Joined once more by Sam of @Thank_u_for_shopping (Follow her here: instagram.com/thank_u_for_shopping )

Our 5th entry in our ‘type of guy’ series. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype and real life people are examined in our breakdown of Elizabethtown, The Garden State, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 500 Days of Summer, and Scott Pilgrim vs the World.

We break the criticism into 2 different qualities that we have opposing feelings about:

We finally turn to the Boy Who Lived and discuss the Harry Potter franchise. The shuffle bois remind you of the plot of each of these seven books/films before turning to discuss their strength (their whimsical world) and their many weaknesses (their politics, their flat characters, and their complete lack of internal logic). En route, they discuss neoliberalism, racism, the corporatization of media, and most the lasting legacy of these books, turning an entire generation of people annoying.

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Btw, the term ‘Foreverism’ I mentioned is from Grafton Tanner

The shuffle boys return to the world of geopolitics and war with an episode on the most traumatic and devastating war of the 2000s: The War on Christmas. This label was a shorthand for a frenzy within the right wing media sphere around the changing nature of the Christmas season in the 2000s. They walk through some primary source documents from the time, explain what exactly this conflict was all about, and have some fun at the expense of the most histrionic voices of the right. Then they zoom out and look at the long history of debates around and changes to the celebration of Christmas all the way back to Early Modern Europe.

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This history of Christmas book we read from in the 2nd half is Stephen Nissenbaum’s The Battle for Christmas.

I hear you mon. The Shuffle Bois turn to the world of Azeroth (and their own adolescences, before their Twink Death) to discuss the one MMORPG to rule them all, World of Warcraft. They trace Blizzard’s rise from a much beloved small private company that went on a historic, untouchable, Michael-Jordan-in-the-90s-style run to a much maligned publicly traded subsidiary of another videogame company. En route, they discuss the mechanics of World of Warcraft, the corporate ownership structures that do and don’t lead to good art, and the massive real world impacts of World of Warcraft in the 2000s.

If you want to skip the non-2000s stuff, the theme song starts at 9:30.

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The Rob Pardo interview I mentioned was the Designer Notes podcast here: https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/rob-pardo-part-1

The Shuffle Bois are joined by Luke Savage (https://x.com/LukewSavage) and Will Sloan (https://x.com/WillSloanEsq) of Michael and Us to describe the least important election of the 2000s. Given that it’s the only presidential election since 1988 in which a Republican candidate won the popular vote, much of the episode is dedicated to the analysis of the greatest Democratic Party loser of all time, John Kerry. They also discuss some of the big themes of the election, including the pathetic loserdom of John Kerry, the rehashing of 1960s counter culture, and the increasing role of the internet in presidential campaigning.

Huge shoutout to our guests for coming on the pod! Be sure to check out Michael and Us (https://x.com/MichaelandUs) and Important Cinema Club (https://x.com/ImprtCinemaClub)!

Huge shoutout to @treedar_ on IG for this listener topic suggestion! . Thank you to all those who send us recs. Remember Shuffle turns to the internet folklore and its most famous cultural output: the Slendered man. We talk about his origins, characteristics and some academic reviews of folkloric study.

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Liminal Space example: https://museemagazine.com/features/2020/11/1/the-cult-following-of-liminal-space

NOTE: SORRY--we had to reupload this one due to an audio issue--THIS EPISODE IS OLD AND FROM Jan 2024. Remember Shuffle turns to the world of stand-up comedy and does a career retrospective of Dane Cook and and album review of his 2005 album “Retaliation.” En route, they break down the internal logic of his jokes, catalogue Dane Cook’s style, and do a bit of armchair psychiatry on everyone’s favourite man-child comedian.

Remember Shuffle turns to the greatest dystopian film of the 2000s, and quite possibly the best film of the decade as a whole: Alfonso Cuarón's “Children of Men.” This text is so abundant that the Shuffle Bois do their first ever seven-theme episode. En route, they discuss hope and despair, capitalist realism, the treatment of migrants, the place of art in our world, what makes this film so prescient, as well as great in its own historical moment.

Our apologies to Alfonso "The Fonz" Cuarón if we mispronounced his name.

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Are you not entertained? Old faithful, we return once more to The Sopranos to discuss the best cultural product of the decade. The season has 4 serialized plots, as well as a unifying theme that ties each episode together. We do a specific deep dive on Fortunate Son, Amour Fou (A Mofo), and one of the top 2 episodes of The Sopranos: UNIVERSITY. 

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Howdy pardners. Remember Shuffle returns to the beautiful mind of Elizabeth Gilbert to discuss Coyote Ugly - the original article that inspired the film, the rather forgettable 2000 Rom Com adaptation, and the actual business that still exists in New York City. The shuffle boys also interview a subject matter expert (@LukeRallo on IG) in tabletop dancing. En route through the history of these kinds of bars, they also discuss 2000s era lipstick feminism, gentrification, and the carnivalesque.

Our SF SketchFest Application video: https://youtu.be/xK_Quj5gCbY

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