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I think I may have hyad a 'geek media' breakdown last night.

I was just being barraged with bad news from every direction: Covid, riots, economic collapse coming, impending meat and food shortages, coming massive spike in food prices, the assault on free speech by The Thing, the coming inevitable total collapse of civilization, ad infinitum.

Suddenly I just had this overwhelming urge to go on youtube and watch old episodes of Ultraman from 1966, which i had watched reruns of when i was a kid aeons ago.

I don't know, did i have like a momentary breakdown and just need to escape the horror of modern reality? Did I just have an urge tow watch something that reminded me on my childhood?

I hadn't watched ultraman in a verrrry long time so it was amazed at how awful most of the monsters looked now. I remember them as being a lot better looking. Some eps i picked had some good or at least interesting bits in them. One ep had a bunch of flying saucers that reminded me of necron scythes. Other eps managed to still be almost creepy or have cool touches even today, there was more "violence" on kids shows back then. There was one ep that made me wonder how anything human could ingest the massive amounts of LSD the writer and production cleary had to have ingested to make it and lived long enough to finish it. Another ep had me laughing at the alien invaders, who were basically a race of Michael Jacksons from space.

No really. See:



It just occurred to me how much stress I was under to suddenly have this need to just escape for a while by watching stuff like this. I might feel a little less bad if I knew other people were dong something like this...

Now I'm having a wicked urge to go watch "the green slime" or "The x from outer space".

Now I'm wondering if I'm alone in this sudden urge to watch something old and simple to escape from now, so anyone else here doing anything like this and honest enough to cop to it?

Unplug. It's not difficult. You determine directly what you consume. Stop reading garbage social media, stop watching news, etc. You're not missing much. You sure as hell don't need to know or hear what other laypersons have to say about said subjects.

Go walk outside, and don't look at your phone. Hell, leave your phone in another room and do something. Cook, read, build a model.

Nowt wrong with having a happy place watch, read or other white noise generator

And i concur with Elbows regarding disconnecting

Now back to trying to figure out if New Girl is actually funny or its just cos pretty ladies, for science

Long ago I stopped watching the news for the most part. I decided that I didn't need barraging with bad news from the whole world, the vast amount of which either has no effect on me at all or is stuff that (even if it affects me) I cannot change (at least not without changing my entire life and dedicating myself to the cause).


Heck most of the time people only watch the news to provide chit-chat content for casual conversations. The vast bulk of it is negative "bad news". News outlets have taken the mantra "bad news sells" and honestly gone utterly nuts with it.

It is possible your actions were stress based.

I’m known to watch Regular Show and Uncle Grandpa when I need to unwind.

 Overread wrote:
Long ago I stopped watching the news for the most part. I decided that I didn't need barraging with bad news from the whole world, the vast amount of which either has no effect on me at all or is stuff that (even if it affects me) I cannot change (at least not without changing my entire life and dedicating myself to the cause).

Plus-one-ing this. News is the business of anxiety, because anxious people seek out more news.

Consider: How many news stories that you've consumed in the last year did you need to know about? As in, you personally would have suffered if you hadn't know about that thing within hours of it happening? Probably not that many.

Yep, the news is more or less...awful all around. Basically tremendously hyperbolic, filled with fear mongering and talking-heads rather than actual news/journalism/information.

Add "pundits" on top of that and you're basically asking for trouble. Twitter, etc? Well...double or triple the level of misinformation/hyperbole and you can imagine what you get.

An added suggestion; if you're a facebook person - there's this handy tool called "unfollow". I keep my Facebook slim by way of friends, and even those people - I unfollow all of them. As much as I love most of my friends, I don't need to see a constant barrage on unfiltered garbage/hype posts, etc.

If I hear about a news item that is actually interesting or worth knowing about, I find a direct/proper source, rather than bothering with what someone else's "opinion" is on said news.

During a very stressfull/emotional time a few months back i went back and cought up on an old show i loved that i kinda stopped watching. While i dont believe that things like things like this can sure depression(I have met people that think a show they watched cured their depression) I do believe they can be a healthy distraction from things.
Dont feel bad, I have just donw and just listen to podcasts before.

I think it is totally normal to escape through media, especially media that feels disconnected from reality. Nostalgia can just be the cherry on top.

I recently binged some* kids cartoons for the same purpose.


*Read: many hours

There's nothing wrong with what you're doing. Escapism is something we crave even when there aren't global catastrophes encroaching on our lives. Step away from social media, stop watching the news and watch those old cartoons and movies to your heart's content. The problems of the world will still be there when you're ready to confront them again. You as an individual have miniscule institutional power to affect change, the world won't be the worse if you disconnect. Do what makes you happy man, life is too damn short for anything else.

 Elbows wrote:
Unplug. It's not difficult. You determine directly what you consume. Stop reading garbage social media, stop watching news, etc. You're not missing much. You sure as hell don't need to know or hear what other laypersons have to say about said subjects.

Go walk outside, and don't look at your phone. Hell, leave your phone in another room and do something. Cook, read, build a model.

This, especially with social media. While some news can be useful (ex. knowing what's opening up during the COVID situation or finding ways to help out with something), the opinion section on the latest crime is probably not terribly helpful.

If you want an additional thing to try when the news is overwhelming you, try to create a thing. It can be a program, a recipe, a song, a dance, a story, or heck maybe even your own Ultraman. I've found that helps divert my attention long enough to let the feeling pass.

