Category: Snark

My IMGUR image essay on a peculiar sci-fi trope went viral

I couldn’t help but notice a trend as I explored the covers of pulp genre media. In sci-fi, horror, and speculative fiction in general, there’s one damsel-in-distress pose that’s almost guaranteed to show up. It’s rampant on comic books and pulp fiction novels, and shows up in TV and film spanning from the earliest decades to the most recent.

I’m talking, of course, about women in glass tubes. And once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere, until you have to wonder if there’s a global conspiracy to encase females in crystal cylinders. Many golden age sci-fi rags did it; some did it up to three times in their print run. Video media has done it from the original run of The Outer Limits to the film The Hunger Games. It was even performed as a science experiment at a world’s fair! Women in glass tubes, nicknamed “tube girls,” just fill the genre to the point where you never find the end of it.

Continue reading “My IMGUR image essay on a peculiar sci-fi trope went viral”

Two IMGUR Galleries Revisit Nightmares Of 20th-Century Kitsch

I don’t mean to gripe, but Millennials sure demand a lot of attention. There’s twenty stories about them per day; they’re killing this thing, they’re embracing that thing, they have it tough because this, they react because that.

Meanwhile, Generation X is over here passed over both ways. We got a couple minutes in the spotlight in the 1990s and that was the end of us. Which suits most of us, but when I keep hearing about how rotten the Millennials have it, that’s the part I get sick of hearing about. Money did not rain from the sky before Millennials were born. Somehow I jumped directly from the have-nots line to the “privileged elite” line while still being the same broke-ass slacker I was in 1990.

As an example of Generation X gripes we never got the chance to air, I present “Kitschy Nightmares From Satan’s Thrift Store” and “Vintage Magazine Ads,” both wry observations of pop culture in the mid-20th century. This, kids, is what your poor papa and mama had to live through. Which is why we’re so funny.

Continue reading “Two IMGUR Galleries Revisit Nightmares Of 20th-Century Kitsch”

Reasons Why I’m Not Popular On Social Media:

  1. I’m not suicidal. If I was, I wouldn’t be burdening millions of strangers with my tragic situation.

  2. I’m not bent, broken, destroyed, or despondent of all hope, and even if I was, the last thing I’d do is reach out to the Internet for support. I would go to the doctor.

  3. I never did heroin, so I have nothing to celebrate being two weeks clean and sober from. I would think I would get credit for never having done heroin in the first place, but apparently you’re only a good person if you did do heroin, then quit and brag about it.

  4. I get my pets the old-fashioned way from a local shelter, not rescuing a shivering abused stray from a dumpster and nursing it back from the brink of starvation. It’s my fault for not staking out dumpsters more.

  5. I’m not at all socially awkward. I’m perfectly comfortable making eye contact and small talk. I’ve even managed to stay married for a sustained length of time. Damn me for working to be such a well-adjusted person.

  6. I don’t have fourteen grandmothers who die every month so I can post memorials about them.

  7. I never had cancer, so I can’t kick its ass. I’m smoking as fast as I can over here, but no luck.

  8. I’m not blown away by nostalgia for something that just happened, nor do I consider myself in an exclusive club just for remembering something that a bunch of other people remember.

  9. I don’t know the names of any porn stars. This is because I’m simply not that impressed with porn to follow it that closely.

  10. I don’t get into petty fights with my work partners, rage-quit, then miraculously land a new job offer the next day with a prestigious company at twice my former pay.

  11. I don’t get disproportionately outraged over minor inconveniences. If it happens to me, I figure it’s probably happened to several other people who didn’t feel the need to make a big scene about it.

  12. I use proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Should I sue my school for making me unpopular?

  13. I don’t pimp my children in staged “pranks” which will traumatize them for life. I had kids because I wanted to raise human beings, not for access to slave labor to enhance my ego.

  14. Most things do not offend me. Even when they do, I get over it fast.

  15. If I see a celebrity, I leave them alone because I think that’s what they want. Consequently, I have no archive of selfies of me next to famous people with a strained smile trying to be polite.

  16. I don’t get outraged at people not being the fans of the same media franchises I’m a fan of.

  17. I’m not threatened by people from other demographics, so I don’t post anything bigoted about them to be validated by other people with the same bigotries.

  18. I do not have anybody bake me a cake themed after anything in pop culture. I don’t even like cake. If I’m hungry enough to get food, I’m too hungry to take its picture before I eat it.

  19. I don’t spontaneously repost, like, and share everyone who does any of the above.

  20. I don’t consider it worth the effort to lie about any of the above.

 

I’m just an old man who doesn’t get it, I guess.