I have a neighbor’s pickup truck for situations like this.
Yeah, I have access to a pickup truck I can borrow if needed, or in the worst case scenario I can get a U-Haul to move it the 3 miles from the arcade to my house.
Oh wow, the Journalism subreddit is getting absolutely slammed with invading Trump supporters.
I guess I’m not the only Rose Buddies listener here.
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There are at least three of us! 
Have you ever been so high you were afraid 18th century British regulars were going to arrest you for possession? Neither have I, but at work today I walked past someone who was.
Lucky it wasn’t the Hessian’s.
I just saw The Room for the first time. That was…something.
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I have been staring at my inbox waiting for an importaint email like a dog sits at the door waiting for their owner to come home. Just want to get the damn thing.
From what I’ve watched of the Bill Nye show I did think it was pretty bad. Are you actually saying you liked the show, or just that certain people disliking it were themselves stupidly biased? I’m pretty sure the show is awful in spite of the fact that they’re occasionally happening to agree with me on something and there is a lot of disingenuous presentation going on.
At no point did Churba say he liked the show or the controversy.
I was personally a bit disappointed. I agreed with the messaging but that was kind of all it was. I was really hoping for more of an adult version of the 90s PBS show for kids.
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I only watched the first episode and was pretty disappointed. I get that they were trying to capture the spirit and energy of the 90’s kid’s show and the live audience was a nice idea, but the whole thing just felt rushed and shallow. I think SciShow has spoiled me when it comes to entertaining science videos.
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[quote=“PrinceRobot, post:102, topic:281”]
Are you actually saying you liked the show, or just that certain people disliking it were themselves stupidly biased?
[/quote]Nope! I wasn’t saying I liked the show in that post, though I was saying something pretty similar to your assessment, the people who were and are screaming blue murder about it on reddit are absolutely hating on it not for any reason related to the show quality, but because it disagreed with them on a topic where they choose to be absolutely anti-science, because reddit on the whole is pretty libertarian-styled far right at worst, and aggressively right-leaning centrist and faux-progressive at best.
Now, that’s not to say it’s a measure of quality either way, just that reddit and other far-right wankers are picking every single thing they can with the show, to the point of grabbing sections, taking them out of context to make them offensive, or even just making shit up to attack it, all for disagreeing with them. Oh, and being enormously hypocritical - the same website that has regular posts about “What’s your favorite super dirty joke in kids entertainment?” is criticizing Nye for having some dirty jokes that were - while far from subtle - still much more hidden that their other favorites from those threads.
There is one other problem that reddit has with it - it’s not for them. It’s for people less informed about science, but still interested, and generally quite young. Reddit seems to not understand or refuses to understand that entertainment properties that aren’t made for 17-30 white American dudes aren’t necessarily, or even usually, personal attacks against them that require response in kind.
Of course, since you’re asking, in a roundabout way, I’ll tell you - Yeah, I did like the show! It was goofy, cheesy, silly and had some surprisingly interesting and informative sections even for those who are pretty cluey about science, such as the long package in one episode about how K-pop influences gender and gender expression in Korea. It was almost exactly like Bill Nye’s previous shows, with updated science and a bigger budget, which is exactly what I expected.
I went in with my expectations appropriately adjusted, since, unlike many, I didn’t have any nostalgic childhood memories of Bill Nye the Science guy as some amazing, deep, informative thing, I first watched Bill Nye in my mid-20s when I was already aware of almost all of what was covered. And with appropriately set expectations, I got exactly what I wanted - a fun, silly, cheesy romp through some 101 science, and I even learned a few things I’d not heard or thought of before.
[quote=“PrinceRobot, post:102, topic:281”]
I’m pretty sure the show is awful in spite of the fact that they’re occasionally happening to agree with me on something and there is a lot of disingenuous presentation going on.
