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demy

@discogoob

any pronouns

I do have to impress on anyone who wasn't around for it how batshit the reality boom of the 2000s could be. Especially on Fox.

Here are some 100% real 2000s reality shows:

  • Who's Your Daddy? A woman has to guess which of eight men is her biological father. One of them really is, and if she guesses right she wins $100,000. If one of the seven fake dads convinces her to guess them, he wins $100,000.
  • Black. White. A white family learns about racism by living a month in blackface, while a black family spends a month in whiteface. The black family was a real family, but the white family was just some actors hired to put on blackface to prove racism exists
  • Without Prejudice? Five strangers decide which of five strangers gets a cash prize based off clips and their answers to political questions. Cancelled when one of the choosers openly said he'd eliminate all black contestants
  • Welcome to the Neighborhood. Three conservative white families in a Austin subdivision decide which diverse family gets to move in. Unaired due to being literal housing discrimination
  • Seriously, Dude, I'm Gay. Two straight men try to pass themselves off as gay and whoever seems more gay gets $50,000. Unaired due to. Due to. Due to
  • Playing It Straight. A woman tries to find love among fourteen men, half of whom are straight and half of whom are gay, and she must eliminate two men she believes are gay each week. If she ended up picking a straight man in the end, they'd split a million dollars; if she picked a gay man, he'd win a million dollars
  • Boy Meets Boy. This was Playing It Straight but starring a gay man and he had to eliminate straight people
  • Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? He wasn't a multimillionaire. He didn't even have a million dollars in liquid assets. He had a battery conviction Fox claims they didn't see. Because it was the 2000s, somehow this ended up with the woman he won being widely vilified and turned into a national punchline. How dare she complain about a massive corporation tricking her into marrying a lying abuser, good thing Matt Lauer's there to take her down a peg
  • The Swan. A "ugly" woman is given plastic surgery and wins a prize if she's the hottest at the end of the season. If she's not hot enough by the show's standards she's eliminated and called ugly on national TV
  • The Biggest Loser. Overweight people engage in competitive crash weight loss that often led to awful health complications. Studies showed basically everyone on the show regained any weight they lost once it was over and they didn't have abusive trainers demanding they take huge health risks to win a competitive weight loss competition. Like the others, this one was cancel-oh, it was a massive hit that ran for 18 seasons? Yikes!
  • Wife Swap and Trading Spouses. These were the same show and had a wife from one family go to another family that was different politically, racially, culturally, religiously etc. Most famous for the God Warrior

At the time people focused on the likes of Fear Factor but looking back it's wild how many of the worst shows toyed with politics. So many of these shows have a premise that's like "what if we exposed these conservatives to these people they hate?" or hyping themselves up as Important Experiments. Then they'd freak out when they got the kind of viral bigoted freakout they were trying to construct the whole time.

There were also a bunch of horrible reality shows, thankfully this time mostly unpopular, in the 2010s that based themselves around economic themes as a response to the market crash, but that's a story for another time

  • Murder in Small Town X. A murder mystery reality show, but unlike most murder mystery games that have a cozy manor-house-mystery vibe this one was all edgy 2000s slasher film aesthetics. The season finale aired on September 4th, 2001 and the winner died in 9/11
  • Lost. No not that one. This one was actually cool (this one and the one above are the only two I actually saw at the time). Contestants were taken to a unknown country and had to first figure out where they were, and then get from there to New York City to win. In the first episode they were abandoned in the middle of Mongolia. Anyway this show about people being flown to the middle of nowhere and safely & freely traveling around the world premiered on Tuesday, September 4th, 2001 and, uh, did not seem so feasible by episode two's premiere date
  • What the fuck I watched both of those. How did this silly post lead me to remembering what I was doing a week before 9/11
  • The Runner: This show was about one contestant as a fugitive, running across the country, evading capture from "agents" as he bypassed security in cities and at airports. Mysteriously dropped unaired from its planned late 2001 release date - who could say why!
  • Moment of Truth. People answer embarrassing questions on polygraph. Cancelled when one woman, with little prompting, admitted she stole money from her boss, wished she'd married her ex-boyfriend, and cheated on her husband, then was eliminated when the lie detector judged her saying "I'm a good person" a lie. Absolute icon
  • Are You Hot?: The Search for America's Sexiest People. Maybe the nadir of reality show creativity since literally the only premise was to put hot people on a stage and judge if they're hot enough, with nothing else being considered. Lorenzo Lamas, arbiter of human attractiveness, used a laser pointer to point to the "problem areas" of contestant's bodies
  • Man vs. Beast. Humans engage in athletic feats against animals. A professional eater competitively eats opposite a bear! Dwarves race a elephant! A sumo wrestler tug-of-wars a orangutan! The producer of this says he couldn't make his animals-fight-humans show today bc society is too "woke"

