I think the actual experience of such an experiment is more interesting than the compensation part. What would it be like once you got to, say, the 500th hour of Bandstand or Soul Train? I don’t think it would be the already familiar music that would draw your attention. It would be the dancers. I think your imagination would create whole back stories about their lives and their relationships (if any) with the other dancers. When that cute blonde with the hip boots and mini skirt stops appearing, you will likely dwell on all the possible scenarios that could account for her disappearance. Did she go off to college? Did she get a job on Hulabaloo? Did she join the Manson family?
Sounds like a mental breakdown.
I do think that those who treated it as a 40 hour/week job would burn out more quickly. I’m not saying they’d give up, but I can see people managing that for a few weeks at most, and then needing a break, or tapering their episode intake, etc.
I picked my target based on what I thought I could sustain, but who knows.
@puzzlegal’s concerns about travel are of course, legitimate. But when I travel, it’s common for me to download episodes/movies from Netflix or Amazon Prime (or copy a few gig of my own digital movies off the NAS) because flights get boring fast for me. So I figure burning through an episode+ on the flights/trains either way would work for me. But again, that’s for me.
But the discussion, especially the suggestion by @colinfred left a loophole that @Idle_Thoughts should address. How much is the minimum that needs to be done in a week to qualify for a break?
Granted, meeting some arbitrary minimum isn’t going to actually aid you in completing The True Lord of the Dance’s challenge, so in the long run it’s not a big issue.
The repetition of the opening credits alone would be enough to drive many insane. Would you want to be responsible for that?
Nope, not interested at that figure. I honestly can’t imagine having the patience to do this as an after work or weekends thing. But I woulndn’t quit my job - I’d be financially far better off keeping my current gig. The pay is better plus it comes with benefits, plus barring misfortune, I can keep this job long after I’d be done watching the shows, thus continuing to earn even more money.
It’s a fun thought experiment to imagine a job interview after this TV marathon. “What’s this gap on your resume? What have you been doing the last two and a half years?”
Hehe, that’s why I would do it while I relax and drink and probably fiddle around on a keyboard to figure out the basics of some of the songs. That’s basically what I do on an airplane, too. Don’t worry, it’s a keyboard no bigger than a laptop, and I use headphones. So my to/from flights would probably be several hours of catching up.
Wait, we can’t fast forward through the opening credits and theme song? That Solid Gold stint may be harder than I thought at first.
If at some point you offer $125,000 for watching all episodes of the Midnight Special, I’m in. These are actually live band performances which are sometimes great and, at the very least, often interesting. I have watched a bunch of them recently for free. The only problem is the ones on YouTube are pretty lo-fi. They are OK on a computer monitor but I have a 4K projector and a big screen and they look like a blurry mess projected on the big screen.
Ooooh!
I deleted my response. I’ll send Mr. Idle a PM
I do, but I am not physically capable of watching anything but first-run murder mysteries that are particularly engaging (and not always even then * SHOUTOUT to BROKENWOOD! *) without doing something else. Sometimes it’s just doing steps in front of the TV. Sometimes it’s solving puzzles like Rubik’s cubes, or those tavern puzzles. A lot of times it’s doing things like folding clothes. The chores would never get done without reruns of Xena & The Big Bang Theory. No, my mother never had me tested for hyperactivity, why? (and yes, that’s the right word; it was the 70s. “ADD” came out in 1980, and “ADHD” in 1987).
I can think of things I can do with my hands that don’t have me looking away from the screen much (shut up in the back row). If I can watch from a portable screen, I can think of more-- heck, I can invest in taking Ubers to work so I can watch-- between waiting and the actual drive, there’s an episode each way. The cost is about 25% of the return, assuming I actually complete the task, albeit, depending on how we negotiate the “nothing else,” I might take a leave of absence, or not work a summer. Even if I needed to take out a loan for expenses-- or apply for a loan from the Bank of Brother, once I convinced him this was real-- I’d cut him in for $125,000 + the loan itself, and he can pay off his mortgage.
