After eight crazy seasons, the wild ride of Game of Thrones is finally over. But is it?
Yes, it is.
But maybe you still want to click on Game of Thrones content. Please.
We, the internet, are utterly bereft of ideas, and can no longer publish anything without the say so of a venture capitalist.
Would you click on these? If so or if not, please share this post on social media. Even (especially) Facebook.
Please log on to Facebook for the first time in 18 months and post this article to nobody. Please.
Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones content.
Here:
(Spoilers Ahead) NEW GAME OF THRONES THEORY EMERGES: What if all the Starks were actually ghosts the whole time, like Bruce Willis in the movie ‘Sixth Sense’? (Spoiler Note: Spoiler is a ‘Sixth Sense’ Spoiler)
GAME OF THRONES RECONSIDERED: We Paid a Harvard Biology Professor Much More Than Was Necessary to Debunk the Myth of Flying, Fire-Breathing Dragons
WATCH A FREELANCE BLOGGER BEG FOR DEATH As They Rank the Top 531 Game of Thrones Characters that Only Appeared in the TV Show But Not the Books And Vice Versa
WATCH THIS 9 MINUTE SUPERCUT OF ALL THE GAME OF THRONES BAD NECK THINGS THAT A SUPERFAN MADE
Game of Thrones Costume Designer Drops Bombshell About Their Snacking Habits (Hint: Chips REALLY Ahoy)
A REAL LIFE GAME OF THRONES? Deranged Game of Thrones Fans Drag George R. R. Martin Out of His Cave and Berate Him Vociferously Until He Resolves the Hot Pie Storyline (Yes, He Lives in a Cave)
Cultural Analyst: The Night King Represents Climate Change
Climate Scientist: That’s Bullshit, There’s No Convenient Magic Knife for Climate Change
HBO ACTUALLY PAID US MONEY TO WRITE ABOUT THAT SHOW WHERE ZENDAYA DOES A SHITLOAD OF MOLLY, THEY ARE TOTALLY FUCKED
We Went to the Storage Locker Where They’re Keeping All the Game of Thrones Swords, and Got Extremely Bored After Two Minutes Because They Wouldn’t Let Us Play With or Touch the Swords
Game of Thrones King Joffrey Actor Jack Gleeson Poses for Photo With Jaleel White, a.k.a. Steve Urkel
THAT’S JUST WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO THINK: Did the Entire Game of Thrones Cast & Crew Reunite to Shoot Ultra-Secret Season 9? (No, But Maybe? But No)
A thing people like to do on YouTube is watch videos of people who just got a cochlear implant reacting to hearing for the first time in their
lives. Their eyes light up. They can’t believe it. They burst into tears. They
are usually sitting in a chair in one of the extremely nondescript rooms where medical
hearing tests are conducted.
These videos are weird but compelling and touching and
emotional, and also highly controversial within the deaf community. Not to be a
killjoy, but if you’re a hearing person who loves watching those videos, maybe
read up about why plenty of people in the deaf community don’t feel the same
way.
I’m not here to talk about those videos.
I’m here to talk about a newer, different kind of YouTube video.
It’s a video with a name like “FIRST TIME HEARING reaction video blah blah blah,”
and the “blah blah blah” part is an extremely popular song.
These videos are of a person, generally a person of color,
watching and listening to a YouTube video of a song, generally of a piece of
music created by white people, like Tool’s “Sober,” or Def Leppard’s “Pour Some
Sugar On Me,” or Disturbed’s rendition of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of
Silence.”
Definitely all of
the people who are uploading these videos, for whatever reason, have reacted to
Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
What is the typical arc of this newer YouTube video
subgenre?
Usually the person in the video asks you to subscribe to
their YouTube channel, puts on the video of the song, nods along to it, and then
talks about what they’ve heard.
Quamax really took the meat pipe from the Tool "Sober" video in stride
These YouTubers pretty much always find something to like about the
song they just heard, even if it was utterly (and here I am being subjective) irredeemable,
like a live rendition of Staind’s “Open Your Eyes.” They never go, “Oh wait yeah,
come to think of it, I have totally heard this song in every grocery store and
CVS I’ve ever been in during the last 30 years.”
Here’s what I like about these videos:
They are funny. Not in a “ha ha ha” way, but in
that way where something is mostly odd but also kind of funny.
These are people, again, usually people of
color, who are entrepreneurially working to monetize the YouTube platform by
doing a very specific thing that takes advantage of people’s apparently limitless
appetite both for cochlear impact reaction videos and fairly dumb but
nonetheless extremely popular rock songs made by white people.
Kind of soothing?
Nobody’s getting hurt.
Actually, it would be funny if these videos somehow
got more popular than both cochlear implant videos and every available non-reaction
version of Pink Floyd’s “Learning to Fly.”
