I'll always remember NIN (or |\| | |/| as us kids typed it) as the first band where I understood the term "sellout". It sounds silly now, but back in the day simply being on a major record label, having your song played on the radio and being on MTV was enough for a Dylan-Goes-Electric fan diaspora.

Flash forward 20 years.. I heard The War On Drugs and Father John Misty mixed in with Alanis Morrissette and Jewel on the radio the other day, MTV no longer plays music videos at all, and "independent" labels like Sub Pop and Merge have two of the top selling records of the last 10 years, The Postal Service and Arcade Fire respectively.

Yeah, no kidding. I don't know why... at the time they seemed to be the epitome of "timely throw-away humour". But they've aged *really* well.

Yeah it's kinda sad, because although I like Judge's Silicon Valley (a lot) a lot of the tech jokes don't really hold up, especially if you're kind of a geek like me and you. Despite being animated Beavis and Butthead is the most real thing he's ever done.

"sad" part being the reboot they attempted a few years ago.. forgot to finish my sentence there.

Just curious what didn't hold up for you in Silicon Valley IZ; we watched that over lunch at work (as employees of a startup now owned by a megacorp) and really liked it/identified with far too much of it.

For me Silicon Valley was more about characters and not as strong on jokes.

Mostly the stuff like the erect nipple app, the potato cannon, overly smart smart car.. I'd say the "killer Huli app" too except life imitated art on that one (thanks ios9). There wouldn't be much of a show without these of course, like working at an office vs. watching Office Space.

But if you guys have funding for vegetable cannon research and there's an opening, I'm on LinkedIn and my username is #refrigeratorfan420z

That's fair... I guess some stuff seemed a bit out there, though some pretty ridiculous startups floated by us and some got funded. Our fave was the "online education" platform one company had, with their servers set up in their furnace room and the only courses offered was all PUA stuff or pyramid schemes. Apparently they actually were bought out. One former co-worker was at a startup where it was all about setting up a database of where you had to fast-forward to in movies and such to see nude scenes.

We had the "killer" Huli app screwjob happen to us - our first partner company (let's just call them HAL) strung us along for a couple years while they secretly worked to duplicate our product instead of just buying us out. Last we checked that product was a disaster and nobody was using it and we got bought by a competitor.

We always debated making a potato cannon at the office but decided against it. We managed to destroy enough of the office anyway.

I do love love love the show though. Hate to put so existentially but Silicon Valley and Rick and Morty's season finales are sort of my Raisin d'etre Bran right now. Plus I know the guy who made the Pinball Map, which I use every day.

Ha ha, nobody took your bait.

Old "Simpsons were all downhill after season 1" Zircon