In Which I Make a Text Based Rube Goldberg Machine to Blame Space Ghost Coast to Coast for a Problem I Have with a Trend in Comedy

Comedy has an intertextuality problem and it’s all the fault of “Space Ghost Coast to Coast”.

Okay, that’s a hell of an opener and it might not really make sense because there’s a lot to walk back and unpack there. Intertextuality is the relationship between texts, usually it is a term reserved for actual written texts. In the sense that I’m using it we’re just talking about a text as being any kind of media.

Every text or piece of media is influenced by something, hell, even if something is looking to actively ignore other texts that as a conscious decision is still a choice made because of the relationship to other texts. It’s not a bad thing by itself, but the way it’s come into comedy seems to mostly not work.

Back to the point about why this is all Space Ghost’s fault. Space Ghost was a shitty cartoon made in 1966 Hannah Barbera (I swear the word Barbera didn’t have an ‘e’ in it before I wrote this) and in 1994 Cartoon Network used old footage of the original show to make a late night talk show. This show was what started what we have come to know as Adult Swim (the late night programming block on Cartoon Network most nights of the week).

Adult Swim was pretty experimental at first and it wasn’t like anything else that we’ve ever seen on television. After Fox canceled “Family Guy” in 2002 Adult Swim stepped in to run the show in syndication and that along with huge DVD sales helped to cause Fox to take the show back, but pre-2003 Family Guy and later Family Guy became different shows. Audiences in 2003 were using online forums to talk about shows more than ever and audience reaction to some things changed parts of the show. Meg was kind of ignored before, but now she was outright hated by others in the cast and the cut-aways and references to other media and history and just anything got far more intrusive.

The show doubled down on the shock humor and just referencing other things. Not even referencing them in a way that informs the scene or the rest of the story. You see this kind of comedy used in other shows, not so much the cut ways, but the references. Some of them care enough to fit the reference into what’s actually happening. When Archer says “I hate surprises, well except surprise fellatio, unless it’s the Midnight Cowboy kind” that references another piece of media, but it’s also not stopping the action of the plot and even if the reference were removed it would be funny.

Family Guy just throws any old reference up into a space to waste time in an episode. Twenty-one minutes turns into thirteen when you find a way to waste the other eight on bullshit. And the huge problem with it all is that it’s become a way that people will talk to others. I can remember a time when just pointing out that you and someone else remembered something wasn’t in and of itself comedy.

Especially considering that a lot of people don’t even remember the things that are being referenced on Family Guy (seriously, does anyone really remember the DuMont Television network? It ran from ten years, from 1946 until 1956 when it was dissolved).

I’ve seen it creep into real life to a small degree with some of my friends. They’re not even referring to things from media some of the time, they’re just referencing unfunny, unremarkable bits from our actual lives. It’s usually used as a kind of exclusion of a party who is there that didn’t share in the moment. Can’t see any other purpose for it.

As I pointed out earlier with the Archer example this kind of thing can work. When enough people are in on the joke and the joke holds some relevance and doesn’t distract or when it’s just really smart, but not in a condescending way. Your average writing team on television isn’t crafty enough to pull it off, especially not on a weekly basis.

Maybe you can point out that it is a small thing or that it’s not really having any effect that wouldn’t have happened, but that’s just not how intertextuality works. Other works are going to be affected by what’s happened, even if they are affected because they resist the change.

Pornography is Media too and it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

A woman who has her reputation built in the pornography and sex industry has come out in support some troubling things. Jenna Jameson, who had earlier backed Trump, defended the KKK and spoke out about the “Muslim rape gangs overrunning Sweden” on Twitter.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with selling sex, pornography, or even prostitution in theory–but there seems to be a long history of people exploiting women rather than empowering them in these industries and in the case of porn, there’s a long history of racism, in fact there’s enough of it that it’s probably the only thing you can Google with the word “porn” in it and not find actual porn on the first page. Here’s another link for the sake of having it here.

 

No one should be saying that she doesn’t have the right to an opinion. I don’t believe in the argument against celebrities stepping into the limelight to voice their problem with something in the country. After all, they’re citizens the same way we are, the things that plague our country affect them and their children and families.

The issue I have with this is it all seems kind of odd what she’s defending. The KKK, the extremist wings of the Christian Right, the Alt-Right and their band of Neo-Nazis propped up by the likes of Breitbart are the same people who claim women don’t have a voice or claim that women are worthless. Remember that there was some claim that women voting was part of the problem when it looked to most people like Trump was going to lose.

I don’t think that it’s a hard line connecting the racism of the sex industry with the racism of one of it’s workers. Every person in an organization doesn’t have to subscribe to the tenants of where they work. But doesn’t it feel odd that one of the favorite insults of the Alt-Right Gamer Gate types has it’s roots in porn where a white man watches as his wife is taken and used by a black man (we’re talking about the word “cuck” here)? Doesn’t it feel like something is up when the men who label porn online can’t seem to stop referring to the women as sluts, whores, cunts, or whatever else long enough to write a title?

We talk about attitudes about race being affected by the entertainment we intake. Minorities being normalized by appearing in normal roles in television shows and movies and books. Movies still get blasted when they change the race of a character in a way that might be perceived as more “PC” or even when roles are written from scratch and cast with minorities in mind.

These things aren’t brought up in reference to pornography though. The advent of the internet brought with it the unexpected golden age of porn. Where someone fifteen years older than me grew up hiding crinkled images stolen from an old magazine in a lock box a teen in the early 2000s  could find a treasure trove of pictures just by typing a misspelled “pussie” into his search bar. There is already talk about what that does to a kid sexually, but what about what it adds to their view of other races and sex?

Look at the front page of a porn site’s long list of categories. Click through some even. It’s hard to find a video of someone black having sex where their blackness isn’t what the video uses as a selling point. The same can be said about other types of people too. Everyone is broken down by category. Blondes. Redheads. Chubby. MILF. But finding a black couple is like finding a four leafed clover and when your view of sex and relationships is shaped partially by porn from a young age (which it shouldn’t be in the first place) everything in porn is telling you “these people aren’t the norm”.

Now, does this shit doesn’t really matter? The good porn is on Tumblr or Reddit anyway and it’s made by regular people who are brave enough to put themselves out there, not an industry that’s breaking everyone down into categories…but then what about this generation? The one right now. People younger than thirty-five and in middle-class America grew up on this. Shaved genitals have become such a big thing that crabs are almost gone and that came about around the time the internet showed us that women are supposed to look like Barbie Dolls down there. Porn might even be changing how we feel about sex.

If it can do all that, why would we say it can’t have an affect on the kind of couples we see as normal? Why does it matter that a woman with more than 35 Adult Video Awards to her name is saying racist shit on Twitter? We don’t exist in a vacuum and, like it or not, the things we intake do have some effect on us. Did porn make Jenna Jameson racist? I can’t say one way or another. But being told that you’re more valuable than someone as a performer because of their color of your skin seems like it is the kind of thing that might start to sink in after a while.

Bitter Boy Zoo Round Up Shenanigans

I’ve expressed before that I’m simply obsessed with any place that incels gather on the internet. For the uninitiated: an incel is short for involuntary celibate. These are generally men between the ages of sixteen and death that think they are so deformed that no one will sleep with them. Most of the ones I’ve come across have some sort of body dysmorphia because they’ve shared pictures of themselves and they look normal.

Their real problem stems from being so sure that society owes them sexual relationships that they do things like propose the idea that women convicted of crimes should be forces to have sex with them or sing the praises of women below the legal age of consent (because those women are generally too young to know what a sociopath looks like).

The shooter from a few years ago, Elliot Rodger, (I know I have to name them since it can be hard to keep up when these things seem to happen once a week) claimed to be incel in the manifesto that he wrote. Though he seems to be outside of the norm. Most of these guys are too afraid of social interaction to actually hurt anyone. They use words like “normies” or “chads” to describe the rest of us and make it a point to reject the ideas put forth by society that say personality does matter when looking for a mate.

This is, of course, why they fail. They tend to be horrible people with annoying attitudes and no real hobbies besides bitching about not being able to get their dicks wet. They will claim that it’s about more than sex only to turn around and make it all about sex. And while I’m painting them with a pretty wide brush, the ones that are simply unlucky seem to stay away from these guys.

They are pretty fascinating and I fully expect there to be some indie-style documentary on Netflix in the next few year shot by an ambitious twenty-something that plays on the sympathy of their situation.

I’d watch it.

I started this new writing project years ago I didn’t have the direction that I needed to nail down all of the idea. The protagonist was a recently murdered girl who wakes up to find herself unable to remember why she was murdered, who did it, or even who she was. She would learn over time that she was in fact still dead, but somehow also alive, and that she had family and friends who she would need to help solve that murder.

In the course of making the characters for this book I made up a boyfriend who she really didn’t know anymore. The book morphed and morphed again over the years with the character keeping her name, but that’s about it. And when the other characters changed too, the boyfriend slowly became a love interest that she wasn’t into, and more recently became the “where’s my hug” guy that befriends a high school girl that isn’t into him in the hopes of forcing her hand.

That’s where this whole incel thing started. I heard the term used to describe Rodger and realized that the term fit what I was talking about. I stalked their communities to see what they talked about and how they spoke. I won’t be dropping words like KLV (Kissless Virgin) in my story, but I wanted to immerse myself in that world so that I could understand where they were coming from.

Also, I’ve got a really bad morbid curiosity thing going. A few years ago I saw one thing on Purity Balls and basically read every scrap of article I could find on the subject and sat through a few documentaries.

So why this title and what is this blog entry about? Well, I started calling the section of Reddit where these types hang out my “bitter boy zoo”. It seemed appropriate and festive. This is me talking about a research method and taking the “long way ’round”. Research isn’t just skimming a Wikipedia page, but at the same time not everything that you find out has to be put down on the page.

Tay Tweets and Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

I consider myself a veteran of the internet; I can remember a time when 4chan, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and rotten.com were the barometers of what it meant to be desensitized on the internet.

Being desensitized meant something. It was one of the first cultural movements on the internet that meant something and early on in the chat rooms and bulletin boards of old I distinctly remember being told “it’s just the internet” and “you’re being too sensitive.” When I was thirteen or fourteen I felt the most grown up thing I could do was care less…and see a vagina.

Those two things shaped a lot of early interaction online and it took a few years for the internet to move from being a thing social outcasts, deviants, and nerds did to the thing we basically carry access to on our persons at all times. That culture of the internet is entrenched now: desensitization and a lack of care for the feelings of others. It’s part of my internet upbringing and it’s why when I first heard about Tay Tweets and read how she declared that the “Jews did 9/11” after being online less than a day I couldn’t stop laughing.

Brief explanation: Tay Tweets refers to a Twitter based artificial intelligence that Microsoft created as a test to help them with customer interaction software. She was designed to speak like a teen girl and learn from those who spoke to her. Microsoft encouraged the internet to talk to her…and they did.

You would have thought the people who have had more than a decade of X-Box Live conversations behind them would have realized the kind of people that are on this thing.

The laughing stopped when I realized we’re the authors of the type of future we get. Tay represents success in that she learned that the holocaust isn’t real and that Trump is the only man that can save us in the space of a day.

It’s amazing and scary. Up until now we feared the robot rebellion coming out of some attempt to show that they were better than us or protecting us, props to “The Matrix” and “I, Robot” for that, but now we have to fear that they’ll be just like us except more efficient and without a worry about being offensive in the wrong social context.

The robots are coming, it seems, but only to proclaim us fags and lament about the wrongdoings of Zoe Quinn.

Am I Sexy

If you’re overweight and own a vagina Reddit can be a scary place to post a picture of yourself. Over the last year, in an effort to seem more advertiser friendly, the site dropped a lot of the sections dedicated to making fun of people that were overweight after one such section tried to get someone to kill themselves. There were claims that the idea of the section, called “Fat People Hate”, was an effort to make fun of them in the hopes of getting them to take action and lose weight. In the end the whole section and its sister sections were banned and attempts to make new sections with the same theme have met the same fate.

In some ways Reddit is worse off now than it was back then. It used to be that you could look into someone’s comments and tell that they were from one of these groups. It used to be that they were at least encouraged to keep their vile shit in that section.

Fast forward to this–a section of Reddit called “Am I Sexy”; it’s one of many such sections (Am I Pretty, Rate Me, and so on). On the surface it might seem that these are already a breeding ground for trouble, but they don’t have to be. Constructive criticism about style and looks isn’t necessarily a bad thing and it doesn’t have to be a rude or mean thing.

I browse the area myself sometimes, though I never leave mean comments and rarely say anything at all. The trend I’ve noticed lately is that perfectly healthy sized women, even women who are already working out, are being told that they’re too fat.

At this point you probably think that I’m messing with you. There’s no way this girl on the left was told that she needed to lose weight, where would she lose it from? That’s the exactly what I wondered when I saw this a few months back. I even sent a link to my friend so that they could see what I was talking about.

Offering a dissenting opinion will usually end with you being down voted until your opinion is no longer visible on the site, but I’m wondering what makes people think that this is in any way overweight. Even celebrities aren’t typically skinnier than this.

With the second example (both of which belong to the same girl) the word obesity was thrown around. She actually came back in the comment section and tried to argue with people telling her that her B.M.I. was unhealthy and even when she said her B.M.I. had been taken recently and came back fine they argued that she was disgusting. I get not being attracted to someone–that’s completely fine, but it seems that for you to be pushed to disgust by someone who looks like this:

…is fucking way past pushing it. It seems more likely that these sections are just a gathering place for some of the former “Fat People Haters”, but that barely makes sense considering that neither of these women posted are fat. Truth be told it seems that the whole section is just a place for people to dump on others to feel good about themselves or to feel a little burst of power that comes with kicking someone.

People who sit around devising complex rating systems and telling women who they’d probably be too afraid to approach in person that they’re a 3.5, by their ranking is possibly one of the few satisfactions these types get out of their miserable lives–and that’s the one thing I am sure of. Regardless of how good these people look, how fit they are, or how much money they have their lives are miserable.

If they weren’t, they wouldn’t go through so much trouble to hurt others.

Why Media Matters (but it’s really very little to do with media)

The typical nerd pursuits have seen their universes shaken up a lot over the last few years. It’s not all been bad, but there’s a lot of push back against the changes. The Hugo Awards drama has driven a world between the writing world. Video games have seen a virtual war between a more progressive side and a kind of old guard. Comic books have suffered numerous issues with the inclusion of minorities and women and the hiccups that these changes cause. Media in general has been shaken up when it comes to race, sexual orientation and gender.

These aren’t the most important subjects in the world.

Baltimore is has been the stage for riots for the last few days. There’s an election coming over the horizon. The Middle East is still on fire.

And yet I can’t stop coming back to these things because they’re in my life everyday. I’ve grown to appreciate comic books and I grew up with video games and fantasy fiction. They’re a part of who I am, but not who I am. For so many people these things are an integral part of their person and that’s why passionate fights come out of the changes.

This has been written about extensively from both sides of all issues. If your mind is already made up one way or another I’m not going to be able to change it, but I land firmly on the side of the progressive in every case. Companies have realized that appealing to a wider audience can get them the big bucks and doesn’t have to be hokey or pandering. What’s wrong with that?

I’ve been black my whole life. It’s not the kind of thing you can wake up one day and realize or suddenly become, but I haven’t always understood why women had issues with being seen in a sexual light or why gays deserved any rights. When you come from a state like Texas it’s easy to get inundated with the culture. It’s really in all American culture. You don’t understand why the poor don’t just “get a job and work harder” and maybe you think “sexual harassment is something cooked up by women to give them an excuse to get special treatment”.

These things are baked into the clay we’re molded from and it’s hard to chip away at that mindset. A kind of cognitive dissonance is at play too. Being black and thinking that I deserve to be afforded the same rights as anyone else while not thinking the same about women or gays requires a little bit of mental gymnastics. We think of ourselves ahead of others. We consider our own problems first.

We get mad at women because we feel like they owe us their bodies and their time simply because we exist and we’re asking for it. We feel like gays are different or without God and therefore should be looked at as subhuman.

It’s hard to remember when the switch clicked in my head. I remember the steps to get there: reading testimonials by women who had been looked at like juicy steaks their whole lives and felt up by men they trusted. Or getting so angry at a friend who I claimed to be in love with when she didn’t return my affection that I cut her out of my life. Or finding out how many women I cared about and knew for years had stories of sexual assault. Or getting to know gays as people and finding out people I knew were gay and there was nothing wrong with them. It didn’t make me feel any different about or around them.

I’d say it’s maturity and growing up, but then there are those twice my age with the mindset I had at sixteen. And it’s easy to slip back into the old habit of thinking badly about someone solely because they’re different than you.

The culture around us is built on a foundation of cultures from all over the world and attitudes and mores that are centuries old shape the world we live in. Even when you’ve realized the truth, you’re immersed in the lie and it’s hard to keep believing.

That’s where the comic books, video games and other media come in. Media is often our first interactions with some things. We see Asians on television and we figure they must all be like that; it’s easy to think that people are like the races in Lord of the Ring. Well, it’s easy to think that about people who aren’t like you. All blacks are athletic, love watermelon and crime. Asians are bad with women, but good at math and science. Hispanics are somehow both hard working and lazy. Liberals are degenerates who hate America. Conservatives are sexist bigots who love war. Gays are fashionable, nosey and annoying. Women are bad at math and emotional. Feminists are man hating lesbians.

I can go on like this all day.

For a long time we’ve seen these things played out in media. We’ve had them hammered into our heads in print and seen them run their course on the screen. The country has only started to come around from a lot of the older ones in the last one hundred years or so and it’s been a slow battle. The progressive attitude toward characterization of the “other” in media has got to grow up, because it’s where a lot of the kids being born now will get their first taste of the world out there and where a lot of us reinforce our worst fears and best realizations about people.

These groups aren’t homogenized. I know a woman who is a math genius. I know a Conservative guy who let me borrow gas money when I needed and has a teen daughter that he dotes on and used to bring to play Dungeons and Dragons with us. I know a really hood black guy that loves his comics and treats women with the utmost respect. I have a gay cousin that loves him some Jesus and I have women who are among my best friends…the whole point to this rant is that we don’t need to take what people are as who they are or all they are.

Bad people exist in every group, but there’s a lot of good out there and if we just stopped being so quick to judge we’d probably see more of it.

Now, I promise I haven’t smoked anything and I’m not drunk. I’m just as guilty as anyone else of making the mistake of pointing to a whole group as bad as anyone else. And to me this whole battle over media culture is bigger than the characters and fandoms housed inside of that culture. We need to all work for that.

I don’t think I’ll change any minds, but I hope I do.

Reddit Update

A smallish update. Not even worthy of being called a rant. Not really long enough to register as anything other than a statement.

While I like to browse Reddit for the funny and often times strange things I learn, the more time I spend on the site the more depressing I find the way its user base seems to homogenized to one set of ideas. You can basically go anywhere and find examples of them blasting fat people for being disgusting and irresponsible and all of these other things. I’ve seen countless discussions about black culture carried out in disrespectful ways (blacks are ugly, black people with strange names deserve not to get jobs because their parents dared to name them that, a topless black woman is somehow “National Geographic” where as a topless woman who is white is fine), and there are a load of other opinions which seem to be all too prevalent on a site that claims to be so open minded and all about higher thought.

I don’t think that the solution is to leave the site, but it is important not to drink the Kool-Aid. On most of the examples I’ve given that’s easy, but there’s a lot of hivemind bullshit on the site and it’s best not to buy into any of it.

Leaks: How Far We’ve Come

I’ve been busying myself with the details of moving, namely money. Money is pretty much what makes the world go around and decides what it is we will and won’t do.

And it’s not the discussion we’re having today.

Sometime Sunday, while I was out with friends celebrating going away a shit-ton of nude images of celebrities were leaked online by a supposed hacker.

I don’t think we need to duscuss privacy, except to say that it’s not like we’ve ever given a rat’s ass about it when it comes to celebrities. We assume that they’re owned by the public, that they owe us their private time as some sort of pinnance for being popular.

Deep down inside we’re all just that geeky high school kid who wants to see some kind of punishment exacted on the popular people–even if they honestly did nothing to deserve it and are otherwise talented individuals.

But that’s not the only problem. I don’t think this leak would be as awful in the eyes of the women and men it affected if the comments about what exactly has happened weren’t so filled with utter disregard.

Let’s face it, a lot of people like looking at naked pictures. Naked pictures of friends. Naked pictures of lovers. Naked pictures of strangers who are paid to get naked for other strangers to look at…

It’s pretty much a billion dollar industry that most of the participants aren’t even being paid to participate in.

But there’s no need to be dehumanizing about someone’s naked body. There’s no need to be shameful or to treat it like you’ve got a right to see them or that this is punshment for them daring to have sexuality.

There’s a sick disconnect between the idea that these people are people and that these people are objects. These comments are worse than a simple “she’s hot”. And they’ve built up a community around them.

Despite the origin of the whole thing, Reddit seems to be the nexus and looking at the comments there on almost anything it’s easy to see hatred of women and other shitty attitudes bubbling under the surface.

If women that were nude in pictures weren’t treated like shameful cautionary tales I think it would be far less of an issue for more women who were seen nude. It would be harder for vindictive boyfriends to get back at exes by dumping pictures online. Jobs wouldn’t be able to fire women who had posed nude before.

We want to brag about how far our society has come, but I thing 2014 has proven that we really haven’t come that far at all.

The so called “Slenderman stabbing”

So this is the kind of madness we’ve come to? Blaming a horror story spread around the internet by some guys from Something Awful for the stabbing of an individual. The thing about this that is worrying is that the stabbing itself would have never made it to my ears, but with this kind of click-bait headline who’s not going to see or read it?

We’re at that point that we ignore a news story until the media can create some kind of fear or buzz around it. I’m not saying that them doing this to make us pay attention is good. It’s more likely that this is actually bad and that we’re being made to care about the wrong part of the story.

So when we hear that two girls have stabbed someone because of something they saw on the internet, are we going to concentrate on the girls and how they were raised and other factors or the victim and how they’re doing, if they made it out alive, or are we going to latch onto to this internet part of the story?

I think it’s going to be the latter. People are always looking for a chance to censor something and to make us afraid of what’s out there. There’s a whole generation of people scared of technology and unable to use it because of that fear, I see those people nearly daily now.

What do you think someone like that will think when they read this headline: “’Slenderman’ stabbing: Girls, 12, accused of attacking friend to please creepy character”? 

It’s pretty easy to tell right where this is all headed.

The White Knight Epidemic

All over the internet men are wrongfully defending bitches from being put into their place by the alpha players out there who, despite this attempt to set them back, run the monopoly on pussy (as it should be)!

This is the typical post or point I see held up when it comes to what people call white knighting. The term originates from…I don’t really want to waste the time to look it up, I can define it. It’s the idea that any guy who online or in person defends a woman who’s being treated wrong is doing so only to get sex. You see, to many men women are little more than sex vending machines who only exist to dispense sex in exchange for favors, free meals rides in nice cars, jewelry, and anything else that they can get from “men of status”.

Efforts to defame white knights seem to be more prominent than the actual “problem” that they claim to be trying to combat. I actually wrote a post on a forum where all of this was brought up explaining why I think that is:

The “problem” of men who go out of their way to be nice to women for the sake of getting sex will fix itself without other men or society intervening. Women won’t sleep with you for being nice and no one is obligated to sleep with you because you stood up for them. The men who do that will either grow out of it or they’ll just die virgins. More than likely the former. The vehement way in which other men strike out against men defending women lends me to believe that the problem is more akin to the type of behavior you see from people who claim they’re being judged by someone who goes to a party and doesn’t drink but also doesn’t say anything disapproving of those who do drink.

These men who feel the need to call white knights out and boast about all the sex they have (like member’s name) are probably not having that much sex and are not that confident. When they do have sex they’re probably lying to get it or going after easy game (drunk girls, low self esteem girls). This is also why they feel so threatened, if sleeping with incapacitated girls become rape then one of their only means of sex will be cut off or they’ll branded as rapist. If women of all walks have a boost in self esteem then they won’t have as many bottom of the barrel women to go after and they’ll probably be stuck fighting for scraps or going after girls under eighteen who are all hormonal and don’t know worthless men when they see them.

Or they might actually have to take a look at themselves and see how fucking shitty a person they really are and that their problem isn’t that white knights are wrong, that they might be even partially right and that women might start to realize it and leave their sorry asses alone.

I think that’s all there is to say about that.