Last time I compiled a list of faves it was general pages of entertainment, news, and culture. I thought this time around I could list some of the people from my favourite shows who’ve kept up some interesting blogs.

Rejected Jokes

• Rejected Jokes – Ben Schwartz writes a LOT, and it’s wonderful. His latest post documented his history as an intern on The Late Show with David Letterman, all the way up to his debut as a guest on the very same show to promote his work on Parks and Recreation and House of Lies.

Aziz Is Bored

• Aziz is Bored – Okay so it’s starting to be clear I love Parks and Recreation, but Aziz is an avid food blogger. His Instagram is essentially #foodporn, and a I recall buying one of his comedy specials digitally and in the zip folder contained a .txt document with his favourite places to eat around America. Tell me that’s not dedication… and his blog mirrors that energy.

MsJWilly

• MsJWilly – Jessica Williams, a correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, is constantly dropping mics on feminism, class struggles, and racial issues.

Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls

• Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls – Originating as an advice web series for young women, it has grown into a beautiful movement. I don’t think I can explain it better than they can: “Change the World by Being Yourself. What began as an online show for young girls and an excuse to host spontaneous dance parties, has become a place for information, comedy and community.”

In terms of what I’ve peeked on other’s blogs this week, I found Maëlle’s post on Le Grand Journal very interesting. It’s a show that has it’s own folder on my hard drives as many of my favourite musicians often perform there, so reading about the structure of the show (considering I hadn’t seen much more past the live performances) was intriguing. On top of it being familiar to me, it got me intrigued about the Broadcast Media class she also takes as it sounds very similar to my TV Cultures class from last semester. Broadcast and post-broadcast was something I actually wrote about on my TV Cultures assessable blog regarding ‘fake news’ (that of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart) and broadcast journalism.

I also read Emerald’s blog and she featured two posts regarding the Galloway reading. Her post Centralised, Decentralised, or Distributed? touched on the different networks and how networks in history have played a role in the way we interact with the Internet today.

The post The Internet. Who’s In Control? focuses on a more general understanding of the reading and I personally found it very helpful in segmenting the giant chunk of reading I struggled through. It at least gave me the comfort that my train of thought was on the right track during the reading.

I’ll readily admit that this week’s reading ‘How Control Exists after Decentralization‘ went way above and beyond my head. I’ve had the PDF open for several hours and I keep requiring a Tim Tam break away from taking notes that even I’m not sure I can comprehend properly. (I did come across a word—metaphysical—that True Detective’s Rust Cohle used in one of his existential monologues and that was enough to give me an idea of what level this reading was working on). If anything, I think I gather more from the whiteboard digram of hubs and nodes than I do reading about them… damn my need for visual stimuli.

Actual screenshot of the notes I was taking during the reading. You’ll notice the abundance of question marks.

Here’s what I did gather from the reading, though succinct and overly simplified (for now?), hopefully after it’s further discussed in class I’ll have more to work off of.

Beginning with the histories of ‘protocol,’ not within technology but the use of protocols within human society, this understanding helped me identify how protocols can be used in regards to technology and the Internet.

“Protocols may be more democratic because it strives to eliminate hierarchy, but it is still very much structured around command and control and has therefore spawned counter-protocological forces.”

The above quote resonated with me, because I read it in regards to societies rather than explicitly relating it to the Internet. It’s as if the ingrained protocols in societal structures were challenged, those that did the challenging would be rejected.

At first glance the Internet might be seen as chaotic when in fact it is highly controlled. This rings back to a few weeks ago when we were discussing the network dynamics in class and the Internet fell under the ‘bell curve distribution’ which are highly regulated networks.

Throughout the reading I also identified several familiar acronyms that I’ve come across during my browsing and amateur troubleshooting. Acronyms which now I know stand for:

• HTML: Hypertext Markup Language
• DNS: Domain Name System
• TCP/IP: Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol
• UNIX: …now I know it’s not an acronym and just the name of an OS.

More to come on all of this, hopefully I get a stronger grasp on societies in the land of networked media as it goes along.

Arriving home from work last Friday and just wanting to unwind with whatever digital had to offer was right up my alley, considering I rarely watch free-to-air and my viewing consists of what my collection consists of, I was more than disappointed flicking through the TV guide.

What I was greeted with was 4 different channels (albeit spawning from one parents channel, but still) all playing the very same episode of dreary game show Family Feud. Salt in the wound was that while I was hunting for another channel, an advertise came on to inform me that Family Feud had even been promoted from a 5-night a week program to 6. Oh joy.

A photo I took of my guide telling me that Family Feud is playing on 4 different channels.

Next was commercials for Gogglebox on Channel 10. A show which is literally watching people watch TV and comment about it in their living rooms (the tagline is ‘a show about people watching television). Not to mention the incessant run of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here commercials. Both of which originated in the UK and are (to my shock horror, pretty huge hits). This was all discovered within the small window of television watching I endured, before I quickly put an episode of Parks and Recreation on. And they wonder why Australia is riding high on the world piracy scales.

I did, however, also see an ad for a new watch-on-demand service being introduced. It’s called Stan, a venture by Nine Entertainment and Fairfax, which actually caught my attention. It’s a service that is powered through an app on your device. What the downside was for existing streaming service that I’d seen is the content available wasn’t the content that people were after. Stan however has rights to the back catalogue of Breaking Bad, as well as it’s spin-off Better Call Saul.

Now, I’ve already ‘collected’ all seasons of Top Gear but it being available here is a plus for me.

With Netflix expected to launch March 2015, the worry of segmented shows across several streamed entertainment providers is now the worry. I guess it never ends. Foxtel continues to have a monopolized hold on HBO content so when Netflix does arrive without the haul of favourites Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and Better Call Saul, it’s difficult to make a solid decision yet… but it will be interesting to see what titles Netflix uses to get out there. There’s also the existing Presto, brought to you by Foxtel, which does offer a wide selection of HBO content, and yet Game of Thrones is still unavailable due to HBO making the fantasy drama unavailable on streaming services worldwide.

What is exciting about all of this though is that there seems to be a solid future for streaming services and paid television in Australia, though exclusivity deals amongst providers puts a dampen on consumers who want it all, and who can still access all through piracy.

Let’s keep a watch on these developments. I actually signed up for the 30-day trial of Stan so more to come. I gave it a test drive with one of my favourite shows that they have in it’s entirety, The Shield.

The Shield on ‘Stan’

It did as expected, played just fine and had the ability to satisfy my binge-watching habits. I’ll definitely check out Australian Netflix when it launches. I’d already had my try at US Netflix when Arrested Development Season 4 was airing and the selection was insanely immense, fingers crossed for the Australian release.