Call For Comments: Why are award shows dumb?

From Mav: Last year, after our Oscars prediction show — and the actual Oscars — Hannah vowed that she never wanted to do another Oscars show again. So I was kinda surprised when she asked me about doing one this year. However, she did have a different direction she wanted to go. Instead of predicting…

e83. 🙂Watching Watchmen😵

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is one of the most popular comic books of all time. It’s been a best seller since 1987, has never been out of print, has been adapted into a movie, video games, role playing game, and now a TV show. It is the single comic book appearing on Time…

e80. Irredeemable Characters

A couple of weeks ago, the movie Joker was released in cinemas. Even before it came out, there was a lot of concern and controversy about the tone and message behind the movie. Would it cause violence from copycats? Isn’t it just an homage to classic films by Martin Scorsese? Are those problematic too? Does…

Call for Comments: The Legacy of Jane Austen

From Hannah: This show is, according to our tagline, “a podcast about pop culture discussion, critique and analysis with beer and swearing.” For the most part, in our seventy-something episodes, we’ve covered contemporary topics because that’s what most of us think popular culture is. As the co-host whose main periods of study are the eighteenth…

e72. The Power of Cuteness

The Internet has two main purposes: porn and cute kittens. The reason people like porn is obvious… or if it isn’t… well, that’s a different show. But what about the kittens? Why do we like cute things so much? The answer isn’t as obvious as it seems. For one thing, cute is a complicated concept.…

e67. Social Justice Knitting

Back on June 23rd, a popular social network took a bold stance for 2019. It decided to pronounce all support of Donald Trump or his #MAGA campaign as hate speech and white supremacy and for the most part ban it from its network. Oddly enough the network that took this stance wasn’t Facebook or Twitter.…

Call for Comments: Cuteness and Popular Culture

From Hannah: Happily, we’re surrounded by cute things. The Internet was made for photos of cute cats (and hedgehogs and teacup pigs and otters and puppies and wombats and foxes and all the baby animals). How many people have gone to see films like How to Train Your Dragon or The Secret Life of Pets…

e66. Fandom Petitions

Did you hear about the thing a couple weeks ago where a Christian watchdog group started a petition to get Netflix to cancel the hit TV show Good Omens because Satan, and the internet got a big huge laugh out of it, because that show isn’t even on Netflix? That was great. But it makes…

e64. Mythologizing the Founders

If you live in the United States of America, then this week is Independence Day, the day when we patriotically celebrate the greatest of our heritage and the foresight of a bunch of men in breeches, wigs and stockings decided to create a perfect nation… or so we tell ourselves. If you live outside the…

e63. Transcosplaphobia

Recently Mav witnessed something fascinating on the internet. Several men arguing on a message over whether or not it was appropriate to post transgender cosplay models and to talk about how sexy they were. This isn’t to say that they were concerned about whether or not it was appropriate to objectify women — that was…