Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley" (HBO Show)

can someone clear this up: they gave the algorithm to the VR guy and it turned around his demo and then they decided to work up a deal where he buys them for a ton of money so he can use their algorithm and then Richard met w Monica and she instantly got him to turn down $25 million so he goes back and turns the guy down and now VRguy is working with Hooli...? does that mean he has their algorithm still? but would he still have it since Richard turned him down? but i guess he didn't turn him down, the VR guy just left to work for Hooli... does that mean he stole the algorithm? or does Hooli own it too?

I think this is the first episode where I've felt it all going seriously wrong - everything up to this point has at least been funny. This wasn't even very funny

xp I think the VRGuy turned them down on his own--seems to be an established character trait that he uses and discards people and companies.

he's going to Hooli because they have the second-best algorithm, back from the big algorithm battle

It was really briefly mentioned that was how they pulled him in, a great deal on the second-best option

Which is hilarious, because he's going to keep doing his pump-and-dump scheme, but they won't care because Barker is only bringing in VR to not look like a jackass in the meeting

or presentation, rather

it's like a band that keeps making the same album over and over and over again but you still listen because they keep remaking a really great album but like after a while you kind of wish they'd maybe do something else??

yep, exactly how I feel. I hope Miller leaving shakes up the writing

yeah, like many people said, the story and what happens with Pied Piper don't really matter anymore. And no one seems to actually WORK for PP anyway. They all hang around being dicks/losers and dealing with whatever new cataclysm occurred which is fixed within one ep.
at this point, it actually seems reasonable for Miller to leave...

isn't the overarching plot's seeming aimlessness an allusion to how the silicon valley economy's underbrush right now is mostly full of companies that might have had a good idea at the outset but were forced to pivot by overzealous vcs and other market forces so many times that their missions have been rendered meaningless, and so all that's left is the server bills and existential dread?

hopefully the next two episodes will 'pivot' back to being really good again

It seems a lot easier to satirize silicon valley excess then failure, because so many of these people fail up or get fired with golden parachutes. Marissa Mayer got $186 million after her disastrous tenure!

I think Richard said he didn't want to pivot anymore !
xpost

yeah but the new pied piper is still different than the original vision

anyway i'm sure the hoolicon episode will be full of ott ridiculousness (does any sv company have a similar event?)

http://s3.amazonaws.com/digitaltrends-uploads-prod/2016/06/Screen-Shot-2016-06-13-at-10.01.18-AM.png

oh duh of course, haha

what does it say about me that i don't even think of apple as being on that plane? i was like "wait, does yahoo have a big event..."

I suppose Google, Facebook etc all have that kind of thing, haven't they ?

when you get to a certain size or outside of the churn cycle you're kind of institutional and less contingent on hoopla

The show's use of Hooli is as a vague stand-in and they've jacked basically every company's origin story and business model in different episodes. More than anything, it reminds me of a more successful version of Yahoo around the time they were flush with cash but bankrupt in ideas and kept buying hot new companies and then wrecking them

yeah i always figured hooli as a yahoo stand in

I think we're biased because we're trying to think of what company just makes fuckin' dumb decisions and they're the go-to

the whole Hooli chat thing reminds me of Microsoft's acquisition of Skype, though

Hooli is definitely a stand in for Yahoo. And Google. And Microsoft. And Apple.

I feel like they have a post-it board with a bunch of dumb SV ideas, and a bunch of character traits of actual SV people, and they graft them on to characters in combinations that seem workable

Jack Barker reminds me of Steve Ballmer a little

Funny, I never thought of them being anybody other than Skype.

Gavin as Jobs, Peter Gregory as Woz. Gavin is a sucker for weird medical practices that are just snake oil and Eastern Mysticism that he wants to pick and choose bits of. Also sacked from his own company only to have a 'glorious' return to take them back to success.And is Gavin's speech at Hoolicon that Jack watches in the last episode supposed to be Macworld Expo 2007 (announcement of iPhone)?

Not Skype, Apple. (multiple windows, multiple jobs. which means I've told someone at work to call me tomorrow on Apple)

The garage in the warehouse a few episodes ago was great.

I missed Ed Chambers this week.

There's a little Jobs stuff going on with Gavin, like the guru junk and the whole garage origin/duo with Peter Gregory bit, but his demeanor and personality aren't anywhere near the same. He strikes me as more like that Salesforce dude or Larry Ellison, who is a complete dick

They've done a good job of splitting all the Peter Thiel talking points into different characters -- Peter Gregory got the weird tics and analytical business ideas, along with the libertarian island junk. Gavin gets the blood boy. None of them get the weird-ass political funding, which is probably good

Peter Gregory was libertarian, with his island and everything. That's pretty Thiel.

Like almost every good and popular comedy that is a few seasons in, the characters get "flanderized" (Bighead & Jared are the biggest offenders), and the more episodes that are made the bigger the opportunity they have to not be as funny as often. Show is still great though! People are hypersensitive to this feeling that a show is starting to not be perfect anymore... it's a little exhausting to me at this point.

It's just this last episode really

I also miss Ed Chambers. I hope they bring him back.

dan, it's a reference to a project Thiel actually funded

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/02/seasteading-peter-thiel-french-polynesia

oh yeah

I like that they mix the traits around, rather than having one Steve Jobs character or one Peter Thiel character. The "Keenan vortex" from the last episode is playing off Steve Jobs' "reality distortion field", I think

I think the show generally skirts around politics, maybe a little too much

yeah that omission has kind of bugged me, v little about the libertarian sexist/racist/generall oblivious bro-culture

Still, Judge denies having political messages in his shows, saying in an IGN interview about King of the Hill:[57]
I try to not let the show get too political. To me, it's more social than political I guess you'd say, because that's funnier. I don't really like political reference humor that much. Although I liked the episode "Hank's Bully" where Hank's talking to the mailman and he says, 'Why would anyone want to lick a stamp that has Bill Clinton on it?' To me that's just like more of a character thing about Hank than it is a political joke or anything. I don't want to do a bunch of stuff about the war, particularly.

tell us more about the Goodes, Judge

(don't get me wrong I love Judge's stuff in general but a lot of it is v political imo so it's weird to see him disavow it)

'Why would anyone want to lick a stamp that has Bill Clinton on it?'

lol I think this one transcends politics

Judge sort of hedges libertarian himself, which perhaps explains his, erm, net neutrality with "Silicon Valley."

was that really necessary

hank hill solidly republican despite having dog named ladybird and getting dead-zone shudders from clammy gwbush handshake.

also Jimmy Carter fan iirc

was that really necessary

Call your congressman!