The title I should have given my latest review at PopMatters. Thanks for reading!

Thanks for reading.

I reviewed two standalone DVD episodes in order to explain the subtleties of what makes MST3K tick. (And that weird semicolon? Wasn’t there when I submitted, I promise)

In general, I think the internet has a lot to offer. So much so, that many of its downsides go unperceived by its users. Along with its stereotypical criticisms, such as the abundance of spam, pornography, and hackers, I’ve already addressed an unfortunate cultural downside of the internet. Not to become the Debbie Downer of the internet, I’ve got another bone to pick with our Skynet overlord.

I was born in 1989 to a hardware engineer father and a videogame testing mother, and as such, our family was always on the cusp of technology. My brothers and I had the privilege of utilizing every OS as they were released. Our young minds were filled with DOS directories that became something like passwords to our favorite 8-bit games. We were even playing LAN games over our house’s network before “multiplayer” was even a standard game type. Okay, so we were a little young for Usenet and the Atari, but for the most part, we matured right alongside the computer.

This parallel becomes exceptionally relevant in the early 2000s. The internet became a commonplace fixture only a few years previous, and was in a period of commercialization. One of the ways devised to make money on the internet is what we would now call “social networks,” though at the time were known simply as “blogs”. To say that my middle school years were dominated by online interaction would be an understatement. To the children of Silicon Valley families, the internet replaced many of the downsides of awkward middle school interactions. Popularity was determined by how many comments received on angsty blog posts, and “going out” referred less to dates and more to the amount of time spent chatting on AIM.

The fencing team is the butt of every joke at Notre Dame. We were consistently good, which means lots of notoriety, yet foreign, and thus unapologetically antagonistic to the sports-savvy student body. Well, after three long years of underachievement and disappointment, and four years of hard work and under appreciation, we won the National Championship. While on paper this performance by four fencing team members (well, three and a manager) was good-natured, I thought of it more as a well-deserved victory lap in front of all the other teams at ND, saying “laugh if you like, but we did it.”

Here’s our cover of The Black Keys’s “Tighten Up,” in front of ‘em all.

(Note: the levels are off. We weren’t the sound guys. Sorry)

Just a little post about why Adventure Time works so well. Thanks for reading.

I just finished my last photo album from my 5 weeks in Europe. They are hosted on G+/Picasa for your viewing pleasure:

1. Baltic Hardcore (Dover, Copenhagen, Waremunde, Tallinn, St. Petersberg, Stockholm, Helsinki)

2. Space Invaders in Switzerland (Calais, Dunkirk, Paris, Geneva, Lausanne, Bern, Zermatt)

3. Spaghetti for Breakfast (Milan, Rome, Sicily, Athens, Ephesus, Venice) 

It took a while to get them all uploaded, edited, and captioned, but all the positive feedback I’ve received thus far has made the work worth it. If you would like to use, have a copy, or have any feedback for any of these photos, just leave a comment or send me an e-mail. Enjoy.

After a long vacation, I’m back reviewing DVDs for PopMatters. Thanks for reading.

I’ve been out of school for a bunch of days - the exact number does not matter. Unsurprisingly, I’ve fallen into a bit of a funk. A funk you would expect someone standing at the crossroads of infinite potential directions. Even less helpful is a five week trip I leave for in several days, which is delaying any serious efforts of preparing to take my first enormous steps into my own.

I double-majored in Music and Television, because I feel that the impact of the popular arts is massive, and universal. What I didn’t anticipate is the uselessness of becoming an expert in fields dominated by opinion. “Experts do not deserve any special role in declaring what is known. Knowledge is now democratically determined, as it should be.”(1) The result is a man with ambition and knowledge lost in a crowd of prolific amateurs. 

I am seeking employment in various fields, all of which are exclusive. A degree might help once you get a foot through the door, but the door itself is elusive. This is, as anyone could have described, the Plight of the Popular Arts Graduate.

           A television show that is effectively complex is still a rarity, despite the medium’s relatively recent maturity into respectability. One of these anomalies is Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a serial dramedy by esteemed television auteur Aaron Sorkin. The short-lived show managed to critically address a large spectrum of serial themes throughout, the most important of which being the precarious topic of religion. What may have originally started as deliberate conflicting characterization of the two protagonists in love eventually developed into an unapologetic indictment of American politics, media, and society.

          Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip uses religion to various degrees in order to illustrate Sorkin’s point about its role in American culture. At its simplest level, the way in which Matt Albie and Harriet Hayes are depicted shows how Sorkin views the personalities of the people they represent. One level deeper, the way in which the media inside Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip portrays issues revolving around religion shows how Sorkin views his medium’s treatment of the same conflicts he attempts to address. As a result of these two levels of religious depiction and discourse, it becomes clear that Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is not a comedy about a sketch show, but a drama about the battlefield that America’s largest culture war is being waged on.