Each era has its own bards.
When we were young, bards were those transfer students of unknown origin; countless mysterious nursery rhymes like 'I want to blow up the school' spread nationwide through them. As we grew up, bards became those genuine group chat members who curated fresh memes in various groups, gathering anecdotes from every corner of the internet and posting them right in our faces.
Nowadays, the dissemination power of bards has leaped forward again—they no longer need to serve a small clique in shady gardens or vast salons; that's too niche.
The true essence of 'scattered stars' is to allow every master of historical reposting to have their own private TV station.
XXTV is a hyperspace highway connecting Bilibili, Kuaishou, Douyin, WeChat Channels, and countless obscure video platforms. Born from abstract Tieba names, it has carved out its own divine path amidst the end of the old era and the beginning of the new, gradually branching into numerous different tracks of all sizes.
'Pseudo-History TV,' 'Baoma TV,' 'Daguo TV,' 'Master TV,' 'Shenren TV,' 'Minke TV,' 'Startup TV,' 'Enjoyment TV,' 'Test-Taking TV'... Immortals line up like hemp seeds. If you mash them together into a sanity-draining army of the dead, its name would best be 'Homo Sapiens TV.'
As the saying goes, no matter how speechless the content is, as long as you add the word 'TV,' it becomes a delicacy pursued by everyone.
'@Feixingshe Shezhang' obviously realized this earlier than 'Niu Lai.' The 'Homo Sapiens TV' he popularized should be the foremost among all TVs. We are all Homo Sapiens, but the Homo Sapiens watching videos can never imagine that the Homo Sapiens in the videos belong to the same category as themselves—thus, the underlying code of Hakijins watching the fun reclaims the high ground. Who doesn't want to watch two episodes of 'Homo Sapiens TV' with a flushed face after a busy day?
Countless Homo Sapiens with top-tier minds and super-strong execution are frantically creating entertainment value.
For example, there is a type of Homo Sapiens who can navigate between Miyou TV, Traditional Chinese Medicine TV, Pseudo-History TV, and Sinology TV, flexibly changing identities. Not feeding children milk powder but only rice oil, treating illnesses directly with traditional Chinese medicine and hot water baths, reciting a passage from the 'Yongle Encyclopedia' before the baby sleeps... These are just basic operations for mindless parenting. Later, they will urgently join several Nezha Immortal Drinks, Traditional Chinese Medicine Milk Teas, and Pigsty Coffees, going head-to-head with Mixue Bingcheng, making a guest appearance on Startup TV, ensuring the child has a life set from birth.
Even more entertaining than Baomas who don't understand economics but still try to create content is the 'Hun de Ren TV' (Slacker TV), which creates content without any economic basis. While some people rack their brains thinking about how to escape their native families, Hun de Ren TV has already made their native families actively flee from them. Still everyone has a second-hand Apple, still heavily modifying No. 9 electric scooters, still playing billiards with more people than balls—this might be the scent of spirit, the freedom and ease that the neighboring Test-Taking TV can never achieve in a lifetime.
Then there are batches of financial Homo Sapiens inheriting the mantle of stock god Warren Buffett and gambling god Gao Jin. Black Egg TV, Stock Trading TV, Silver TV—no matter their level of understanding, as long as they see a speculative opportunity, they will go all-in with loans until the end. Essentially, it's still Gambler Dog.exe TV, because they all believe in the same phrase: You have nothing to begin with, so what is there to fear? Don't bully the young for being poor; maybe you'll turn things around with one last dance. Leverage upon leverage, doubling upon doubling, with a pull and a tug, easily breaking through the housing prices of their residential community,堪称 the greatest trading maneuver of the 21st century.
But economics is just the surface. If we delve deeper into cultural and historical angles, the special channel 'Master TV' under 'Homo Sapiens TV' has something to say. 'Chinese people come from Guangyin Heaven; we are not Earthlings,' 'Nominal age is the real age; actual age is a Western conspiracy,' 'Asia is a derogatory name given by the West because it is not Guanzhou (Crown Continent)'... Countless clean viewpoints unpolluted by science come from the mouths of masters, merging with worldviews connecting the Earth-Moon Buzhou Mountain and the Huaxia Divine Race theory, forming a great co-created worldview. This is the greatness of Master TV—it can draw more people into Homo Sapiens TV, possessing immense power.
From this perspective, Daguo TV, which only harms itself and doesn't disturb others, actually starts to look quite appealing. They are upright individuals, chewing Daguo Daguo chew chew chew, chewing themselves into Steve, chewing He Cheng Tianxia from 50 to 5000, chewing Zhao Lei into the Betel Nut Immortal. Confident smiles appear on their superb square jawlines, making one wonder who has less of a future, the person in front of the screen or the person inside the screen.
