Tag Archives: internet

The Golden Age of Television

Readers, yours truly is not a person to whom the positives of life are either readily apparent or understandable, but even someone as typically dour as myself can’t deny that we are living in a golden age of television.

It’s he-re…

Now I’m not exactly sure why that is- why all of a sudden we seem to have had a jump in quality and quantity of shows. An age thing, perhaps? I considered that, but as much as we could argue that we simply prefer the television shows we had when we were in our 20s, I don’t think my generation is alone in the belief that TV is better now than it was a decade ago.

Let’s try to figure out why. Continue reading

Fame Day: #SafeSearchWrapUp

Alright, so this week’s Fame Day is going to be short, sweet, and, as you’ve probably noticed, late. I unintentionally got behind work last night, and then this morning I had a pseudo-interview. Anyway, the point is that cartoon porn should be kept under wraps.

Really rough segues aside, Bronies Against BullShit is responsible for today’s subject. To be perfectly fair, they’re worthy of a good amount of praise in general, if only because the tumblr exists as “a platform for the brony fandom to call out, critique, support, and analyze itself in a constructive and mature manner.” Places like that need to exist all over the internet, because introspection is a sorely needed quantity around here.

The page, which I’m going to shorten to BAB, and those behind it are the ones who came up with #SafeSearchWrapUp.

famesafesearchwrapup

 
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A Culture War Report: Facebooking the Ukrainian Protests

Social media is rapidly becoming a common source of news. For me personally, scrolling through my Facebook news feed can feel like picking up the morning paper. I have get to read comics, funny/uplifting stories, and even, these past few weeks in particular, serious current events as they happen. Sometimes, when you’re lucky, networking through Facebook can mean you might be able to contact friends who are near where those events are occurring and get a perspective you might not hear in the news. I had that opportunity with the Ukraine Protests and will be sharing with you the experiences that were shared with me.

Around mid-February I started to see this video circulating on Facebook:

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Comcast and Net Neutrality

Few things have revolutionized culture and the modern world as much as the internet has. Art, music, news, gaming, communications, shopping, education, politics- there’s not a single aspect of life that hasn’t been affected by it. Heck, revolutions that no one imagined could take place have, and the innovations and collaboration the internet has given a platform to have largely been credited as playing an integral role.

Not of course, to say that praise doesn’t ultimately go to the bravery of the Egyptian, Kurdish, and Syrian protestors…

At no other time has humanity had such access to democratic development and discussion.

And that time may now in fact be passing, with the striking down of net neutrality by a D.C. circuit court in January of this year.

FCC Head/Lobbyist Extraordinaire Tom Wheeler, who just doesn’t give a ****.

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Culture War Correspondence: Censorship

GORDON: Welcome readers to another exciting installment of [redacted], where we’ll be discussing [censored] and the [undisclosed] surrounding it.
(The topic for today is censorship, for anyone baffled by my oh-so-subtle clues…)

While this topic did originate out of Evan’s and my discussion of TV (how we’d deal with rating systems, more specifically) we HAVE touched on this topic before, with our previous discussion of the UK’s automatic porn-block for British ISPs.

KAT: You guys actually included a poll in your discussion on television, too. And while there weren’t an awful lot of votes, it seems like more readers agreed with censoring daytime TV to some degree.

Censorship is such a big topic, but before we go much further, let me get an idea of how you feel about it. Is censorship ever okay? If so when? And by who?

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Why I Do Need Feminism

This was originally going to be another of “Gordon’s Happy Monday Posts”. I’m serious, folks, I had every intention of changing things up from my typical doom-and-gloom tone and write about some lighthearted stuff for once. That’s what I had prepared for today. Wouldn’t ya know it, but I just happened to come across something so supremely stupid that I felt compelled to switch out our happy, uplifting topic with another message from the trenches.

What was that thing that robbed you all of sunshine and butterflies and stuff? It was a series of pictures on imgur of young women holding up signs explaining why they “didn’t need feminism” [sourced from the Who Needs Feminism? tumblr -Ed.]. I scrolled down, hoping at first they’d just be sarcastic comments, and once it became clear that wasn’t happening, that they’d really just be criticisms of the most off-the-wall elements of the movement (as Kat mentioned in her post this past Saturday).

They were not.

So let me take this time to go through ’em, picture by picture, and explain just how wrong they are. Continue reading