Due to the newest wave of reality shows, my cynicism has reached an all time high. An apex, a peak, if you will. Sure, a new genre is always nice, but these are just plain stupid! They're like game shows gone bad. They have taken a novel idea and stomped it into the ground. Like when you try to re-heat sausage pizza and it messes up the cheese texture so much that you can't eat it. Like horror movie sequels. Like trying to turn good video games into good movies. They are just bad news. The premise is always simple. A certain amount of people from diverse ethnic backgrounds compete to win a prize. However, "compete" means spend time in the wilderness, having to deal with each other, but also conspire with one another in order to get the prize. The prize is usually a boat, a million dollars, a new car, a japanese fighting fish, a broken down Greyhound bus, and even if they don't win, they're bound to get called onto at least two different talk shows.

I watch TV to see a group of people react to a given comic situation with one liners and self flagelation of the mental variety. I want kookie character flaws. I want snappy come-backs to everything everyone else says. I want to see many of attractive people hanging out, doing nothing, and doing expensive things even though none of them work more than an hour a day, if that. I want to watch these people get trapped in uncomfortable situations due to their quirks. I want to see strange and entertaining things happen to them.

For example: The attractive guy falls in love with the attractive girl who only has a cameo, and she has to go back to South America. The day she has to fly back, the friend of the guy wins plane tickets because the other guy had signed him up for a game show as a prank and he took the guy up on it. Then there's this huge rush for the airport, but they are too late and have to fly to South America and find the girl.

I want to be shocked, titilated, maybe even grossed out (but not by people eating bugs). I want lots of action, one liners, midgets taking on twenty guys twice their size and still winning. Explosions, slow motion gun fights, gatuitous sex and violence. Things that scare me. Fiction, situations that make one question one's morals. Hell, I'd even watch British comedies over these crappy reality shows. If I can't watch those afformentioned, I at least want to watch a dysfunctional family with a strange skin color and number of phalanges make fun of everything that is wrong in our society.

I don't want to watch eight normal unattractive people compete for money by backstabbing one another and eating anything they can find. I don't care about a bunch of people stranded in some jungle/desert/mountain chain/fast food restaurant trying to build a shelter, but can't because they are too busy arguing. I don't want to watch how many days someone can live on insects before acquiring scurvy. I don't need to see old/African American/small/smart people being the first to get kicked off the show because the other people don't like them.

In short, I don't want to watch reality. I watch TV to escape the inevitable thought that my life is mundane and ultimately pointless. I want to pretend that people are all friendly, fun loving, rich, attractive, and single, living in a city where nothing bad ever happens. I want to wish I could back flip up onto a table and take out seventy guys with an UZI clip in seconds and not getting killed. I don't want to deal with survival issues when I watch television. I don't care who some guy they picked off the street chooses to marry, no matter how strange the woman's name might be. I live in a technological age, where everything is pre-fabricated by someone who wants to make what ever it is, or is forced to by The Man/economic traps of capitalism. Am I pampered? Sure. I don't know how to hunt, fish, or build a hut out of sticks. But I don't care, because I don't have to. It's human nature to hate anything that is different, assume everything needs a reason, and fight over greed until we're nothing but six billion rotting corpses, or the planet is inhospitable. But it is also in our nature to try to make things easier for ourselves, so why not use this technology? I'm rambling, and getting off topic, which for once I don't want to do. Since I relish technology, I don't care about how fast eight people can make a hut out of palm trees. I want to be entertained, not reminded of how ugly and stupid and mean the average person is.

