podcast friday
Jan. 26th, 2024 08:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabby I have been looking forward to this one all week. There are two things you need to know to understand why.
1) Dunking on terrible films and books is my favourite hobby. I used to have a series called Cheatsheet of Freedom (you can probably still find it by searching my tags, though it's ported over from LiveJournal and Photobucket so most of the links and images are dead now). It was about reading and watching horrible things, most of it right-wing in nature, and making fun of it. I cut my teeth on Slacktivist/Fred Clark's fantastic literary and theological takedown of the Left Behind books, which taught me more about media criticism and good writing than any class ever could.
2) The Daily Wire makes movies now. Did you know that? They made a movie called Lady Ballers, which is so awful as a concept that even right-wing movie stars wanted nothing to do with it, and I had considered torrenting it to revive Cheatsheet of Freedom, but as you know Bob, I have very little time these days (and CoF required a minimum of watching each movie I reviewed twice).
Fortunately, Garrison Davis, It Could Happen Here correspondent and Patron Saint of Shitty Movies, watched Lady Ballers so I don't have to. You can listen to it here. Trigger warning for transphobia, obviously. On the episode with Garrison are James (who has an extensive background in sports—it's his main thing), Sophie (who loves basketball), and Robert (who, like me, can correctly identify that LeBron James is a basketball player).
This episode had me cry-laughing. Yes the ideology of this movie is a toxic cesspool but also it's bad in every other possible way and dunking on it put a big smile on my face. There are cameos by the worst possible people. In general it's just a really well done bit of media analysis, but there are also a few other interesting points that can be made about it.
1) It pairs well with Julia Serano's thesis that the root of transphobia is misogyny. This is why TERFism inevitably drifts to fascism rather than allying with feminism.
2) There have been, at various points, fascists who are good writers (Yukio Mishima and F.T. Marinetti spring immediately to mind) and a number of conservatives who are. There are even some conservatives who are capable of being funny, though they are mostly in England, not America. There are, however, no fascists capable of being funny.
3) The Daily Wire is doing a fantasy miniseries and you bet your ass I'm going to torrent at least one episode and subject you to my thoughts on it.
I have a lot of restrictions these days on who I can publicly mock, but this shit is fair game so if you like making fun of bad media, check this episode out.
1) Dunking on terrible films and books is my favourite hobby. I used to have a series called Cheatsheet of Freedom (you can probably still find it by searching my tags, though it's ported over from LiveJournal and Photobucket so most of the links and images are dead now). It was about reading and watching horrible things, most of it right-wing in nature, and making fun of it. I cut my teeth on Slacktivist/Fred Clark's fantastic literary and theological takedown of the Left Behind books, which taught me more about media criticism and good writing than any class ever could.
2) The Daily Wire makes movies now. Did you know that? They made a movie called Lady Ballers, which is so awful as a concept that even right-wing movie stars wanted nothing to do with it, and I had considered torrenting it to revive Cheatsheet of Freedom, but as you know Bob, I have very little time these days (and CoF required a minimum of watching each movie I reviewed twice).
Fortunately, Garrison Davis, It Could Happen Here correspondent and Patron Saint of Shitty Movies, watched Lady Ballers so I don't have to. You can listen to it here. Trigger warning for transphobia, obviously. On the episode with Garrison are James (who has an extensive background in sports—it's his main thing), Sophie (who loves basketball), and Robert (who, like me, can correctly identify that LeBron James is a basketball player).
This episode had me cry-laughing. Yes the ideology of this movie is a toxic cesspool but also it's bad in every other possible way and dunking on it put a big smile on my face. There are cameos by the worst possible people. In general it's just a really well done bit of media analysis, but there are also a few other interesting points that can be made about it.
1) It pairs well with Julia Serano's thesis that the root of transphobia is misogyny. This is why TERFism inevitably drifts to fascism rather than allying with feminism.
2) There have been, at various points, fascists who are good writers (Yukio Mishima and F.T. Marinetti spring immediately to mind) and a number of conservatives who are. There are even some conservatives who are capable of being funny, though they are mostly in England, not America. There are, however, no fascists capable of being funny.
3) The Daily Wire is doing a fantasy miniseries and you bet your ass I'm going to torrent at least one episode and subject you to my thoughts on it.
I have a lot of restrictions these days on who I can publicly mock, but this shit is fair game so if you like making fun of bad media, check this episode out.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-26 04:55 pm (UTC)googles
goggles
closes the tab with extreme force
no subject
Date: 2024-01-26 04:58 pm (UTC)I have a lot of restrictions these days on who I can publicly mock
Date: 2024-01-26 09:25 pm (UTC)loooooooongboi answer
Date: 2024-01-26 09:45 pm (UTC)Tame example the first: I sometimes have to do ARC reviews of small press or self-published books. Some of them suck shit. In a fair world, I could criticize these honestly, because there is no work that should be above criticism. This is a capitalist world, though, and if you dunk on a small press or self-pubbed author, you're shitting on their livelihood. So I mostly don't unless the work is truly offensive in some way.
Tame example the second: On the other end of the spectrum, there are some authors who are very popular and who I think absolutely suck shit. Sanderson is a good example—I read one of his books to see what the fuss was about and it was worse than the aforementioned self-pub stuff. I absolutely dunked on him when I wrote about the book here, but I wouldn't dare under my real name because he has a legion of fans who would then take the opportunity to dunk on me, and I'm not a bestselling author. Even friends of mine have been pretty offended by my comments. There are certain other authors who, even though they make enough money from their writing to live on, Google their own names on a regular basis. This is a problem because 1) a real person can say the mean thing you said about them on the internet and 2) legions of fans who will then mob you.
I also don't know everything. I probably repeated some silly furry jokes 20 years ago before I knew any furries that would have been offensive, because that was how the internet was, and that's shitty because every furry I've met has been rad and also we wouldn't even have an internet without them. In my defence I also repeated silly furry jokes that furries made themselves so like. Everything is a learning process.
Accordingly I have to be careful to always punch up, assume that the person is going to see my dunk, and try to restrict my dunks to people who I'd tell off to their faces. In terms of who's imposing it, me? The social-media induced flattening between famous people and not-famous people? The mortifying fear of actually causing harm? Things like that.
Note that this is a terrible burden for me because I have a mouth on me and say mean things that are funny as a matter of course.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-27 01:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-27 01:21 am (UTC)