I've lost the ability to enjoy watching anything

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FPLOON

Your #1 Source for the Dino Porn
Jul 10, 2013
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dylanmc12 said:
Watch all episodes of Pokemon

>Appreciate everything 15% more
...I still do that just to keep my sanity in check... (Ash's "childhood" friend's joining him now? And we're just mentioning her NOW?? *watches next episode* This better be as good as last region's Team Rocket subplot...)

OT: Watch stuff that's not usually within the genres you would generally gravitate towards... (Mmmmm... B-movie "cult" goodness...)
Read something that's doesn't take itself seriously... (even when the book thinks it does...)
Listen to a bunch of underground music that hardly get mainstream recognition... (That's another thread in and of itself...)
Find people that have different viewpoints that you... (I'm pretty sure you've done this step... but, just to be sure...)


If you want to go to extremes... Totally shut down your brain and watch something completely random in concept and in execution... like Excel Saga or Monty Python... Sometimes, you just need to accept the immersion given to you and/or laugh at their overall shortcomings like it's some sort of twisted comedic timing on their part... (Or, you know, live with "nostalgia goggles" on all the time... and keep reject modern entertainment like it's the cliche zombie apocalypse... I can't tell you how to think, mind you!)
 

Herzesser

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May 7, 2009
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Never shut your brain down.

Monty Python is filled with subtle (and not-so-subtle) jabs at the British upper and middle classes. They parody everything from the class system to the hypocracy of the officer class waxing nostalgic about sending young men off to die to the absurdity of the American movie industry "It's in the contract: He gets to fight the lion." Monty Python's good for the soul but not because it's stupid or random but because the educated men and women involved in its production worked long and hard to craft a surrealist piece of absurdist art for twenty-some minutes a week.

You think "The Meaning of Life" just happens? That's a legion of educated, dedicated and creative people working long hours in the writers' rooms and music studios.

Zipzip, this feeling you are having is not a sign of dysfunction, it is a sign of proper function. If it were as easy as "turning off your brain", you wouldn't be in this situation. If it were just a matter of watching offensively bad or profoundly unchallenging things, that would have done it by now.

Your options are not "media you like" or "media that is smart that won't be engaging". That is a false dichotomy. There is a world of things you just haven't seen yet. Media you haven't consumed, foods you haven't tasted, games you haven't played, songs you haven't heard, stories you've never read. Even if there's a lot of crap to sort through, sorting through it will help you figure out what it is you want, at what level you want it and what form you want it to take. Just accepting some thin gruel from a thing that is kinda-sorta what you like i guess will, at best, forestall the return of this sensation because the sensation is not due to a lack of things in the world, but a lack of knowing what things to go for and much as everyone (myself included) would love to just throw things at you and have one of them be The Thing You Need, you'll never find the thing you need if you don't try things that are right out of left field and run the risk of being more disgusted all over again.

You're learning how to weild a scalpel, Zipzip. A scalpel, a lightsaber, a chainsaw and a BFG all rolled into one.

Your frustration and despair is your call to action! An adventure in media awaits you! Dive in face-first and slay the dragons of shoddy writing and boring plotting! Laugh in the face of shoddy craftsmanship in million-dollar films and learn to adore the shortcuts taken by amateurs. Pass through trials of quality, fall in love with the bizarre and the foreign, sharpen your mind's edge on every rough stone you come across until it glows blue and cuts through chaff like the reaper's scythe! Take on and cast off media obsessions in quick succession like the names of some mad, hungry trickster god!

Don't hate it because it's modern! Don't hate it because you've seen it before! Hate it because it cannot match the face of your elusive Dulcinea! Find glory whereever you can and learn disdain for everything that cannot match it! Find it in a well-made children's program or a hard-hitting drama or a song or a poem or a line of political reasoning!

And if you can't find it, take a ball of clay in your hands and like some old, forgotten god, get to crafting the thing which expresses your inner self in perfection. Even if the screenplay will never see the light of day, write it. If the comic will never have art, write it. If the sculpture will never see a gallery, sculpt it.

Steve Ditko, one of the men who made Spider-Man the multi-media powerhouse he is today, labours in his office, nearing ninety years old, quietly producing pages for comic book stories no one but him will ever see and if you must become that labourer to find joy in your life, then you do it.

Not because I want you to be lonely, but because this is YOUR ONE AND ONLY BRAIN IN YOUR ONE AND ONLY LIFE. Life is too short to waste on badly-realized or lazily-written media. No one has time for art that is so painfully mediocre that it makes no impact but its own mediocrity.

I'm not saying you need everything to be GREAT but learn what great looks like for you and what good looks like for you and where the line between them is. But learn it! Know it! You're a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm! You don't need to think less, you need to think MORE.

