I have written many times before about how the internet has changes things – the way we interact, conduct business, entertain ourselves, stay connected. Recently the whole idea of how we entertain ourselves became highlighted anew for me and I thought I would talk about it a bit.
As mentioned here, we got rid of cable about 8-9 months ago. Although Mrsfabp misses the mindless babble of some show or another in the back ground, I have to say that I don’t miss it at all. We utilize nexflix and hulu and other similar content aggregators to watch specific TV shows and we watch them differently now. Last weekend we watched CBS’ Big Bang Theory – not one show but 6 consecutive shows, few commercials, with bathroom and snack breaks at our time, not theirs. MJ is reliving some early childhood moments re-watching Rug Rats, the Nickelodeon classic, without all the cereal and toy commercials. I get to watch a baseball game almost every night during the season and have plenty of shows to catch up on when there are no games – Eureka and Burn Notice to name a couple. I watch Colbert and Jon Stewart, streaming from Comedy Central and get Letterman clips when in the mood.
One of the real benefits of the social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter is that they provide tips about things to watch. For example this weekend, someone I follow on twitter mentioned a video called “My Drunk Kitchen” which is a short parody of all those cooking shows on The Food Network. Having been a FN fan, this was right up my alley. Having been drunk once or twice in my life helped solidify my watching experience. Someone else, on Facebook mentioned a Bob Dylan parody of a popular song right now and this too was a great entertaining experience while drinking my coffee Saturday morning.
The internet parodies are something that didn’t really exist 15-20 years ago in any form. Sure, someone spent time to video a skit or something but it rarely saw the light of day for the general public. Yes, someone may have made a funny song parody, Weird Al Yankovic comes to mind, but again access to it was more limited. Comedy albums? Except for an occasional Bill Cosby or Bob Newhart, kinda blah. Youtube began to change that a few years ago with postings of comedy performances and clips that heightened peoples reputations like Mitch Hedberg. Why back in my day we waited until someone passed around a mimeographed sheet of off color jokes or cartoons and we were happy to see the 17th copy of it with the barely legible type and all the creases and fold lines. The internet changed all that and the entertainment comes streaming in at gigabytes a second.
CollegeBoy and his roommates at school made a parody song the day after Osama Bin Laden was killed. To date it has over 17,000 unique views. This just boggles my mind, to think that that many different people have seen it. His roommate Christian aka skullkruncher13 has a youtube channel where he makes internet game raps and several of them have over 2 million views – 2 MILLION! Man, the kids nowadays huh!
A few entertaining links:
For “My drunk kitchen” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmHdRTX-g9Y
For Bob Dylan’s “Friday” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FISHEO3gsM
For CollegeBoys Roommate video and game rap videos, check out … http://www.youtube.com/user/skullkruncher13
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