21 Important, Undeniable, Inalienable Truths About This Whole "Captain America Is A Nazi" Thing

1. It's just a comic book.
2. But it's also a comic book with symbolic meaning and a high cultural value.
3. People have a right to feel however the hell they want about a thing.
4. People have no right to tell other people to feel or not feel a certain way about a thing.
5. Even though you have that right to be upset about something, that is not an excuse or intrinsic justification for hyperbole, melodrama, or other such absurd overreactive expressions.
6. Not everyone who feels upset is necessarily overreacting.
7. Not everyone who doesn't feel upset is a cold, heartless Nazi.
8. Reactionary thinkpiece culture is out of control.
9. The Manufactured Internet Outrage Machine is a serious problem.
10. But again, to reiterate: individuals are allowed to be upset, or outraged, or experience any other emotion about anything, ever.
11. They also have a right to express those feelings, in person or online.
12. Having or not having certain feelings about an issue does not give anyone a reason to act like a judgmental shithead.
13. Yes, retroactively changing established comic book continuity to make Captain America into a Nazi sleeper agent is absolutely a marketing ploy. (And yes, you fell for it.)
14. Just because something is a marketing plot, does not mean that is inherently good or bad.
15. It's also part 1 of an ongoing storyline — which is part of 75 years of the single, never-ending storyline that is Big Two comic book continuity. Which means that it's not the full story, and in fact was likely written to intentionally deceive and draw readers back in to buy the next issue, because that's what cliffhangers do.
16. It might even end up being a good story? Who knows? (My money's on "probably not," but YMMV)
17. Yes, it will inevitably be undone/erased/re-retconned out of the story.
18. That's neither a defense nor condemnation of this particular piece of storytelling. It's just the nature of corporate superhero comics.
19. Every single Captain America comic book ever written still exists, and will still exist, and can still be enjoyed in isolation, and is not nullified or ruined by this revelation.
20. This is all due in part to the fact that capitalism has enabled corporations to control and profit off of folklore and cultural iconography in the way that would make Hercules and Gilgamesh cry.
21. Perhaps most importantly: the Cosmic Cube, which was responsible for returning Steve Rogers to his youthful appearance, was already being tampered with by the Red Skull, who has previously used the Cube to alter reality and history and, oh yeah, switch bodies with Captain America, which means that Captain America was kind of already a Nazi already, and that's not even counting the time when the Red Skull lived in the cloned body of Steve Rogers for years, or any of the numerous times he infiltrated high-level positions in the U.S. government, or the fact that he currently has incomparable telepathic abilities due to being in possession of Professor X's brain and could have easily implanted a memory or something else BECAUSE COMICS.

Up and Worthy!

Just a friendly update to show what I've been up to at Upworthy these past few weeks! First, here's a slideshow put together by our Editorial Director, Amy O'Leary, detailing the company's new direction (with the secondary purpose of pre-emptively shutting down your rehashed "clickbait" jokes*):

July 8 2015 — Upworthy Editorial Vision from UpworthyAdmin

While I'm still getting the hang of the system (it's only been 2 weeks, after all), I've still got a few stories up that you can check out. It's mostly coincidence that the subject matter is, well, pretty much right my alley. I've also got a new Official Writer-y Facebook page, if you want to follow all of my (strictly professional!) adventures.

*I can say that, because my own jokes are half the reason that I work there now.

One Last Time — "Net Neutrality: What It Is & Why You Should Care"

Man, aren't you going to be so happy when I stop posting / talking / raving like a lunatic about this, and it's all become a distant memory of the past, a "haha remember that time the government was going to allow corporations to control the flow of information access and eviscerate our society hahaha good times bro" rather than becoming a HORRIBLE DYSTOPIAN FUTURE that we'll all be forced to live in?

Of course you are. Today's your last chance to make your voice heard before Congress and the FCC reconvene to discuss these newly proposed laws. So if you haven't taken action yet, this is my final attempt to make you change your mind. After that, it's back to your regularly scheduled programming of indie rock bands and geek culture and other obscurely insular humors. That is, unless I find another political topic du jour to be passionately outraged about. Who, me? Nahhh...

