TV Table

A big table corazón and I made to randomly pick TV shows (formatted as a 24 × 36 inch poster): PDF (221 KB)
Edit: The PDF is hard to view in my browser so here's a 300 dpi image: PNG (4.2 MB)

Instructions are at the top. Here's a list of the shows/seasons included: Google Sheets spreadsheet

It has 3,360 entries, 3,177 of which are episodes of shows. This was as close as I could get with typical gaming dice (d6, d8, d10, d12, d20). 3,360 is 7 × 10 × 6 × 8; or a d8 (re-roll 8's, ergo 7), a d10, a d6, and another d8. The first two give the Y coordinate and the second two give the X coordinate.

The 183 non-show entries are just to fill out the table and can be treated as "re-roll all dice" if you don't want to be creative. There's about a 5% chance of landing on one of these.

This was fun to make in Excel. Lots of VLOOKUP, CONCAT, LEFT, RIGHT functions. Putting in the numbers of episodes per season of each show was the only slightly tedious part.

Floor Plans, Movies, Etc.

Here's a floor plan I've been trying to make work. I rebuilt it in SketchUp (requires lots of tweaking because inevitably I find I've cheated on distances somehow). I think I need to trim it back. It ended up being a five-bedroom/three-bathroom house and that's more than I'd ever need. Or, I dunno, maybe it's just a level of consumption I'm not comfortable with. I still need to figure out how its roof will work.

New season of Portlandia on Netflix! Watched the first three last night. Also recently watched Over the Garden Wall. Logan showed it to me. It's really good, kind of a cross between The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack and Spirited Away, if you can imagine.

Some movies I saw recently: The King's Speech (8/10); Mr. Nobody (8/10); The Master (5/10); Tiny: A Story About Living Small (4/10); Burt's Buzz (7/10). Also a couple Werner Herzog things, but they were pretty short. I love listening to him talk. He did a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross back in 2011 which they recently replayed. That's what got me into his stuff.

Oh, and I'm halfway through the last book in The Giver Quartet. I'm liking it better than the middle two so far.

BoJack Horseman

This BoJack Horseman Netflix series is pretty good. It reminds me of Ugly Americans in that the people aren't always human. (The animation style is a little similar too.) Only in Ugly Americans they focus on those differences; it's part of their history. Half of what makes that show fun is seeing how they reconcile these non-human characters with actual history (e.g. Lincoln going on to become a big celebrity after his death and zombification). But in BoJack Horseman the differences are only used for quick gags (like a cow waitress milking herself to serve a customer).

I haven't seen them all yet, but I think one of the conceits of BJH is that every animal has a human body (with rare exceptions, like the armadillo lady who curls into a ball when startled). Even when a human is shown riding a horse the horse has a human body and carries the guy piggyback. It's kind of neat how they don't address all the ramifications of that. Like, how would American culture be different if nobody had pets? In a way it's more surreal than Ugly Americans.

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The amount of effort they put into this jury summons that's on screen for, like, 1 second is awesome.

Haha, ahh

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Mr. Peanutbutter is such an enjoyable character because he just LIKES everybody. Like you can imagine a happy golden retriever would. Whoa, it just occurred to me that his character might be a reference to the dog (Comet?) from Full House. Since that's the show Horsin' Around and Mr. Peanutbutter's House were aping. Which, now that I think about it, also explains why BoJack imagined he had gone on a bender with John Stamos.

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Ha, I saw this IANTSE logo on a character's T-shirt and I thought it was a reference to the logo on They Might Be Giants' album Flood. But as it turns out, the logo on Flood is a reference to the logo for IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees). I'm surprised I didn't know this.

Zack Morris, etc.

I heard about this Saved by the Bell behind-the-scenes TV movie on Stop Podcasting Yourself (one of the hosts works in a building where it was being filmed) and my friend Lindsey just sent me this little preview video from it:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jarettwieselman/lifetime-saved-by-the-bell-movie-footage

Looks entertaining, I may actually watch this.

The Freedom of Monochromatic Dissemination

I thought this was interesting, just something that hadn't occurred to me.

From here.

(Why am I posting this as a screen capture of my RSS reader? BECAUSE I CAN, DAMMIT.)

Season 7 Judah is way worse than all previous seasons

Early Judah: Funny

Judah Friedlander played Frank on 30 Rock. He was funny in the early seasons. Then around like season 5 they started giving him more focus. He had his own little story lines and stuff. Like his romances with the old cleaning ladies. "Frank moves in with Liz" and "Frank and Jenna sleep together." Those were kind of trite. 30 Rock is a great show, but they were really coasting when they wrote these episodes. It's such 90s-sitcom stuff. I think those arcs were demeaning to Judah Friedlander, like the writers had a grudge against him. "Yeah, we'll make you famous. But your character will be lame!" And maybe Judah took that deal but forever regretted it. So he got less invested in the show, grew a beard, and started phoning in his performances very overtly starting with season 7. I think his acting in early season 7, and growing the beard, those were the only "fuck you's" he could publicly direct at the writers.

Season 7 Judah: Lame

I should listen to the commentaries and see if they explain what happened. Alternate theory: Judah got  more famous in seasons 5 and 6 and decided to rest on his laurels and not try anymore. "Another take? I don't think so. Next scene." That kind of thing. Or, since he knew he'd get paid regardless of how he performed this season, maybe it was just him not caring. Anyhow, I don't like season 7 Judah.

You Are the Scarf-Wearer

This lady liked a question about a movie that I posted to ask.metafilter a while ago. And now Chords thinks the movie is The Land that Time Forgot (1975). That lady likes Twin Peaks which I've always kind of meant to try watching.

Rosy Critter of Casting

Update: Finished it!



Update: This:

The greater of $290.00 or Zero Point Three Eight Percent

This music video is amazing. J-pop heavy metal.



This is also neat:



House of Cards is getting good. I have a hard time figuring out characters' real motives though. It seems like everyone wants power. But they already have all the stuff power can get you. And they endure so much stress just to keep climbing. I've really come to like Raymond Tusk. And Linda's exit was so awesomely dignified. I hope she shows up again later. The stuff with the hipster photographer was weirdly funny and satisfying. It's fun to see people suddenly realize what the Underwoods really are.

I think the end of the series will be Frank going out Heisenberg style. Zoe Barnes' people are going to come back in a big way I'm sure. The whole battle between Connor and Seth seemed a little pointless. But I guess it was necessary in the same way that scene with Adam photographing Claire while she slept was. I can't wait to see how they dump all this stuff out when Frank's empire implodes. It's got to implode, right? But I kinda wish more TV shows would let the bad guys win. Bad guys getting their comeuppance is so predictable.

I think I might stop reading 1Q84 and start The Peace War.

Oh and I got a little ways into Zach Weiner's Polystate. It was really good, I might go back to that. Not the kind of book I usually read, but everything he does is so darn clever.