Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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decay & ruin
Biosphere II
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dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

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   ignored demographic
Thursday, February 24 2011
This evening Gretchen and I went over to Ray and Nancy's place down in Old Hurley for our weekly watching of The Bachelor (recorded on Monday), a giggle-filled activity so delightful that now even Gretchen participates (remember, the ritual had begun as a way to get me out of the house and give Gretchen some much-needed alone time). Ray had prepared another delicious meal, this one of bean chili, rice, and greens. And Deborah had come over with one of her jalapeño-containing cornbreads.
This week on the Bachelor, we watched Brad, our lunk-headed hero, meet the families of his prospective brides. No matter how "real" they actually are, one of the compelling things about a reality show is that it takes you into random people's houses, where you can see where they live. This was, for example, how I came to realize that the dreary wooden cabinet doors in our kitchen, though they are of a kind I'd never lived with before, are the norm in middle class houses throughout America. On the Bachelor tonight, the houses of the prospective brides tended to be a bit on the upscale side, though, again, the details were telling. Chantal, the prospective bride from Seattle, introduces Brad to her parents in their opulently-appointed house, and all we could do was moan at the espensive tackiness and absurd grandiosity.
The two-hour show takes about an hour to watch on a DVR (when skipping past the recaps and ads). Afterwards we talked and chuckled about various things and somehow the topic of targeted advertising came up. I pointed out that the targeting possible on Hulu or Youtube is much greater than anything that can be achieved with broadcast television, especially for a show like the Bachelor being watched by a demographic like us. How are they going to target ads to those watching ironically? Though ads on, say, Comedy Central can be quite clever and twisted, if one accidentally watches an ad during the Bachelor, one finds them uniformly bland and ernest, suggesting our demographic is being ignored.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110224

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