duty" were there.
It's a Rick and Morty (TV show) reference.
EDIT: 02x06 - The Ricks Must Be Crazy, it's a very good ep.
I've got a large amount of extended family and married friends, so good shows like these are super helpful in positively connecting with their kids. And shared media interests is actually part of a large social aspect of public school.
> Steven Universe
This show works incredibly well. Especially since the episodes are short - a feature for parents as well as kids. Gravity Falls, as well, does a great job of being fun without trying to do much preaching. Of course, some of the adult fandom for these can be a bit ... enthusiastic, so I worry about whether the kids will be able to enjoy themselves at conventions and on the internet without getting caught up in the drama.
Both of these shows have also garnered approval from some parents with some pretty insane control issues, too. In situations like that, it's nice to be able to provide gateway entertainment to kids languishing under extreme supervision. I doubt I'm the only one who's had to deal with that. It's surprising how many parents unwittingly rob their kids of a childhood. Being a non-parent in some ways gives a more even perspective about loosening the grip on the kids and not taking everything so seriously.
Shows like Regular Show and Adventure Time are pretty good, but some parents reject them for being "too stupid". Yeah, there's juvenile behavior, but it's not all over. When introducing parents to these, I sometimes have to be particular about which episodes I start with, or they'll immediately reject it.
I've introduced teens to shows like Rick and Morty and Star vs. the Forces of Evil. Parents are generally more accepting of more edgy material at that age. And they're gonna push boundaries, so at least point them to the better quality shows. Anime has also gotten hugely popular in this recent generation, to the point that some of my nieces and nephews seem to literally breathe it. Streaming subscriptions help with that, though available shows vary by licensing deals and region. Hulu is one of the best for cartoons.
It's also amusing that the creators of these shows are the recent adults who grew up on the last generation of entertainment cartoons.
My favorite podcast is Harmontown. It is an incredibly brilliant improv comedy by Dan Harmon(creator of the tv shows Community and Rick and Morty). This guy is a genius, I highly recommend to listen to this show.
Some Rick and Morty episodes are available for free, but not all. I think they shuffle them around so if you have patience you can eventually watch them all that way.
I thought that Rick and Morty was free on Adult Swim's website? That's where I ended up watching at least the first season (that might have changed).
However, from the same creator, there was Dan Harmon's Community. Season 6 was funded by Yahoo, and they put it up on Yahoo Screen. For free! Great! Except they had big issues with buffering, and region locked the show to America. In the end that whole operation was shut down.
Rick and Morty did it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_qvy82U4RE
Rick and Morty screw up the universe they're in, so they just hope sideways to a universe where their dopplegangers died seconds ago. They bury their bodies in the yard and take their place in that universe. The graves are still there in the backyard with rotting corpses in them. So, to Summer, it seems like Morty belongs there, but Morty knows that the original version of him died and he's a transplant from a parallel universe. But, the universes are almost entirely identical, so it's almost like being in his original universe.
The secret is not to think about it too much.
My favorite theory regarding Rick and Morty is that each episode doesn't necessarily follow the "same" characters. If there are an infinite number of Ricks and Mortys, in an infinite variety of situations, many of which are indistinguishable from each other, then it doesn't matter if you tune in to the "same" characters each time.
I think that's a practical answer to the philosophical navel gazing. Each thing that exists is its own thing, regardless of how similar it might be to another thing. The universe is infinite so just deal with as much of it as you can manage and don't worry about the rest.
I disagree. I think everyone has their own journey and everyone must accept and respect it for the value it offers. Just because you can't see the value or the impact does not mean it's not there. Wings of butterflies and all that. Ali's influence on the world is incalculable. How's that for critical thinking?
"We must"? No, we musn't. If you don't like sports, don't watch them. I don't.
Clearly you come here with an agenda. The goal of your "progress" is by definition regressive. Equality means respecting and defending everyone's rights equally as individuals and not a specific ingroup, such "those who contribute in a more fair sense." That would be collectivism and you appear to be demonstrating authoritarian attitudes and socialist (culturally Marxist) shaming techniques in an attempt to make people feel disconnected from the intellectual elite as a means of coercing them to join your group/cause. We are not your weaponized zombies, shamed into submission and programmed to deliver your message so we fit into what you define as an elite group.
That's called 'malignant narcissism' by the way. How's that for openness?
The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as individuals is what needs to be promoted if you believe in free will/agency as a goal. And with that you have to accept the good with the bad, whatever you believe them to be.
"I'm sorry, I didn't know freedom meant people doing stuff that sucks." --Summer, Rick and Morty Episode 203: Auto Erotic Assimilation
Episode 5 of Rick and Morty's first season is relevant (the Mister Meeseeks episode).
Mom: "We got Sky now, so many channels and we get the newest Soccer and Movies!"
GF: "Oh nice... so where can I choose the movies?"
Mom: "You select the movie channel at 20:15 and it shows it"
GF: "What? I that's in four hours! Who pays a company to wait? This sounds like Netflix in bad to me..."
Classic cable TV is basically dead.
First Netflix&co had better airing times (on demand, haha) and now they invest in better shows.
Besides Rick and Morty and Game of Thrones, every show I watched last year, was made by Netflix or Amazon.
And this seems to be a good thing. Just look at stuff like orange is the new black. These new producers are far less conservative than the old media companies.
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.
Reminds me of that episode of Rick and Morty. The one with Colbert.
Harmontown - a podcast by the creator of the brilliant tv shows Community and Rick and Morty. I'm not sure it will make sense on it's own, but if you really love Community, think that Dan is a genius, and want to understand how he thinks - it's awesome. Also very funny.
Or an episode of Rick and Morty.
Comedy. I love comedy. Stand up and sitcoms. Works every time.
Try watching Louis CK, Bill Burr, or TV shows like Community, HIMYM or Rick and Morty. Or read some xkcd =)
As an anecdote I have resorted to pirating Rick and Morty. I love the show, it's amazing really. If you haven't go watch it now. You might think that I am selfish a-hole who wants to rob the creators of one of my favourite shows of their income, but that's not the case. I am simply not located in the right part of the world. Not being an American is a huge hassel when it comes to digital content consumption.
I am willing to pay, nay I would love to pay, for Rick and Morty, but from my research I have found no way, short of VPN + US credit card, to buy a season pass. So you have potential customers who have to resort to piracy because the industry has no interest in distributing to their region. Am I going to buy Rick and Morty when it eventually comes out in Sweden? Not very likely as I will already have watched all episodes.
The same holds true for The Walking Dead, thankfully HBO has started releasing episodes of Game of Thrones the same day in Sweden as in the US and I can and am paying for that.