Television, drug of the nation

film4 - are you telling me , you built a time machine.....out of a delorean!!!

Blade Runner. Classic.

Blade Runner. Classic

"I'll be back".

I love Denzel's work.

ya bunch of eeejitz trolls
its Spielbergz init
"Marty, may the Force be with you....always"

Technically not a show, more 4 chunks of standup, but James Acaster's new stuff on Netflix is worth a watch.

I really enjoyed this. love how the shows tied together (esp as they are all filmed with same audience given the reactions to the callbacks)

His book Classic Scrapes is excellent too (and audiobook)

Technically not a show, more 4 chunks of standup, but James Acaster's new stuff on Netflix is worth a watch.

Yeah would definitely recommend.

I very rarely watch Mock the Week since it's a bit shit, but I don't rate him on that, so was surprised that he's very good. Can't judge a comedian by a bunch of forced and semi-scripted (I assume...) one liners I guess.

he was very good on richard herrings podcast.

+1 It's generally very good, but I did a couple of Lols out loud during Acaster's. Always slightly embarrassing while queuing at an ASL.

I was at the recording for the upcoming Brian Blessed episode of Richard Herrings podcast. No idea how it will come across as a podcast but it was fucking hilarious / odd, in person. 90 minutes of a standup life stories / bullshit routine from Brian with roughly 10 sentences from Richard in total.

Cheers - wasn't sure what to make of it when it popped up after updating.

It's sooo bad that I've disconnected my TV from the network altogether and factory reset it.

I've even gone and purchased a whole new setup just to ensure I have total control of it.

Samba.tv is that bad.

Why? Lack of trust in Android? It's pretty amazing how little there is on what it does in the first handful of Google results.

I trust Android, and use it on my phone too.

But it's the manufacturers I do not trust.

Android today, TV or phone, are where manufacturers of laptops were a decade ago. HP would load on their 3rd party crap, and it would be full of malware... Lenovo would load on theirs, and it was just shoddily made and full of security holes.

I trust Google to keep Android secure and for any data gathered to be used in a responsible/protective manner (they never give data away, but will use it themselves and the way they do so it balanced by their caution not to break trust).

So for me... the key is to get as vanilla an Android as possible.

On phone that means the Google produced ones, but for TV that isn't as obvious. I thought the Sony was reasonably vanilla, but it turns out not (even their Netflix calls home far more often than Netflix on any other device).

And the Samba.tv thing is terrible... just go look at https://platform.samba.tv/ and delve around. There's all kind of things in there, from knowing what you are watching within 2.5 seconds... through to selling your data for re-targetting or integrating digital adverts over the broadcast stream based on your data.

It's capitalist surveillance state at it's maximum... and the volume of data is nut.

There are people who replied to my twitter who disabled it... yet their Pi-Hole shows it still pinging every 5 minutes.

The only way to kill it is to disable the network totally.

What I've moved to instead:

• Nvidia Shield (vanilla Android TV)
  
• Hauppage WinTV DVB dual tuner
  
• Plex
  
  

And yeah I still have Netflix, Mubi, BBC iPlayer available... but now I watch TV via Plex, and this has become my Plex server.

My Sony TV has been reduced to a factory reset dumb panel, and I'm really glad. Samba.tv is pretty much the worse thing I've ever seen in terms of privacy. It's full big brother straight out of 1984 level.

Anyone seen The City And The City? Probably won’t get a chance for a while and wondered if it was any good. Loved the book, so apprehensive about a televisation.

Sounds like a clean version of Sex and the City.

Anyone seen The City And The City? Probably won’t get a chance for a while and wondered if it was any good. Loved the book, so apprehensive about a televisation.

I'm also intrigued as to how this can be produced for TV. The book was staggeringly good. China Mieville can be incredible. Perdido St Station is as good a piece of imaginative writing as Gormenghast, IMO.

(He can also write stinkers, à la Kraken and that one about trains)

All this doesn't affect me much as I don't own a tv but when I set up the new shiny thing for my dad a few years ago (first time I gave a tv internet access) it began to dawn on me how the game will change in the near future.
Kinda surprised to hear you put that much trust in google though to be honest.

Kinda surprised to hear you put that much trust in google though to be honest

I know enough about them as a company, their internal stuff, to actually say that I feel more trust investing in using Google stuff than I do any other company.

Your mileage may vary, all opinions are valid.

In addition to that ^, Google serv8ces provide me with so much value that I am willing to extend them a long branch of trust.

That equation went negative regarding Facebook a very long time ago. I think it has been nearly a decade since I suicided my FB account.

I know quite nothing about them, nor about the other companies.
Basically it's not possible to tell which company is trustworthy (if any).

@mashton
Google services provide me with so much value that I am willing to extend them a long branch of trust.

Does this make any sense?
Let's say, hypothetically I'm a really evil company. But if I'll give you a lot of nice things that you'll appreciate I'll earn your trust?

Ps: sorry for derailing the thread

I think it does make sense. I am aware that the trust may be misplaced and so, there is a privacy "price" associated with the services.

The expected cost of that price is modelled by the privacy impact if they fuck me over, multiplied by my assessment of the likelihood of them fucking me over.

If that price is, in some way, outweighed by the value of the services they provide me then I am willing to extend the branch of trust.

Of course, this is all very hand waving and qualitative, but to me it justifies why I am OK to use so many Google services but no Facebook ones (except WhatsApp, grrr).

City and the City is the best of his I’ve read so far (but I’ve only read that, perdido st station and currently half way through the scar) - that chase scene was a triumph.