It would be great if it’s all bullshit and these
people have totally heard these songs before.
It’s fun to imagine the kind of person who’d care
whether a stranger has previously heard “Bohemian Rhapsody,” or be emotionally invested
in video proof of that no longer being the case.
Here’s what I don’t like about these videos:
They aren’t as funny as they could be. They’re
mostly pretty boring. I am sensing there's not yet a master of the young genre. I could be wrong.
There’s some very complicated cultural forces at
work in a phenomenon when you’re a white person like me, and you’re watching a
person of color listen to Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” for what they profess is the
first time, and then when they’re done they don’t really do anything except agree
that it’s pretty good, and that’s a thing you like to watch?
Like people subscribe to this?
Are the people in these videos kind of… are they…
basically renting their brains out to the highest bidder, and that bidder is an
algorithm?
Is that what the internet is now?
Is this a bad racial thing, am I bad for thinking that, or am I completely stupid for even being confused about the relative racial goodness or badness of this phenomenon?
Maybe people are getting hurt. Maybe this yet
another symptom of a deep, pervasive, unrecoverable hurt — of the slow heat
death of human dignity. Of people entertaining machines because it’s worth more
money than entertaining people. Maybe everybody’s very hurt, and everything’s
broken, and we’re all living in some weird bonus time where everything’s
recognizable but seemingly detached, like a normal-seeming world on the other side
of permanent kaleidoscope glasses.
Why are there people in
the world who haven’t heard all 9 minutes of “Bohemian Rhapsody” enough times, and who,
through YouTube comments suggestions, also want to make sure everybody else has
listened to it, all the way through, at least once?
What if these videos are 100% genuine, and exposing
a whole new generation of excited fans to mediocre rock, and I have to feel
alienated by prevailing tastes all over again, well into my 40’s?
Final analysis:
I am now nearly a decade older than most people
who are alive in the world. I don’t know about YouTube things. I don’t really want to know about YouTube
things.
This is probably fine. It’s probably not even
really a thing. I probably don’t even know how to tell the difference between a
thing and a non-thing anymore.
I’m curious as to why a train near your train yard in
Northeast DC blew its loud whistle for such a long time at around 9pm last
night. It was annoying, sure, but I’m more just genuinely curious as to why it
would seem necessary to blow a train’s whistle for what felt like 20 minutes
straight. I’m sure it was more like 2-3 minutes, but still, it was a long time
and the reasoning escapes me.I could
hear the train moving, and not particularly slowly. If it was to warn
someone/thing that was on the tracks that a train was coming, it really seems
like in that amount of time the train would have just hit it already. If a
train hits a deer is it Amtrak policy to lay on the whistle for an hour to
honor its noble life being sacrificed to the destructive whims mankind calls
progress? That would be kind of nice actually, I could live with that. There
aren’t that many deer in my neighborhood.
My wife
went on Nextdoor, which, don’t ever go on Nextdoor. It’s like if you took all
the bad parts of Facebook and turned up the volume on them and also now all of
your annoying Facebook friends live in your actual neighborhood and have the
potential to murder you. So she found out sometimes train whistles happen in
our neighborhood and people think it’s because kids cut holes in the chain link
fence and go on the train tracks. That sounds about right, but still, why so
long? I think what probably happened is there was someone on the tracks so the conductor
blew the whistle, the person got off the tracks and the train passed them just
fine, but then the conductor kept right on whistling out of indignation at
someone being on the tracks. Is that what this was? Is there an angry conductor
out there holding whistles down too long for their own emotional benefit? Every
time an Amtrak employee hears a long train whistle do they sigh and think “damn
it Howard, give it a fucking rest”? If so could you tell Howard to knock it
off?
Anyway, how
are you, person that has to read Amtrak customer questions? I feel like I’m
talking about me a lot. I bet you get a lot of dumb questions on here. I bet it
gets pretty grating to type the same polite translation of ‘google it yourself’
and ‘no, you entitled prick’ over and over again. I hope this one is at least
entertaining you a little bit. I guess what I’m trying to say is, my wife
hasn’t been feeling well recently. She’ll be ok, it will be fine and
everything, but right now she’s pretty miserable and it’s been tough. The train
didn’t even bother her all that much, although she was trying to sleep. It’s
more just like, I dunno, it’s a new thing I’m dealing with and maybe it’s
throwing me off kilter just enough so that I feel like I want to write a long
thing to a poor Amtrak employee expressing my very specific curiosity about
train physics.
Maybe it
was to cover for a really long fart?
Or maybe it
wasn’t anger at someone being on the tracks, but a different anger. Maybe the
conductor just checked the mini fridge and saw that someone ate their lunch. It
could have just been a mean tweet. It could have been an article ranking the
best episodes of Lost that the conductor REALLY did not agree with. Do
conductors ever whistle out of love? Why not?
