July 6, 2022
[sweet guitar riff]
Jack De Sena is a former child actor and the voice of Sokka and the Dragon Prince. His longtime pal Chris W. Smith is a former Blue Man, actor/writer/producer, and juggler. Together they make Chris & Jack [trailer, Twitter, previously], a criminally underrated YouTube channel featuring high-concept, high-production value comedy sketches shot through with smartly-written metahumor and and a surprising amount of wholesome emotional honesty. Highlights:
Groundhog Daying -
Wormhole Monocle -
The White Room -
The Secret Weakness -
Abduction and Mind Wipe -
Body Swap -
Secret Alien -
Your Whole Life is a TV Show -
The Art of the Heist -
The Moments Between the Montage -
If Scrooge Slept In -
What's My Line? -
Deja Vu -
The epic struggle to invent a new holiday: July Sixth Park -
15-minute magnum opus MOVIES IN SPACE, about a cultural-exchange astronaut who is catapulted by host Eepgarg into the strange, strange world of alien movie production. [more inside]
trolley mashup
Pierre Senges, l'auteur de la baleine
In Melville’s epic, the singular Ahab goes on a hunt for an equally singular creature; in Senges’s satire, everything and everyone has become generic: an act, an imitation, a copy, a plagiarism—a sequel. from The Hunted by Ryan Ruby [Archive] [more inside]
I am the ONLY candidate bold enough to stand up to the Luciferian Cabal
The Georgia Guidestones are a weird monument in Northeast Georgia built in 1980 with an odd ecofascist message. Nobody knows who exactly paid to have them built. Recently, they have been a target of QAnoners, including minor, unsuccessful candidate for Georgia Governor, Kandiss Taylor, who called them "Satanic" and included plans to destroy them in her platform. Last night, someone attempted to blow them up, with partial success. [more inside]
"But I knew that all was not ok."
Maria Farrell wrote advice for people struggling with the effects of COVID in 2020: "Indefinitely Ill – Post-Covid Fatigue: What to do when your body forgets how to be well": "Because I really only want to say one thing; if you have had Covid-19 (tested or not), and are getting to a month or two on and still feel like you’ve been hit by a bus, please, for the love of God, rest." Last year Ada Palmer wrote about a bad turn in her health: "the resistance to taking medical leave came from me, not others." This month Farrell wrote "Settling in for the long haul": "about how I habituated, or; how I learnt to lie not with my words but my deeds" when coping with life-changing chronic illness. [more inside]
“I’m telling you, it was a little cursed, the movie.” – Jodie Foster
‘No Aliens, No Spaceships, No Invasion of Earth’ is an oral history of the making Robert Zemeckis’ 1997 film Contact. Come for the description of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan having the idea, stay for the many different ways people attempt to describe how hot Matthew McConaughey was, bail out emotionally at the end when David Morse talks about meeting a father and daughter after the film had been released.
The danger of a Christian Nationalist takeover of the United States
Christian Nationalists have declared war on most of their fellow US citizens. Archive.org link.
The repealing of the Constitutional right to an abortion has emboldened a powerful coalition of far-right conservatives in the United States to consider a wave of draconian measures designed to turn the American experiment into a theocracy with its roots in Puritanism and the most extreme Biblical literalism of the present day.
The repealing of the Constitutional right to an abortion has emboldened a powerful coalition of far-right conservatives in the United States to consider a wave of draconian measures designed to turn the American experiment into a theocracy with its roots in Puritanism and the most extreme Biblical literalism of the present day.
Trolley problems got you down?
Take a high-energy ride along the MBTA Green Line's new Union Square service, through the central subway and out the "E" Branch! How about a relaxing inbound trip through the woods along the "D" Branch? Or a magical journey through the snow on the "B" Branch or the Mattapan Trolley? [more inside]
Get up, Stand up, Don't Give Up the Fight
As musicians express their dissatisfaction with the US Supreme Court ruling on abortion, and the recontextualizing of protest songs, the important question has become "Which song would you fist fight the (US) Supreme Court to in a White Castle parking lot?"
There was good money to be made as a beatnik
Stewart Brand is not a scientist. He’s not an artist, an engineer, or a programmer. Nor is he much of a writer or editor, though as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, that’s what he’s best known for. Brand, 83, is a huckster—one of the great hucksters in a time and place full of them. [more inside]
Absurd Trolley Problems (aka, A Chidi-stomachache-generator)
A series of increasingly absurd philosophical quandaries. CW: a lot of cartoon death by trolley, moral philosophy. What's the trolley problem? Who's Chidi? previously previouslier still more previously
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