Shyzer.com

I can already tell I’m far too jacked up on (rational) emotion from having just watched the presumable series finale of Jericho to make a clear and unbiased post, so I’ll just say this.

Fuck you, CBS.

I could sit here and tout a countless array of argument as to how inept the current heads of television are. I could mention how TiVO and iTunes and bittorrent and DVR aren’t factored into Neilson ratings. I could reference the great YouTube debate or link to all the thousands of words I’ve written here on Shyzer mentioning how much money they’re losing every day they refuse to recognize the new ways of media consumption. But it’s all been said a million times before by just as many people.

Jericho was one of the few character driven shows on TV that didn’t employ a trite and vapid setting of doctors sleeping with each other or lawyers standing up for the common man. No matter what CBS wanted the show to be, Jericho understood that no matter how fantastic the story line was, the sci fi was only a setting and not a story in and of itself. The fact that shows like LOST and Battlestar Galactica have the same understanding only further exemplifies the type of company Jericho kept.

The bottom line is Jericho not only had a proven rabid fanbase, but had a handful of brand new episodes at a time when television was starving for new material. From two months, as the writers strike dragged on and every show had exhausted their supply of fresh material, CBS had the opportunity to move up the release date and showcase Jericho against the crap that every other network was scrambling to pump out. Instead, CBS not only killed an early release, but buried the show at it’s historically worst time on it’s historically worst day. They never wanted Jericho to succeed this second time around and in effect had no qualms about giving their fans a giant “fuck you.”

Yet I’m not pissed. These past seven episodes were beyond perfect. In ten years, we’ll casually laugh at how stupid we were in the past to have so many open-ended & slow driven shows. We’ll remember that it all started to change when shows like BSG and LOST not only refused to let the networks renew them for countless seasons, but demanded they be ended on their own terms - amazing ratings be damned! Networks will realize how successful these types of shows are, how much better written they are than the average show. Along the way, one network will finale realize the goldmine that is TV on Demand and suddenly shows will no longer be canceled due to poor Neilson ratings alone.

And then we’ll remember that show that not only came back from the dead because of it’s fans, but that managed to squeeze an entire season into only seven episodes. And we’ll remember how fucking awesome that show was and how long before it’s time it truly was.

Thanks for every damn episode, Jericho.

“Roslin promotes Adama to admiral. He promotes her right back.” Hahahaha.

We’re less than two weeks away from the fourth and final season of the best show on television. In case you’ve forgotten what’s been going on, here’s a hilarious and well made 8 minute video of all the previous Battlestar Galactica episodes and movies.

It’s sad when you read an article on ESPN and notice it references quotes from sports blogs like With Leather. I’ve even seen scanned newspaper clippings where they’ve quoted comments from people on sites like Digg and Fark. Yet CNN has quietly taken the lead for “laziest news network in the world.”

Their iReporter feature shouldn’t even exist. “Got a camera? Then send us your photos and we’ll show them to millions!” During any given news segment, the Youtube to professional cameraman ratio of video clips is somewhere around 90:1. Now they’ve reached the point where they find somebody’s Myspace page and use it to write an entire article.

Suddenly, apathy is quite appealing.

I hope I never do anything newsworthy. Just imagine the shitty article they could write about me just from using Shyzer. God help us.

[via ZeFrank]

When I first heard the old saying “good writers borrow, great writers steal,” I scoffed at it. Surely great writers don’t steal. If a piece of writing was good enough to be stolen, wouldn’t the original author be able to find success with it? Plus, anybody stealing other’s work and then capitalizing on it would definitely be caught!

Then I entered the real world…

It wasn’t until I got to college that I actually started putting the Internet to good use. Downloading new music, finding directions, chatting with friends…and reading unpublished work.

Growing up, I’d venture to guess that 90% of the average person’s reading material is forced upon them. Book reviews, summer reading lists, crappy textbooks. Eventually we begin to find our “enjoyable” reading niche, which unfortunately for most men is Sports Illustrated or some other pathetic magazine while women turn to crappy romance novels. Before we know it, we’ve unceremoniously morphed into adults who have long forgotten what it feels like to read something spectacular. It’s no wonder that every time you board an airplane, all you see are cookie cutter John Patterson novels in people’s hands.

