unbibium

read a few Calvin and Hobbes comics recently, and I no longer sympathize with Calvin as I once might have. He seems utterly malicious to me. And I chalk that up to me being in middle age, childhood is an old foreign land I barely remember.

Why, then, do I still sympathize with Bart Simpson? He's twice as dangerous by any metric, but I still feel bad for him when he gets in trouble, which is all the time.

Maybe that's it. I don't remember seeing Calvin in detention very often. Meanwhile entire episodes are about Bart getting shipped off to France, to military school, to juvenile hall, etc. Getting caught is as much a part of his identity as causing trouble.

and, that fear of getting in trouble, that's followed me into adulthood, that's evergreen.

as I'm reading about the early history of Paul Reubens' career, I see some parallels to Andy Kaufman. The first iteration of Pee-wee was a stand-up comic who had only been performing for a few weeks and mostly brought out funny toys he bought. The first iteration of Kaufman's Foreign Man was a stand-up comic who did incompetent impressions but the punchline was a perfect Elvis impression. Both appeared on The Dating Game in character.

The key distinction seems to be that Kaufman's performances were based on disruption and jerking the audience around. in the Dating Game appearances, for example, Foreign Man spent the whole time failing to understand the rules, complaining that he couldn't see the girl, etc. But when Pee-wee appeared, he earnestly attempted to win with the weirdest possible answers. And because he was sitting between two 1970s pickup artists, his schtick aged better than his competitors' actual personalities.

Despite all the hype in the 1990s leading up to that Jim Carrey movie, I don't think Kaufman's "commitment to the character" was as successful as other character actors. When Pee-wee Herman appeared on Letterman, nobody mentioned Paul Reubens. When Super Dave Osborn appeared on Letterman, nobody mentioned Bob Einstein. When Max Headroom appeared on a talk show, nobody asked about Matt Frewer. When Kermit the Frog appeared on TV, nobody mentioned Jim Henson. When Tiny Clifton appeared on Letterman, Dave's first questions were about whether he's really Andy Kaufman, and I suppose the joke was that Bob Zmuda was playing him that time so audiences would seek a resemblance to Kaufman and not find it. But that's not what appearing on talk shows in-character was all about.

I bring up Super Dave because he kind of split the difference. He was a big stuntman parody of Eivel Knievel with an Asian caricature sidekick. He had kind of a Clifton-like inflated ego. But he was sympathetic with audiences because his stunts failed. Not like Knievel's did, more like Wiley E. Coyote's did. And, like Pee-wee, he lived in a magical world parallel to our own and invited us in. Clifton just lived in Vegas.

I don't think we appreciated Reubens the way we appreciated Kaufman, because Kaufman died young, while Reubens lived long enough to get arrested and have his mugshot posted.

When I was growing up in the 1990s I called BBSes and they had these text files describing how to build strange hacking devices and programs, how to hack the phone system, and other interesting things of varying legality. Sometimes it was just ideas for pranks and exploitation at K-Mart or McDonald's. See textfiles.com for examples, if it's still up.

In the 2000s, there was a cable channel called TechTV, and a show called The Screen Savers which was basically about emerging technology and online culture, hosted by Leo Laporte. And there was a young employee of the show named Kevin Rose whose first big segment was about the port 139 exploit in Windows. He gained a reputation as "the Dark Tipper", with the kind of stuff we used to see in BBSes. And this was how I knew him for many years, as he expanded his role on the show, as the Screen Savers was replaced with Attack of the Show with him as host, and as he and his AotS co-host Alex Albrecht hosted the video podcast known as diggnation, despite Rose living in SF and Albrecht living in LA at the time.

As his career progressed he tapered off the "Dark Tipper" stuff despite the demand from the likes of me. He hosted a more explicitly underground show called thebroken with co-host Dan Huard. The intro had this kind of campy cyberpunk "heroes on the run" thing. He started the show with him and his co-host each opening a 40. They started strong with a street segment where they hacked WiFi and even broke first-generation WEP encryption. Then they had this weird segment where Ramzi, a "hacker" correspondent, just downloads Bonzi Buddy over KaZaa while crazy foreign music plays in the background. And after that, they describe how to get a free pizza by trailing a walk-in customer, writing down their name and order, and impersonating that customer over the phone while complaining to the manager.

man, what a scummy show in retrospect. But it was all stuff that '00s me was happy to let slide. Why shouldn't we all just break into encrypted WiFi? Why shouldn't we laugh at funny foreign man doing bad acting? Why not lie to minimum wage employees and franchise owners to steal pizza? Indeed, I was able to wash my hands of all this because I was too lazy to actually try this stuff.

His heart wasn't in it anyway, and he made two more episodes: a short "oops, all Ramzi" episode and an interview with Kevin Mitnick. For years, people clamored for him to keep the show going, and he always gave excuses like they couldn't get Ramzi back.

