Snacking

8:28AM

I was rewatching Adele: Live in New York City this morning, and I noticed a curious thing: whenever the footage switched to a combined shot showing Adele in the foreground and a large video monitor showing the live concert in the background, I found myself unconsciously watching the video monitor instead of the more accessible, vibrant foreground of the actual concert.

Eh? What the hell?

I remember catching myself doing the same thing in actual live concerts, and have to consciously remind myself to watch the actual damn show happening right in front of me instead of watching it on a monitor. I didn’t pay an inordinate amount to go to a live show and just watch television in a concert hall, dammit.

I think this is a consequence of our incessant media watching that it’s become an ingrained and unconscious habit to turn to a video monitor and watch when one presents itself. Even when it’s doing a redundant function such as providing better visuals of a live concert to the cheap seats far in the back.

It’s not as if I can help it. It’s an automatic response, a Pavlovian reaction. I don’t even think about it, I just do it. It’s a function of the current technological stage we’re living in that we unconsciously watch a video monitor whenever there’s one around, regardless of the situation or environment at that time. It’s so deep-seated as to be a fundamental instinct.

We have to remind ourselves that there’s a time and a place for everything, and when the actual reason for the video coverage is happening right there, in flesh and blood, breathing and thinking and reacting, singing and dancing and acting, we need to watch that actual thing instead of watching reproduced pixels and phosphors on a bright screen. When the actual thing is long gone, or the actual thing is not happening in front of us and we don’t have easy access to it, then that’s the time we consider watching the footage on video.

So there.

Wala lang. Just ranting.

4:57PM

Just saw the premiere episode of Humans Season 2 this afternoon, and as I was watching it I was struck by how much show business has overlapped with similar or same stories and plots again. This happens every so often. In cycles. And it’s happened again.

Humans, the remake of Westworld, Pure Genius (the premiere of which I saw this weekend), to name a few.

We have androids/robots slowly gaining sentience, Silicon Valley young upstart billionaires spending their money to promote their own agendas—some plots are so alike they could pass for one another with a few simple tweaks.

The synths of Humans and the hosts of Westworld could literally switch places and no one would be the wiser. Carrie-Anne Moss and Anthony Hopkins too. Or the wonderkinds from Pure Genius and Humans.

Strange.

Wala lang. It’s probably nothing important, but I thought I’d mention it.