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- 1 day ago on Tank McNamara
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1 day ago
on Over the Hedge
By coincidence, today is my annual cardiology appointment.
The clinic is on the third floor, and I usually wind up taking the stairs because the elevators are busy.
sad trombone
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1 day ago
on Doonesbury
The Dallas Morning News ran a strip from 2019 in place of this one, with an explanation at the bottom noting that this strip didn’t meet their minimum standards of neutrality.
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2 days ago
on Peanuts Begins
It’s different here in the United States. While some channels do air rebroadcasts and older movies during the overnight hours, others lease the time out to shop-at-home retail promotions, make the time available to the public as “public access”, lease the time out for paid commercial advertising, or lease the time out to third-parties like religious groups. Cable and satellite networks may also rebroadcast some or all of their prime-time line-up for people who came in late.
It varies from station to station and channel to channel.
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3 days ago
on Peanuts Begins
Back then it was generally believed that it just wasn’t economical to continue broadcasting either radio or television during the overnight hours.
The increased level of automation in most stations, combined with the realization of how many people work overnight, has led to most stations now programming content 24/7. The trade-off is that they generally only have a skeleton crew working, and so if there’s any sort of technical issue they might not have the people on staff to fix it.
I remember a few years ago a radio station I was listening to while doing overnight deliveries having serious technical issues as a result of a malicious actor affecting their systems, and it was all they could do just to stay on the air.
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3 days ago
on Peanuts Begins
Nowadays, TV antennas are making a comeback.
One of the advantages to the digital television transition is that each station can now have up to 8 “side band” channels it broadcasts as well. This has led to a slew of niche and specialty channels arising that are designed to serve as side band channels, and so in many media markets you can actually get 20 – 30 channels for free over the air.
This has resulted in a lot of people deciding to “cut the cord” and give up either cable or satellite, instead relying on their local over-the-air broadcast channels and 1 – 2 select streaming services.
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3 days ago
on Dick Tracy
The other day I noted that ever since the 2008 recession there have been a lot of TV shows in the United States dedicated to people purchasing seized or abandoned properties to renovate them for flipping.
It came to me that properties of this nature would be the kinds of places that criminals might use as stash houses or meeting places, and so I envisioned a movie premised on the cast & crew of a house-flipping TV series unwittingly purchasing one such house.
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4 days ago
on Miss Peach
The one problem with “skeleton crew + automation” is that if a major issue arises during the overnight hours it can really foul things as the best person to fix it might not be there.
I got my start in the newspaper industry doing overnight residential delivery to pay for college, and one night a station I listened to seemed to be run by goblins. It turned out that a malicious actor had done a number on their computers, and they were struggling just to get anything going.
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5 days ago
on Thatababy
The live-action series disappeared rather quickly, which is why the legal team for the 1984 movie didn’t realize there was already a valid claim on the title until the studio was so neck-deep in production that it was cheaper to just cut Filmation a check than to reshoot everything and redo the promotional materials.
Filmation was very happy to take that check and basically used it to finance a single-season 65 episode syndicated cartoon series based around Tracy mentoring the sons of the original characters (who had the opposite personalities of their fathers).
This is why the cartoon series that followed up the 1984 movie had the title “The Real Ghostbusters”, to keep them separate.
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5 days ago
on Miss Peach
Back then it was generally regarded as not worth it financially to air any programming overnight, either radio or TV.
Nowadays so much of broadcasting is automated that a skeleton crew can air basic programming and handle simple problems, making it more economical to air at least a little something overnight, especially given how shift work means that more and more people are working nights.
In all seriousness Tank, check the trading card section of your local big-box retailer.
Some trading card companies are now making special packs of cards to give away as treats.
This is two years running I’ve seen Pokemon cards done up like this, 3 cards to a pack and $25 or so for 30 such packs.
I’m also seeing football and basketball cards also being done up like this, 3 cards to a pack and $25 for 40 packs.
You can be giving out football or basketball cards to the kids, something they can treasure long after the night’s over.