I missed a really fun day yesterday. I was working until 11:30 pm and mostly off social media and now all the good memes have been taken. However, if you have some really good ones, please feel free to share them with me in the comments.

For today's recommendation, you have all stuck by me in my angst (and I haven't even posted all of it. Yegawds.) so you deserve a treat. That treat is Jamie Loftus' new podcast, Sixteenth Minute. It's about internet main characters, but also about so much more.

Take the latest episode, "boston slide cop." It's about a viral video where a cop does a really bad job going down a slide in a children's playground. The video is very funny, by the way. But it's also about the relationship between class, race, and policing in Boston, the specific horrors perpetrated by the Boston Police Department, and most interesting to me, the process of filing a Freedom of Information Request to discover something that the state doesn't want you to know. In this case, our heroine is trying to discover the identity of Boston Slide Cop. Spoiler: she fails, but she finds all sorts of other fascinating information along the way, including names and receipts. It's a funny episode but also weirdly empowering and educational. Jamie's deadpan delivery absolutely makes it. All of the episodes have been great so far, by the way.

Also, because I have nowhere else to talk about this, have a bonus YouTube video:





People don't believe this about me but I don't have a great brain for philosophy. I need it explained to me like a dumby dumb-dumb. I tend to bounce off highly specialized vocabulary and abstract concepts and I have no formal training in philosophy, so while I am interested in philosophy, I often don't know what the fuck philosophers are talking about.

Judith Butler is an interesting example because they largely deal in areas that I know nothing about, but when they talk about politics, I agree with them. So whatever philosophical framework they are using lands them in the same place as me, blundering through life on vibes. So this video is very helpful in terms of breaking down what they are actually saying and translating it for the plebes.

But there is also a thread that runs through out about Abigail's own journey as a trans woman, where she has a dialogue with her past self (played by an actor friend). It's incredibly moving. I may have cried a little. Don't judge me.

Turns out the livestream of the Kermit vs. Oscar debate is $15, because there is nothing that Peterson will not shamelessly monetize. Obviously I am unwilling to pay this (I wouldn't be if the filthy lucre wasn't going to Peterson, but it is). Unless something changes in the next hour and a half, I hope you're all cool with me holding off on the lulzy commentary until tomorrow when the torrents go up and watching the season finale of Disco instead.

cannibal_x posted this intriguing Zizek lecture, "Why Only an Atheist Can Be a True Christian," and I just got around to watching it last night. Zizek takes his typical meandering approach to discussing morality with and without religion, how atheists secretly believe, and how religious people secretly don't. He also discusses secular liberal hedonism and provides the best fix-it for Life is Beautiful.

Skip the first few minutes if you know anything about Zizek. He doesn't actually start talking until around the seven-minute mark, wherein he describes how he was symbolically castrated by the moderator.


[Closed-captioning is reportedly available, but I can't get it to work. Ah, this resolution is turning out to be harder than I thought to keep.]

A madman thinks he's a piece of grain. He's finally cured; now he knows he's human. He's freed from the psychiatric asylum—then quickly comes running back. He tells his psychiatrist: "I met a chicken. I was afraid that the chicken would eat me."

The psychiatrist says, "But now you know that you are not a grain of corn. You are human."

He says, "Yes, I know it, but does the chicken know it?"

On a slightly shallower note, on a whim, I searched Zizek's name on TVTropes. There he is, under Real Life examples of Memetic Badass. ("He lives on a giant whiteboard in the centre of time and space.") The usual warnings apply to clicking that link.

[Poll #1472313]

(You can watch it here or read the transcript here.)

zingerella: So, library porn.
sabotabby: That's really hot.

sabotabby mutters some comment about shagging in Robarts.


Robarts Library, a.k.a. Fort Book.

zingerella looks faintly nauseated.

sabotabby: I just heard it was a good place to pick up. [Sullenly] I wouldn't know. They never let me on the good floors.
zingerella: It's more like the setting for a BDSM porn. It's got cages, shit lighting...
sabotabby: Oppressive concrete...
zingerella: Can't you just see some dominatrix stalking through the stacks, forcing chinless grad students to read Kant?
sabotabby: You realize if I just post the words "Kant" and "porn" in my LJ I'll get about a million comments, don't you?
zingerella: There's just something about sex in a building that looks like a giant turkey. [Pause.] And I don't even like porn.

[Pause.]

sabotabby: Well, neither do I!

Has anyone ever written a thesis applying Foucault's analysis of the Panopticon to the design of open-concept offices?