[/quote]On the first point, hey, fair enough. Not everything is for everyone, and that’s okay. But the latter part, about disingenuous presentation - Absolutely not. They might have been very simple science, they might have been a bit silly with it for fun’s sake, but at no point were they insincere, and at no point did they pretend that we know less than we do for the sake of argument. At the time of writing, the science is accurate, regardless of the silliness of the presentation at times. In fact, I’d appreciate if you’d give me a few examples of what you thought was disingenuous, and maybe we can clear a few things up?
I don’t want to speak for @PrinceRobot but in my opinion it was a liiiittle disingenuous when in a few episodes they invited obvious quacks to the panel portion basically just to shit on them.
I’ll have to watch an episode this weekend or something to pick through. What I do recall is the crowd going nuts over completely trivial things and half-cocked arguments which seems fake as hell to me. On the GMO one for example it was like a 10,000 foot view, and while people that think GMOs are the most horrible thing ever are pretty dumb, on the other hand we’re accelerating the rate at which we can make changes to things with stuff like crispr and there are a number of big concerns with patents and predatory use against competition… then you invite a Monsanto guy on for some slow pitch softball questions. There’s a lot of potential, and a lot of ways to exploit that potential.
[quote=“PrinceRobot, post:108, topic:281”]
What I do recall is the crowd going nuts over completely trivial things and half-cocked arguments which seems fake as hell to me.
[/quote]Weirdly enough, the crowd is real. But as usual with crowds, there’s hype men, and people just being weird. Can’t help you there, I just ignored them for the most part.
[quote=“PrinceRobot, post:108, topic:281”]
On the GMO one for example it was like a 10,000 foot view
[/quote]Well, everything on the show is, really. I see where you’re coming from, but that’s also kind of the point - it’s meant to be a very broad view without going deep.
[quote=“PrinceRobot, post:108, topic:281”]
on the other hand we’re accelerating the rate at which we can make changes to things with stuff like crispr and there are a number of big concerns with patents and predatory use against competition… then you invite a Monsanto guy on for some slow pitch softball questions.
[/quote]Okay, there’s a reason for that - first, a lot of those patent concerns and such are more often than not just a fallback method of lashing out at Monsanto, since a lot more people are now much more aware of GMOs being generally safe, so the frankenfood line of bullshit is nowhere near as effective as it used to be. So instead, they demonize Monsanto as some evil patent-hoarding monster trying to control our food supply, when that’s really just not true, or at least, as portrayed.
Yeah, they have patents - but they generally don’t use them, except no large corporate competitors. Which is fair enough - they want to make the money back they spent on research, testing, and so on before their largest competitors reap the benefits without any of the expenditure. The shit about them suing farmers? Only partially true. They sue farmers who break their seed contracts - which are pretty standard in modern agriculture - and don’t seek excessive damages, they usually just seek to have them stop doing it. When they do get damages, they’re donated to charities that benefit farmers, they don’t even seek costs.
Monsanto is the primary point of fear and primary snarl-word for anti-GMO folk. They’re bringing him on and having him answer what are softball questions, but are also the most common things people want to know about Monsanto and their operations.
[quote=“PrinceRobot, post:108, topic:281”]
I’ll have to watch an episode this weekend or something to pick through.
[/quote]Mate, you don’t really have to push yourself. I don’t want to force you to watch something you don’t like, if you’re not into it, don’t go out of your way on my account.
I suspect the crowd is curated and prompted like so many things nowadays for one.
It’s not just the patent stuff though, and it’s not just Monsanto. Lobbyists are practically writing their own laws on the subject. For example they’re avoiding having to follow through on environmental impact studies by using “existing” genetic material within compatible plants. So in the (likely, hopefully, harmless) case of the button mushrooms that don’t turn brown naturally they re-wrote some mushroom DNA with some more mushroom DNA. Since this “could” theoretically happen through breeding mushrooms, the usual GMO laws don’t touch this. But is that actually how we want that to work? It seems rooted in the notion that the public thinks it’s weird to take snake DNA and put it in a fruit or something, but just because any particular plant “could theoretically” get to a certain place doesn’t mean it would naturally.
Either way, Bill Nye’s attitude historically on the subject has went from stupid (GMOs are horrifying) to stupid (GMOs are the best thing ever).