Seriously good point. Not moving while watching this is different from not moving while watching Law & Order: SVU
What does the OP get? this sounds like an episode of The Twilight Zone, where the gamemaster turns out to be either God or the devil. Or the person is caught in some kind of time warp, and when he finishes, he’s aged 20 years, but no one else has; however, his savings account has accumulated $500,000. His kids are grown up, though, and his wife and dog are both dead.
I was at a taping of Solid Gold in Los Angeles in 1980. It was obvious that the band was lip-syncing. After sixteen takes, the SOS Band still couldn’t get “Take Your Time (Do It Right)” correctly. Well, I got to meet Dionne Warwick and Howie Mandel, so that was nice.
I never watched Solid Gold after that on TV, and I never watched Soul Train at all. If both are included as conditions of the prize, then I don’t think I could do it.
To me, this is effectively “Would you endure excruciating torture for thousands of hours, for money?” I’ll pass, thanks.
Given the project will take a couple years minimum, and the more successful candidates will take a decade, I’m going to insist the OP escrow the money earmarked for me before I start.
And if all the rest of us do the same, pretty soon the OP, unless he’s Scrooge McDuck in disguise, will be out of of money for his evil torture scheme (thank you @MrDibble).
I think one of the hardest things would be watching that much old NTSC video. HD video has really gotten me spoiled. Yeah, a lot of the episodes and outtakes from those shows available on YT are people pointing a vid camera at their TV screens and are therefore super-shitty reproductions of super-shitty reproductions of shitty originals.
But even if we’d be watching the original tapes / films, its still gonna look like NTSC shit. Because it as recorded as NTSC shit.
Sign me up
I think the secret to success would be to randomize the eras and shows. Don’t use up all the Chuck Berry and CCR in the first year. Use that to dilute the bulk of dreck we have all spent the last 50 years trying to forget.
I know that this was asked in here a while ago, but here I am to finally clarify it…
… By “not do anything else” I mean you can’t do anything that will take your attention away from the screen. As long as you can watch the screen you’re fine, so if you want to walk on the treadmill or if you want to ride an elliptical machine or if you want to ride on a exercise bike, that’s fine. You can do that and watch at the same time. You can’t do anything else that will take your view away from the screen for more than a few minutes, that’s all..
Yeah, no way will i take that deal. Thanks.
How accurate is the eye monitoring?
I’m thinking a second monitor next to both my computer and TV if being well within my peripheral vision counts.
Do you have to hear the audio?
EDIT: Oh, snap! I accidentally set this as a reply to Smapti instead of the OP, but discourse lets me change that on edit. Super cool.
Well, considering that I don’t have the money and this whole question is just made up and not based in reality and partly based on magic, let’s just say the eye monitoring is magical okay? If you look away for longer than a few minutes, I will know and you will not get the money.
Yes, you have to have the audio on and hear it.
Parallel lines, you asked about a break and with the minimum would be to watch, there is no minimum. I know that this seems like it goes against the rule that you cannot look away for a longer than a couple minutes but it’s really not. As long as you are actively watching you are not allowed to look away. You are allowed to take a break however long you wish though. Like you can break away to sleep and go outside and go to the bathroom and do other things but you are not actively watching at these points. You can take a break for as long as you wish. You can watch a ton of all of it and then stop for three or four months if you wish. You can stop for an entire year. You can stop for good whenever you want, and then you can just pick it up again if you want later on right where you left off and you don’t have to start at the beginning. The only Caveat here is that you don’t get paid until you finish it all, but you can take as long as you want and take as many breaks as you want in between. But if you look away from the screen when you are actively watching for more than a couple minutes that will be suddenly considered a break rather than actively watching.
You cannot look away for any extended period while it is playing and currently on the screen otherwise you will have to rewind and watch what you missed. This differs from a break because with a break you will probably pause it or shut it off to get up to do what you want to do or take the break.
I was a insurance claim adjuster for 30 years. I can do 4900 hours of anything now without complaining, and would likely find a way to significantly reduce the actual time required for completing the watch list. Judging from the draconian conditions for the OP, I am tempted to speculate Idle_Thoughts was a claim manager in a previous life.