Category Archives: Pop Culture

All the stuff culture-related that doesn’t fit elsewhere.

Popping Tags

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For most of my childhood, there were a few insults that were as common as they were unforgivable: You didn’t utter them unless you were prepared to fight. They were, in order of severity from highest to lowest:

Any implication you were gay. Any insult against your mother (“yo’ momma”). That your clothes came from Goodwill.

That’s right: One of the worst things you could say to a kid was that their parents bought second-hand clothes. The severity was probable swapped for girls – I never heard one girl call another “dyke” until high [...]

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Copyright is not for You

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Forgive me another “response to a Facebook hoax” post, but the recent “protect your profile by posting a copyright notice” nonsense gave me a reminder of just how poorly most Americans understand their own copyright laws.

It’s often assumed that, because I’m an artist that creates intellectual property, I support strict copyright enforcement. I certainly wouldn’t like it if someone claimed my work as their own and profited from it, and it would be great to have accessible legal recourse in a situation like that. I do not. Most artists — be they writers, musicians, performers, or visual artists — do not.

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How I Learned To Start Worrying and Hate Facebook

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It was a hoax so skillfully crafted, several of my brightest, best friends fell for it.

The premise was simple: A warning that because of the latest privacy fluke, all your Facebook “Private Messages” from before 2009 (or in many cases 2010) are now publicly visible. It wasn’t true, but the claim was a stroke of genius so well done that many people still insist it happened to them.

First of all, Facebook is so bad about privacy failures, ever-shifting settings, and unannounced changes that something so ludicrous was actually plausible to us. And because of Facebook’s recent change to the “Timeline,” public messages from [...]

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A Signifigantly Less Merry Unbirthday

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Human-I-Strongly-Approve-Of John Leavitt’s got a very entertaining Tumblr going at TIME 2 TRAVEL. “A Crowd-sourced UnTourist Guide For the fashionably broke Time Traveler.” They take submissions, so, you know. Naturally. 

I’m hoping to do a few more from the point of view of this character, if they’ll have me. He’s kind of like John Preston with a Time Machine… but more on that later.

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Reddit and Weep

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A comic titled "responding to a 15-year-old posting on r/atheism." Panel one is a person typing and is captioned "Atheist" while panel 2 shows a person vommiting black bile all over a keyboard and says "Reddit Atheist."

In response to this (Trigger Warning: Examples of extreme misogyny).

PS: Posts of substance will resume in the new year. Wrapping up 2011 has been rough.

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Ulfric Stormcloak: Strong

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Ulfric Stormcloak, a character from the video game Skyrim, in a Youtube widow with the same background and title as Rick Perry's Strong video.

“I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a worshipper of Talos.

But you don’t need to attend the Temple of the Nine to know that there’s something wrong in Skyrim when gays and cat people and lizards and shit can serve openly in the the Imperial Legion, but true sons of Skyrim can’t openly celebrate the apotheosis of Talos or pray at his shrines without being kidnapped [...]

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Saturday Morning Dissonance

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A screenshot of the NYTimes website, showing an article on increases in the census of "near poor," and an article saying raising prices will lead people to spend more.

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An Intercepted Letter to Mayor Bloomberg

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Kind Sir,

On receiving my AM edition of The Daily Planet,  I was greeted with an A1, above-the-fold headline proclaiming that – with excessive displays of force and beneath the twin shrouds of night and a media blackout – your police force had “evicted” the Occupy Wall Street protestors from Zucotti Park. In fact, the Planet corespondents themselves had been arrested in the process and had filed the story from a jail cell!

Bravo, sir! My hat is off!

I confess, I didn’t think you had it in you after backing down in the face of national opposition once before. [...]

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Erotic Nightmares: Sexual Identity in Rocky Horror – Part 2

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View Part 1 here.

In Part 1, I talked about Rocky Horror Picture Show creator Richard O’Brien’s late-life identity crisis and realization he felt of neither gender (I continue to use male pronouns in reference to O’Brien because he seems to himself). I then looked at several characters from the film in turn, analyzing them for potential meaning to back my theory that the film is largely about America’s fears of sexual deviancy. Let’s continue in that vein, non?

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So Awesome it will Melt your Goddamned Face

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