Hacker News is a place where people know a great many facts, but know almost nothing about the operations and imperatives of the real world.

It makes for odd reading where one can encounter a list of facts so startlingly at odds with the conclusion that it almost seems to be a bizarre joke. Something like:

1) The sun is made mostly of hydrogen.

2) Hydrogen in the sun fuses into helium.

3) Helium is protons living communally, so helium is an anti-market liberal conspiracy!

Hacker News is a silly place.

It is really quite cool to be living through the golden age of one type of art – and I am referring to that of the TV show.

I’d date the start of the belle epoque of TV being around 1993, with the airing of the The X-Files, and it is continuing even today though I think we’re in the declining period of the golden age. In art, such periods generally last 20-30 years.

And if making a TV show is not art, and if no TV show is art, then neither is any music, nor cinema, nor painting.

The best season of any TV show ever is in my opinion Season 2 of Battlestar Galactica. Unbelievably gripping – and the best portrayal of utter desperation I’ve seen in any artistic medium.

And whatever its flaws, there will never be another show like Lost again. The show was sui generis – it “tricked” millions of people who believe they hate sf and fantasy into watching just that! – and its like will not be seen again.

These shows and others like them so raised the bar that mediocre shows now are better than the best shows that would’ve been aired 30 years ago.

Seeing an artistic medium pushed to its absolute limit is a really fun thing to to live through. It doesn’t happen all that often in human history.

Of course people who hate TV will not believe a word of this, but history will prove them wrong as so often happens.

I wonder how many of the same men who are virulently homophobic and against the idea of gay marriage have happily watched lesbian porn? I bet it’s a very large percentage.

The problem with being born a man is you are associated by women (for understandable reasons) with all the bullshit that other men believe and do.

The problem with being born a woman or a gay man, though, is even worse – you must then directly experience all of the bullshit that all too many men believe and do.

Raw deal either way, really.