The Computer Room

Jack makes a return and we discuss Tumblr fake stories, from Oppa Homeless Style to my personal favorite, Aceggots. What’s the difference between a fake story and just lying online? Is there a meaningful difference? Is there a taxonomy of fake posts? Beyond that, are there discrete genres?

Theme: Are You Satisfied? by Marina 
Produced by: Will Kraus

Paul Town makes a return to my Substack for a conversation about writing books, moving to Southeast Asia, and killing time.

Produced by: Will Kraus

From the “glow up” to main character syndrome, the internet loves a hero (or an anti-hero, as it were). I sat down with my dear friend Meme Analysis to talk about what this has to do with the persistent popularity of MGMT’s “Little Dark Age” on TikTok.

Theme: Little Dark Age by MGMT

Today, Emmet Penney, host of ex.haust, and I discussed PKD's sprawling 1972 speech from the Vancouver Science Fiction Convention, "The Android and the Human."

I encourage everyone read the whole piece here, but it's perhaps best summed up by the following quote:

Our environment — and I mean our man-made world of machines, artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components — all of this is in fact beginning more and more to possess what the earnest psychologists fear the primitive sees in his environment: animation. In a very real sense our environment is becoming alive, or at least quasi-alive, and in ways specifically and fundamentally analogous to ourselves...Rather than learning about ourselves by studying our constructs, perhaps we should make the attempt to comprehend what our constructs are up to by looking into what we ourselves are up to.

Read it here.

I have a backlog of episodes! This is a conversation I did with Atoosa Rubenstein, former Editor-in-Chief of Seventeen and founder of Cosmogirl, in January (😅) about her career, the importance of content curation, and her wonderful Substack, Atoosa Unedited. 

P.S. I was sick once again while recording and there are a lot of "I'm sick" noises in this episode. I'm sorry. 

As a paying subscriber, you receive this episode a week early. Last week’s episode with Oliver Bateman is now available for free. Listen here:

In this episode, I talk to the YouTube personality and fellow Fan Studies guy, Peter Coffin about YouTube, politics, and the mob.

Check out Peter across the web:

* Twitter

* YouTube

And his books here:

* Cancel Culture: Mob Justice or a Society of Subscriptions?

* Custom Reality and You

Subscribe and receive early podcast releases, a link to my Discord community, movie nights, the advice column, and a whole lot about Internet culture.

As a paying subscriber, you receive this episode a week early. Last week’s episode with Rayne Fisher-Quann is now available for free. Listen here:

Subscribe and receive early podcast releases, a link to my Discord community, movie nights, the advice column, and a whole lot about Internet culture.

This was a wide-ranging conversation.

We talked about mIRC WWE roleplays, the impossibility of creating a genealogy of bodybuilding forums, how trolling evolved from Usenet to Twitter, the implicit similarities between Aimee Terese and Zyzz, why the digital invites body modification, male-to-male transsexuals, and the lasting impact of what the New York Times’ once dubbed “the male fitness internet.”

Read Oliver’s EXCELLENT reporting here:

* The Unheard History of Bodybuilding Forums

* Steroid Solidarity

* Muscle, Smoke, Mirrors

* The Life of a Jacked Guy in 2019

* How Selfies and Social Media Shaped Modern Bodybuilding

* What Could Have Triggered Elliot Rodger?

Books referenced:

* Muscle, Smoke, and Mirrors by Randy Roach

* Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder by Sam Fussell

I would love to do a follow-up episode dedicated just on Zyzz. If anyone has any guest recommendations, feel free to let me know below.

I needed to add something below the line to create the paywall. Here’s more Zyzz. Your dollars will go to me getting a fake tan today.

And for the heterosexual gentlemen, of which there are maybe two, here’s Paris Hilton in a bikini: