Tuesday, May 31, 2016

NERRRRRRRD! vol.52

Fandom Is Broken

Controversies and entitlement shine a light on a deeply troubling side of fandom.

i've been composing my thoughts on extreme fandom in my phone's notebook for the past week. inspired by Evan Dorkin's Eltingville Club, Alan Moore's thoughts on the matter (and his writing style), and a near-lifetime of observations that started in the mail columns of magazines and evolved into comment threads and video reviews involving comics, movies, music, games, and all "geek" pursuits.

 phone rant begins now; ...

the big companies are becoming far too preoccupied with catering almost exclusively to the misaligned territoriality of over-demanding consumers. the frequently vicious, unendurably spiteful, moribund obsessives polluting any discourse with meaninglessly aggressive, wearingly cacophonous wailings. perversely entitled caustic scolds that are less concerned with creators' intent then they are weighing in with their hastily constructed caloric-gut driven point of view, policing imaginative growth till it relents to their limited experiences. the first to demand that the imagined integrity of corporate entities be forever upheld and last to acknowledge or consider the very real tragedies and injustices ever permeating a world of flesh and steel that's omnipresent to even the most casual observer. their cultural tastes sub-refined, emotional understandings malformed, and intellectual nutrition in ruins from a debilitating dependence on mass market franchises and nakedly commercial properties (that more often than not meant to capture the unsophisticated, unchallenging, undemanding, not-yet-completely-burgeoned sensibilities of children) for their root sensory experiences. and when their naively sociopathic demands are not met, they counter with unnecessarily profane declarations of their limp outrage, toweringly interchangeable in their escalating grotesqueire, which are little else but mentally inert examples of a categorically bitter, revealingly jealous, skewered entitlement attempting to convince itself that its a thorough deconstruction of a "flawed" work, when the defects (more often than not) lie in the consequence-averse opinions of an inferiority-riddled non-entity's crudity-bloated pontifications.

phone rants ends.

as someone who has a deep respect, interest, and investment in much of those mediums, i find it disheartening and worrisome that the default mode for genre-enthusiasts has been of the "angry nerd" variety. i have absolutely been guilty of this behavior in the past (sometimes the present.... DC Rebirth for the fuck of shit), but that was never my go-to response when presented with something that didn't match my expectations. i had and continue to have plenty of comics, movies, music, books, TV shows, etc that intrigue, arouse, inspire, inform, and upend my perceptions of what is possible within these mediums, and i've tried to avert my attentions from the contrarians, the fundamentalists, and the would-be provocateurs who have a pathological attraction to the prospect of destroying everyone else's good time with sloppy displays of empty subversion or hollow scholarly frustrations. but they just don't seem to show any signs of diminishing, so here we are.

Monday, May 30, 2016

Quotant Quotables vol. 41

When your friend is in an awful, abusive relationship — man or woman — and you risk weighing in that their counterpart is a demon, you know the odds are they will jump right back into the fire and then dump you from their life for being honest.


- Doug Stanhope


Johnny Depp Is Being Blackmailed by Amber Heard – Here’s How I Know (Guest Column)


Saturday, May 28, 2016

Negation Aspiration vol. 22

How I used lies about a cartoon to prove history is meaningless on the internet

Negation Aspiration vol. 21

They crawl up the mountain, bare hands on the sharp volcanic rocks. The sun beats down on them. It is a grueling test. The island has a secret that it doesn't want to reveal.
They draw close to the man at the top of the mountain, keeping their guns trained on him. He has no weapon. His body is fragmented like an image in a broken mirror, various pieces floating without connection, the brightness of the sky shining between them, the blood of his insides bright red. His head is like a balloon floating several feet over the rest of him.
‘Hello, America,’ the head calls, breaking into a sickly smile. The whites of the eyes are clustered with red hemorrhages. Sweat rolls down the face.
What you just read is an anonymous Redditor’s reply to an innocent photo of a man posing with his enormous LEGO battleship.

'_9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9' Is Reddit’s New, Terrifying Mystery

Friday, May 27, 2016

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! vol. 77

Is Everything Wrestling?

For a while, it became trendy to insist that the 2016 presidential election, with all its puffed chests and talk of penis size, seemed more like a wrestling pay-per-view event than a dignified clash of political minds. In politics, as in wrestling, the ultimate goal is simply to get the crowd on your side. And like all the best wrestling villains — or “heels” — Donald Trump is a vivacious, magnetic speaker unafraid to be rude to his opponents; there was even a heelish consistency to his style at early debates, when he actively courted conflict with the moderator, Megyn Kelly, and occasionally paused to let the crowds boo him before shouting back over them. (The connection isn’t just implied, either: Trump was inducted to the WWE’s Hall of Fame in 2013, owing to his participation in several story lines over the years.) Ted Cruz’s rhetorical style, with its dramatic pauses, violent indignation and tendency to see every issue as an epic moral battleground, was sometimes reminiscent of great wrestling heels. The way Rick Perry called Trump’s candidacy a “cancer” that “will lead the Republican Party to perdition” before endorsing Trump and offering to serve as his vice president: this was a tacit admission that all his apocalyptic rhetoric was mainly for show. Pure wrestling, in other words.

Monday, May 23, 2016

We Are The Sprocket Holes vol. 229

Elijah Wood claims Hollywood is gripped by a Jimmy Savile style sex abuse scandal

'There are a lot of vipers in this industry, people who only have their own interests in mind,' Wood says