I'm actually curious what bizarre shows other countries had. I know the UK had several 'cause a lot of these are based on UK shows, and their reality TV boom started earlier and afaik was more popular than America's, like my distant sense is that reality TV drama got non-stop coverage over there. What batshit reality shows were airing on Channel 4 and ITV back then, does anyone know??

@ everyone: please. Add your own entries into this terrible archive

  • H8R. Not a 2000s show but a early 2010s show. A show where online commentators who made fun of celebrities were shamed by the celebrities in-person. But it wasn't, like, people who had said racist things, it was people who made jokes about reality TV stars and famous-for-being-famous celebrities. You know, people whose own shows treat them as a joke? Most infamously the show took people to task for insulting Joe "Girls Gone Wild" Francis, since god forbid anyone online dare to criticize someone sued multiple times for filming underage girls. He was charged for false imprisonment and assault earlier the same year he did the show about how unfair it was that internet trolls were mean to him. If it hadn't been cancelled they planned to expose the "haters" of Sarah Palin and Mel Gibson
  • Seriously, this review of it has stuck with me. They tried to frame this show about how the peasants should never criticize their betters as anti-bullying! All the celebs featured on it turned out to be exactly like they seemed on TV! All their criticism of the celebs was mild and on point (like the reality stars were mad that people are judging them based on the characters they choose to play on their shows? How else were they supposed to be judged, exactly, besides what they choose to show to the public?)
  • If you made this show now it'd be called UnCancelled and everyone on it would've been "cancelled" or something. Logan Paul and Pewdiepie would be on it. Gina Carano would be on it. It would be the worst show ever made

British TV managed to find a show less healthy than The Biggest Loser. Incredible @redacted-user-69420

I thought this couldn't possibly be a thing but it was real and called Space Cadets @canutegoodman

This reminds me of an American show called I Wanna Marry "Harry", where twelve American women were taken to a castle and competed to date a British guy posing as Prince Harry.

People joked about how the women could've fallen for it but according to a interview with the winner they didn't, but Fox basically had a gaslighting regime to separate them and quash doubt??? They were isolated in hotel rooms with no connection to the outside world and told not to look around in public, lest they see a image of the real Prince? Fox had someone pose as a therapist and tell the cast they were being delusional for thinking he wasn't Prince Harry??? Like they didn't treat it as a joke, they were dead serious about making them believe he was the real Prince Harry. Incredible Sex House energy

So The Runner did eventually come out, since they did a version in 2016 for something called...go90? What the hell is go90? (A defunct streaming service owned by Verizion, apparently)

Hunted sounds worse though bc on The Runner the chasers were also game show contestants, like viewers at home could be picked to be chasers. While on Hunted they were all cops???

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This made me remember a godawful dutch TV show; Hotter than my Daughter.

The whole premise is that daughters (sometimes sons, stepdaughters etc.) put their mom’s up for this makeover reality show, because they are emberassed by their mothers clothing style and overall appearance, which they deem “too sexy for their age”. Often times the daughter is the complete opposite and dresses like its sunday church service every day.

They then take PICTURES OF BOTH OF THEM INTO THE STREETS to get them rated by complete strangers, who would often say horrible shit about both of them!

Then they get makeovers, dress the mom really boring and nothing like her own style, put the daughter in a dress, and make them walk a catwalk with all their family there, where they are also revealed to eachother.

This show ran from 2011 until 2021!!!!!!!

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It’s so uncreative and cowardly when designers refuse to make clothes for fat people. Sorry you’re bad at your job I guess.

language is so funny. i started saying a dutch phrase that my boyfriend says sometimes. he started saying it because his late grandfather always did, because he thought it was funny. now my friends are copying the phrase from me, and in some funny way, my boyfriends grandfathers legacy continues on inside the vocabulary of people he never met. that’s the mark i want to leave on the world too

I read a fair number of recipes on the ten thousand interchangeable recipe blogs that exist, and often they say something like "This recipe is a family favourite!" or "This a crowd-pleaser" etc. and I roll my eyes a little bit every time because of course they are, it goes without saying! People like food! Nearly any special-occasion home-cooked meal is going to be popular.

