As a longtime Survivor viewer, I've been bothered by its slow decline. Some of the show's problems are apparent on its surface, like Jeff Probst's appalling gender bias and the show's overemphasis on tacky "themes" for the season. But I got to thinking about what's wrong under the surface, on a conceptual level. It seems to me that the show lost track of what story it was telling. It used to be about choices that players made, and now it's about events that happen to them, and that's just not interesting. I wound up writing out these thoughts for an article today in reality blurred. It felt good to figure this out and say it, because not being able to put my finger on the exact problem has been bothering me for years.


Logical Operator

The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »

House of Pain

Happy new year! The first month of 2015 has been so terrible that I'm declaring a re-do as if it never happened. 2015 really starts now as far as I'm concerned. Go »

Trial of the Century

I served on my first jury last week, for the gripping case of the Walmart Protein Bar Bandit, accused of a $1.46 theft. Voir dire was oddly focused on whether grazing (eating groceries before you pay for them) was acceptable, whether eating protein right after a workout is important, and whether any of us had strong feelings about the Walmart corporation. Go »

Windbag

I don't know what Polaroids he has of whom, but somehow Tom Skilling has elevated himself to some kind of all-important weather-broadcasting god. When I grew up in Chicago, I watched him gradually get a bigger and bigger budget for his animated graphics, and gradually get a larger and larger timeframe to deliver his dull reports. By the time I left town, he had a whole 20 minutes of the hour-long midday newscast for the fucking weather, and boy did he find trivia to fill it: Average dew points across Cook County on this day in 1854, theta-e temperature predictions for every Cubs home game next season, you name it. Go »

Bombed Back to the Jurassic Age

Judging from what happened to my car the other day, not only is there a species of pterodactyl still alive in Sarasota, but it's suffering from an outbreak of dysentery. Go »

Where the Hell I Have Been All Year, Part III

This is a long story of interest only to friends of mine and people who really want to spend fifteen minutes reading about my life, but I've been promising to reveal this secret for the better part of a year and the time has come: Kelly Lee and I were a couple again this past spring. I kept it secret because A) it was difficult to tell the friends who had supported me during her breakup that we were dating again and B) for the duration of the relationship I didn't know where it was going and I wanted to know this before I said anything. Anyway, this story is solely my point of view and may not be fair to hers. Go »

The News is Scary

Sixth-grader admits stabbing ducks with pencil. Does anyone else read this and think, this kid will grow up to be Jeffrey Dahmer? Vegan parents guilty of murder. Go »