Saturday Morning Cartoons officially dead in the U.S.

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llj
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Re: Saturday Morning Cartoons officially dead in the U.S.

Post by llj »

I've posted about this before, but I think an overdependence on socializing through a computer screen does affect one's ability to socialize face to face. In person, socializing is largely about instinct and experience. Humans, like most animals, are social beings. You learn to read faces and body language and mood through up close interactions. You learn to accept differences and different opinions better. But if you're doing more socializing online than in person--and this IS becoming a reality today--then you start to lose that instinct, that ability to "read" people. I see more and more young people today self diagnose themselves as being "mildly autistic" or having Aspergers because they feel like they don't have the ability to socialize well face to face. And I look at them and all I see are just social retards rather than people with any kind of biological dysfunction. If they got out and exercised a bit socially they would eventually learn it.

I will say though that some young people are more naturally extroverted and are better able to divide their time between online socializing and in person socializing. These people are the ones who have the most success living today's lifestyle. But I think the internet has cleaved a bigger line down the middle between introverts and extroverts. The introverts of today have a much harder time face to face than introverts in the past, because online socializing is a much more enticing and preferable way of exercising their voice.
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Re: Saturday Morning Cartoons officially dead in the U.S.

Post by davemerrill »

So, the gist of the discussion here is that kids used to watch one kind of screen for hours on end, and that was OK, but now they look at another kind of screen for hours on end, and that's bad.

Obviously the solution is to smash all the screens. It's the only way to be sure.

(I'M KIDDING)
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llj
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Re: Saturday Morning Cartoons officially dead in the U.S.

Post by llj »

Yes, smash the world's egg, smash it! :lol:

But really, we could only watch so much TV back in the day. Never mind the inconvenience of lugging a TV around, but all the good programs (for kids, that is) only happened within a specific time frame. We weren't entirely dependent on it. Although if we had the choice to carry a portable TV around, I'm sure we would have taken it.

You have a smartphone or laptop today, and you could be glued to a screen any time you're not eating or in class. Not possible with a TV.

Statistically, obesity rates have increased dramatically over the past 15 years. Cases of socializing-related anxieties are also statistically up among teens and children (though they are unofficial polls, admittedly).

Honestly, I'm really glad I grew up in the pre-online era. Not that I ever suffered major bullying, but just the thought of kids being able to harass a peer any time of the day is just scary stuff.

I'm hardly a person who's all about trumping up the "good old days" (there are several things I'm glad we as a society have left behind) but I definitely am not someone who believes everything that is "now" is more progressive in comparison either.
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Re: Saturday Morning Cartoons officially dead in the U.S.

Post by greg »

Yeah, I am with you, llj. I am glad that I grew up in a time when things were analog. Saturday morning cartoons were great, but those tapered off sometime between 10am and 11. There were other things to do, but playing Atari with friends was just something to do, and we still did stuff outdoors. On my own, video games were enjoyed as well as reading books. Then again, playing something like Asteroids or Pole Position was not as engrossing as playing games like Dragon Quest. I didn't experience those types of games until I was in college. (Although I sure put a lot of time into Starflight by Electronic Arts on the family's 286 computer. That game was very involving.)

Living here in Happy J-Land, kids still go to the park and play, or play outside. I live in an apartment building, and we've recently had to tell our daughter that she must not play outside with other kids because it is against the rules to play in the parking lot. Plus the fact that the kids in our immediate area suck. The boy in the building next to ours is a total street urchin who raises himself. Every time she plays with him, he makes her cry. The twin girls across the street are very fickle, and one of them stole a toy from our daughter a few weeks ago. Crappy kids are everywhere.
davemerrill wrote:Parents on this board will have to enlighten us as to what the 8-year olds are up to these days, how they use television as a reward or an incentive.
Well, we use the DVR to record our girl's favorite shows. Various Precure shows, Youkai Watch, Sailor Moon R, etc. We rely on these as her motivation to wake up in the morning and eat her breakfast. During dinnertime we turn on the Fuji cable TV station, which starts Doraemon at 6:30pm, followed by two Crayon Shin-chan episodes. From 5pm to 6, she may or may not watch the pseudo-educational kids' shows on NHK. But whatever it is that she's watching, we'll either pause it or change the station if she isn't doing what we expect of her (eating her food, putting her toys away before dinner, etc). But usually the one who keeps the TV on all the time is my wife. She just likes having it on in the background, even though she used to gripe about how my mom always did the exact same thing. Double standards, I guess.
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Re: Saturday Morning Cartoons officially dead in the U.S.