This might be why Homo Sapiens TVs are popular. When the stars of quasi-humanity shine, you can always be exhausted by at least one of them. As Thomas Hobbes said in 'Human Nature,' the effect of comedy—the production of laughter—arises from a sudden sense of glory when one discovers weaknesses in others or in one's past self, suddenly feeling a certain superiority in the present.
This is also the joy of curiosity and appreciating ugliness on the internet today—these Homo Sapiens may have no future, but I, also a Homo Sapien, still have a future. What a relief.
The helpless behaviors of Homo Sapiens in those videos, their anger-inducing yet laughable actions, and various imaginative theories are all seen as ridiculous by viewers, something that can be rightfully parodied and mocked. In this process of mockery, a sense of superiority arises naturally. This phenomenon has a long history on the internet, and because of this, different verticalized TVs focusing on specific phenomena, such as 'Master TV,' have gradually emerged for netizens to savor category by category.
However, the most amazing thing about Homo Sapiens TV is that it itself becomes part of Homo Sapiens TV—nowadays, many people have started criticizing various types of TV.
Why do they criticize XXTV? The most direct reason is that most of these TVs involve unauthorized reposting, and after reposting, they mark it as original instead of a repost, violating the most basic video upload principles. In other words, it's video theft, belonging to the self-developed version of Minecraft Haochen's 'If I don't repost, what will you watch?' Moreover, many XXTV compilation creators enable Bilibili charging or directly place ads in videos to make money, which looks somewhat greedy.
Furthermore, in the eyes of some netizens, such TVs may also be suspected of taking things out of context—since the reposting of such videos depends entirely on what the reposter stumbled upon that day, it is easy to form subjective assumptions about unfamiliar fields, or simply treat other people's life videos as jokes, hastily labeling normal people as 'Homo Sapiens.'
The consequence of this is the potential for cyberbullying inherent in such videos. After all, these XXTV videos are essentially no different from behaviors like 'posting to the toilet' (public shaming); they broadcast things they dislike to a wide audience and trigger resonance within a certain group—in TV videos, it triggers resonance among those who appreciate ugliness.
Therefore, although video creators repost and edit videos with an attitude of curiosity and aesthetic appreciation of ugliness, and viewers evaluate the content with the same attitude, once some normal people accidentally get mixed into the videos, both the uploader who included the normal person and the Homo Sapiens who mindlessly cyberbullied the normal person should include themselves in the mix as well.
Just as Homo Sapiens TV itself was added to Homo Sapiens TV, opposition to XXTV has also joined the TV package, giving birth to TVTV. Supporters of XXTV believe that these opposing voices are hypocritical—just as viewers of Homo Sapiens TV enjoy the superiority of stepping on Homo Sapiens, those against XXTV also enjoy the superiority of standing on the moral high ground and stepping on others.
Amidst various outrageous arguments, whether sincere or trolling, Everythinggj becomes increasingly chaotic. And it is predictable that such debates will continue into endless hatreds like TVTVTV, TVTVTVTV, TVTVTVTVTV...
This development is similar to hell jokes—from the fundamentalist 'laugh and you'll go to hell,' to some people's indiscriminate mockery of the deceased, to children saying 'this isn't funny.' However, this sudden sense of glory has shifted from the deceased in hell jokes to people in reality. Perhaps some deserve to be mocked, perhaps some do not, but in the context of Homo Sapiens TV, the emotion of mockery attacks everyone indiscriminately.
As for how the future will develop? No one knows. Perhaps various TVs will 'strictly review' content, or perhaps this discussion will continue... But regardless, there will always be people who appreciate such videos, and there will always be people who repost them again and again—after all, reposting history is indeed an indispensable part of the internet.
However, here I can tell you a little story about Homo Sapiens: Once there was a man named Hao Long. In his time, there was a custom of drying books on the Qixi Festival. So, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, he stripped naked and lay in the sun to dry his belly. When others asked why he was performing such behavior art, he said he was drying his books—referring to the ten thousand volumes of books in his belly.
Looking at it now, this could clearly be added to Homo Sapiens TV by Jiahao. In fact, this comes from 'A New Account of the Tales of the World · Ridicule': On the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, Hao Long lay on his back in the sun. When asked why, he replied, 'I am drying my books.'
In 439 AD, Liu Yiqing, the Prince of Linchuan from the imperial clan of the Southern Song Dynasty, compiled 'A New Account of the Tales of the World' to record the words, deeds, and anecdotes of scholars and celebrities during the Wei and Jin periods. The text varies in length, with some entries being just a few words, fully reflecting the casual nature of notebook fiction. It contains many stories about extraordinary people, which is why 'A New Account of the Tales of the World' has significant reference value for later scholars studying the history and culture of the Wei and Jin periods.
Looking back at 'Homo Sapiens TV,' perhaps the future of these videos will be the same—whether good or bad, whether appreciating ugliness or satisfying curiosity, whether mocking, sympathizing, or cyberbullying, they all record this era.
That's all.