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IMGUR posts: 1980s Action Figures and Vintage Pulp Novel Cover Art

So you all might be noticing by now, I’ve been tinkering around with IMGUR a lot lately. I can’t help getting hold of a social media platform and eventually experimenting with it to see what kinds of nifty posts I can make in that medium. The IMGUR format is underappreciated; it’s more like a super-Tumblr since you can post any amount of text appended to images and chain images together into albums. Not bad for a site that originally started as a side-feature for Reddit.

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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.

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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:

The Most Underrated Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Movies – Looking for sci-fi movies that actually peg the apocalypse? Here’s a list of the more realistic takes on the end of civilization as we know it.
Things CoronaVirus Has Taught Me About Apocalyptic / Dystopian Sci-Fi – COVID-19 pointed out the plot holes in our concept of what an apocalypse would look like.
Groundhog Day and Time Travel in Sci-Fi – On Groundhog Day, we marked the best time travel movies which treat the premise with the playful fun it deserves.
Five Sci-Fi Novels Just Waiting To Be Adapted To Film – While Hollywood is scrounging the bottom of the bargain comic books bin looking for yet another superhero movie, these epic science fiction languish in the darkness without a film adaptation.
Why Do We Force-Feed Dystopian Literature To Students? – You’re not living in a dystopia; I checked for you.
Best Devotional Items For Alternative Religions – Show your faith in the new breed of gods for the thinking age, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Dr. J.R. “Bob” Dobbs.

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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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.

New at 123ish.com: Let Comedians Say What They Want – That’s Their Job!

Are you offended by what Louis C.K. says? Or Aziz Ansari, or Kathy Griffin, or, for another example I forgot to include, Bill Maher and his ill-timed rant about comics right after Stan Lee passed?

So am I! I’m offended every day, but I have discovered a wonderful secret to cure perpetual offended syndrome! It’s a hard cure, you have to work for it. Here’s a meme to pass around social media and help others find this path to enlightenment:

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New post at 123ish.com: We Always Need A Black Mirror

Netflix’s Black Mirror has been critically acclaimed and widely praised, but also gets its share of fan hate? The new episode “Bandersnatch” gives us a great opportunity to re-examine the series’ cultural position.

Join me as I illustrate why Black Mirror isn’t just any TV anthology series. Along the way we revisit some classic genre anthology TV series from decades past, including the one that used to scare me silly as a kid!