EPISODE 1011: CONGRATULATIONS, YOU'RE A PIRATE
And/or Blowing Up the Whole World and Calling it My Birthday.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi and welcome to Pop Culture Spirit Wow, the Substack that’s trying real hard to stay positive and/or wants to just post this over and over.
It’s been a week, hasn’t it?! Let’s get into it.
THE WOWND UP
Big news from Hollywood: That game that your kids/grandkids/siblings’ kids were playing ten years ago that didn’t really seem like a game, they just run around digging and building stuff is suddenly a hit movie. Starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa, A Minecraft Movie made a killing at the box office in its first weekend, and also critics seem to like it, and also it seems to be an actually loving look at the game rather than an empty cash grab filled with creatures that somehow really really wrong and were almost certainly made by AI, and so hurray for them and for giving us something kind of sweet to think about.
Also trying to raise our expectations and/or hopes for reality, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker did a 25-hour-and-5-minute speech on the Senate floor Monday and Tuesday, which was not a filibuster, as NPR has pointed out, because a filibuster requires a bill or nomination that the speech was trying to foil, whereas Booker was offering a scream into the void that is reality right now. As reported, Booker’s speech length wipes out the record previously held by Strom Thurmond, who filibustered to protest the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 for 24 hours and 18 minutes.
For me, though, the question was why there wasn’t another senator there to take over for another 24 hours and another and another, because it sure would have been nice to have someone ready to respond to current president and noted crazy person’s announcement of a new round of world-wide tariffs which have wiped $6 trillion out of the stock market in a couple days, and included tariffs on penguins, on a French island that has had almost no commerce with the U.S. in the last ten years, on Madagascar because the U.S. has a trade deficit with Madagascar on vanilla, which is because vanilla is a product the U.S. actually doesn’t produce, and on a South Indian Ocean island only occupied by U.S. and U.K. soldiers.
Meanwhile, you’ve heard of Wikipedia, but do you know Wikienigma? It’s a new site filled with questions to which there are no answers, like what exactly passes the flu from one person to the next, or who invented the idea of pedals as a way of powering bikes, or the origins of the word Abracadabra, or whether there’s any way out of this insanity. It’s pretty neat.
THIS IS YOUR WEEKLY REMINDER TO READ THE VERGE
When I’m working on my newsletter and/or processing A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT WHITE LOTUS AND REALITY, I like to wander around the internets and see what I stumble on. And this week, over and over what I found was that the Verge is doing some really great work right now. For instance, there’s this article about just how false “views” are as an internet metric, which includes maybe my favorite paragraph of the week and/or description of reality right now:
Instagram, TikTok, and as of last week YouTube Shorts all count a view the second a video starts playing. This is objectively absurd. Every time you scroll, even if you immediately jump to the next video, the platform logs that you watched the video the same as if you’d seen the whole thing. That’s like saying, if you’re in a Best Buy and you walk past a TV playing Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, you’ve now technically seen Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Congratulations, you’re a pirate.
(Netflix says you viewed a movie if you watched 2 minutes. Meta says you’ve viewed a video if it plays, despite the fact that videos autoplay when you scroll past, unless you turn that off, which I highly recommend. QED Views are trash and mean nothing.)
Or there’s this very cool article explaining why wi-fi keeps working and not requiring constant updates despite improvements in hardware and software, which actually seems like it might be a great guide for how to do things right in business and tech, and/or I’m terrified that it’s being reported because this administration is intent on destroying everything that is good. Literally.
Even the titles of their articles are stimulating, like this piece, which is actually about a game called Your House, and yet if you have a house, I think you should take it literally and see what happens.
I DON’T KNOW IF I AMOR FATI BUT I DEFINITELY HAVE A FATI IN MIND FOR THIS GOVERNMENT THAT I WOULD AMOR
THAT’S FILI TO YOU, BUSTER
NPR’s article on filibusters also included the fun fact that a filibuster was originally a word used to describe “an unauthorized military adventurer,” specifically an American who goes to a foreign country (usually Latin America) to join in their wars. It comes from the Spanish word “filibustero,” which means “freebooter or pirate,” although according to Merriam-Webster, filibustero comes from the French flibustier, which itself comes from the English freebooter, i.e. free booty or free loot (which itself comes from the Dutch vrijbuiter, aka plunderer), and yes, none of that seems remotely connected to our current usage.
