Thereâs a horrifying short story by Richard Matheson called âThe Dance of the Dead,â about a teenager in a post-apocalyptic future who goes to a seedy hellhole of a nightclub where a nightmare cocktail of substances is used to animate corpses and make them dance luridly on a phantasmagoric stage. Things go poorly. After itâs over, perhaps the most upsetting part of the story is how changed the teen is by the experience, how irreversibly warped and tainted sheâs become, and you wonder whether itâs the corpse or her thatâs truly in hell. I think thatâs us! I think weâve dragged too much shit out of our comic books and crappy old sitcoms, and mined enough of what was once this or that artistâs authentically original or at least authentically self-respecting style, and rechewed it like big stinking wads of cud, and now weâre just ruined! Ruined! This is what I was thinking while watching this fucking movie! Granny gloated âIâm goinâ old-school on his buttâ about an isolation matchup with some sort of mechanized, time-warping Damian Lillard(??), and a bright red light exploded in my brain. This thing, on this scale, with this level of visibility and prestige, is simply not something that anything but a terminal culture would produce.
A certain type of reader is going to form a certain sharply negative impression of what sort of person I am when I say the things I am about to say. I will admit thatâs normally something that would bother me very much, but I think I am too tormented and unclean by the experience of having done this to muster up much more than a grim shrug. (Though I do want to note that I was assigned this blog and told it was not optional.) Here goes: Itâs a bad thingâmeaningfully bad, bad at a cultural and societal level, urgently badâthat Dumb and Bad are now viable genres of motion picture. Itâs bad that people give dumb and bad movies credit for their pandering, mocking performances of art, and itâs especially bad when that credit is given to movies that are the cinematic equivalent of a Pine Sol tweet with just the word âbaeâ atop a photo of like Kevin Love scrubbing a countertop. Itâs alarming and sincerely bad that we seem to have thrown ourselves so willingly into some sort of bizarro world where studios ever more boldly express contempt for their audiences by exploiting an earnest, incomplete, and possibly premature 21st-century critical reassessment of pop entertainment, while simultaneously exploiting a Gen-Xâpowered tidal wave of nostalgia for cultural artifacts that shouldâve been left where they died. That the resulting papâthatâs what all of this is, pap, in the very literal sense of the wordâis so often cynically fortified against criticism by broadly liberal-seeming bonafides and by the psychotic Gamergate-esque militance of diehards is all the more frustrating and dispiriting.
It used to be that shitty movies won by getting you to buy the ticket, and would just accept the critical pounding to follow. That was the trade, and it was a fair one: We got to call garbage garbage, and from time to time we would admit to ourselves that sometimes this or that hunk of garbage was our particular flavor of garbage. But now, I think, in the era of online, an unredeemably beshitted movie industry wins by getting us suckers to dig and fortify rhetorical battle trenches around some new derivative horror show, out of pure tribal loyalty and near-religious sentimentality. My hating this movie and writing about it is the prize, because I am providing it with a vector into some fresh corner of The Discourse. I havenât worked out the more intricate mechanisms whereby this improves the Q Score or whatever of quite literally the most famous basketball player on the planet, but I know in my ruined soul that ticket sales are no longer the point. The long con is to get you to believe as deeply as possible that attaching your one infinitely precious self to these endlessly mass-produced mockeries of art and forming up a human shield around them is in fact a moral act.
This front of that campaignâthe Space Jam: A New Legacy maneuverâis just appallingly brazen. The plot is nonsensical, but who cares. The acting is horrendous, but who cares. It looks bad, but who cares. The updated Looney Tunes characters are just bone-chillingly gross and distorted, like the screenwriters were given two-word descriptions of Bugs and the gang and had otherwise never heard of them before. The runtime is full to bursting with little winking asides that will mostly sail over the heads of anyone young enough to enjoy all the disconnected sweaty mania of the action (Bugs warns LeBron, âDIS AINâT DA MIAMI HEAT, YOU KNOW,â when LeBron wants some good players for his team), but are not in any sense âjokes.â Thereâs a Michael Bayâstyle montage where Looney Tunes characters are gathered willy-nilly from scenes in nonâLooney Tunes moviesâYosemite Sam is somehow in Casablanca; Elmer Fudd is in Austin Powersâthat I swear to God was the most boring thing I have ever endured in my entire life, even though it was almost certainly the seed and inspiration for this entire movieâs existence. The script is pure Joss Whedon/Seth MacFarlane crapola, where characters have no real distinguishing personality traits that cannot be swapped at a momentâs notice in order to have a specific one of them deliver the next samey and deeply unfunny one-liner. Respectable actors are paraded across the screenâWood Harris, Sarah Silverman, Sonequa Martin-Green, Steven Yeun, Lil Rel Howery, Michael B. Jordanâbut are given nothing even approaching interesting or funny or original to say or do. Whole huge chunks of the plot are shamefully yanked right out of Futurama and Hook. Everything is a reference to something else. Scenes and music and whole big sequences overtly reference Wonder Woman and The Matrix and Mad Max: Fury Road, but the movie is too ingratiating and chicken-shit to reach for parody, and so it winds up just sort of thirstily grasping for the lowest hanging fan service shit: recognition.
I have never repeated any word or words as often in such a short period of time as I groaned the words âoh my godâ during this movieâs 115 minutes, and I have performed the Hallelujah Chorus before. Porky Pigâs dreaded rap battle is punctuated by Ernie Johnson saying, âHe was spitting hot fire.â Who wants this? Who is this for? But I have the feeling that I am supposed to root for it, somehow, because LeBron is firmly established in the culture as A Good Dude, and because it canât be very harmful to have a little fun with nostalgia, and what kind of asshole evaluates Space Jam: A New Legacy on its merits as a movie? Have some fun! But this trend is ruining us equally: I am becoming like the crew of the Event Horizon, tearing my eyeballs out and hissing scary Latin phrases, and you are twirling in a field like the poor teen from the Matheson story. Weâre both fucked.
