Who the bananas has time to blog on their own site this time of year? In between tying off the big holiday rush and jamming out my vanity projects, any non-compulsory work falls behind in priority after my dedicated #GenX slacker lifestyle.
Yeah, right. Actually, folks, in the content marketing / online blogging business, I type all day and all night until I fall asleep with my beak on the keyboard typing “zzzzzz” and then my adorable wife drags me to bed, from whence I spring into action hours later to gargle espresso and run back to the keyboard. How can you turn down extra money this time of year?
Video Review Debut: Boom! (1968)
When last we joined my escapades, I was as amazed as everyone else to have pulled off my first video review for 366 Weird Movies, with Legacy of Satan. Well, hold your horses, because I videoed again this month with a video review of Boom!(yes, it’s spelled with an exclamation point, like Yahoo!) (1968), Liz Taylor and Rich Burton.
Because those 2 movies will totally have fan overlap, right? Don’t leave now, I have done much more than this in the past month, after the jump.
It’s impossible to avoid now, but for future generations: Squid Game was a TV series on Netflix. It got a viral marketing boost and now all of social media is teeming with foaming-mouthed fanatics insisting that everybody MUST WATCH this show immediately or there will be consequences.
Now I will tell you why, not only am I not watching Squid Game, but you should not watch Squid Game either.
We’ve seen enough class-struggle dystopian sci-fi
The first 10 times I saw a class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movie, I thought, “Yeah, great socio-political commentary!” The next 50 class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movies I saw, I thought, huh, neat take, but it’s been done. After that, every class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movie gives me the kind of heartburn you get from too much grease and not enough substance.
Let me save you some time and tell you all about every single one of the above movies. This is the entire point:
“Proletariat vs Bourgeoisie”
There are RICH PEOPLE, and they are EVIL for the sake of being EVIL!
There are POOR PEOPLE who suffer because they are POOR!
The RICH stay RICH by exploiting the POOR people and keeping them POOR!
Nobody can seem to do anything effective about it.
You should be MAD about this! MAD MAD MAD!
That’s all this is. A class-struggle sci-fi movie is not inspirational or instructive or educational or witty or original. It is not deep or profound. It’s not even a story. The entire point is to invoke the Krodha rasa and turn the viewer into the Incredible Hulk. Hulk hate rich people now!
Not only that, but we have a whole wing of literature devoted to the exact same effect, called dystopian literature. They include The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Brave New World, all of which are at the top of the list of most recommended books for required reading in school. I’ve written this same blog post about why force-feeding students these novels is a crime against intellect.
But we’ll go over it again, this time with movies and TV, because what I am saying really IS an original thought which is currently absent from all of world culture.
Blah blah blah Pete doesn’t post often enough, blah blah blah I’m too busy working for clients to look into my own website. My own site is so neglected it’s a wonder they haven’t opened a Spirit Halloween here yet. Blah blah blah there I’m blogging now.
I see tweets like this all the time:
#writingcommunity post your books, what you're working on. I'll help you with #writerslift share your links below. Hoping you all have a great day! Don't be shy, say hello 🙂
So I’m a cultural muckraker, and consider it my station in life to slaughter sacred cows, shatter illusions, bring illumination to our dark world, and correct common misconceptions. My popularity in this regard varies depending on the target. I can savage organized religion, Wall Street, Republicans, Nickelback, whatever is the acceptable target, and then you all love me. Because you are the choir I preach to.
I could publish a recipe for BBQ Jeff Bezos right now and probably get a ticker-tape parade for it. But then, if all I did was knock down straw men all day, I’d be fat ‘n’ lazy. Instead, I choose a more difficult topic, which will make me a lot less popular.
Today, I am going to tell YOU, yes YOU READING THIS, why YOU do a bad, damaging thing on social media, and why YOU need to stop it. In fact, I am going to beat this lesson into your backside with a belt and squat you in the corner afterwards to think about what you’ve done. I do it because I love you.
I’m not very popular when I do this. There will be no ticker tape parade for me for this post, but I am OK with that. Because doing things means more to me than validation.
What is this “Gatekeeping”?
Not to single out this particular person or account or even instance, but the lesson demands a random example:
This gem is a perfect example of the “gatekeeping” delusion. It hits all the woke buzzwords. And it shows a nasty mental virus that infests the “writing” community.
There’s this new attitude out there that a “blogger” equals a stay-at-home mom who posts recipes for gorgonzola milkshakes accompanied by pages-long rants about how she did not turn into her mother. I mean just look at the #blogger tag on Twitter. Everything is safe, cozy, filled with Pinterest snaps, tranquil.
That is not how I work. That is not what I am about. You will never catch me, for any amount of money, doting on homemade hummus yogurt or embroidery patterns to stitch “life, laugh, love” on your toilet seat cover.
I blog with my fists. I am on a holy mission to spread enlightenment to the world, and the way I do that is by beating the stupid out of people one concrete skull at a time. I love my job.
You can’t deny that 2021 is shaping up to be a different year from 2020. We have the same ol’ virus, but we threw out everything else we can get our hands on. The smell of revolution is in the air, and it smells like a new generation wrestling the wealth away from the old, and new culture bumping off the old guard. Finally.
At request of my handlers at 123ish.com, I plunged again into the Gamestop stock short raid and modern Bitcoin millionaires, and pointed out that this, at last, is the proverbial sacking of Rome writ in modern times and the movement of wealth from dusty old guys in suits to bright young kids who approach investing the way they do a World of Warcraft raid.
Speaking of Bitcoin, JWZ, one of my old-skool-hacker idols, has lately become the Al Gore of cryptocurrency mining, yelling that we’re heating the Earth with our greed and we’re all doomed, doomed, DOOMED! He has headlines like “Bitcoin mine cargo container literally incinerating planet,” and more on his dunning-krugerrands tag.
Meanwhile I follow Satan on Twitter (don’t ask, it’s a long story), and come to find out Hell has its own cryptocurrency now. Because of course it does.
The new official cryptocurrency of hell is here! Fast, Reliable, and Transaction fee Free currency. LEOX is the future of cryptocurrency!
I think Satan and JWZ should meet, and possibly have a no-holds-barred brawl in the DNA Lounge for the destiny of this planet. Wouldn’t that be exciting, boys and girls?
Want to see what other cultural rat-traps I have been poking my battered nose into lately? Right this way…
Pay no attention to Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space in the banner. We’ll circle back to that eventually. By the way, there is no rule 34 of that show, and I demand to speak to the manager of the Internet.
Over at GeekyDomain, we focus a lot on games, movies, comics, and all that, but I proposed that we’d neglected anime and animation in general. We should make up for that with a whole month just devouring animation. There’s so much in that vein that modern audiences just don’t know exists, especially older stuff they might have caught as a kid and half-remembered now. It’s the cure for the winter blahs, I soapboxed, so everybody went along with that.
That got me on an animated kick. First I commemorated Liquid Television, MTV’s groundbreaking showcase, which was a cheery bazaar of shorts, experimental projects, pilots, and episodes of series that could barely be tracked down otherwise. It was the launch point for Aeon Flux, Psychograms, The Maxx, and later Cartoon Sushi and the eventual launch of Cartoon Network. And then I barely had room to discuss USA Network’s Night Flight, a show with very similar DNA.
There’s no shortage of Gen-X kids who wax nostalgic for Night Flight now, but a lot of viewers couldn’t be bothered to stay up at 3 AM watching every random bit of craziness which tracked onto the screen, so they missed bits like Arise!, the Church of the Subgenius “recruiting” film. Let us pause in reverent amazement: In the early 1990s, before Bob J.R. Dobbs became the Internet’s very first meme, when Robert Anton Wilson yet drew breath, there was a Church of the Subgenius special aired on public television. Where ordinary muggles could see it. How we survived that calamity is anybody’s guess.