Post by davemerrill »

Boy, those DVRs are a blessing; I work weird shifts and am pretty much never home weeknights, which means that if I want to watch any sort of network television, it either gets DVR'd or we have to download a torrent of it. And now that we no longer have cable TV and its DVR, it's a lot of torrenting going on.

Having the DVR almost made cable TV worth it, however. Almost.
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Re: Saturday Morning Cartoons officially dead in the U.S.

Post by SteveH »

It's funny, we don't have a DVR. Not interested in the extra fees Comcast would tack on even if we bought our own.

And letting things pile up on the DVR is a dangerous drug. We (mom and I) just play it like the old analog days- if there's conflicting shows, pick one, catch the other in reruns.

DVRs are indeed a good thing, just like VCRs, but there is a flaw I never see anyone address. You're hostage to hoping that the idiots at the cable company are keying their metadata correctly. EVERYTHING hinges on that data is correct. A show runs two minutes longer than expected, you're screwed.
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Re: Saturday Morning Cartoons officially dead in the U.S.

Post by greg »

Hmm... we've never had any problems with that so far. Our cable provider, Vic Tokai, integrates the DVR function into the cable box, so basically it comes as part of the service automatically. We've never had any timing issues. Maybe it's because Japanese are more precise than Americans?

But yeah, in the USA, the extra cost just was not worth it for us. We never bothered getting one, because it's not like we watched any shows on a regular basis anyway. Now that we are here though, it's a veritable gold mine in terms of anime and such.
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Re: Saturday Morning Cartoons officially dead in the U.S.

Post by SteveH »

greg wrote:Hmm... we've never had any problems with that so far. Our cable provider, Vic Tokai, integrates the DVR function into the cable box, so basically it comes as part of the service automatically. We've never had any timing issues. Maybe it's because Japanese are more precise than Americans?

But yeah, in the USA, the extra cost just was not worth it for us. We never bothered getting one, because it's not like we watched any shows on a regular basis anyway. Now that we are here though, it's a veritable gold mine in terms of anime and such.
So let's say you're recording Gundam Build Fighters Try (and you should!) and the station postpones the new episode for a local sporting event. Do you get 30 minutes of Baseball or Sumo, or does it just go *burp* and not record anything? If the new episode shows up 2 hours later does it know to grab it?

See, THAT is the issue with the metadata encoding. If everything was working right, if everything was keyed properly, you'd never miss an episode regardless of when it runs. That's the promise of the technology.

Reality often falls far short. :)
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Re: Saturday Morning Cartoons officially dead in the U.S.

Post by greg »

Oh, well, I don't know about that. We only mainly record stuff off of the cable stations. I record stuff like Precure, Youkai Watch, and Sailor Moon R for my daughter. Those are on stations like Animax, Kids Station, and Fuji. Those work like clockwork, so no preemptive baseball intrusions or whatever.

I still have the rest of the first Gundam Build Fighters to watch, already recorded off of Animax. I haven't checked to see what station the new show is on. I am really in the dark about new stuff. But trust me, if/when a second Yamato 2199 season is broadcast, I will be all over that in a second!
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Re: Saturday Morning Cartoons officially dead in the U.S.

Post by SteveH »

greg wrote:Oh, well, I don't know about that. We only mainly record stuff off of the cable stations. I record stuff like Precure, Youkai Watch, and Sailor Moon R for my daughter. Those are on stations like Animax, Kids Station, and Fuji. Those work like clockwork, so no preemptive baseball intrusions or whatever.

I still have the rest of the first Gundam Build Fighters to watch, already recorded off of Animax. I haven't checked to see what station the new show is on. I am really in the dark about new stuff. But trust me, if/when a second Yamato 2199 season is broadcast, I will be all over that in a second!
Don't feel bad. I have no idea what's current in anime, and what I see, I have zero interest in.

OTOH I'm loving LOVING Gundam Build Fighters Try. They can just keep making this. :)
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