The Old Country's Biggest Blunders

I think the big issue is that (and this predates Trump) a decent chunk of the commentariat consists of your stereotypical “Fox News Uncle,” but from the center-left. This has been a thing for a couple of years, but it’s getting nuts—a couple weeks ago they were in full “The Russians hacked Wisconsin!” mode in the OG TI. Carve out some space in your life where you can actually enjoy yourself, not just another echo chamber.

I have no issue with well-placed election humor, or the odd article, but it’s really just not one of the AVC’s strengths. And the recent trend in thinkpiece writing that we’ve mocked over and over again in this thread is just spectacularly ill-suited to talking about actual politics. I started reading the AVC regularly in high school back during the Bush Regime, and it was stuff like “Box of Paperbacks” and “Commentary Tracks of the Damned” and cool interviews. Maybe, because it was still packaged with The Onion (hard copy!) there was a feeling that politics was covered (and stuff would sometimes come up organically from time-to-time in AVC features), but it was fun stuff about film and random pop culture detritus and the like. I really don’t think that’s a bad model, or that the AVC readership will turn into fascist sheep if they aren’t constantly reminded of how bad their soon-to-be POTUS is.

Whatup Cy! Let's talk about HBO!

I thought Westworld was...interesting. It was fun to watch, I guess, but it didn't engage me on an emotional level like, well, Deadwood or the dearly departed Boardwalk Empire. I agree with Zach Handlen's assessment: "catnip for people who like to argue about plot points, but...the actual experience of watching the series is clinical bordering on sterile." The only character/plot arc that really engaged me was Maeve. Everybody else is giving good performances, but the characters are all as one-dimensional as the robots. 

I don't understand why AVC works so hard to bury some of its features. AV Undercover this year would be the biggest example, as it always appears hidden near the bottom of the front page but presumably costs more to produce than a simple piece of writing.

Consider the reader best-of-the-year poll article today. Not only is it released in a Newswire instead of as one of the featured stories on the main page, but look a the time line. There was another Newswire published less than 60 seconds later (of the little attended "hear this band's song" variety), and one more just a minute later! Why not simply schedule the post so it appears at the top of the list for over an hour instead of the Chris Rock thing?

Barsanti suucks. Over the weekend he called out Alec Baldwin for not responding to Trump in the manner he would have liked him to.
    

It's an interesting dilemma that has a bunch of tributaries feeding into it, making for a big ol' river.

The first is that a presidential election without an incumbent becomes, by default, one of the biggest stories of the year in every single topic, up to and including the weather. The AVC didn't post nearly as much about Obama in '08 (it didn't post as much period back then), but it certainly posted a lot of stories about him. And, arguably, that election was the entertainment story of the year, as was this year's election.

The second is what that writer mentioned: Trump was primarily an entertainment figure before he ran for president. And if you look back at how he was covered in mid-2015, when he announced, he really was covered as an entertainment sideshow. Late-night comedians mocked him like you'd mock a fatuous celebrity, Huffington Post only wrote about him for its entertainment section, and stories about him were all over pop culture sites. I always worried this would play into what made him popular, and it did! (I wrote a bit about this last August, but even I figured he would sputter out sooner or later.) But regardless, once he was already thought of as an "entertainment figure," it made it easier for entertainment sites to write about him. I certainly wrote about him more than I would have, say, Jeb Bush. And it's not as if there's a comparable figure in American political history to do A-B testing with. Even Reagan had a long political career after his entertainment career before he became president.

The third is what you mentioned, which is that Trump drives clicks, and that becomes tempting.

The fourth is that the wall between political coverage and every other kind of coverage has been crumbling for a while now, for a bunch of reasons, some good, some neutral, some bad, and in the sort of hyper-unusual environment Trump has created, that's just ratcheted up beyond compare.

And the fifth is just that everything about Trump is so beyond anything that's happened in American politics (you have to go back to Andrew Jackson to REALLY find a good analogue) that it's not hard to find every single story bending toward him. And if you're someone who believes his actions shouldn't be normalized, shouldn't be made to feel like "just another president," as a lot of folks do, then it's not hard to want to remind people that, hey, this dude is going to be president. But even if you take more of a wait and see approach, it's still kind of baffling that this dude is going to be president. 

So I don't think it's 100 percent the clicks thing; it's that we live in a hyper-partisan environment, and Trump is such an anomaly that it's very hard (and some would argue irresponsible) to go about business as usual.

(For the record: I find Trump appalling but am not yet worried he is going to become a dictator.)

Has anybody looked at the AVC's Facebook Live things? I thought about it for half a second then realized I wasn't going to jeopardize the anonymity of the ganews brand by linking it to my Facebook account.

I've felt so utterly disconnected from and underwhelmed by Undercover this year that I didn't even realize the voting had gone up eleven days ago. It used to be one of my favorite features on the site, but I've been getting steadily less and less interested in the last several iterations of it.

I do feel like the site's design/layout/behavior tends to bury Undercover a lot more than it ever did before, but I think that's only part of it. I just haven't been excited by the content of it in a long while, too.

Not for nuttin I watch vikings illegally on either channel 131 or couchtuner

because it is.

Goddamn the comments on that Michael Sheen Newswire. I wish I believed it took a lot of work for people to be that joyless and miserable. I feel better as a result about how well I'm aging. If my days are a lot more numbered than they would have been a month ago, I'd rather go out like me than them.

I can't find re_trace for some reason (unless it's under a different name)*. Yeah, they were relatively solid, though I'm still inwardly cackling over the one commenter (not to name names, given board standards) whose instant cynicism on said article didn't stop them from flipping out some time back when I and a few others dared to criticize M*A*S*H (the movie); apparently our relative disdain was more or less the equivalent of spitting on returning Vietnam troops or something (and our disdain actually happened!!).

*EDIT: Ohhh.

speaking of VN, if you scroll up from there, you can see dino ironbody's

Anyone else finding that Disqus has been unusually enfuckenated for the last few days? Plus TOC hasn't updated the Newswire at all today.