Scamwagon

I got to thinking about tv content today. Nowadays, there's more and more "unscripted" reality tv crap splattered all over the cable-waves. It seems like each genre has various levels of 3 specific characteristics. I've come up with a rating chart to contrast 3 major characterists of all the various kinds of tv content: Type Scripted Stupid Fabricated Plot NASA Channel Movies X X Reality TV X X Crappy Sitcoms X X X NASA Channel : Reality TV without the suck.

My obsession with looking forward to new technology is not a new one. This is a brief essay I wrote on November 30th, 1999. The point was to have some sort of a forward-looking benchmark to "look back at". It's funny, some of this stuff seems obvious now, but at the time you couldn't even buy a DVD burner, and "TiVo" was not a widely recognized verb in the english language. The iPod didn't come out until Oct. 23rd, 2001... Almost 2 years after this was written. I'll admit that I didn't see the personal music player as a stepping stone to "PC-in-my pocket ubiquity", but you can definitely see things moving in that direction. Some of these things have yet to come to fruition. Still, not bad for a pre-turn of the century prediction. Here's a list of key modern-day technologies this article touches on, albeit in scarce detail: -iPod -DVD burners -Surround sound audio DVDs (still on the rise) -5.1 (and 7.1) digital audio soundcards -Ti...