Death and Klaxons
Nov. 22nd, 2014 01:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogAbout our biggest local problem from the massive snowfall to the south? A lack of entertainment options, due to mail being delayed and Netflixes not showing up. (I know, this is about as First World Problem as it gets.) Fortunately, we only recently learned that Hulu has finally answered the pent-up domestic demand for screenings of QI episodes, and we've been slowly working our way through last year's Series K. With the free Hulu site, you get commercials, and while they're not too terribly long and reasonably well placed, we find ourselves totally shaking our heads about the content they seem to think we'd be interested in.
Three of them have been in rotation for most of our recent viewings. The lead one, for the New York lottery, is actually kinda cute (tied to their Monopoly-themed game, with Jimmy Durante crooning under some cute top-hatted images), but the other two, huh?!?
One is for a Type 2 diabetes med called Januvia. The first thing to screech at you is the generic name they made up for the thing:
Sitagliptin.
Eep. Sounds like a Middle Earth monster, yet that's what every generic maker will have to call it when its patent expires. Then they run the ad itself, which starts with the happy sight of the diabetic couple swinging on a see-saw -
(click the link above the empty space if there's an empty space and it won't embed)
- but goes on, for more than two-thirds of the ad, to warn in the happiest voice imaginable of the restrictions, side effects and risks, "which may be severe and lead to death." As they're walking down the fucking beach. Kervorkian himself couldn't make self-slaughter this appealing.
And still, thousands of patients are doubtless going to "ask your doctor" for this shit because a pretty-sounding voice on the tv ordered them to.
----
We only got that one once. The most repeated advert was for Grand Theft Auto V, which, I'm told, is the current generation of video game. These games have lifelike looking characters, real plots, even movie credits for the tales they tell. And someone at either QI or Hulu thinks a couple of mid-50s farts are going to want to run out for an XBox to play this.
Ha.
Eleanor knows less of this genre than I do, but to me, "video game" means Pong. Or even something less real-time interactive, like this:
That, you young whippersnappers, is what a video game looked liked in 1979. I became addicted to it on Cornell's primordial IBM mainframe-connected terminals that year, rediscovered it in early PC form toward the end of law school, and have found it a few times in the decades since in quaint corners of the Interwebs. It, too, has a director, and his name is Satan: this game is positively evil. Your mission is to blow up anywhere from 10 to 25 Klingons without dying yourself, and there are infinite ways to accomplish the latter. Since reacquiring it a few weeks ago, I've settled right back to my lifetime horrid batting average at this game -somewhere well below the Mendoza line of two wins out of 10- but at least I pulled off a new way of getting myself killed last week:
I'd successfully knocked out a major Klingon colony using my (highly unpredictable) deathray, managed to avoid Tholian webs and black holes in pursuit of the rest, and was down to just the one positively evil Super-Commander, who I tracked to a spot where he instantly attacked and took out my engines, weapons, communications and sensors....
but not my self-destruct. And that, for the first time in almost 40 years, got me this epitaph:
Now THIS is the kind of game I'd find relevant, Stephen:P
----
In the end, the last-season episode titled "Keys" was quite fun. Among other things, we learned that a
German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, one of a number of people given the title of the last person to know everything, along with Thomas Young, Erasmus, Gottfried Leibniz and Alexander von Humboldt, thought cats with different pitched meows lined up together would make a good musical instrument which he called a "Katzenklavier".
They went on to describe this device, but the Internet, of course, has evidence of it actually in use. (Without real cats, sadly.)
We will have five of them plus a dog in the house for Thanksgiving, so if we find the right key, something might be possible here;)
Three of them have been in rotation for most of our recent viewings. The lead one, for the New York lottery, is actually kinda cute (tied to their Monopoly-themed game, with Jimmy Durante crooning under some cute top-hatted images), but the other two, huh?!?
One is for a Type 2 diabetes med called Januvia. The first thing to screech at you is the generic name they made up for the thing:
Sitagliptin.
Eep. Sounds like a Middle Earth monster, yet that's what every generic maker will have to call it when its patent expires. Then they run the ad itself, which starts with the happy sight of the diabetic couple swinging on a see-saw -
(click the link above the empty space if there's an empty space and it won't embed)
- but goes on, for more than two-thirds of the ad, to warn in the happiest voice imaginable of the restrictions, side effects and risks, "which may be severe and lead to death." As they're walking down the fucking beach. Kervorkian himself couldn't make self-slaughter this appealing.
And still, thousands of patients are doubtless going to "ask your doctor" for this shit because a pretty-sounding voice on the tv ordered them to.
----
We only got that one once. The most repeated advert was for Grand Theft Auto V, which, I'm told, is the current generation of video game. These games have lifelike looking characters, real plots, even movie credits for the tales they tell. And someone at either QI or Hulu thinks a couple of mid-50s farts are going to want to run out for an XBox to play this.
Ha.
Eleanor knows less of this genre than I do, but to me, "video game" means Pong. Or even something less real-time interactive, like this:
That, you young whippersnappers, is what a video game looked liked in 1979. I became addicted to it on Cornell's primordial IBM mainframe-connected terminals that year, rediscovered it in early PC form toward the end of law school, and have found it a few times in the decades since in quaint corners of the Interwebs. It, too, has a director, and his name is Satan: this game is positively evil. Your mission is to blow up anywhere from 10 to 25 Klingons without dying yourself, and there are infinite ways to accomplish the latter. Since reacquiring it a few weeks ago, I've settled right back to my lifetime horrid batting average at this game -somewhere well below the Mendoza line of two wins out of 10- but at least I pulled off a new way of getting myself killed last week:
I'd successfully knocked out a major Klingon colony using my (highly unpredictable) deathray, managed to avoid Tholian webs and black holes in pursuit of the rest, and was down to just the one positively evil Super-Commander, who I tracked to a spot where he instantly attacked and took out my engines, weapons, communications and sensors....
but not my self-destruct. And that, for the first time in almost 40 years, got me this epitaph:
Now THIS is the kind of game I'd find relevant, Stephen:P
----
In the end, the last-season episode titled "Keys" was quite fun. Among other things, we learned that a
German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, one of a number of people given the title of the last person to know everything, along with Thomas Young, Erasmus, Gottfried Leibniz and Alexander von Humboldt, thought cats with different pitched meows lined up together would make a good musical instrument which he called a "Katzenklavier".
They went on to describe this device, but the Internet, of course, has evidence of it actually in use. (Without real cats, sadly.)
We will have five of them plus a dog in the house for Thanksgiving, so if we find the right key, something might be possible here;)
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no subject
Date: 2014-11-24 09:31 pm (UTC)Never got to the end, either.