You need EVERYTHING except turning off your brain. You need to turn it on then crank that sucker up to twelve.

The story that perfectly describes your life and syncs up with your values is out there! You are not alone in the cosmos! But if you don't go questing for it, you'll never find it and if you don't get swallowed by a few dragons on your way there (and cut your way out of their throats with your lightsaber-chainsaw-scalpel-bazooka, of course), you won't appreciate how GOOD it feels to have one thing (though it's usually a small family of hidden things) which gives you the excitement you crave without making you feel insulted or taken advantage of.

And when you hold some token of it in your hands and in your heart and devour it and make it a part of you, you go out and do it again because your search has left you changed and in need of something new but suddenly able to apprecate everything you went through to get there. Every slain beast and saved village and new companion will be a song you found along the way which reminds you of home and you will return to those things you love not as a petitent or an old friend but as a cosmic singularity in the tiny fleshy confines of a human being and you will experience them with new eyes and a new heart because you are a new birth, your own most recent regeneration, so much bigger on the inside than ever you were before because you contain multitudes and have been so many people along the way: a gamer, a hater, a fanboy(or fangirl, I don't know), an expert, a n00b, an evangelist and a wanderer of the desert wastes.

Go FORTH, adventurer! To glory!
 

Nouw

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Mar 18, 2009
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Herzesser said:
glorious-snip


Just wow...wasn't expecting to read that at all. I feel like any other attempts to put into words the awe I have right now will cheapen your post so I'll just leave it at that.
 

[REDACTED]

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Apr 30, 2012
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My advice: just take a break. It happens, and it sucks, but fiction is far from the only thing you can use to occupy your time. Find something else to with your free time, and don't feel in a rush to start enjoying your old TV shows again. My guess is that you're just burnt out on too much of a good thing. Try studying a language instead[footnote]I suggest Russian[/footnote]. It's fun.
 

Weaver

Overcaffeinated
Apr 28, 2008
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It doesn't really go away. I watch everything with an insanely critical slant to it now-a-days.
I've learned to live with it, but this is why you have people saying things like, I dunno, Elfen Lied is so overrated. If you actually use your head and pay attention it's a pretty shit story.
 

Lunar Templar

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Sep 20, 2009
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Zak757 said:
Maybe you need to overwhelm your senses with mind-blowing stupidity, absurdity, and lack of logic to short out the critical neurons in your brain? I suggest playing Metal Gear Rising while simultaneously watching Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill on a 3 monitor set up. If you can combine the final fight with Senator Armstrong, the Ryuko versus Satsuki battle, and the galactic scale mecha fight and absorb all three at the same time, you should be able to overwhelm the cynical part of your mind and shut it down with sheer awesomeness.
Quazimofo said:
Personally I'd go with the final boss fight of Bayonetta
God herself
. Or any of those boss-fights really.

Alternatively, saint's row the third.
Just.... the whole damn thing. It's just too silly. Too absurd to even begin to think critically about.
Bummer :/

I was gonna suggest the 'over exposure to pure unfiltered awesome/absurdity' as well.

um .. >.> <.<

Go out side for a while then? Ya know, just unplug and chillax some where, and let all the bad stuff wash away.
 

shogunblade

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Apr 13, 2009
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I experience the same thing you are going through, OP. Have you considered that you might have SAD (Seasonal Anxiety Depression)?

I was this way last year too, when the weather gets better, you should feel better, but until then, listen to music, watch television that is different, play something out of your comfort zone.

I don't watch Television anymore (I mean to say I don't watch serialized TV anymore, and all the shows on my Netflix account will probably never be watched), but that's not a bad thing. It's more room to watch movies. I watched two movies that were actually pretty good (one was Great, and it brightened my kind of 'bleh' day) Now, I'm on The Escapist, blasting Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen in my headset, and it's a lot of fun to listen to something so different.

Reading your post a bit more: Try listening to music, maybe you will hit an emotion you aren't hitting with your current viewing, maybe it will be all you will need to feel better. Music is something that, like art, isn't as cut and dry as most shows and movies. Watch something abstract and different, you might find your spark coming back.

Hope it helps.
 

FalloutJack

Bah weep grah nah neep ninny bom
Nov 20, 2008
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I'm afraid I don't understand this kind of issue at all. You can't 180 on everything, or even lots of things. At least, not unless you're depressed or something, which I'm afraid I can't do anything about, personally.
 

Flutterguy

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Jun 26, 2011
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Your brain feels it needs to accomplish something so it's falling into a depression so you'll hate your routine and change it.

I don't know you, but that seems to be the case for myself when I take the time to focus on the 'why this not awesome'.