Holy. Frak.
I’ve never wanted an eye patch any more than I do right now. And this is coming from a guy who practically idolizes pirates.
Kudos on whoever made the conscious decision to score the hell out of this episode as well.
There’s regular shows, then The Daily Show, then Lost, and then lightyears above everything else there’s Battlestar Galactica.
Holy. Frak.
“I love you.”
“About time.”
Goob: KISS HER!
I can’t say anymore, I’ll ruin something amazing for too many people.
EDIT: Well, yes I can. From TWOP: Laura finally [edit for spoilers] —unbelievable. Mary McDonnell, I don’t care that you’re older than my mother, you are brilliant and beautiful; let’s make out.
Holy Mother of Christ, I’ve found the next website that I need to be writing for. A random Google search came up with an obscure site called Advertising Wizards and I gotta say I’m loving every ounce of it. It’s like my 17 Commercials that suck balls posts expanded into a regular, full blown site.
After finding both this and Fire Joe Morgan recently, I’ve really starting digging their style of writing. Watching the systematic dismantling of anything with wit, sarcasm, and the occasional foul word is both highly entertaining and delightful.
In all honestly, I’d never heard of The Wire until one morning last March when I awoke to a blitzkrieg of news articles and segment pieces talking about how amazingly wonderful the series finale had been the previous night. Being the huge spoil freak that I am, I refused to read any of the said articles that mentioned the entire plot was about to be given away in the following paragraphs, but I soon came to the realization that I needed to see said TV show.
Seriously, every spoiler-free article and headline talked about how fulfilling and complete the final season and specifically episode was. I couldn’t find a single negative response to it and in doing some hasty research, I couldn’t find much against the show in general. Here was a show on HBO which critics and fans alike loved and which had been running for the past six years or so. And I’d never fucking heard of it!
I’d been burned by an HBO show before (FUCKING SOPRANOS SUCKED ASS!), but I finally broke down and watched the first season during the tail end of March.
Last week, I watched the final episode of the fifth, and final, season.
One of the top 10 shows of my lifetime? Most likely.
The beauty in the show is it’s realism. The good guys have huge flaws. The bad guys aren’t 100% evil. This isn’t some episode of 24 where all the bad guys speak in a Russian accent and Jack Bauer is God. This is real, where the good guys don’t always win, the bad guys don’t always lose, and sometimes you forget who in the hell is on which side much less who you’re “supposed” to be rooting for.
I told my brother it was like LOST, but in the real world. Everything everybody does screws over somebody else. The police, judges, lawyers, businessmen, politicians, dope dealers, crack addicts, children, teachers, dock workers, and everyday citizens all affect one another. If you think LOST weaves character stories together, you ain’t seen shit yet.
If you’ve already seen every episode, then please feel free to click the “more” link below. Otherwise, go watch the entire first season (their seasons are only 10 or 12 episodes long), become hooked, watch the rest of them, and then come read what I’ve written below.
And just in case you’re too fucking lazy to click on the link above, here’s a short recap from Wikipedia to let you know what the hell you’re about to get yourself sucked into.
The Wire is an American television drama series set and produced in Baltimore, Maryland. Created, produced, and primarily written by author and former police reporter David Simon, the series was broadcast by the premium cable network HBO in the United States. The Wire premiered on June 2, 2002 and ended on March 9, 2008, with 60 episodes airing over the course of its five seasons.
Each season of The Wire focuses on a different facet of the city of Baltimore. They are, in order: the drug trade, the port, the city bureaucracy, the school system, and the print news media. The large cast consists mainly of character actors who are little known for their other roles. Simon has said that despite its presentation as a crime drama, the show is “really about the American city, and about how we live together. It’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how…whether you’re a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.”
Despite never seeing great commercial success or winning any major television awards, The Wire has frequently been cited by critics as one of the greatest television series of all time. The show is recognized for its realistic portrayal of urban life, artistic ambitions, and uncommonly deep exploration of sociological themes.
Central to the structure and plot of the show is the use of electronic surveillance and wiretap technologies by the police—hence the title The Wire. Salon.com described the title as a metaphor for the viewer’s experience: the wiretaps provide the police with access to a secret world, just as the show does for the viewer.
Without further a due (I still get a small kick out of that)…
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.
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!