There is a moment toward the very end of the movie where it appears very much like the filmmakers have killed off Bugs Bunny. To heck with all spoiler sensitivities! As an audience member you are supposed to feel Feelings about this, because of course you love Bugs Bunny and do not wish him dead. I grew up watching Bugs Bunny, I do love Bugs Bunny, and I did feel something. I felt regret that I had not been given the opportunity to choke the blasphemous unlife out of this reanimated corpse of Bugs Bunny with my own quivering hands. Alas, you will not be surprised to learn that it was all misdirection. Bugs returns moments later, with no explanation whatsoever, and is fine. Once again you are invited to feel Feelings. I felt bad, after all that suffering, that neither of us had been allowed to simply die.
im sure theres a legitimate canon reason that anakin didnt get executed during order 66 but im obsessed with the idea of palpatine sending out like a mass email to the clones just being like “ps anakin is on our side btw”
pov: you’re the clone trooper that accidentally killed anakin and you have the break the news to palpatine
Holy shit please do not do this. This is the most disorganised disaster Iâve ever seen and all theyâre going to do is get vulnerable people fired. Do not go on strike as an individual. Do not do not do not. The point of a strike is collective action to show the collective power of workers.
It is not enough to say that the NLRB has made vague gestures at showing that a non-union strike is theoretically possible. If you get fired illegally and youâre not part of a union, whoâs going to pay for your employment tribunal? You? Unless youâre aware of how expensive tribunals can be and have that money set to the side, youâre opening yourself up to a world of hurt.
This is genuinely the most dangerous, nonsensical thing Iâve seen on this website in a long, long time. Do not do this. Do not mistake masturbatory individualistic action for a collective movement.
If you would like to find a way to seriously stick it to your bosses, speak to your coworkers, organise an actual union in your workplace (if you need pointers on this, donât be afraid to reach out â Iâve done it before and would be happy to share pointers!). If you want public healthcare, get involved in any of the myriad campaigns for single payer going on. But do not, do not welcome unnecessary risk into your life like this.
Seriously, this is so incredibly sus. You do not just organize a general strike on a national scale by sending out a tweet and slapping together a website with no relevant information. At best, this is a well-intentioned but dangerously misguided social media activism move. At worst, this is an intentional disinformation campaign to undermine the labor movement. Do your research and learn your history before getting involved in stuff like this- the consequences are very real
Iâm not passing around blame but this feels like a consequence of social media activism misunderstood as organizing. It rarely if ever is. Social media can be introductory, informative, and discursive, but you canât organize workers by announcing what they should be doing
hey, did yall know the quileute nation’s still (it is april 2021 as i write) trying to raise money to move out of that potential tsunami hazard zone and onto higher ground? i remember it was trending for a little while on tumblr when the twilight book came out but my corner of the web’s been quiet on it since.
there’s a lot going on all over the world right now but if you can spare them even 5 bucks, thats 5 bucks they wouldnt have had without you! please help them if you can.
People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.
An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.
Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.
It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…
It’s an ant again.
Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.
This is madness.
Thank you for this good PSA because I’m still seeing sincere, published, professional writers doing “ahhhhh oh no this monster was SO UGLY i’m mentally ill now!”
Colonialism still exists. The effects of original colonization still exist.
Native Hawaiians cannot afford to live on our own land. Everyday tourism kills us.
We are fined for using our water. We are screamed at by tourists. We are stacked in concrete apartments the size of shoe boxes. Waiting lists for apartments are decades long. The government never provides aid. The money that belongs to us is wasted on half finished monorails and hotels. Tourist take pictures of us like we’re an attraction.
In 2018, the UN acknowledged the present day occupation of Hawai’i. And they did nothing.
“The Living Wage Calculator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) says that one adult in Honolulu needs to make $16.59 per hour for a living wage. If that is a couple with 2 children, each adult needs to make $17.70 per hour.”
-RealHawaii.Co
My culture, my people, are sexualized, ignored and stepped on.
We cannot live. And everyday more of us die.
And no one even notices. So notice. Notice. Notice.
the older i get the more incomprehensible fandom moms become. not because theres anything wrong with being a nerd as an adult, but because interacting with teenagers starts getting exhausting once you’re past like 22
do you guys wanna hear the latest drama among librarians across the country
Ask and I shall deliver
Okay so the latest drama is apparently there is a man calling across random libraries across the country and heâs asking for information on a court case specifically Brady v Maryland and when he calls he claims he doesnât have a computer so he asks for the case to be read aloud to him
Hereâs the thing. He is asking for uh not legal reasons but umm because he wellâŠ.he wellâŠheâs yknow đł And heâs called multiple libraries and done this and the FBI is supposedly involved and canât catch this pervert thatâs just calling libraries and getting off on librarians reading about some random court case
And apparently the dude called my work! And I wasnât there for it but they put him on hold cause they were like âis it himâŠâ so they got a male coworker to answer the phone and he immediately hung up and like hdjdhsjshhs?!? What is happening!!
I TALKED TO HIM. He is absolutely masturbating while you read the court case. He has hit MULTIPLE libraries ACROSS the country. Heâs called my library twice and another local library last week.Â
So if you get a blocked number asking you to read Brady v Maryland wiki article while he âwrites it out by hand,â hang up. Log it, tell your managers.Â
Links to just one of the ALA facebook posts about it, for evidence if you need to email your bosses:
