Category Archives: internet

Even Trolling Should Have Its Limits

books, cyberbullying, entertainment, internet, rhetoric Leave a comment

‘Twilight’ Stars Rally Around Fans After Death At Comic-Con (mtv.com) I haven’t read any of the Twilight books or seen any of the movies, and I don’t have any plans to. My tastes don’t tend to go towards young adult literature to start with — I only read Harry Potter this past spring — and I’ve never been much for vampire stories (except for Poppy Z. Brite’s early work). However, I’ve been directed to several entries on Reasoning With Vampires since its launch, and from the passages…

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On “Perverts” and the Brony/Pegasister Community

entertainment, glbt, internet, politics, rhetoric, sex, stompity, television, transgender, videogames Leave a comment

Michael J. Nelson: “BronyCon 2012 drew a crowd of 4000 chubby little pervs.” (twitter.com) When I first started writing here about getting into Dance Dance Revolution in late 2003, I got a lot of negative e-mails. Most of them were along the lines of, “You can’t go play video games where kids are present because you’re one of them queers and everyone will be right to assume that you’re just going there to try to ‘pick up’ or kidnap kids for whatever perverted things people like…

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The Machine

internet, music, politics, sex, teaching, television Leave a comment

Joseph Campbell: “[The modern myth] has to do with machines …” (Interview with Publishers Weekly excerpted in Facebook post from the Joseph Campbell Foundation) Anything having to do with Star Wars is kind of timely with news of George Lucas preparing to step down at LucasFilm still fresh in our minds. As I read Campbell’s words I had to wonder what he would have made of the Borg from the Star Trek universe, which were more contemporary for people of my generation. With Darth Vader the threat of…

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The Myth of Schadenfreude

internet, politics, rhetoric Leave a comment

Sometimes you just latch onto something you hear somewhere like you don’t latch onto anything else. It’s like your intuition, instead of giving you a friendly nudge to let you know, “Hey, this might be useful,” screams at you, “You must remember this for the rest of your life.” One of those moments for me came when Dennis Miller had his HBO show during the Clinton years (you know, back when he was still funny), and he devoted one of his rants to the topic…

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Buried in Tape

dvds, entertainment, internet, music, personal, television Leave a comment

In 1997 I used my tax refund to get satellite television.  Although I was much more of a television-watcher back then, the one primary reason I wanted to get satellite television when I did was so I could catch a documentary on Björk that was going to air on Bravo, which my local cable company didn’t carry back then.  Back when we were closer to having 500 cable channels than the 5,000 or so we have today, a documentary on Björk airing in the United…

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