Tag: culture

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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All You Need Is Drugs

Along with my other geeky pursuits, I’ve waddled along in this whole legalized cannabis industry thing. Mind you – you can take it or leave it, God sees my heart – all this time I’ve been blogging cannabis without so much as smoking a single puff of the stuff. I’ve tried a couple CBD vapes and experimented with kratom, that’s it.

Yes, I have partaken of the ganja plant in the past. Yes, I enjoy it, it is very nice. But weed to me is like ketchup; I don’t need ketchup every week to remember what it tastes like. My attitude towards drugs, like my attitudes towards everything else, is different from most and of course, pisses off both prohibitionists and righteous stoners alike.

Anyway, the cannabis news beat has been fraught with peril and wonder. I even mean the “peril” part literally; there is still an unsolved mass shooting at an Aguanga, Riverside County, California, cannabis farm which has yet to produce a lead. Seven people died and nobody cares because they were all undocumented pot farmers at a bootleg facility. The police just shrug.

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I Had a Very Animated January

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.

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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.

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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…

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Now My Other Gigs Are Infected With Occult Influence

You could say the same for every day of the cursed year of 2020, but my timeline seems to have been particularly dark since reviewing – and being bit by – Cultist Simulator. It was indeed a fit spooky choice for October, which dragged me through the month as I’ve tried to keep up my horror viewing in the middle of everything else.

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Is Ignite Cannabis Co. trying to tell us something?

At my stoner DabConnection gig, we’ve become the freelance police of the cannabis industry busting fake brands of THC vape cartridges left and right. But this time I got interested in a real brand managed by an Instagram influencer Dan Bilzerian, though “real” and “managed” are both up for debate. The brand has raised millions in investor funding and squandered millions more with Bilzerian apparently going through the most hysterical public midlife-crisis ever. We’re talking $50 million in 2019 alone!

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In Which I Explore More Hidden Worlds

As a freelance blogger, what I really do for a living is just explore. That’s it; I visit some exotic far-off realm of the anthropocene noosphere, and I report back on what I found. I always find something weird and squirmy, without even digging much.

My favorite thing to do in the world is to open the door on closet cultures most of you never knew existed, and drag them out in the daylight. Even though I snark a lot, I love these pocket societies because they present an alternative view of the world. We all have our own perspective on “where it’s at.” Where is it at? That depends on whom you ask. Maybe the lost tribes are right. Maybe the underground subcultures are right. Maybe we should all ditch everything and go find enlightenment in some hidden digital playground because that’s all the meaning we have left to get out of life. Maybe we’re all deluding ourselves. Maybe we have no choice, and our only relevant decision is to pick the delusion that allows the most comfort.

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I Investigate Some Anti-Pot Propaganda Billboards

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:

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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.

And speaking of UFOs (he said provocatively)…

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Linux Gaming Roundup : Help, I’m Kinky For Bowsette!

I’ve been a busy game blogger lately, but before I get into Linux-specific gaming, I’d like to share my latest crush: Bowsette!

In the grim future of Bowsette there can be only war!

Bowsette is a fan creation I covered in my write-up of the top weirdest moments of the Mario / Donkey Kong franchise. As a Gen Xer, I’m in a unique position to sum up the scope of the historic Donkey Kong and Super Mario franchise. I was there twoscore years ago, a greasy triangle of disgusting pier joint pizza in hand at the Balboa Fun Zone witnessing the dawn of the Donkey Kong original arcade machine. (You can still play that on Linux, if you bootleg the ROM and load up Mame.) I catalog the weirdness from that day through all the magic mushrooms down to modern-day 4chan and its Bowsette abomination.

See, I understand where it comes from. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (2014) for the Game Boy Advance and Wii U had this moment where they decided a female-possessed Bowser would make a fun boss fight, namely Bowletta. Fans instantly repressed the memory until it manifested itself years later on image boards. Every fetish has a childhood trauma behind it.

As wrong as Bowsette is, on the teeth-grinding irritation level of Brony culture, it still feels like it belongs in 2020 pop culture somehow. It was inevitable. Torment the proles enough and even their escapism becomes twisted.

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I Am Now A Documented Nunsploitation Watcher

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:

Satanico_Pandemonium slasher nun

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…

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You Gotta Fight For Right To Anything

Well, it’s revolution time in America again! What took it so long?

Around the nation, the Black Lives Matter movement has inflamed the nation and swept around the Earth. While I don’t hold out hope that much permanent will be gained, let me go on the record as saying I support it 100%, and Civil Rights for anyone, anywhere, at any time. Pictured in the banner: Graffiti in the Seattle “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” summing up the national attitude right now.

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But in the meanwhile, I’m scrambling to select topics in my usual venues that are both on-point for the clients’ interests and relevant to today’s headlines. For instance, did you know that geek culture was founded on Civil Rights activism? From Star Trek to The Munsters to Night of the Living Dead, promotion of equal rights for all races, genders, beliefs, and lifestyles has been at the root of our most cherished institutions of sci-fi and fantasy fiction.

UPDATE: Actor Tim Russ gives his thoughts on what makes Star Trek tick, points out exactly the same parts I do without saying the phrase “Civil Rights.”

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Bulletin From the Trenches : What Have I Done For You Lately?

We’re back with another update from Penguin Pete, that blur you might have seen sprinting around trying to catch up on all his projects. I’m so busy blogging that I don’t have time to blog about my blogs.

Cannabis Culture – The Fake Cart Wars continue!

First, Sherbinski, a counterfeited real brand with a history so disgusting that this time I’m rooting for the bootleggers. The guy who founded this boutique brand is a clueless, Narcissistic, spoiled infant who insists that he invented the universe with his stupid orange vape cartridge packaging, and teamed up with Post Malone for a promotional deal. Don’t know who Post Malone is? Lucky you. But just imagine if you compiled a worldwide database of every child porn collector and had a computer AI form a composite from all the mugshots. Ready? Here it is:

Yuck!

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