Eventually they put out episode 4, and their way of apologizing for the long wait was a two-minute sketch where both hosts stumble are incapacitated by marijuana. The rest of the show continued the theme of tacky fratboy culture. The campy cyberpunk intro had a strip club scene now, and strip club scenes are scattered throughout to break up the long technical segments. The first segment was completely illegal cell phone jamming with a "don't do this in America" fig-leaf disclaimer. After another Ramzi bit about removing DRM, they do a bit about hacking the X-Box 360 to play backups, which includes this part where they stand outside of a Blockbuster, in Blockbuster uniforms, and tell their audience send pirated DVDs back to Blockbuster's DVD-by-mail service as revenge for getting "fisted" by the brock-and-mortar stores. Boy that aged like milk didn't it. There were credits, and then 5 minutes of bloopers where they showed how hard it was to make the funny foreign man say "dat ass".

Rose and Huard also put out a serious tech show with none of the GTA shit called Systm, which I think only had one or two episodes. I can't find it on YouTube, but I remember they had a circuit diagram with a debouncer on the first episode. I may still have a T-shirt I bought to support the show. His production company, Revision 3 Studios, would go on to make other stuff.

At some point, Kevin Rose got on the cover of BusinessWeek in shabby clothes for a "dot-com kid gets rich" story about Digg. Rose hated the cover, and Digg's fortunes didn't last.

I lost track, but at some point, Kevin Rose resurfaced an "angel investor"... and he'd still appear on This Week In Tech every so often.

and then, I heard Kevin Rose did the Joe Rogan podcast. this was back when Rogan was just a comedian with a super popular podcast, a lot of MMA expertise, a few ill-considered opinions, but was still many years away from becoming a full-fledged tool of the alt-right.

And he spent the first twenty minutes talking about keto.

I don't know why that felt like a revelation, or what it revealed, but I knew that I was no longer one of what Kevin Rose was. The geek species had diverged, into nerds like me, and tech bros like him.

All the TechTV alums were early adopters of bitcoin, but most fell by the wayside, as it became known how impractical it was as a currency, how wrought with fraud and crime the industry was. A few years in, Leo Laporte lost the password to his wallet, and it became apparent that his story was more common than the successful cash-out. But Rose stuck with it, to the point that Laporte doesn't want to give him airtime right now.

and I wonder, was Kevin Rose really a cyberpunk gray-hat hero who stuck it to the Man, only to become one of the Man's tools of financial dominance? Or do his old thebroken episodes betray ethical blind spots that were always there, and society has just disintegrated enough that our latest generation of capitalist sociopaths can exploit them? Are those ethical blind spots endemic to tech culture, ever since those 1980s text files telling us how to steal services from phone companies and mess with K-Mart employees?

You can't denote your own cutoff point on Facebook, so I'm posting here.

( Spoilers for Picard S01E02 )

So, the Internet is full of obsessive people... why has nobody compiled a Joy of Painting episode guide?

And there are so many ways to sort through them, too.  Maybe I want to find an episode that uses only the six colors of paint I actually have.  Or maybe I only have a black canvas left, and want to sort by those.  Maybe I want to find an episode where a guest comes in and paints something other than a landscape.

Except, that's kind of only useful to people who have the entire series.  And most of the people who have the entire series are people who torrented it.  It's not legitimately available for online streaming, and the Bob Ross estate sends takedown notices to any full episodes on YouTube, despite it having been a public television show.

 OK, so Lorenzo Music voiced Garfield in cartoons, and Bill Murray played Peter Venkman in the Ghostbusters movie.

Then Lorenzo Music voiced Peter Venkman in the first season of The Real Ghostbusters, when eventually Bill Murray would voice Garfield in the feature-length films.

After season one, Dave Coulier took over the voice of Venkman.  He's an impressionist whose repetoire includes Bill Murray.  And it's hardly worth mentioning, except for that throughout the run of The Real Ghostbusters, Ray Stanza was voiced by Frank Welker, who recently did the voice of Garfield in his new CGI series.

If I can work Egon into this, I might have enough coincidences lined up for a full-blown conspiracy theory.

Internet legend Kibo once reviewed a movie called Mr. Magoo, in which Leslie Nielsen forgets what made him funny in Airplane!.

Years later, when he was in full-on clown mode, but too old to insure for a feature film, he made these commercials for Arizona Federal Credit Union.

1. 1. I don't remember the cheerleaders being this hot when I went to Computer U.
2. How many more ways could the director have underlined the "uh-oh" moment?

OK those were the only two I found online.

So everyone knows you can stream Firefly episodes on Hulu, but Hulu only works in the USA, and has a habit of suggesting I'd get my chest waxed for a Klondike™ bar.

Are there any shady overseas video sites that stream it?

In other news, you can watch entire MST3K episodes on Google Video.

Dumb Dora is so dumb, she sent her cultured pearls to BLANK.

BEEP! Hi, Nick's phone. Nick doesn't have AT&T, and therefore has no bars in some crucial location he ended up in. So he won't get your call with the crucial information that you could have given him in person a week ago, so it looks like we'll undergo some horrible consequence, such as death or imprisonment, as a result of missing your call. But it's because we don't have AT&T, and not because cell phones have fooled us into thinking we don't have to prepare for anything. And also, land lines and emails don't exist, and people don't post security outside demolition sites.

BEEP! Hi, Wynn Guy's phone. Wynn Guy doesn't have AT&T, so he's not getting your phone call about how the crumbling economy won't support his existing luxury Vegas hotel, so he should find a better way to follow it up than by building an identical hotel two blocks away, and then filming an ad on its roof.