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Link to comic.
I'm just gonna copy/paste Tycho's entire blog post here, too.
The terminology changed recently, I don't remember a memo going out. But I don't consider something that has commercials "free" to watch. I'm not trying to be churlish; I just recognize that I'm paying with something. And they know I'm paying with it too, which is why they have the commercials there. You used to be able to buy most content online with this currency - attention - but it's depreciated over time, to the point where you now pay a service to show you ads.
So, if you are thirteen, it's entirely probable that you have never watched what they now call "Linear TV" and what we might understand to be Television. Maybe you watched discs from Netflix early on and transitioned into streaming along with the service itself. Commercials on YouTube, or Twitch, sure. You know about those. They're creatures of that environment. But seeing it come up on a television was… new, for them. It hadn't happened before. What a strange, incredible little slice of time that was.
I used to say it just to be a contrarian jagweed, I didn't really believe this is how it would go, because it would be fucking nuts. But we definitely reinvented a shitty, more expensive form of cable. Well, we didn't - you and I. Maybe you did, I guess. If that's the case, please stop doing it! Don't do it anymore.
Seriously, though. It's been crazy finding out just how much money "streamers" have been willing to stuff into a furnace to… Just to… what, exactly? Show us they can't be trusted to make or distribute culture?
(CW)TB out.
I've never until now heard of TV (as in, you know, fucking traditional-ass, normal-ass television) referred to as "Linear TV." And I kind of wish that I never did. I don't even watch regular TV on anything even vaguely approaching a consistent basis anymore, because regular TV generally sucks ass (due in no small part to all the interminable commercials, same as it always has been, pretty much from the very advent of "normal-ass TV"), but this still makes me feel old as fuck. Like, just that the Kids These Days™ apparently had to come up with a new term for "TV" because they just don't get it? Or something?
Well no, it seems that this term has been around since at least 2015, based on the date of that article, except that even in that very article it is said that the term has been around for "quite a while," with other references dating back to at least as early as January 1995, when I'd have been a... second semester sophomore in high school, if I'm doing the math right on that. So I guess it's less the Kids These Days™ and more the Kids Those Days Almost Three Decades Ago™. And yet, I still somehow remained blissfully unaware of the term "Linear TV" for "TV" until now.
Moreover, however, the fact that the mind of Gabe's son apparently just went immediately to "just like a video game" when confronted with the seemingly alien concept of a "TV commercial" is just... ...ugh.
Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Fuck fucking fuckity fuck the fucking actual fuck.
(EDIT) Not sure why the subtitles on that needed to be censored, when the song itself is being sung right there. (/EDIT)
