Right on, that’s good on them. I was honestly disappointed to learn that they were deniers years ago, which definitely effected my ability to watch the show afterwards. I’ll have to check out the episode when I can.

Oh, I didn’t realize they’d revisited the gag. Thanks for the head’s up.

Kudos. That got an unexpected, but much needed, hearty chuckle out of me :D

That episode is commonly misunderstood. I too had always thought they were lampooning climate change deniers, but Matt and Trey were actually poking fun of Al Gore and An Inconvient Truth as alarmist. They’ve since apologized for the episode, but it’s wild that it’s so often confused for satirizing the very thing it was mocking. For me I just assumed that Matt and Trey wouldn’t be deniers so it never occured to me until I found out their true intention and now it’s pretty cringy to watch that episode since it’s a lot more obvious. Here’s an article about it:

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a25127458/south-park-climate-change-manbearpig-apology-season-22-episode-7/

Excellent! I noticed that there seems to be a lot of UK stuff that is explicitly working-class versus American. Interesting to say the least. It seems like, for whatever reason, it’s a little bit more prevalent in the UK. Maybe it’s just the responses I’ve gotten so far, but I have noticed there seem to be a disproportionate amount.

Ken Loach

Thanks! I’ll look into him.

Right on. The small snippet I read was intriguing. I look forward to it.

Ooo, sweet. I enjoyed The Plague. I’ll take a look. Thanks ;)

Haha, thanks. I’m surprised there’s someone out there that isn’t even familiar with Rent in passing. My ex was a theater major and she looooved Rent, but even I had heard of it before that. I’m not sure I could survive watching the movie again. I think seeing a stage production of Rent would have been awesome though, especially if I knew someone in the play. I DO dig the overall perspective of it, from what I do remember of watching it years ago.

Will do, thanks for the reply!

Billy Elliot is one of those films I’d always meant to watch but never seem to finish when I start. I’ll have to seek it out again sometime soon.

It’s been awhile since I watched Firefly, so I can’t recall the show’s perspective on class, if any. I haven’t seen it in years, so maybe I’ll rewatch it. Although, I liked the show, I didn’t feel as strongly about it’s quality as others commonly do. I wonder if it’s worth a watch for me because of that.

Comic recommends are always welcome, I’ll take a look at Our Members.

Thanks for the suggestions ;)

Huh, I hadn’t picked up on that when I watched it. I’ve been meaning to rewatch it when I get the chance. I’ll be sure to keep an eyes out.

Thanks! Those all look pretty interesting. I’ll probably watch Vast of Night over the weekend.

Interesting, however sitcoms in general really aren’t my cup of tea as well. It was mentioned in other places that Roseanne was one of the few shows to depict working class life somewhat accurately, and with some dignity. A lot of the time the working class is shown in a shallow, stereotypical depiction of what upper-class people imagine it’s like.

Yes! Kids shows are particularly egregious about this. All the kids shows are about rich kids and their rich parents. That’s not to say that kids shows need to explicitly put the problems of class society front and center (although, some small discussion of class and social relations would be nice) but consistently showing kids living out these hyper-capitalist consumerist fantasies is pretty cringe-worthy.

Exactly. The thing that repulses me the most is the fake-y, artificial looking life that is so often represented in entertainment, and then that is what is spun as “normal”. Which I imagine is why these upper-class people even in real life look like the shallow Stepford Wives aesthetic that the movies and tv depict them as, life depicting art it seems.

In my initial short searches I did earlier, Antonio Gramsci comes up as addressing the issue of “cultural hegemony”, where art and entertainment tends to represent the dominant bourgeois culture, which makes a lot of sense. I’ve heard of Gramsci in passing, but haven’t read anything by him yet. I think it’s a good place to begin regarding a critical analysis.

Although, even without a thorough critical analysis, it’s pretty straightforward to realize that the economic barrier for art, entertainment and creating media in general leads to an over-representation of the wealthy since they have the money and means to create and distribute media to the masses, which in turn consolidates their dominance of the popular narrative.

What’s particularly sad about this, is that people that grow up working-class are absorbing messages from media that marginalize their narrative, and cause them to internalize a narrative that leads them to being oblivious towards their class standing and even hostile towards it. The whole “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” concept that causes people to denigrate the poor and working class, even if they themselves are a part of it.

I never used it myself, but I appreciated that it existed nonetheless.

Ah, I see. Good to know.

Hmm, that make sense. I suppose due to the quality of the tv you’d get dimishing returns the higher the fidelity of the set. I honestly have only been slightly curious about RGB, but never enough to go for it. Somehow I always suspected that it wasn’t quite worth the effort.

For sure! Such a trip it made it on the DS, with a level editor even.

That’s awesome! I’m all about upcycling. It’s amazing what people will toss without thinking about repair. Although sometimes it’s not worth the headache. I remember flipping my shit when I couldn’t figure out how to repair the read error on a PS2 I picked up. Ended up just giving up in the end. Also spent hours through the middle of the night jacked up on energy drinks pulling a laptop apart to fix an issue with the processor running too hot, only to put it back together and still have the same issue.

Ah, what’s the issue with the Game Genie? I’m buying an Everdrive, I think I heard that it had built in cheat support.

Yeah, nowadays I shy away from hardmods because of the experiences I listed above. I’d rather buy from someone with the time and experience if I need to go that route. Otherwise I’m completely fine with softmodding or flashcarts for my needs which tend more towards software. I wouldn’t mind seeing a RGB mod in person running on something cool like one of those “HD” Trinitrons that were used a video editing monitors back in the day. I hear they look fantastic, the highest fidelity picture you can get for CRT based systems.

I would always be jealous of my friends who would talk about playing a Link to the Past and Chrono Trigger. Here I was sitting in my room playing Pitfall and Enduro on my 2600, while they were jamming on their SNES systems. I had one friend who was lucky enough to have a PS1 when it first came out, seeing FFVII on the PS1 blew my mind at 12 years old. Eventually my parents did get me a other systems, first the SNES than the Genesis and later a PS1. My dad got in on the PS1 pretty hardcore (he was a big car fanatic and thought Gran Turismo was amazing). The funniest time as a kid was when my parents got us a Genesis, and we got the Sega Channel through the local cable company. My parents got so hooked on Shining Force that they’d play for hours and hours, a lot of times they’d hog the Genesis to where we kids barely got to play lol

Sweet! Thank you, happy B-day (or soon to be) to you too! The CRT is the icing on the cake, I love real scanlines in action. Sadly I didn’t pay attention to the listing close enough and purchased the console only so I don’t have the dogbone controller (was really looking forward to it too). I had to grab a generic NES one for now. Eventually I’ll be grabbing the dogbone when I can though.