Literate Machine
How a show about poverty that can't ever bare to really show poverty illustrates everything we've been blind to. Support the show on Patreon and get early access to episodes and exclusive Authors Notes: Text of the show and more information about other formats it's available can be found at: Bibliography and Further Reading - Hallmark Christmas movie montage sourced from: - On the urban-rural divide of Christmas movies: - The TV Tropes entry for From New York to Nowhere: - Ted Koppel's piece on The Andy Griffith Show and modern politics: - A fascinating video that explains how the ethos...
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Is the Paw Patrol an unintentional conservative utopia? What can the show tell us about how the political spectrum views the police, its purpose, and its funding.
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How Aaron Sorkin whitewashes the story of hippy activism, and how the hippy activists whitewashed themselves.
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Pete Doctor takes us into the meaning of life, but is there something hollow at its center of it?
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What does it mean to be an artist?
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In the 1990s, Myst and Doom fought a war for the soul of video games. Myst sold almost twice as many copies. Within ten years, the entire industry had remodeled itself around Doom. Special call out to Jimmy Maher at the Digital Antiquarian (https://filfre.net) whose work covering early video games I drew on extensively.
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For 30 years, Dave Sim engaged in one of the most remarkable ongoing artistic endeavors ever while he gradually lost his mind.
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How the worms ate into my brain, what I did and did not understand about The Wall, and what it tells us about the rise of the Alt-Right.
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What do you do when the authorities have been compromised?
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Let’s go back in time, to before the Pandemic, and see if we can change anything.
info_outlinePete Doctor takes us into the meaning of life, but is there something hollow at its center of it?
Bibliography and Further Reading
* Soul using uncomfortable blackface: https://noripatterson.medium.com/whats-wrong-with-pixar-s-soul-animation-racism-and-blackface-c9a7709cd50f
* Tom Wolfe’s famous article declaring the 70s the “me decade”: https://nymag.com/news/features/45938/
* Google ngram of the term “personal fulfillment” showing its rise in the 1960s and 70s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Personal+fulfillment&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CPersonal%20fulfillment%3B%2Cc0
* How distrust of the government among the hippy movement led them to embrace Libertarianism: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/may/19/comment
* Twitter thread about conservative’s using the “money can’t buy happiness” slogan to say we don’t need to raise the minimum wage: https://twitter.com/cons_owned/status/1372670714201968641/photo/1