I’m Super Good at Procrastination You Guys – Perspicacious Geek
Once again, I was really counting on having a Loot Crate to write about this week, however I have yet to receive it. That’s a whole other frustration in itself, but I digress.
Instead I shall treat you to yet another list of things that prove that I am absolutely terrible at getting things done.
Yesterday I took the day off to recoup from my announcing duties this past weekend at Beast of the East. Other than doing laundry, the day was more or less a wash in terms of productivity. So far we’ve talked about playing video games and reading books and ending up reading twitter and playing cell phone games. On a day like yesterday I was looking to be a lot more passive. So today we’re talking about the most passive of all activities: watching stuff.
What I should be watching: Mad Men
We always hear about people talking about the fact that we’re in the Golden Age of television with shows like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, House of Cards and the like providing high quality entertainment that rises above and beyond many big budget Hollywood pictures. So I should be watching these shows right? Specifically, I should be watching Mad Men. I’m doing a good job staying caught up to Game of Thrones, but Mad Men? I’ve yet to start the second half of the 7th season. That’s right, I’m already so invested into Mad Men that I’ve watching the previous 7 and half seasons more or less as they came in. Watching the final 7 episodes of what will surely be remembered as one of the best TV shows of all time should be a priority, right? Nope. I ended up watching…
If you listen to Go Plug Yourself or 9ES or have kept up with the occasional blog post that I’ve made in the past then you’ll know that I have a soft spot for the world of professional wrestling. The “big boys” at WWE put out like 12 hours a week or something of content and I’m also pretty into some of the smaller promos like Lucha Underground. Now here’s the thing, wrestling can be very good but a lot of the time it is also very bad. After sitting down and watching an entire episode of Monday Night Raw you will rarely, if ever, say “wow, that was as good as Mad Men.” However, it is goofy silly fun which is exactly what your brain wants sometimes.
Now, there’s a certain amount of respectability that comes with watching pro-wrestling. A certain history and cultural impact that the spectacle still holds ever people. A much MUCH bigger guilty pleasure that steals my attention is Big Brother. Hot damn if I don’t enjoy watching strangers locked in a house together in a 24/7 psychological torture experiment/game. Is it trashy? Damn right it’s trashy. Is it in incredibly compelling to watch people lie and try to manipulate each other all in the name of “the game”? You bet your sweet ass. I can feel my brain cells melting away. Which is just as well since I might end up watching…
YouTube Videos
Or their close cousins the Facebook video. Sometimes you end up clicking around in Youtube to kill a few minutes and wind up having watched a bunch of videos and wasting an entire hour. I probably could’ve used that time to watch Mad Men but instead I ended up watching videos of stupid pets and people getting hurt. Did you see the one of that dog who can’t catch food? Or how about where Julia Stiles explains how she’s super into hacker culture in the 90s in an episode of “Ghostwriter” (thanks Keith Waterfield for showing us all this clip):
I seriously just watched it again while writing this article. I’ve already seen multiple times it but I just threw a few more minutes of my time into the garbage. Thanks brain, you’ve really got my back. I think there’s something incredibly telling about us internet people on the whole that if a video is more than 5 minutes long we probably won’t watch the whole thing through. And by 5 minutes I mean 2 minutes. Screw it, even 2 minutes is too long. And you know what? Who needs sound anyways? If only way I could watch the same few seconds looping again and again with no sound. Oh right, of course there is.
Watching GIFs
GIFs are particularly sneaky at wasting your time. Lots of times on reddit people will share the best gifs. A good gif will trigger someone else sharing another good gif, and so on and so forth. Before you know it you’ve watched dozens of gifs and wasted time that was not only probably the worst possible use of your time but multiplied over and over again. That stupid 5 second gif didn’t just waste 5 seconds of your time (but that’s how they get you). It wastes a few minutes of your time since you’re going to watch the stupid thing 10 times in a row. Here’s a good example. Just watch this for a while. It’s the best.
Fuck Mad Men I got a guy tossing a puppy into the ocean again and again as his idiot friend stands there smiling. I don’t care what happens to Don Draper, I’m just going to watch this puppy for the next hour.
Keith does all sorts of things here on 9to5.cc, he works with the other founders on 9to5 (illustrated), co-hosts our two podcasts: The 9to5 Entertainment System and Go Plug Yourself and blogs here as The Perspicacious Geek.