In the past, only a select few seemed to be lucky enough to truly discover and appreciate a Watership Down or Catch-22 or Ball Four. But even with those, you were limited. It’s my experience that no matter how wonderful a book may be, chances are anything else by the same author is…well, sub standard. You’ll always be holding the author up to what ultimately may be their magnum opus, at least in your eyes. Something that took years of writing and polishing and editing is what you find yourself holding as the benchmark for adequacy. An author can’t just snap their fingers and produce another equally astounding piece of work. I don’t care what J.K. Rowling writes next, it won’t top Harry Potter. The same goes for Richard Adams or Pat Conroy or any of the other authors who’ve written something I’ve grown to love.

So with that, all I can say is thank God for the Internet. There’s something different between an author in the traditional sense and somebody who writes and publishes something each and every day. Sure, you have to sludge through a lot of crap, but every now and then you find a hidden author that for reasons unknown is able to produce gem after gem, day in and day out, with practically nobody reading it. It doesn’t take a genius to see how somebody then goes from reading an unknown blog to ripping it off.

Think of it another way. How many of your favorite bloggers have taken their old material and actually made a book from it? How many of their posts will actually ever be read by more than a few hundred people? With odds like that, and other pressures that a “”published” author faces such as deadlines and expectations, I’m honestly shocked we haven’t seen more cases of plagiarizing on the web. The only blogger who I can name off the top of my head that transformed his material into a book (and whom I once read on a daily basis) was Colby Buzzell. Most bloggers simply delete their material when they grow tired with the net, like Doc and Stan did. At that point, ripping somebody off isn’t just an appealing option, it’s practically screaming in your face.

I write this post to point out one fact: in the past, I’ve ripped people off. There, I admit it. I’ve since deleted anything I copied from somebody else and thank God none of it became popular (in the sense that it made the Best of Shyzer or even garnered a lot of comments). Before, whenever I read something I especially liked, I might copy it here on Shyzer and bury it somewhere in a post. Now, I just link to it as it should be.

I think what changed my ways was having my own content stolen for the first time a few years back. It pissed me off then and it still pisses me off now, as is evident with the Mark Kotsay’s wife post I made a few months back. But at the same time, it’s an occupational hazard and something to be expected, I guess. Hell, I’ve even had attacks against me that I’ve copied other people for posts I made on HIF and it wasn’t even intentional. Such was the result of accepting user submissions. So, basically I know how it feels to be on every end of the plagiarizing triangle and frankly, none of them provide an enjoyable experience.

So to any would-be plagiarizing author out there who thinks he or she can get away with copying just a few paragraphs from an unknown website and passing them off as their own work - don’t do it. It’s simply not worth it, trust me.

If you’ve read Shyzer for a while, you know that I’m something of a commercial enthusiast. I love good commercials. Problem is, there aren’t many of them. If you think anything that airs during the Super Bowl is a good commercial, then you are retarded and should never voice an opinion again.

Below I’ve compiled a list of current commercials that are so horrible, I want to jab a dull spoon into my eyes whenever I see them come on. If given the option of watching each of these for ten consecutive hours or being dipped in a pit of molten lava, well, go ahead and get my casket ready. The first bunch of commercials are just random ones I hate, with the final three being the Top 3 worst current commercials. I’d say “enjoy” right about now, but I have a feeling that nobody will enjoy suffering through these visual pieces of shit.

And if you haven’t guessed by now, strong language below, mainly because I like to say fuck whenever I get angry and hate something.

(more…)

So, Desmond and Penny? Best couple on TV? I think so. Incoming reports are a bit conflicting, but I’m receiving news that their tears can cure cancer.

I’m grabbing my pitchfork and demanding a new show called Sayid and Desmond be created. The pilot episode can contain them both just sitting in rocking chairs on the front porch for an hour. Desmond just gets to say “brotha” over and over while Sayid builds an intercontinental ballistics missle out of toothpicks, wax candles, and gummy bears. Brett Favre and Ichiro will show up during the last ten minutes as special guests and then the universe will implode due to so much awesome being in such close proximity. I smell an Emmy!

I’m usually good about not watching promos for upcoming TV shows that I love. I hate being spoiled about anything, even if it’s simply a bunch of half second shots of random scenes. I don’t want to see it! But I’ve never quite been able to stop from watching the LOST promos every chance I get and as tonight’s episode wrapped up, I couldn’t help but notice the helicopter flying directly into the storm next week.

