Tag: culture

From the Trenches of #2022 : Your War Blogger

Good morning, and how are all my cosmic blueberries? Here, if you need a mood fix, there’s a gallery of hippie New Age good vibes I threw together on an old IMGUR post.

Sorry for not catching up more, but things have been busy. Blah blah blah, Pete doesn’t blog enough, blah blah, I don’t have time to boost my own site because I’m too busy boosting my clients’ sites.

I’ve also been hypnotized by the endless Doomscrolling feed of world news like the rest of you. Ukraine Putin Russia COVID climate change. Bad news all around. I’ve been telling you all it would get this bad years ago.

I Predicted Everything!

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how much of the year 2022 I prophesied, years and years ago. I’ve been tracing this line between Trump and Putin since Sally Yates got fired – yes, remember her, New Years’ Eve, 2017?

Trump-fires-Yates

Oh, I am sure that we are all shocked at Vladimir’s Putin’s INSANE and senseless massacre of Ukraine, as well as his own soldiers, citizens, economy, etc. But, boys and girls, I have been following this yellow brick road a long ol’ time. Won’t you join me on my adventures?

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Having a Boom! With the Holidays

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?

Boom 1968 screenshot

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.

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Why I Am Not Watching Squid Game

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.

metropolis

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.

I’ve seen Snowpiercer, The Platform, and High-Rise. Somebody else already pointed out that they are exactly the same movie. I’ve also seen The Hunger Games, and Squid Game is literally the exact same premise. I’ve seen The Purge, Elysium, They Live, The Running Man, Freejack, Soylent Green, and V for Vendetta. Not to mention, as the above image forecasts, that Metropolis fits in this category too; the very first sci-fi movie ever made.

Let me save you some time and tell you all about every single one of the above movies. This is the entire point:

karl-marx-quote

“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.

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My latest adventures in Content Marketing…

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:

Except I’m a BLOGGER, so while everybody else posts a onesie-twosie WIP, I’m seeing my projects go by in a blur. Today is October 12th.

Here’s a round-up of everything I’ve been busy as a bee with in just this past month, right after the jump.

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How To Work From Home : A Survival Guide For The Hardwood Jungle

Forgive me, I should have written this guide sooner in the pandemic. Just didn’t think it would really be needed. But now that the global pandemic is a permanent thing for a while, and so many of you are clamoring for some of my work-from-home magic, I will share my tricks of the trade.

While a 9-5 job wage-slave working remotely can benefit from some of these tips anyway, this guide is written for the freelance / professional point of view.

toddler-on-phone

[1] I’m sorry, you need self-discipline.

Do me a favor: Take a deep breath and then scream “GATEKEEPER!” at me as loud as you can. Now that we have that out of the way, I’m sorry, but nature imposes this gate, not me. Either you are a self-starter and able to discipline yourself, or you will fail. If you say, “I can’t self-dicipline,” make yourself do it. Learn how. Give yourself a new chance, maybe things have changed.

Of course, there’s days when I don’t want to work, there’s tasks I dread, there’s deadlines that I procrastinate because, to be frank, it’s fun and I perform amazing under pressure. But I get the thing done! It always eventually comes down to “it is time to sit down and plow through this unpleasant task.” There are no shortcuts, no tricks. Just start doing the work and let the momentum carry you. Really, you were doing the same thing for a boss when you worked 9-to-5. Now you get to reap the full spoils of your labor, so that’s even more motivation, right?

Wanting to work from home without self-discipline is like wanting to be a lifeguard without learning to swim.

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Belief in “Gatekeeping” is a Paranoid Delusion

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:

Millennials

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.

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Epiphanies After the Apocalypse

I survived the cyberpunk end times, and never got to assemble my own Mad Max warrior tribe. I got my COVID shots and never got weird mutant superpowers. I ventured out of my survivalist seclusion and found out the world is going to keep going.

Recently we’ve all emerged from COVID quarantine, and my household bravely ventured out to public life again. My first time dining out at an actual restaurant took some adjustment.

My darling wife of 30 years, Mrs. Penguin, could not afford to lose her cool. She is a patient woman, and I speak here as a man who is an expert at being impossible to take out in public. She sat in Felix & Oscars enjoying her personal pizza and margarita, happily munching and slurping away. I was eating too, but nervously. My sweaty hands gripped the table. My eyes scanning madly from side to side around the room. I assured her that I too, was having fun.

But inside my dumpster of a neurotic brain, I was screaming: “AAAAAAAAAAHHHH! I’M SURROUNDED BY PEOPLE!!!!”

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Further Exploits of the World’s Feistiest Blogger

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.

waters_of_knowledge

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.

See how much…

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Attention Internet Court : Guilt Requires Intent

If you’re reading Harry Potter because you like J.K. Rowling’s alleged transphobia, you’re doing so with intent and are a bigot.

If you’re reading or watching Harry Potter because you like fantasy stories about wizards and magic, you’re not a bigot. Indeed, even if you’re reading just to see what all the fuss is about, you’re not a bigot.

If you don’t even think Rowling is seriously transphobic because she seems more to be just plain naive about society and culture, congratulations! As God is my witness, before the Rowling row I personally did not know that trans-folk menstruated at all, I thought they just got a Depo-Provera shot or something to have done with it. Nevertheless, Rowling doesn’t realize that Twitter isn’t the place to have this kind of in-depth debate and stupidly digs her way in deeper every time she opens her yawp. I’m still not convinced she’s intentionally bigoted.

Land_O_Lakes

If you bought Load O’ Lakes butter because you like having submissive female native Americans kneeling at your breakfast table to feed your imperialist fantasy, you’re a bigot. And weird.

If you bought Load O’ Lakes butter because it’s just damn butter and never gave a thought to the packaging, you’re not a bigot.

Wanna see more? Right this way!

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Crazy Times Don’t Last, But Crazy People Do

Greetings and the usual introduction about how the current news cycle is as nutty as squirrel poop. However, there is light at the end of this tunnel. I see signs of meager improvement. The year 2021 is so far being nicer to us than 2020. Let’s get to brass tacks and bras tax:

If you follow my Twitter feed, I also broadcast my latest work there occasionally. Lately at the geeky fandom beat, I got sick and tired of The Matrix getting a free pass with all the crazy conspiracy theories it’s spawned. If we’re going after the toxic media that poisons our minds, let us include the popular ones. We openly laugh at the spastic static of Marjorie Taylor Greene, but wrap the same bullshit in a leather trenchcoat with cool guns and we literally make a religion out of it.

And nothing appears to be as popular as The Matrix. Between Red Piller Incels and people murdering their parents because they thought they were living in a computer simulation, The Matrix is responsible for indoctrinating people to a level similar to The Turner Diaries. Yet social media does not allow you to criticize The Matrix! The Wachowski siblings are sacred, untouchable cows. You get stoned to death by angry mobs for daring to suggest that they don’t walk on water.

UPDATE: As usual, after I finish my thesis, I find a video with a reasoned scientific argument agreeing with me!

Using the same logic, we could say “there are more ants than people on Earth, therefore the odds are better that we are ants.”

I like that! Let’s insert a jump here before my front page gets overloaded.

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