Finding a Deal Online

Have not posted in a while. Been busy. Currently writing another short essay similar to my other posts, but it is a bit more complicated. Probably will not finish until weekend. Sentences are fragments for some reason.

Here are some sites that I use to find deals on products. These sites have been recommended to me by online peers.

www.woot.com- Showcases one product per day.
Pros: Has one deal a day to focus on.
Cons: Has one deal a day to focus on.


www.slickdeals.net- Showcases several products per day.
Pros: The website lists several deals per day. Clicking on an item shows more details about the product and the specific details of the deal. Deals that have expired are grayed out. A flame icon is displayed next to the site's "hottest" deals.
Cons: The products are not categorized in any way. Does not list as many deals as www.dealnews.com. May not list every single deal that is on the Internet.


www.dealnews.com- Showcases several products per day.
Pros: The website lists numerous deals per day. Clicking on an item shows more details about the product and the specific details of the deal. Products can be categorized in various ways to make finding a product easier. Meters on a scale of 1-5 are displayed next to products to signify level of "hottest" deals.
Cons: May not list every single deal that is on the Internet.


www.giveawayoftheday.com- Showcases a free software product per day.
Pros: Showcases a free software product per day.
Cons: If you do not like the product, you probably will not download it even though it is free.


There are many other deal-type websites on the Internet, but these are the ones I currently monitor. Most of the products listed may seem trivial in value in face of the current economy, but you may find a deal or two on food products. Food is important. That new HDTV- maybe not so much.

Family Guy, Robot Chicken, and the Form/Function of the Narrative: Part 4

The definitive theme of Robot Chicken is that all narratives can be modified, combined, or cut short; they actually have no effect on the audience’s ability to piece together a rational picture in their mind. Take the 15 minute running time. It is indicative of the watcher’s lack of attention span after years of television and film viewing, not to mention the fleeting commercials in between. The stop animation not only serves as a signifier of nostalgia by its technical obsoleteness, it also functions as a metaphor for the splicing of various storylines together with its crude, unrefined imagery.

Even the opening sequence of the show hints at its ultimate premise. The opening shot is of a dead chicken on a nondescript road (a perverted interpretation of the joke “Why did the chicken cross the road?” perhaps). A crazed-looking scientist picks it up off the street and takes it to his laboratory. There he hacks and cuts at the dead corpse. As he moves away from the camera, we see that the chicken has been revived, sporting new metal prosthetics (hence the emergence of the titular character). The scientist then straps the reformed chicken into a chair and forces its eyes open, presumably to watch the literally dozens of television screens that have been placed before it.

The chicken, as you may have guessed, represents us- the audience, to be more specific. We are an abomination, a twisted experiment resulting from the countless plotlines and stories we have witnessed onscreen. Eventually, as demonstrated previously by the example of the Voltron/ You Got Served act, these once-singular narratives blend into one another. The opening itself borrows from various sources: the aforementioned “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke, the stereotypical mad scientist with a lab in a giant castle housed in the mountains, the Frankenstein-like emergence of the half-robot, half-flesh chicken, and the “rehabilitation” through the forced viewing of televised images reminiscent of the criminal’s in A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1969). This hodge-podge creation displays the superiority of Robot Chicken’s narrative elucidation. We have no idea why a scientist would revive a chicken and force it to watch television, possibly forever. There is no revelation of motives or backgrounds of the characters or a description of the situation. Nor, as Robot Chicken dictates, are we required to know. What we do recognize are the conventional narratives that it borrows from, which is all that is necessary to enjoy what we have just witnessed in the opening and the subsequent acts that follow.

Nostalgia requires information to be drawn from the viewer’s memory. Both Family Guy and Robot Chicken acknowledge that the modern mind is so muddled with data that pieces of information are grouped into a shapeless mass, often overlapping one another. Robot Chicken, however, fully embraces the chaotic state of the narrative’s current form by mimicking the attention-deficient watcher’s experience through short, jumbled skits that can only produce laughter because of its initial incoherence. Family Guy seems to make only momentary indications of the nature of the modern narrative with its cultural allusions, reverting back to a more standard, traditional plot after each one.

Family Guy is by no means a lesser show than Robot Chicken. The problem is that it will always suffer criticism by those who see the insertion of references as random and disruptive in relation to the main storyline of an episode. Chicken makes no attempt to conjure a stable, primary plot, and therefore, randomness may be present, but there is no disruption.