And in case you somehow missed this, to sum it all up...

Here's the Official List of "Twitter Slang" According To The FBI

First government defense organizations tried to create an algorithm to understand sarcasm on the Internet. Now, in their latest effort to understand what all the kids are talking about with their hip lingo, the FBI has compiled an official (83 page!) list of "Twitter slang", presumably so that they can more easily spy on outraged high schoolers on Tumblr or something, which in turn will help fight terrorism, because America.

You know, because apparently that Quantico education doesn't teach you that the number "2" sometimes stands in for "to," "too," or occasionally, "two."

And so without any further ado, here is the FBI's complete list of Twitter Slang, including things like "PMFJIB" (Pardon me for jumping in, but) and "KMT" (Kiss my teeth) which are apparently real things that people on the Internet have actually said.

FBI Twitter List

An Open Letter From Netflix To Verizon For Being A Bunch Of Greedy Selfish Jerks

Continuing in the modern trend of a never-ending ouroboros of open-letters, Netflix has sent a letter to Verizon about the letter that Verizon sent to Netflix about how angry Verizon was that Netflix was throwing them under the bus and blatantly telling its customers that their slow-loading time were entirely the fault of Verizon trying to throttle internet service (an unfortunate omen of the world to come, should Net Neutrality laws be abolished).

Net Neutrality Explained With Basic Stick Figures & Do You Finally Understand Why This Is So Serious?!

Did I mention that Comcast has already begun discussing plans to limit your monthly broadband consumption and thereby prevent you from binge-watching your favorite shows on NetFlix? 

If you're still having trouble extrapolating how this is an issue, consider how the narrative structure of television continued to evolve in response to our binge-watching habits. I'm not here to argue about whether or not we are in a "Golden Age of Television" right now, but the truth is, there are some pretty great shows out there right now. The expectations have been raised, as narratives have matured. Networks used to prefer sitcoms because they had a better chance of new viewers tuning in every week. But now, with fewer people relying on live broadcasts, it's changed the way that we interact with TV shows — with episode pacing, exposition, serialized story details, etc. — and those narrative structures will continue to change and evolve. 

That is, unless Comcast starts to restrict your bandwidth. Then you only get about 70 hours of streaming a month (to say nothing of the data limitations on the millions of other things you do online). If that happens, then not only are you less inclined to catch up on Game of Thrones, but the writing team on Game of Thrones is less inclined to create quality programming that really grabs you because it's more financially viable for them to create formulaic programming instead, thereby returning television to the "Boob Tube" status of audio-visual brainwashing instead of a compelling narrative medium*.

Perhaps more importantly, if Comcast begins to limit streaming, then my fiance won't be able to listen to Law & Order: SVU every night in order to get to sleep. "How does Law & Order: SVU help her get to sleep," you ask, "when it's a procedural show that mostly consists of horrible, horrible acts of rape and violence against women? Doesn't that give her nightmares or something?" Look, man, I don't understand it either. But if it works for her, then it works me, and then everyone wins, because everyone gets to sleep, so everyone's happy.

DO YOU HEAR THAT, FCC?! MAINTAIN NET NEUTRALITY SO THAT I CAN SLEEP IN PEACE.

*Some folks would argue that binge-watching is in fact the greatest accomplishment of television brainwashing, and that we're even worse off now than we were before. They're probably right, and I'm probably so brainwashed at this point that I'm blindly spouting propaganda in their favor. Oh well. 

#StopTheSlowLane

As far as I'm concerned, Net Neutrality is up there with Climate Change under "Hugely Important Issues That Are Actual Realities (and of which most sane and educated acknowledge the existence) and We Seriously Need To Act On Them Immediately Before Our Entire Society Goes Kablooey," especially now that cable lobbyists have strong-armed Congress into signing a new anti-Net Neutrality petition as of yesterday.