In
conclusion, I found the coffee you served on the train I took 4 years ago to be
adequate. I wonder about the most bland, unnecessary comment you’ve ever gotten
in your work. Have you ever read something like “My friend worked for Amtrak 13
years ago and liked it ok” and been like WHAT IN THE WORLD MOTIVATED THIS? I’m
sorry for yelling, you don’t have to answer that. You don’t have to answer any
of this really, you deserve better. There are lots of different trains that
come through my neighborhood- it probably wasn’t even an Amtrak come to think
of it. Well anyway, keep your head up. I’m rooting for you.
When it was brought to my attention on www.facebook.com that the father of Ben Johnson (aka, Bozo #1), whose name is Ed Johnson, wrote a book, and that book was available for purchase on the website www.amazon.com, I bought it immediately. It did not matter that I had never personally met Mr. Johnson, nor did it matter that the book in question was about a little girl (whom I'd also never met) experiencing some difficulty climbing a tree. I personally felt the need to buy this book to answer the following questions that the existence of the book sprouted in my mind:
1) So, you can just willy nilly write a book and then be like "here, internet, sell this?"
2) Print media is alive and well? (That's not really a question I had, I just wanted to write those words.)
3) So, what's the deal with this tree?
I am a strange friend in that I will literally never call you on the phone or hang out with you, but if your family member writes a book, you can bet that I will be one of the first to buy it. That's how I show that I care. With money. And the internet.
When Adelaide Climbs A Tree arrived in the mail I was pleased to notice that the book was magazine in nature (zine-esque, if you will.) The cover has a glossy slickness to it, and the paper has literally no odor. These are just some surface findings I thought people would like to know.
Doing my best to avoid any spoilers, the crux of the tale is this: A girl named Adelaide is like "I think I'll climb this tree." No known reason for this activity is given, which lends a lot to the book's mystique. She climbs the tree, un-climbs the tree, and then her life unravels into a Kafka-esque voyage of the inner psyche that results in her, and her grandfather's (Mr. Johnson) understanding that "there is no tree."
I would recommend this book to anyone who is yearning to find out a little bit more about themselves.
Often referred to by their common social media platform
naming convention #hats, real life hats are a useful and good thing to have on
your head from time to time.
Here is a partial list of some things hats do:
1. Cover your head.
2. Shield your head and various head parts such as face and
neck and general head from things such as sunlight and rain and non-rain
precipitation and other kinds of light, and like dripping things that are not rain.
3. Like if you have glasses but not prescription sunglasses
you can wear a hat and that way you don’t really have to get prescription
sunglasses because you can still se okay even if it’s bright out because you
have a nice dark hat brim shielding your face.
4. Extend your head area’s intrinsic personal space bubble
several additional inches in all directions, allowing you to navigate crowds
and social situations with an extra cushion of ease and comfort.
5. Can look good on your head.
6. Can become an easy way for friends and loved ones to
recognize you from afar if you wear a particular hat often.
7. Make your head warmer than it would ordinarily be.
In conclusion: hats are good.
Walruses
Are walruses good?
If you watch a nature show about walruses, you might come to
the conclusion that walruses are, in fact, not good. They can be jerks to each
other. Big male walruses especially can seem like assholes. They fight a whole
lot, like they do that walrus-fighting thing where they whomp their big ugly
walrus necks against each other until one walrus relents, and then dating wise it’s
probably some kind of ugly walrus-copulation-as-reward-for-successful-walrus-fighting
scene. I bet it's not too much fun to be an actual walrus.
I just Googled what do walruses eat and it turns out they
eat clams. Man, they must eat a ton of clams. Walruses are huge. They must have
like 50 pounds of clam meat in them at all times. No wonder walruses mostly
just lie around and go “bork bork bork bork!” all day. That’s probably about all I would do if
I ate enough clams to be 4,000 pounds.
And it’s not like, hey, don’t eat so many clams. I got no
beef with a walrus just eating as many clams as they want. Eating clams is a
pretty chill move as far as being a predator goes.
I think walruses are good because they look like walruses,
and if it weren’t for walruses there wouldn’t be anything in the world that
looked like that. You’d see Wilford Brimley or Stan Van Gundy and you’d think
“man, that guy looks so much like a…” and then there would not be a word at the
end of that thought. But thanks to walruses, there is! Walrus guys need walruses to exist in order for the rest of us to see a walrusy-looking guy and say, "oh man, that guy looks like an exact walrus."
Conclusion: walruses are good.
Pillows
For my money there’s just nothing better to put your head on
than a pillow when it comes to sleeping or resting.