I don't care to see people doing the above mentioned things any more than I want to do them. And why are there suddenly eight zillion reality TV shows on every network? It's you stupid writers. Going on strike and pricing yourselves right out of the business. Thanks a lot you selfish pricks. Now that the corporations know the masses will watch anything, especially if there is no thought involved, they don't need writers. So they don't have to pay them, so you're all out of jobs. I hope you all rot in Hell. Or someone makes a time machine, goes back in time, and stops you from ruining television for me. Of course if that had happened, I wouldn't be here writing this rant, but I might be writing a different one. You never know.
posted by Slade at 12:42 PM

Good call by ChefElf. I typed the link to my comic wrong. Kudos to him. It's fixed now.
posted by Slade at 10:20 PM

Hoo ah! Contra Comic Four: "Blue Pants Says Some Stuff", or alternatively "What did Blue Pants do Before the Comic Started?" is done! I've also discovered a funky fresh new way of doing speech bubbles, so work on the comics will go much faster now! That means sometimes two a week instead of one! Woo for you! Go on, "Woo!"... I. Said. WOO! Fine, don't do it. See if I care. See, PSP has this dufus magic wand feature, but it doesn't select the whole bubble, just the outline, and you can't go fill in a non-solid line... ah screw it. You don't care and I don't feel like explaining about working around annoyances in paint programs. Click here to check it out. Enjoi.

Oh, and I might just try to make my own HTML page sometime this week. If I can, I'll link to the Contra Comics, and make an official Archives page, so you can all see past zanyness with just a few clicks of the mouse.
posted by Slade at 10:03 PM

I'm currently in the process of making Contra Comic Four, and even though I'm not at home to work on it, I'm still going to take this opportunity to slack off and not give another update. I might have it done tonight, depnding on how much my dad hoardes the computer. He has a habit of using it constantly from the moment he wakes up to the moment he gets off because I'm home and would like to use it too, which is about eight hours later. Of course he takes breaks, so it's really like six hours of computing.
posted by Slade at 12:18 PM

Today I'm going to tell you all about a dream I had last night. Ok, so me and a bunch of other guys I either don't know personally, know their names and don't care about them, or... no, that's it. So we're all standing out in the middle of a dirty slushy wintery road. I know right where we were, but there's no point it saying it here. It was warped by the dream though. At any rate, we are all standing out there in the winter. The snow banks are easily eight feet high, but we're OK, because I have my snow pants, hat, and gloves on. Some of the other people did too. One guy was standing on top of the snow banks. Now, my Dream Sense(TM) tells me we've just been in a massive car wreck, and I look around, noting one car buried three fourths of the way into the snow on my right, and the other upside down on top of the snow bank to my left. The car on the right is behind me, and the other one is ahead of me a little ways. So I go down to see if I can help get that car down and right side up, and there's suddenly a hole in the snow and I can walk underneath it. However, the snow that's holding it up isn't very thick, so I freak out and decide not to go under it. Now we suddenly realize someone is missing. One guy begins to walk out into the field behind the car on top of the snow, following a plowed trail, calling for the guy. I start to follow him, but then think "Wait a minute, he'd leave foot prints." I somehow go back to the car that was in the snow back and un bury it. I peer in the dront passanger side seat and there the guy is, in jeans and a sweatshirt, not snow clothes. I open the door, yelling to the other guys, and then think "Crap, he's dead." He was sitting slumped forward, or he would be, were his head not holding his body in place hitting the dashboard. However, when I yell he stirs, appearantly not dead.

With all members of the team alive and kicking now, we all go to try to get that car off of the snow bank. People are already starting. They've got all of these thick ropes and are going to pull it off of the snow bank, and now that I think about it, into the snow, not the road. At any rate, suddenly Ernie from Sesame Street scoots over. I say scoots because he is only a torso, arms and head. He leaves a scoot trail as he scoots, and says he wants to help. I'm thinking "How are you gonna help when you don't have legs? You're gonna go flying." Sure enough, he scoots behind the car and my view, and then suddenly goes flying over it, above my head, rope flinging after him and then stopping because it's attached. He lands in a refrigerator which has some junk in it, but not a lot, and is yellowish, and the light isn't on.

And then my alarm went off, and I woke up, then fell promptly back to sleep. My alarm is set for ten on weekends, but I slept until eleven. The end, since this was about my dream, not my day.
posted by Slade at 10:05 PM