From the present, we have a film about a struggling artist trying to determine if she has anything of value to say and where she fits in with the larger art community. From the past, it’s a film about falling in love but with some heavily problematic messages and weird stalker-ish, parasocial behavior.
Continue reading “PopCult Podcast – Showing Up/Sleepless in Seattle”
In November 2022, I wrote up some thoughts about learning to understand being a person with autism as an adult. Since then, I’ve jotted down notes and paragraphs from time to time reflecting on it more. Being that 21 June is my birthday, I thought I would share some of these here. I mainly hope that people with autism who find writing down their thoughts difficult may find some connection here. I always appreciate when an author manages to verbalize an idea that has felt incoherent in my own mind for so long.
I am 42. I am three years from the age of my maternal grandfather, who died of a heart attack at age 45. My mother was 12 when he passed. It’s a story I’ve known since I was a child, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that it really started to swim around in my mind. I jokingly celebrated when I turned 34 that I’d outlived Jesus, but this one is a little closer to home. I also add that the average lifespan of autistic males is 39 years old. COVID-19 has also made me think more about my mortality. When I reach age 46, I suppose it will be like having navigated a boat through treacherous waters, not entirely safe now but done with a period of intense potential for harm. Though so many seem to be dealing with grasping mortality poorly, I think I’ve come to a healthy place with it. I have no guarantee of when my life will end.
Continue reading “Autism II”
It’s birthday time for two movie releases from the past. One signaled the weak spots in a mega movie star’s career. The other was the first steps of a comedy star who would dominate the 1980s.
Continue reading “PopCult Podcast – Last Action Hero/Trading Places”If you enjoy the reviews, podcasts, and other content we make here at PopCult Reviews please consider sending a tip of appreciation through our Ko-Fi. Thanks!
Galatea
Written & Designed by S. Kaiya J.
You can purchase this game here.
The Wretched by Chris Bisette has spawned a whole subgenre of solo ttrpgs using that game as its framework. Many provide variations on that base game’s mechanics of dice, playing cards, and block tower. Galatea’s take on these mechanics perfectly fits its premise and tone.
The title references the Greek myth of Pygmalion. In the story Pygmalion, the sculptor carves a statue of a beautiful woman out of ivory. He prays to Aphrodite that she might come to life as he’s fallen in love with the image of her. His wish is granted, and the two marry and live happily ever after. This story has inspired many narratives about artificial life, including the origins of the Wonder Woman character.
Continue reading “Solo Tabletop RPG Review – Galatea”
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
Written by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and Dave Callaham
Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson
In January 2019, I was sitting at home on a weekday due to an unexpected week of snow. By the end of the week, the snow was melting, but there was still ice on the rural backroads, so we were still closed out of precaution. Buses wouldn’t handle these conditions well. I got a text from one of my sisters asking if I wanted to see this new animated Spider-Man movie with her and my nephew. I’d been aware of it but wasn’t chomping at the bit to go see it. However, getting to spend time with her and my nephew was something I always loved to do.
Continue reading “Movie Review – Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”
Whether your family are a quasi-cult of car ninjas, a media empire owning cluster of ghouls, or living in a doublewide on the plains homeschooling via YouTube this episode has what you are looking for.
Continue reading “PopCult Podcast – Fast X/Succession & Barry”If you enjoy the reviews, podcasts, and other content we make here at PopCult Reviews please consider sending a tip of appreciation through our Ko-Fi. Thanks!
Ex Novo (Sharkbomb)
Written & Designed by Martin Nerurkar & Konstantinos Dimopoulos
You can purchase this game here.
Worldbuilding and mapmaking make up many of the solo games I come across on itch.io. It makes sense because these activities are things people already do casually. These games provide formal structures to guide your imagination and create an end product that can stand on its own or be used as a jumping-off point for another solo system or as a setting for a campaign you’re running for others. Ex Novo is one of the more popular and well-known of these types of role-playing “toys.”
Continue reading “Solo Tabletop RPG Review – Ex Novo”
Succession Season Four (HBO)
Written by Jesse Armstrong, Tony Roche, Susan Soon He Stanton, Lucy Prebble, Jon Brown, Ted Cohen, Georgia Pritchett, Will Arbery, and Will Tracy
Directed by Mark Mylod, Becky Martin, Lorene Scafaria, Andrij Parekh, Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini
***Lots of spoilers***
In Michael Parenti’s 1993 book Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, the author goes through each stakeholder in bringing the day’s news to the average American. The most powerful in this hierarchy are the owners of the media conglomerates that own the United States’ newspapers & television stations. While written in the late 1980s and updated in the early 1990s, Parenti does not touch on the coming power of the internet, but we can understand that it, too, is folded into the realm of control of the monied classes. The world as we perceive it, taught in American schools and raised on American media, is a fabrication. The ideology behind these things is not a conspiracy where world leaders sit plotting around a table in a secret headquarters kind.
Continue reading “TV Review – Succession Season Four”
A couple of quirky offbeat films make up our pair for this episode. One tells the story of the rise & fall of the most popular cellphone before the iPhone came along. The second is surreal, dreamlike, unsettling odyssey through suburbia.
Continue reading “PopCult Podcast – BlackBerry/Ham on Rye”
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