Apparently the bridge is an idea from the 1850s that politicians who give long speeches to disrupt votes were “disrupting government business,” a la the old-timey filibustero in Latin America and/or the current U.S. administration.
ANDOR S2 PREP: THREE THINGS
Andor, the Rogue One-prequel TV series that we all went gaga for a couple years ago, is headed back for its second and final season on April 22nd. To get ready I did a rewatch of Season One over the last couple weeks. Here’s three things I noticed:
1) Where Cassian Ends Up vs. Where He Begins (vs. Where He Ends Up).
It’s pretty standard storytelling that you want a character to end as far from where they started as you can. How did they get from Point A to Point B, that’s the journey.
On one level, Andor very much sticks to that formula. The Andor of the first half of the season is mostly in it only for himself. He cares about his mom and maybe her droid, but otherwise even his close friends Bix and Brasso are people he’s willing to ditch (although he clearly assumes nothing bad is going to happen to them). By the final episode he’s changed so much that when he gets to town for his mom’s funeral and hears that Bix has been captured by the Empire, he drops everything to rescue her instead.
But it’s worth noting, in a way that finale realizes Andor’s primary goal when we first meet him. He starts the show looking for his long-lost sister. And in the end, he does basically that. It’s a very satisfying trick on the show’s part—yes he changes, but in a way he simply casts aside everything that was not fear and self-interest, leaving behind the boy who’d do anything for those he loves.
All of that should make season 2 pretty interesting—because if Andor Season 1 taught us anything, it’s that being a Rebel means having to sacrifice everything you love—your ideals, your happiness, even your kids. In a way Andor Season 2 needs to bring Andor full circle, but now with his focus not himself but the Rebellion.
Be ready for darkness, my friends. And I’m not talking the Empire.
2) Andor is About Everybody.
That finale is a work of art. And what’s so interesting about it from the point of view of the Rebellion is that neither Andor nor his frenementor Luthen are at all involved with the riot which sees the people of Ferrix basically side with the Rebellion. Instead, we’ve got Andor’s mom and Brasso, whom we might expect, and a bunch of others who are basically minor characters we’ve spent zero time with—the son of the guy who ran the depot were Bix would go to make calls to Luthen; the guard at the shipyard who told Andor to take a hike; and the guy who tells Andor that his mom has died.
All of that is basically Luthen’s dream writ large—by attacking the Empire, he tricked them into cracking down on worlds, which made the people of Ferrix say enough is enough. But beyond a couple cutaways to a seemingly stunned Luthen looking on, the show really keeps its eyes on the people itself.
All of which is to say, this is not a Great Man show. It’s a show about a lot of different people each coming to their own moment of truth, including Andor. And I wonder if season 2 ends up being about each of them and others having to face the sacrifice involved, in the ways that Luthen, Mon Mothma, and Lonni Jung, the ISB mole who wants out, already know…
3) Big Come with Me 2-4-6-0-1 Energy.
Syril Karn, the low level agent obsessed with Andor, has maybe the most interesting trajectory in the first season, in that despite being kind of a goofball obsessed with getting the right neck line for his tunics, he’s so 1000% invested in his belief in the Empire and his Les Mis-Javert-like hatred for Andor, by the end he ends up getting exactly what he wants.
Will something cause him to recant that in season 2? I sort of doubt it. But wouldn’t it be great if he and Andor finally got a scene together which made him realize that Andor is not the boogeyman that he thought he was, that in fact on some level his quest has indeed been absurd?
It'd be a great parallel with Andor’s own potential second season 360, too.
MOMENT OF WOW
As tonight was the finale of The White Lotus, it feels like the right time to revisit the season that I dream of getting.
It’s tough out there. Be gentle with yourselves. See you next week.