By the way, great to see another Ultraman fan! Saw Ultraman Geed some time back, and thought it was awesome!

My current escape is rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender.

I'm quite isolated on my own at the moment due to the lockdown stuff and because I'm vulnerable due to medication I'm on. My family is quite far away and my partner left at the beginning of January so I'm all alone in my flat.

So yeah, not in a great place at the moment but Avatar is such a great story and with such great characters it helps and lets me not think about stuff for a while.

As to remembering the effects to be better, its amazing how your brain remembers things with present effects kinda
When I replayed kingdom hearts, I SWORE the effects where better and the world where bigger. Same when i Re-watched OG Star Wars, I swore it had more light saber fights/better effects.
Your brain fills in old stuff with new stuff and its pretty insane

It's also amazing how sometimes if you watch a film you can watch it again and realise whole segments that you missed the first time around.

Thanks guys. I am still wondering how that one episode predicted michael jackson like 20+ years before he became that. At times I wonder if the writers did so much LSD it reached Melange levels...

 Matt Swain wrote:
Thanks guys. I am still wondering how that one episode predicted michael jackson like 20+ years before he became that. At times I wonder if the writers did so much LSD it reached Melange levels...

Its pretty simple, Following trends of musicians aint hard. Its like how people say "Simpsons Did it" its more that some writers are really good at looking at past trends and writing in predictions or jokes based on currents trends.
Like saying someone predicted a disease from a bat would cause a pandemic is being psychic, nope, its knowing that bats arre well known to carry communicable diseases.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

 Matt Swain wrote:
Thanks guys. I am still wondering how that one episode predicted michael jackson like 20+ years before he became that. At times I wonder if the writers did so much LSD it reached Melange levels...

Its pretty simple, Following trends of musicians aint hard. Its like how people say "Simpsons Did it" its more that some writers are really good at looking at past trends and writing in predictions or jokes based on currents trends.
Like saying someone predicted a disease from a bat would cause a pandemic is being psychic, nope, its knowing that bats arre well known to carry communicable diseases.

Maybe true, but in all fasirness to me the resemblance is kinda creepy.

Also don't forget if you work in media you likely hear things that never make it to the newspapers at the time. So its easy to slip in sneaky references to daft/odd things other "creatives" get up too because you've heard it on the grapevine. It might even be common knowledge, its just not been wrapped up in a newspaper article and packaged to the whole world.


As for prediction on world events, yeah there's a LOT of repetition. A lot of great seers and mystics rely on it heavily. "Oh there will be a great war in the east". You can also add any other cardinal point because history has had wars EVERYWHERE. "Earthquakes and tsunamis in Asia" It's on the Ring of Fire, it would be more abnormal for there NOT to be major geologically driven natural disasters. "A great flood" again most places experience massive flooding at some stage. Plus humans are bad at remembering, the "Worst flood in generations" is easily whipped up on the cover of a newspaper and no one remembers the last major flood around 100 years ago anyway.

One other thing about media is, reporting on some terrible imminent crisis or doom is what gets people reading, but the resolution to those crises is seldom reported on, usually because it's quite unexciting or anti-climactic to report "Big Imminent Crisis Turned Out To Not Be So Bad Once We Reviewed The Evidence", "People Sit Down And Talk Like Adults To Solve Problem" or "Devastated Community Rebuilds, And Is Actually Well On The Road To Recovery".

This leads to a quite subtle effect where the world is portrayed as terrible crisis after terrible crisis, with nothing ever being resolved or sorted out.

Indeed, the news is horrendous at followup articles. Both on the negative, but also the positive. There are loads of cures and developments that sometimes get reported on, but the media will very rarely if ever actually follow up that story toward a conclusion.

Some newspapers do followups, but unless the problem got dramatically worse, most times its hidden away or hardly commented upon. It's not "fresh" and its not "disaster" so it won't "sell".





Heck I've started to stop watching nature documentaries now because almost all of them are going down the "here's something pretty - and its all going to be gone in a few years because humans". It's an important message don't get me wrong, and it is darn ahrd to avoid environments that aren't falling apart, but darn it let me have a little window now and then there isn't doom and gloom.
Heck I'd argue that conservation is falling into the same trap that a lot of other charities fall into in that they get hooked on reporting the doom to the point where their donation market gives up on them. It's like animal shelters - many will post images of abused and sad looking animals and then wonder why no one is adopting them. People don't willingly get on a sinking ship; they don't want to take the abused cat home. However take that same message, that same animal and shot them happy in a contented situation and suddenly people want to be a part of that.
Similarly its why a lot of donation clips on the TV started to stop showing starving children and started showing happy healthy ones running through fields through the efforts of donation.

 Elemental wrote:
One other thing about media is, reporting on some terrible imminent crisis or doom is what gets people reading, but the resolution to those crises is seldom reported on, usually because it's quite unexciting or anti-climactic to report "Big Imminent Crisis Turned Out To Not Be So Bad Once We Reviewed The Evidence", "People Sit Down And Talk Like Adults To Solve Problem" or "Devastated Community Rebuilds, And Is Actually Well On The Road To Recovery".

This leads to a quite subtle effect where the world is portrayed as terrible crisis after terrible crisis, with nothing ever being resolved or sorted out.

Very true. The events we do continue to hear about in the media are also the ones that don't get resolved and become a big festering wound, which then becomes the "norm" for how the world appears through a media lense.