This is a weird catch-22, because I care a lot about Net Neutrality and want to do my part to make more people aware of it. So I tried installing one of these widgets from StopTheSlowLane.com onto my website here, which essentially replicate what would be the experience of using a website (like mine) if the proposed Internet laws were to be passed. The only problem was, it made the experience of using the site incredibly obnoxious — which is precisely why it's an important issue to be aware of, but also would probably deter the little bits of traffic I'm already barely getting on this site. See what I mean by a catch-22? Luckily, there's the GIF up there (linked to more information about Net Neutrality) which gives an impression of A World Without Net Neutrality without actually slowing the load time on my site. In the end, I don't have enough faithful readers (hi everyone!) that there'd be any real benefit to show for giving you all such a frustrating on my website.

Here's Cory Doctorow, one of my Clarion mentors, explaining it in a recent column for The Guardian:

Anyway. That's all for today. Fight the power, save the Internet.

T3h Intarnetz! Jokez!

A quick, fun piece on Five By Five Hundred today, fleshing out a tweet I made the other day that I thought was particularly clever. That's all!

"The Book of Sega Genesis" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

Sh!t Daleks Say

I know, I know, this meme is awful, it never ends, and I can't stand it. Sure, there are a few gems in there, but ugh, make it stop. ...so really by doing this, I know that I'm just perpetuating the issue, but I see it more as my chance to EX-TER-MI-NATE the meme, if you will. Plus, c'mon — admit it — this is funny. And I'm awesome.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxLQl5ns-Do&w=485&h=276]

@Horse_Ebooks: The Poem

@Horse_Ebooks is my latest obsession — a spam twitter account intended to sell, well, eBooks about horses. In order to avoid being deleted as a spambot (which it is), @Horse_Books tweets random phrases from...well, no one's really sure. Sometimes, they're obviously sample lines from various eBooks about horses. Other times, they're just little two-word bursts, like "Boating Needs." If you're really lucky, you'll get some brilliant non sequitur gem like "I wanted to make love to her like a crazed weasel. I wanted to make love to her like I was an aroused teenage boy at a drive" (Yes, that was not a complete sentence, which makes the whole thing that much more ridiculous and hilarious) I decided to scroll through the @Horse_Ebooks twitter account and compile a list of some of my favorite 2-7 word incomplete sentence tweets, and turn them into a Found Poem. It was a lot harder than I expected it to be — some of those tweets make no sense whatsoever, and are even hard to string into some kind of narrative logic — but I'm pretty entertained by the results, and I hope that you are too!

"The Collapse of the Theory of Evolution in 50 Themes" (yes, that title is a complete tweet in and of itself) at FiveByFiveHundred.com

(also — follow @Horse_Ebooks, because it's hilarious, and I guarantee it will brighten up your day)

The Internet: Giving Dumb People a Voice

I've been pretty busy writing and re-writing the script for my play True Believers, but we finally start rehearsals today, so I'm pretty excited. Despite the gazillion pages I've written/re-written in the past week, I knew I still had a post due for Five By Five Hundred. I ended up scouring the YouTube comments on my Glenn Beck/J. Jonah Jameson mash-up video and found one particularly vocal YouTube commenter, whose breathtaking (really, the only word for it) diatribe I mined to create the "Found Poem" that makes up this week's entry. It does go a little past the 500 word mark — but it was all too priceless to pass up.

Oh, and also, please note: I did no copyediting of any kind. I simply add line breaks for emphasis. The text appears entirely [sic].

I'd like to take a moment to thank the Internet for providing ignorance with a voice, and providing the rest of us with a constant stream of entertainment and funny pictures of animals.

"Race and the Internet, According to Hogwild19100" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

New Review: "My Favorite Band Does Not Exist," by Robert T. Jeschonek

I've posted a book review of My Favorite Band Does Not Exist, by Robert T. Jeschonek, over on DailyGenoshan.com, where I'm now a regular contributor. You can read the full review here. Recommended if you enjoy fantasy novels, rock bands, the internet, metafiction, and liking bands before they even exist just so you can tell your friends that you liked them first.* *You like all of these things.