Zoom meetings are are a simple fact of life in the pandemic lockdown world. Work meetings, school classrooms, social events. At this point, we’ve all done them. And quite honestly, we’re all sick of them. But as long as we’re trapped in the lockdown world, they’ve just become a reality. But what about jobs that…
Tag: podcast
e154. Can We Cancel Cancel Culture Culture? (or can’t we?)
Every day another celebrity “is cancelled” for any number of problematic reasons. Typically, the celebrity responds by claiming they’ve done nothing wrong and blaming “cancel culture” gone wild. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen not only politicians and actors supposedly cancelled as as well as children’s toys and books. Looking at the news,…
e153. Seeking a Game for the End of the World
Do you remember the before times? The long, long ago. Do you remember a time where you used to have real live friends that you used to be able to do stuff with? Maybe you held a weekly game night where you got together and… well, you mostly probably hung out and drank beer and…
e152. Obviously it’s the WandaVision Show
Somethings are inevitable and predictable. Water is wet, gravity pulls us down, and this show was going to have to talk about WandaVision. That was clear even before the series premiered. However, we didn’t know just how big a cultural phenomenon it would become. Who could have expected while reading the 1982 Bill Mantlo comic…
e142. Deconstructing the Queen’s Gambit
If anything has characterized pop culture in the year 2020, it’s streaming media. From Hamilton to Tiger King, during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the essential elimination of out-of-the-home entertainment, we as a people have been absorbing a great deal of content from our couches through the magic of streaming. This is a world made for…
e141. Ghosts, Spirits, Scrooge and a Merry Marxist Christmas
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is likely the most famous Christmas story ever written. First published 177 years ago, it has been produced as stage plays, adapted into dozens of films and spoofed and parodied countless times on television shows, in comics, and other media. Whether from Disney, The Muppets, Scrooged, the original or somewhere…
e138. Holiday Tradition and Ritual in the Time of COVID
It’s the holiday season. In the United States we just celebrated Thanksgiving, and in the coming weeks that will be followed by Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Years, Pancha Ganapati, Yule, Festivus, Saturnalia, Slackernalia and probably 1000 other winter holidays that get celebrated somewhere around the world. These holidays are often commemorated by coming together with…