loadingreadyrun.com

Paul, Cam and Alex discuss their not so guilty pleasures.

"This video is unavailable"

Tell you our own guilty pleasures? Mmm... well, like Paul I've been known to get lost in a wikia or two. For me it was mainly the WoW wiki. I will never, ever need to know the details of how to create Shadowmourne, but they're in my brain now.

And if you want to talk juvenile, I pretty much love Panty And Stocking With Garterbelt. It is loud, crude, and shameless, and, as they say, rad.

No one picked up on Archie Bunker? I laughed very hard at that.

I Enjoy the hell out of Power Rangers.
it is cheesy, corny and very often TERRIBLE but I love every minute of it.

I'm doing my first Synchro Swimming solo routine to the theme of Mighty Morphing Power Rangers. My first cosplay was the original Green Ranger.

People often "judge" me for this taste, but I don't care. I love, LOVE Power Rangers.

I loved BOTH ICP movies. Both Big Money Hustlas and Big Money Rustlas.

As someone who is really into geeky stuff, has friends that are all geeky......I ****ING LOVE SPORTS.

Assuming I don't have classes on or an assignment I will happily sit down for 5 days and watch an entire test cricket match. I have two rugby league teams I watch whenever their matches are televised, and a soccer team that I follow.

I don't geek out about my sport with like stats and stuff, I just really enjoy watching it and following progress. It seems to be a very uncommon trait with other people in the IT world.

I feel that the whole premise of 'guilty pleasures' sort of feeds in to the whole thing of objective opinion, or objective quality. These concepts don't exist and can't exist because everyone likes what they like, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's all personal opinion. I guess an example could be the idea of an 'objective review', and how that can't exist because each reviewer is different, because they're still just people with their own ideas and thoughts and opinions and biases. What you read (or watch, I guess, in this modern era of the online video) is their opinion of the piece, and how it filtered through them or reacted with them.

So, I guess, every review is biased, and no review can be unbiased.

"Y'all know this is just my opinion, right?".

And I guess this kind of goes against what Alex says in the beginning of the podcast. "What I say is that it's perfectly fine to like trash, as long as you admit it's trash." But you don't necessarily have to? If you like something, like genuinely enjoy something, and you think it's good, but other people think that it is trash, you don't necessarily have to admit that it is 'trash'. To you it's good. To others it's not. That's where it ends. And if you think it's that sweet so-bad-it's-good sensation, then great. That's what it is to you. A trashy novel could be genuinely trashy to some people, to others it could be genuinely good. Doesn't mean that the latter camp has 'bad taste', or that they like trash. They like their shit, you like your shit. There ya go.

But, to reference Sarkeesian, you can still enjoy a piece and be critical of it. Analysis and discussion of art and media is important, and almost necessary. If you can notice that a piece of media that you enjoy keeps getting something wrong, or keeps tripping over some trope, and you notice that and are still able to enjoy it, then that's critical thinking at work, at it's best. Personal example: Conker's Bad Fur Day. I genuinely enjoy it. I think it's design is excellent, as is the gameplay and the cutscenes and their comedy. But I can recognize the tropes it trips over, and the offences it performs. It can, and is (or at least through my eyes) seen as sexist, it damsels, it's a little homophobic, it fat shames, it makes rape jokes, etc. And I recognize this and still enjoy it. Sure, there's the little activist voice in my head that says "Oh, god this is doing some real bad shit." But it's good enough to have that voice ignored, and for the guilt to pretty much be assuaged. Media like this could also be seen as perfect for critical analysis and discussion.

Brief P.S. sorry if this felt really ramble-y and like it repeated myself. I've had this sort of sitting in my head for a while and it's been slowly building.

Thank you for this video. I was thrilled to death with starting at Riddick (my mother's 'guilty' pleasure) and ending it with a mention of VNV Nation....which I will shamelessly admit to loving and have loved it since High School.

I didn't know there were other people who listened to it!

Yay! Super awesome LRRcast!

Okay, I have a few:

Food: I LOVE the Pilsbury Microwave pizzas. Like, legit, I would go a week eating them if I have the option. They are so bad, but like Cam describing KFC, they are SO good.

Music: I am almost ashamed to admit it, but I actually enjoy Nickleback. I make fun of them, I rightfully point out their musical flaws, but while some people react to them on the radio like someone is pouring acid down their ear canals, I truly don't mind them (in moderation, at least).

Books: I am like Paul where I love reading sourcebooks as almost the distilled super-crack of fictional universes. I almost don't care anymore to actually read the book because of this. I have almost every Battletech and Shadowrun sourcebook written before 2010, and I love them!

i think mark rosewater made the player profiles http://mtgsalvation.gamepedia.com/Psychographic_profile

I unashamedly listen to Bad Dubstep, sometimes just Drop Compilations, just the best part of dubstep

I'm so glad I was alone in the car when I listened to this because literally for every "guilty pleasure" you guys talked about I yelled "I too love (DBZ, DragonLance, Riddick, KFC, etc)!"

My biggest one is electronic music, I LOVE loud, fast, euro music!

Phew, feels good to be out of the closet!

