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I think Mike Judge is the difference here. He strikes me as a genius when it comes to understanding human behavior.
by city41 8y ago
I think Mike Judge is the difference here. He strikes me as a genius when it comes to understanding human behavior.
- jjuel 8y agoNot to mention how he used to work in Silicon Valley.
- blocked_again 8y agoAlso the people they hired for consulting was top notch. https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-technical-advisor-for-silicon-valley-on-hbo-ed-mcmanus/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-technical-advisor-for-silic... https://medium.com/@timanglade/how-hbos-silicon-valley-built-not-hotdog-with-mobile-tensorflow-keras-react-native-ef03260747f3 https://medium.com/@timanglade/how-hbos-silicon-valley-built...
- ryanmercer 8y ago>He strikes me as a genius when it comes to understanding human behavior - Office Space, check! - Idiocracy, check! - Silicon Valley, check! For Silicon Valley it helps he's actually worked for a startup, a hardware one at that.
- ModernMech 8y agoDon't forget King of the Hill. That's a double check right there.
- city41 8y agoeven Beavis and Butthead captured defiant male teens pretty well
- agoodthrowaway 8y agoBeavis and Butthead are hugely underrated. I recall people making fun of me for watching it back in the 90’s. It was almost the only TV I ever watched.
- auntienomen 8y agoThey were the best music critics of the 90s.
- agoodthrowaway 8y agoThe DVDs were disappointing because they cut out all the videos which were the best parts. I loved their commentary.
- ryanmercer 8y agoDid you watch the new season (2011)? It was pretty good.
- agoodthrowaway 8y agoDidn’t know there was a new one. Thanks for the tip will check it out.
- sneak 8y agoIf you squint a little bit, Tom Anderson is basically proto-Hank Hill.
- amyjess 8y agoOffice Space and Silicon Valley, sure, but Idiocracy has aged _horribly_. That movie is full of memes that haven't been relevant since the mid-00s (and specifically, the humor in the movie has a distinct Bush-era vibe which straight-up feels foreign in 2018... it feels like a period piece even though it's set in the future), and I lost whatever enjoyment of it that I had left when actual Neo-Nazis began using the movie to promote their pseudoscience about race and intelligence.
- rbanffy 8y ago> Idiocracy has aged _horribly_. Are you sure? Who is the POTUS now?
- scoggs 8y agoThanks, I was really baffled to see that comment.
- powvans 8y agoAnd in the movie the POTUS was Dwayne Camacho an ex pro wrestler... and in real life many people want an ex pro wrestler named Dwayne Johnson to run for POTUS as an improvement to the current POTUS?! I'd say you can't make this stuff up, but Mike Judge made this stuff up before it was real life!
- SamReidHughes 8y agoThe current POTUS is also an ex pro wrestler.
- ryanmercer 8y agoYup, 2 WrestleMania events.
- amyjess 8y agoWhen I said "Bush-era", I was talking more of the national zeitgeist during Bush's presidency and not so much about how Bush himself was perceived. The Bush era—or rather the core of the era, from about 2002 to 2007 (i.e. after the dust from 9/11 settled and before the housing crisis), was a boom time, and much of the future situation feels like it comes from "what if this boom lasts forever?" (i.e. society becomes wealthy enough to automate everything, so people just sit around and watch Ow My Balls and drink Brawndo every day instead of having to work). Something made nowadays would probably start with a premise that comes from "Millenials can't afford anything". Mainstream culture during the Bush era was also before the sudden explosion in nerd culture. Superheroes hadn't eaten the entertainment industry yet, nostalgia wasn't yet a driving force in pop culture, and it was still uncool to admit that you enjoy RPGs or reading comic books or doing whatever else nerds do. A parody of modern cultural memes would resemble Ready Player One more than Idiocracy, and Ready Player One wasn't even intended as parody. Instead, Idiocracy spends a lot of time lampooning shock reality TV (e.g. Ow My Balls), which was a huge thing in the mid-00s with shows like Jackass and Fear Factor but isn't big anymore. And the general culture is different. Like, you had people saying things like "you talk faggy", which sadly was common in real life during the mid-00s, and as such it was a ripe target for parody, but would be completely taboo now. Even in bro-culture you wouldn't see that in 2018 (I mean, there's still a lot of homophobia around, but you don't see those slurs dropped casually anymore), and so a parody of modern bro-culture probably wouldn't even mention it. TBH, a parody of modern bro-culture would probably involve MRAs and redpillers and pseudo-intellectuals who worship Jordan Peterson. Like, the _idea_ of a movie about the future being full of stupid people would still be relevant in 2018 (and you can thank Trump for that), but it wouldn't be Idiocracy because Idiocracy was more about parodying mid-00s pop culture than anything else. I'd imagine a late-10s Idiocracy would involve some combination of nerd culture turned mainstream eating the world, '90s nostalgia (with "only '90s kids remember" somehow being reiterated over and over 500 years in the future), avocado toast, and nobody being able to afford a house.
- rbanffy 8y agoIdiocracy is, sadly, a bit too prophetic.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoIn the US, we have been living it for 2 years.