Pro-tip: Don't in fact go to Hawaii! The native peoples of Hawaii have long been calling for a halting of the tourist industry but it reached a breaking point after COVID. The one-way traffic of tourists in has put a huge strain on everything but especially the healthcare infrastructure. Not to mention the long-flights that rack up quite the carbon cost.
I'm really appreciating the lessons that are becoming apparent across the arc of the show. Namely that virality is not neutral and something we should increasingly ask whether we want at all (because social media empires are built to serve that for profit, or monopoly or both). Asking how virality serves both the platforms and the subjects should be included more as a part of media and internet literacy. In the case of couch guy it should have been obvious that the stakes were so low and the risks so high that even if the internet was "right," it's beside the point and only upends some ordinary young people's lives for little benefit.
I also wonder how much our growing alienation since the industrial revolution has made it easier to disregard the human life behind the internet. We've been increasingly atomized in our relationships to neighbors, communities, and our fellow workers and capital has taken on this almost primal status over and above humans themselves. I can't imagine these forces having no influence on the culture of the internet.
The YouTube channel my nephew puts on almost every time he visits is some super annoying let's play/family vlogging account. It has all the stink of desperate YouTuber scthick (shock faces! yelling over cheapo Steam horror games! whoa we got a big new toy!) and the kids being involved front and center. After a while I realized the insidious appeal of it where kids, like my nephew, get this vicarious view of a "happy fun family." It's like a whole layer of parasocial relationship that acts like a salve to his own family's humdrum or dysfunctional day-to-day.
Of course he's 10 so way too young to understand the big forces at play and his parents are clueless and act like YouTube is this frivolous thing. It's all very it's depressing and it made me wonder what sort of unforeseen rot has been planted in his brain.
My hope is that when a lot of the kids who were the target audience of these families grow up, there's a generational conversation they can have about how fucked up this all was (and rightfully asking their parents and powers that be why this was allowed to happen).
This was 1) very good and 2) made Firewatch seem way more interesting than just a mystery that fails or succeeds to pay off. I suspect Delilah as this disembodied companion voice also heightened the expectations for this mystery after the popularity of Bioshock.
As someone who held off on Firewatch because of all the weird vibes, I'm glad I watched this and know that there is a payoff but not in the place where people might expect.
The irony is that Dan's harebrained egg plane idea is not too far off from what giant wind turbines are doing today. Right now even bigger off-shore wind turbines are being developed with rotors upwards of 350+ feet wide.
Best I can summarize it, a cold liquid enters the fridge via coils. Heat energy transfers from the food and air inside the fridge to heat the liquid in the pipes. But, conveniently, the liquid is also close to it's boiling point. The heat energy that goes from the food to the coil works to convert the liquid into a gas. Then that gas travels back outside to a compressor that raises the pressure (which requires outside energy i.e. electricity). The raised pressure of the gas does two necessary things: it raises the temperature of the gas and it raises it's boiling point. By being hotter than the outside air, the heat energy from the gas can now leach out into the ambient air. And by leaching that energy, it goes from a gas to a liquid. This setups up the fridge for its final trick. By making the compressed liquid lose a bunch of energy out the back of the fridge, the expansion valve reducing the pressure of the liquid makes the temperature of the liquid go below the temp inside the fridge. And then it goes inside the fridge and the cycle begins anew. This process is possible because it is tuned around the pressure and temperature curves of freon.
I think Dan might be thrown off from the start because "cold" doesn't really exist. Heat is all relative to absolute zero, a state of no particle motion. So ignoring radiation for a minute, it's all about higher temperature particles transfer energy to lower temperature particles by bumping into them. Heat always goes somewhere (or comes from somewhere) unless it's insulated.
The crew here are absolutely zeroing in on what it is about this that is gross on a moral level. Seeing the naked cynicism of a broken internet built to serve attention as a commodity by monolithic platforms. The scope and scale when you look at the numbers leaves you feeling pretty depressed and rightly so.
I think the organized effort behind the Rick Lax network is a fascinating angle to it.
Just from this series alone we can see how much of a total crap shoot it is when things go from visible and tangible to abstract. It continues to be harrowing and fascinating.
The secret best show is all the reactions we don't get to hear from the editors as they go through all the footage first. Also I love that Dan's hypothetical explanation of the internet to someone over 100 years ago is basically just the telegraph.
As far as subjects I know Dan has admitted plenty of times to knowing nothing about, it's cars. It would be a great way to touch thermodynamics, petroleum and emissions, transmission, and the mind boggling action of internal combustion engines. Plus a bonus link back to electricity with electric motors.
A juicy one would be "medieval times" because that subject is thick with misconceptions and myths but might get a bit too spicy if not researched properly.
Ah a great time to be showing off the next product in the Call of Duty™ franchise made by Activision Blizzard, Inc. Nope just business as usual showing off the fancy new war game.
Also that Halo Infinite trailer being two steps away from a US Marines ad.
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