End

Family Guy, Robot Chicken, and the Form/ Function of the Narrative: Part 3

And it is in the communication of this message that Robot Chicken exceeds its predecessor. Whereas Family Guy argues the amorphous nature of the spectators’ minds in an explicit fashion, Robot Chicken makes it both explicit and implicit. In the former, the references are made to the viewer, who is made aware of their ability to distinguish among various allusions when they are reintroduced to the ‘main’ storyline. The latter achieves the same effect by its exclusion of a primary narrative rather than its inclusion.

The television static motif noted previously serves as the transition between the multiple strands in the show, but also to delineate the fact that there is no principal storyline or characters for the viewer to compare and contrast with other cultural insinuations in the way that Family Guy does; thus, the explicit and the implicit are manifested. Instead of having two separate parts, such as ‘Family Guy’s main storyline’ and ‘a cultural allusion,’ one act of many in an episode of Chicken may intertwine two or more cultural references creating the equivalent of one strand.

In one particular act, a team of humans who command a giant robot named Voltron are challenged to execute elaborate dance moves in a contest against an equally gargantuan monster; when Voltron fails to dance well enough, the sketch ends with their defeat (not before they kill the monster as retribution for being humiliated though). The act is derived from two sources. The Voltron team is based off a show in which there is a giant robot that battles monsters, but such battles are usually conducted by swords and other traditional weapons of warfare. The ‘dance off’ is a product of the film You Got Served (Chris Stokes, 2004) in which black youth participate in a dancing competition to win literally and metaphorically [in life]. Separately, these two narratives are dramatic. Together, they are a basis of humor, as they have now formed a ridiculous story. Robot Chicken accomplishes the overt communication in a similar way Family Guy does [by its combination of various cultural intimations], but it also achieves the inherent by masking the observers’ capacity through the blending of its numerous acts.

This lack of discrimination results in the kind of seamless spectator analysis that Family Guy flirts with but never attains. If one were to turn on the television in the middle of an episode of Family Guy, for example, they would be momentarily disoriented; they would have missed the first half and would require some time to piece together the overall plot.

With Robot Chicken, it states by its very design that there is no need for that kind of viewer exercise. The divided acts have very little reasoning in their placement; the one that is introduced in the beginning has no influence on the others that transpire subsequently, and even if a previous act is revisited, it is only briefly, of no consequence, and rarely an occurrence. If one does not understand a certain act, the television static will most likely appear soon and whisk the observer to the next sketch. No time to comprehend if you are too slow to get the joke; it would not be any different if you were the one switching channels, would it?

End Part 3

Family Guy, Robot Chicken, and the Form/ Function of the Narrative: Part 2

Robot Chicken triumphs over Family Guy in one specific aspect: its presentation. Although Family Guy succeeds in its integration of cultural humor, its doppelganger prevails not only with integration but also with the form in which it presents it. The problem with Family Guy is its dependence on, or perhaps obligation to, the traditional sitcom. As mentioned before, the show revolves around a small family of unusual characters. Like television families before it, this group often has to work through some kind of plot, at the end of which they learn a life lesson and progress as a whole or as individuals. To be fair, not all of Guy’s episodes are structured in this way, but there are quite a few that adhere to this principle. The utilization of a conventional narrative would not be so detrimental to the show if it did not rely on the irreverence of typical narratives for its comedy.

Robot Chicken’s format, on the other hand, is anything but conformist. Without a cast of central characters, there is no demand of character development that plagues Family Guy. Without said development, there is also no prerequisite for a coherent storyline. Without these conservative elements, there are no restrictions, a fact that becomes apparent when watching Chicken.

As stated previously, an episode of Robot Chicken consists of a series of comedic skits. These skits, or ‘acts,’ are broken up into segments. In between these acts, there is a visual motif that consistently reappears as an interesting transitional device. As one part segues into the next, a brief moment of television static is recreated; television static appears as the incoherent scrambled image that momentarily materializes when channels are switched or when the television is not receiving a signal. The significance of this recurring motif relates to a greater theme that Family Guy and Robot Chicken espouse on the nature of modern storytelling.

The message that they emphasize by continuously drawing upon past and present pop culture is that the established method of telling stories may be obsolete in some respects. Family Guy, in its later seasons, has visibly increased the frequency of seemingly random jokes that have little or no impact to the episodes’ storylines; this rise is not without purpose. By its practice of referencing other narratives constantly, the show comments on the viewers’ learned ability to retain an expansive knowledge of television and film narratives and differentiate among them effortlessly. The observer no longer needs to view only the world confined in Family Guy’s in order to produce a coherent sequence of events in their mind. The individual can understand the allusions being made, yet at the same time, be able to discern among them as separate entities from sources outside of the sphere of events that occur in Family Guy."

End Part 2