And that was just the first step of my month-long adventure…
Greetings, energy beings of planet Gaia! I have ingested large quantities of an exotic plant from the Far East which gave me new, mutant powers of bullshit detection and a renewed faith in our one true god Zardoz. It doesn’t matter how interesting your week has been, mine has been more interesting.
Discovery #1: Kratom is Bullshit!
At the behest of my client at DabConnection.com, I experimented with this Thai herbal drug making the rounds at convenience store kiosks. Read my bummer trip report on kratom here, where I risk bodily soundness and my sanity in trying to get any reaction out of this rip-off product, including gulping down mugs of kratom tea on an empty stomach at 5AM because that’s the thing you do on an average weekend morning! Alas, I got nothing but dead air for the trouble, which included gulping down so many of the half-gram pills that I rattle when I jump up and down.
I love my career.
I found out confirmed proof that alleged “kratom strains” all come from the same plant, too. My suspicion that the alleged “kratom plant” is actually catnip can neither be confirmed nor denied by my cat, who recognizes catnip but will not touch the stuff.
If I offer him catnip, he’ll sniff it once and give me a dirty eye, insulted that I would disrespect him with this offering, before pointedly batting it away. I have a Mormon cat.
In this Monday’s edition of my weekly exploration log, I got curious about marijuana propaganda and decided to dig into who is behind all the billboards popping up in weed-legal states. The answers, as you might expect, range from complete mysteries to right-wing muscle groups to hair-raising teen-torture scared-straight camps. JWZ, world’s biggest fan of They Live(1988), would have been proud of me. I felt just like this:
Anti-Drug billboards sponsored by Straight Incorporated founders
And seriously, I’m not kidding about teen-torture camps. Some of them are sponsored by “Drug Free America Foundation,” no surprise, but that foundation was founded by the same husband and wife team behind Straight Incorporated. Sample review:
“Straight, Incorporated was a very destructive, highly controversial and extremely abusive cult that shamelessly and dishonestly, masqueraded as a drug rehab for teenagers in several parts of the United States from 1976 to 1993.”
“These teenagers who were incarcerated in all of these savage Straight locations usually ranged in age from 13 to 20 years of age. The Straight cult had these Warehouse type facilities which operated in states such as California, Virginia, Texas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Georgia, Maryland, Ohio and Florida. Contrary to the mythology and propaganda endlessly perpetuated by Straight, these kids were not clients! These teenagers were hostages. While on First Phase they were imprisoned and held against their will physically,emotionally and psychologically (and sadly in so many cases, all three,) at the Straight Facility during the day and at night they were shuttled and transported (against their will) to various foster homes where they were held against their will there as well.”
The hair-raising tales of torture, rape, brainwashing, and even deaths in these American teen-torture camps rival many a horror story from the Holocaust, and it’s going on right under our noses right now, nobody knows. Start digging here, and here, and here. Bring your barf bag. This industry has gone on with no oversight, no regulation, for decades now, without once breaking the news. Remember when Mitt Romney was running against Obama? He was financed by WWASP. The teen torture industry has some deep ties to US religions that have an unusual interest in UFOs, which might explain why the closer to Utah you go, the creepier the anti-marijuana billboards get.
Cthulhu give me strength, my review of Satanico Pandemonium : La Sexorcista (1975) is now live over at my 366WeirdMovies gig. There’s no taking it back now. What’s worse, I actually half-liked it. It’s got great locations and cinematography, and moves at a brisk enough clip that the batty plot will fly right by you without too much grief.
Oh, and here’s a film still that didn’t make the review’s cut:
My clients get a little squeamish about posting borderline images, but here in the gutter on my own site I put on no airs of propriety. You’re already reading a post with “Nunsploitation” in the title; it’s a little late to pretend you have standards now.
Of course, I’ve been up to a lot more film-related devilment lately…