Books referenced by Cam are all written by the excellent author Dan Abnett. I HIGHLY recommend the Eisenhorn series as well.

I like watching your MTG videos and podcasts but I don't play Magic. Is that considered a guilty pleasure?

As another fan of the Riddick films, I can thoroughly recommend watching Dark Fury, the animated short which is set between Pitch Black and Chronicles, and attempts to make the jump between the two stories a little less "crunchy". Don't get me wrong, it doesn't make Chronicles any less stupid, but is definitely worth watching.

One of my main "guilty" pleasures is the Eurovision Song Contest, which for non-Europeans, is like a giant annual Pop Idol contest, where 40-ish countries each enter a song (typically pop or ballad, but we've had most genres over the years) and we all vote for the best over 3 live shows in May. For those of us who add music to our list of geekeries, the real gem is getting to see each country's national finals, where they have their own contests to select the song they'll enter in the main contest. This is a great way to experience lots of different styles of music and get exposed to the many varied cultures across Europe.

Sounds awesome, right? The "guilty" part of it however comes from living in the UK - for years, our commentator for the final turned the contest into a "lets laugh at the funny foreigner" festival, which considering we were already a country that takes pride in being xenophobic assholes, poisoned the contest for most people. Add in the large LGBT fanbase (another thing we're not good at accepting), and suddenly anyone who doesn't want to join in and laugh at the contest is instantly "gay" - we really are the "Deep South" of Europe at times! But as long as you can get over that (!), Eurovision is a great celebration of music and Europe as a whole.

Listening to podcasts from groups who make comedy videos for the Internet.
Watching comedy videos and gaming streams from those same groups.

A few other things, but those are the ones it's hardest to admit to the general public when they ask "what do you do for fun?".

It's so interesting how context changes these things. When I'm talking to a coworker, playing Magic seems like a guilty pleasure. But when I'm on the LRR forums, it's being a Spike which is the guilty part. And at my LGS, it's the fact that I play goblins in Modern because I don't like the format much.

Or, at work my guilty pleasure is that I'm into professional wrestling, but on the LRR forums it's that I like crap wrestlers.

The only thing I can think of as a "guilty pleasure" which I think I basically universally feel mildly abashed about admitting in any context is that I like to sing badly to 90s music.

When I saw Chronicles of Riddick my first thoughts were "my god who let Louis Royo into here?" When I was younger I was really into Louis Royo's works -- he's done a lot of fantasy book covers and is known for putting women into wispy translucent garments intermixed with cybernetics and tribal tattoos. I discovered shortly after that he was in charge of the art design for the movie as well. It was like a double-guilty-pleasure for me because of both the movie itself and recognizing the art.

I love Warhammer books too, for the same reason as the guys stating in the video. I haven't read Gaunt's Ghosts yet, but have devoured Sandy Mitchel's "Caiphas Cain" series. That series is more intentionally comedic, or at least less subtle with it's comedy.

I also enjoyed Kim Newman's (writing under the pseudonym Jack Yeovil) "Vampire Genvieve" series set in Fantasy Warhammer. That one is chock-full of homages to various films and other books I enjoy, mainly of the schlock horror Hammer Films variety. Which brings me around to the "Anno Dracula" series, where Newman does more of the same but sets it on an alternate Earth were Dracula wasn't defeated by Harker and Van Helsing. He takes the history of popular film and books, adds "but with vampires," puts it into a blender, and manages to make it entertaining.

Tumblr is a mecca of guilty pleasure. It's become what I spend hours upon hours exploring. It used to be Wikipedia and TvTropes, and now its jumping from one oddball blog to another. I think it's the variety of media. One place will be a gallery of art, but have one re-blog of a joke some other guy did, which leads to a weird collection of philosophical ramblings, that leads to a bunch of juxtaposed gifs, that leads to various fandom archives, that leads to out-of-context tabletop roleplay quotes, and so on. Tumblr is all "just the good stuff" all the time.

I've almost decided to start a blog of my own, but get distracted by looking at other blogs.

One of the "just the good stuff" websites I enjoy is the blog Weepingcock, which showcases hilariously-bad excerpts from erotic fiction. Sometimes without context, sometimes with MST3K commentary -- whichever is funniest. It's slowed down recently with updates, I think mostly because of tumblr.

Tvtropes. Oh god tvtropes. I used to start reading it at night and accidentally stay up to see the sun rise. Then I began contributing. I'd add to the examples, edit the grammar and formatting of the various pages, and build articles of my own. But there came a point where things weren't fun anymore.

Got to be "Digimon: Our War Games". If I ever spout off an obscure one-liner it is most likely from this movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BASGp91Pa3U

"It's about the egg. The egg has already hatched!"

I thoroughly enjoyed this cast; thanks.

I do want to link to Tim Minchin's bit on guilty pleasures, with the disclaimer that I don't think LRR have particularly low thresholds. Enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0HNu77t354

I have quite some guilty pleasures. But to extend cam's and alex's butter conversation.
we have a buttercake Here which is literally 1pound butter 100 gramms flour and half an egg. It is ridiculousy bad for you but oh so good