Oh removed, I thought he died after it ended. Still the worst celebrity death for me, and one of the few that I could care about.

What a great guy.

removed Discovery for ruining a good thing

A few years ago I was rewatching the Smyths edit of the show and I was wondering if it was ruined or if the show just was a product of its time and couldn’t exist in <modern year>

I think the internet has turned urban legends on their head. What constitutes a plausible myth has changed. We can just search for a lot of these now (and back then too, but it was less common and there was less stuff online). A lot of new urban legends are floating around now, but I don’t know, a lot of these early episodes tackled timeless schoolyard myths.

But the point wasn’t always to test the myth, the myth was just a premise to see them build things and blow them up. Even when I remembered the outcome from when I was a kid, I loved rewatching some of these episodes. It was really interesting to see how they set their experiments up as well. Very practical, very “workshop-brained” in the very best way.

But more than that, I think there’s just no way any network is bankrolling anything like that anymore. My understanding of TV show finance is very limited but I can’t see a modern Mythbusters being profitable, between the insurance and the networks’ unfailing appetite for canceling shows and writing them off, especially expensive shows. Didn’t Netflix make a spiritual successor with the B team only to cancel it, back when Netflix was just blowing up in popularity?

I firmly believe Mythbusters was made in the best possible era for it. Right when the internet was becoming a part of everyone’s lives but not to an intrusive level. Right when there was enough public interest in educational (well, educational-adjacent) TV and right when it was feasible to make the show.

Of course I’d like Mythbusters to exist in some form today. Maybe a tiny self-funded operation with its own in-house streaming site. But are there enough 25-40 year old vaguely nerdy types willing to pay for it? Adam Savage’s YouTube just isn’t the same. I appreciate it, but it’s a shadow of the real deal.

I do really miss seeing the world through the eyes of a kid flipping channels and landing on Jamie Hyneman creating a frozen poultry cannon.

I only ever participated in the original Place years and years ago, putting down maybe two or three pixels.

Maybe where you’re from it’s easy to separate your government flag as its own symbol that doesn’t represent real people but when you’ve got like 20x30 pixels it’s hard to represent a local community online with something better than a flag. I think we ended up with less than ten pixels inside of a heart iirc.

At least for me, in my own country, I associate flags with popular protests and other symbols make me think of the government. Law enforcement uniforms and mismatched old automatic rifles from fifty years ago. Crippling bureaucracy that operates four hours a week that stretches five hours of paperwork errands into a six month chapter of your life (not a symbol but when you say government that’s what I think of).

Point being I don’t find it weird at all that people wanting to represent themselves will default to a national flag. My understanding is that in like Germany there’s a line where nobody wants to seem too proud of the flag, and in the US people are so desensitized to seeing every McDonald’s have 4000 flags on display, in England the red and white flag has different connotations if it’s in a football context or not, etc etc etc

A lot of flagpoles here are faded and tattered and often with one of the stripes almost separating off the flag. Might be doomerism but I think it looks cool, I think it very much is an appropriate representation.

I’m from Lebanon, this flag is for me, and when the government uses it, it’s using it deceptively to pretend it has any interest in our lives and our problems