Rambling about Pacific Rim 2, the Olympics, and a Boycott

Today I found out something about a cool movie sequel – Pacific Rim 2, watched the closing of the Olympics and the horrible coverage, and decide to boycott NBC and its advertisers.

Pacific Rim 2

I was listening to the Geektopia podcast this weekend – episode 66 – where they were covering upcoming movie releases for 2016 and they mentioned that the Pacific Rim sequel was greenlit and was announcing cast members. While it’s not coming in 2016, it was something they, and I am looking forward to. So when I got home, I looked up IMDB.

Apparently Ron Pearlman is signed on to reprise his role and they got John Boyega, from The Force Awakens, to play as the son of the character portrayed by Idris Elba in the first movie.

The release date is set for Febrary 2018 and I’m already excited.

Rio Olympics Concludes

So the USA ended up with 121 medals – almost twice the next highest count but I think the contest they lost was coverage. NBC really dropped the ball in my view. We had to search online for any footage of rhythmic gymnastics and then were presented with 2 hours of uncut footage. No way to search for a specific country or event. It was really pathetic. Of course, if you tried to watch on TV, you had to be watching at 8am Sunday morning. And then the men’s gymnastics was no where to be found either. Sailing…rowing…boxing…cycling…it was plain that NBC really didn’t care about their audience unless you wanted to watch hours of golf, endless heats of swimming, or the handful of non-US gold medal contests NBC chose to broadcast. I think I saw more of Hillary Clinton during the programming than the Triple Jump, the Long Jump, the Steeplechase, and the High Jump combined (all of which I would gladly prefer to watch).

The fact they would delay showing events till ‘prime time’ meant the millions of potential viewers out here on the West Coast most likely already heard about the results before they were on TV – I wonder if NBC has heard of Twitter. The gold medal contests were shown at 11:30 at night but they were sure to show the 8 qualifying events at 8pm. In my view, it was just a disaster. So much so that we stopped watching most of it by the second week even though there were events we would have enjoyed seeing.

And then it became the Ryan Lochte show and we got non-stop coverage of a non-event. Sorry, but if I was in a foreign country, drunk, held at gunpoint and had money extorted, I might claim I was robbed too. I don’t care how much damage was done to the gas station – you call the authorities, you don’t hold people at gunpoint and extort money – I’m pretty sure that might be called kidnapping in this country. In any case, it was not an Olympic event but it got more coverage than many that were.

Finaly there was Kim Rhode who became the first summer Olympian to win medals at 6 consecutive olympics – where was the coverage of this? 6 Olympics – that’s 20+ years of excellence – a few more than NBC’s swimming god Phelps, or the fastest man alive, Bolt. 20+ years of top performance under pressure in international competition and that doesn’t merit a ‘moment’ from NBC. I guess it’s because NBC has to be politically correct and not show any coverage of sports involving guns…so pathetic.

Boycott

On the whole, while I enjoyed the sports, I hated the NBC coverage. So…I am boycotting NBC and any of their advertisers for the foreseeable future. Sorry Blacklist, I will no longer watch you because NBC has no respect for their viewers. Hillary, sorry but all your ad buys bought you a boycott. All the insurance commercials – I was never gonna change anyway. McDonald’s, Coke, BMW, The Voice…sorry. You all bought into the billions of $$$ NBC spewed forth on these games and I am not pleased with any of it.

You all get a boycott.