Tag: geek culture

IMGUR dump: Vintage Science Fiction from the Golden Age

My latest IMGUR image essay is a tour of Golden Age Science and Speculative Fiction. It’s a nostalgic trip through sci fi as I discovered it growing up, from TV series to movies to magazines to the glory of paperback novel hounding at used bookstores. It was a damn fun post to throw together and I hope everyone has fun remembering the classics or discovering the forgotten gems from the sub-Atomic Age of Sci-Fi.

UPDATE – Related science fiction stuff:

 

New at 123ish.com: Is Disney A Monopoly, And Should We Be Worried?

Disney has recently raised some harrumphs in the geek community for becoming the owner of both Lucasfilm and Marvel properties. Is that enough to make Disney The Mouse That Roared? I discuss that question in the context of the big picture: In 2019, what media company isn’t a gigantic, world-crushing monopoly? As I demonstrate, hardly any.

As an addendum, literally the day after I posted this, rumor has it that Disney may shut down Marvel Comics right after acquiring it. If so, my prediction there:

“And here Disney just acquired two properties which – hold your fire, please – may prove to not be so valuable in a few years’ time.”

…proved more prophetic than I intended. Oops.

Other Disney-related things I’ve had to say over the years:

  • The Cult of Don Bluth – Former Disney animator, he struck out a career on his own and briefly beat the Mouse that Roared at his own game. Now fighting to get the classic arcade game Dragon’s Lair realized on screen.
  • Forgotten Gems Of Disney’s Dork Age – Disney put Generation X through hell in the 1970s, but these were its least stinky turkeys during that creative holocaust.
  • Best Disney Villain Figures – Paying tribute to the best of the baddest in Disney, with handsome collectible figurines.

Seriously, I don’t say much about Disney because it overall sucks.

 

New at 123ish: If You Mourned NASA’a Opportunity Like A Lost Pet, This One’s For You

Why do humans anthropomorphize inanimate objects? Here we are on the brink of advances in AI, and we’re still failing the reverse Turing test with a simple shell script from the 1960s. Let’s explore the curious twists and turns of how humans relate to technology and get to know the Eliza effect. And maybe you won’t be impressed with Eliza, but you won’t be forgetting Laurie B. Andrews any time soon…

Related: My previous nattering on how much power AI is getting over us even now.

More stuff about robots and AI:

 

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”

Gimme Your Weird Love: Our 366Weird Picks For Valentine’s Flicks

Valentine’s Day just got very warped: Three of us weird cinephiles (your humble author included) pick our top five weird movies to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Is your vision of love bizarre and unconventional? Do you hope to win a mate over by your quirks alone? Is your idea of the perfect couple closer to The Addams Family than mainstream rom-coms?

Well you got 15 (don’t sweat the math, I checked) certified weirdest movies to choose from to mark this pesky wanna-be holiday. Giles even wrote a poem about it! What a hoot!

XOXOKQ : But bonus content has since been added:

Continue reading “Gimme Your Weird Love: Our 366Weird Picks For Valentine’s Flicks”

Geek Gifts Lists: Valentine’s Ideas

So it’s almost Valentine’s Day here, and you know we’re all about the geek love at Penguin Pete’s! I don’t usually do this kind of thing, but conveniently one of my gigs is at Krononaut, which curates lists of cool stuff we find on Amazon.

What’s the difference between that and the zillion other Amazon list blogs out there? Well, we make sure the product is in stock, has a price range in the median of ~$40 for a comfortable disposable income budget, and we organize things by theme. If you happened to be looking for a certain niche item, you can search Amazon and wade through pages of irrelevant results, or grab one of our lists and have a concise assortment between six and ten items long that’s targeted exactly at what you were shopping for. Sound nifty? You’ve no idea!

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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.

 

If You’re Mad At Bill Maher For What He Said About Comic Books, Come At Me

Let’s wade into some more controversy with the latest Internet temper tantrum: Bill Maher’s remarks on comic book fandom after the death of Stan Lee. While his timing is admittedly tone-deaf, his impression is spot on, however poorly articulated. I crack into the nut of the matter: toxic fan bases.

Don’t you hate it when you’re just enjoying some work of media just because you happen to like it, and some raving idiot out there has to ruin it for everybody? That’s what we have here.

Continue reading “If You’re Mad At Bill Maher For What He Said About Comic Books, Come At Me”

New at 123ish: Star Wars Conservative, Star Trek Liberal

If the Star Trek franchise paints our future under the Federation as, to quote one editorial, “Bernie Sanders on steroids,” then where does that leave competing nerd franchise Star Wars? Under the oppressive thumb of a big bad authoritarian Empire or under the slightly-less-crushing domain of a centuries-old religion guarded by mystics in drab cloaks carrying funny colored sticks, that’s where!

How I came to my epiphany: Star Trek Is For Liberals, Star Wars Is For Conservatives. Let’s see how many nerds I can piss off at once!

 

New at 123ish: Real Men Aren’t Threatened By A Razor Commercial

#Woke advertising: It’s in, it’s hot, and it has the diapered Manbois crying in their Internet playpen! I say “Good show!” Let us dive into an exploration into online toxic male supremacy and how a razor commercial got their balls in a wringer.

This is the brilliance of the Gillette commercial: The story isn’t the commercial, but the reaction to it. It makes the Manbois blow their cover.

UPDATE: A collection of Manbois reacting to Gillette’s tolerance manifesto:

UPDATE:

Conservative women respond to reports of attempted rape that makes the victim feel in danger of her life with “LOL That’s normal!”

“If you genuinely think that all men attempt to rape women in high school, the correct response is to be incandescent with rage.”

I don’t know what’s wrong with people.