But there is one recipe, one cake, that has recontextualised all those comments for me and now actually I think those bloggers might be wrong about what a family favourite is. It sure as hell isn't Interchangeable Chocolate Cake No. 7.

I'm telling you this because I need you to know the seriousness of the power I am going to bestow on you. And hey, maybe your friends and family have different preferences than mine do. Maybe you need to find another recipe to fill this role. But you must know that there's a recipe out there, and not even a particularly alluring one or a particularly difficult one, which people will bring up in unrelated conversations to you four years later.

If I so much as say the word cake, my family all turn to face me like a pack of hungry wolves. Even the ones that don't like food!! Health nuts and people who simply don't enjoy eating and people with no appetite and people I have no goddamn memory of ever having cooked for, all of them come up and say to me "Hey remember that cake-" I asked my brother and his girlfriend what foods they're looking forward to, when they return home after three years in Japan, and they say "You know that cake?"

It doesn't sound particularly appetizing. I only made it the first time because it was gluten free and I had a bunch of lemons. Please don't let the name inform your opinion here. This is a fairly fast and simple cake that requires no special equipment and people will literally never stop asking you for it.

It's not even my favourite cake! I'd rather have basque burnt cheesecake, which is harder and more expensive to make and consists almost entirely of fat and sugar but still manages to be a little savoury... But people want the weird corn one.

To be fair, this is the only cake that'll make me dip my fingers into boiling sugar without regret.

i hate that every time i look for color studies and tips to improve my art and make it more dynamic and interesting all that comes up are rudimentary explanations of the color wheel that explain it to me like im in 1st grade and just now discovering my primary colors

“red and green are opposites 🥰” cool now how do i paint a tree with pinks and blues without it looking like a child’s finger painting or incongruous blobs of rainbow vomit

ok i can’t explain it very well but im looking for tips and techniques for rendering art like

with specifically the highlights and colors being hues that compliment each other, don’t distract from the scene, and make it more interesting/visually appealing

is it too much to ask

gonna drop some sources I have saved on Pinterest! I don't know if these all link back to the original sources so apologies for that

This one's more for palette building but I think it's useful and can be applied to the other ones

"Chromatic fringe" - I also see people using this with shading, they bring in a transition color that is a different hue than the base color or shadow, it makes it so that less vibrancy is lost and it doesn't get muddy!

This one specifically has a lot of process behind the style of painting you're looking for!

Also one of my favorite artists who makes bright and colorful art like this is Not Sorry Art on TikTok & YouTube, her website is here and it's<3 my fav. She has some videos where you can see her process

With the oranges painting you put as an example, I noticed they painted the lighter values more toward yellow - they also exaggerated the hues of the undertones of the photo, so I'm guessing they either did it in their head or bumped the saturation up to get a closer look! I really love these paintings you shared and I definitely share your desire to paint/draw like that :)

petitiom to start doing fuckyeah blogs again

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i know i’m biased because i’m 12 at heart and i think everything he does is funny but my little brother put together a last-minute “time traveler” costume for halloween which comprised solely of this homemade WW3 draft card and i think every single aspect of it is absolutely fucking hilarious

icemaiden-deactivated20220406

Important question: no matter how embarrassing the answer is, tag or comment with the first song you can remember really liking as a little kid. The one you tried to listen to as much as possible and thought was really profound. Bonus points if you say how old you were.

i’ll start. the song “i talk to the wind” by king crimson was my favourite song when i was 7 years old … I thought it was so Moving. and it still slaps

i hate "sports but for gay people" jokes because I'm gay people and i just got home from playing hockey and my partner is a devoted mariners fan and it just makes me feel very uncomfortable and othered

anyway if you're gay people and like sports please tell me what sports in the tags, i don't want to feel so alone

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The complete Eschatron 9000 series.

I’m so… enchanted by this context-less gallery. After a bunch of googling, the only information I can find is something about it coming from ye olde intertubes closer to the year 2000. Also I found a picture that’s not in this: