Tuesday, May 21, 2019

12 Pieces of Game of Thrones Content You Might Still Click On?



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:

  1. (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)
  2. GAME OF THRONES RECONSIDERED: We Paid a Harvard Biology Professor Much More Than Was Necessary to Debunk the Myth of Flying, Fire-Breathing Dragons
  3. 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
  4. WATCH THIS 9 MINUTE SUPERCUT OF ALL THE GAME OF THRONES BAD NECK THINGS THAT A SUPERFAN MADE
  5. Game of Thrones Costume Designer Drops Bombshell About Their Snacking Habits (Hint: Chips REALLY Ahoy)
  6. 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)
  7. Cultural Analyst: The Night King Represents Climate Change
  8. Climate Scientist: That’s Bullshit, There’s No Convenient Magic Knife for Climate Change
  9. HBO ACTUALLY PAID US MONEY TO WRITE ABOUT THAT SHOW WHERE ZENDAYA DOES A SHITLOAD OF MOLLY, THEY ARE TOTALLY FUCKED
  10. 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
  11. Game of Thrones King Joffrey Actor Jack Gleeson Poses for Photo With Jaleel White, a.k.a. Steve Urkel
  12. 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)


Do you remember your Facebook password?

Try.

Please.

We’re dying. We’re all dying.

@itisbenjo

Thursday, October 25, 2018

First Time Watching: First Time Hearing Videos

By: Ben Johnson




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.

You should, if you watch YouTubes often, absolutely subscribe to all of the channels where people do this, including Lost In Vegas, King KTF, Joey Reacts, AFRO REACT, QuamaxReacts, DO LEGACY, Got Flava Reacts, TooFunnyTerrell and any others you run into. Unless any of them are bad in a way that I am not willing to research, in which case, don’t.

I will be fine. We’re all going to be fine. (We’re totally totally not going to be fine, but THAT will be fine).

Also, this is the best one I saw:








Saturday, April 14, 2018

DEAR AMTRAK


by: Pete Johnson

Hello,
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.
           

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Adelaide Climbs A Tree: A Review

By: Kelly McClure


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.

@WolfieVibes

Friday, August 5, 2016

Three Good Things: Hats, Walruses, Pillows

By: Ben Johnson

  
Hats

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.

Conclusion: pillows are good.