“Well, that’s cool, it totally plays into the Mirror Moon Matter theory!”

Long story turned into a simple sentence, some dude came up with an idea, researched it, discovered some pseudo-science that the creators of LOST have admitted being interested in, and came up with a damn convincing argument as to what the hell is going on in LOST. Well, kinda. I should say, the best argument yet, by far.

If you hate LOST, stop right here and I’ll see ya tomorrow. But if you’re as obsessed with the show as I am, you need to go read everything in that link above. I’ll wait. Yeah, I know, it’s long. But it makes sense! Oh, come on, you still need convincing in order to read that much? How about this:

Things The Theory Answers
The black smoke
How to get on the island
How to get off the island
Why the button had to be pressed every 108 minutes
The whispers
Why the missile took an extra 31 minutes to reach the island
How crazy things, like the Black Rock and Yemi’s airplane, ended up in the middle of the island
Why various characters can see and interact with things that aren’t there, like teenage Walt, the horse, Jack’s dead father, Jacob’s cabin, etc.
Things that are “clues” or “shout outs” to the theory, such as character names, the four-toed foot, the Apollo Bars, DHARMA’s name, etc.
Why the LOST logo twirls like it does at the start of each episode
The hieroglyphs
And more…

So there. Go read it and join me below.

(more…)

While sitting in a Chinese government office this week, I found myself distracted by the Chinese version of CNN being blared at around 900 decibels throughout the building. My BOSE noise canceling headphones work great on jet airplanes at 30,000 feet, but they couldn’t shake the Asian Soledad O’Brien. After conceding defeat, I figured I’d just stare at the screen a while and see what I could learn and the only thing I discovered is that China has a huge hobby for ripping off American commercials. For instance, remember this commercial below?

Click To Play

Yeah, the official Beijing 2008 Olympics Committee totally ripped that off, except they found a way to make an even cheesier and longer version with worse actors and more absurd scenarios, like a little Chinese boy running through the streets chasing his soccer ball only to be saved by an aware driver who slams on the brakes at the last minute. Quick cut to another guy standing on the curb and staring at this little Kodak moment with eyes aglow. Now, call me old fashion, but isn’t that just called being a good driver? Is it common practice in China for drivers to mow down any pedestrian in the street at will? Because otherwise, that little act of kindness was probably executed out of the driver’s desires not to end up like Jack Bauer instead of helping his fellow man.

It got better though, as one of the good deeds was done by a man walking down a crowded street and picking up a recently dropped apple by the woman in front of him, who promptly thanked the good Samaritan and chomped right into the tasty snack. Oh, I left out the part where the apple was dropped IN A PUDDLE ON THE STREET. But hey, China only has 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world. I’m sure it was perfectly healthy.

Halfway through the commercial (it was honestly about 90 seconds long), I asked the guy next to me if he noticed it as well and we spent the next hour dissecting every ad we saw as there were plenty. McDonalds has a campaign that basically rips off The King from Burger King, except it’s not nearly as funny and his face will most certainly haunt my dreams. And even though I have no idea what they were saying, Chinese car commercials looked to be just as annoying as their American counterparts. Glad to see that crappy ads screaming at you to buy a new truck is a global experience.

Yeah, so Jericho’s back. Officially. They’ve got it slated as a seven or eight episode mid-season replacement, but if the initial Fall schedule goes poorly, it could be back as soon as October. If the ratings are good, CBS has promised to pick it up for a full season and yet if the ratings are bad, the show’s main writer has said they’ll be able to wrap it up and end it instead of leaving us with yet another unbearable cliffhanger.

But this post isn’t meant to bask in the glow of the awesomeness that is the Internet grassroots campaign that saved one of my favorite shows. No, wait…yeah. Yeah, it is. But because I love you, I’ll just keep this short and funny. So, you can either click the more link below or go directly to the source in order to read two of the best “could have happened” conversations ever.

(more…)

Oh please, oh please, oh please.

Jericho fans, if this comes through…I can’t even begin to describe the implications it would have on future television shows. If nothing else, it’s brought attention to how poorly run many networks are operated and how shitty their methods are for determining who is watching what.