Tag Archives: pop culture

Caffeinated Links: The Civil Wars’ New EP, Black British Accent Sketch, Sleep Research

Before their split The Civil Wars recorded an EP of Elliott Smith tunes to commemorate his passing, and you can now listen to it on NPR prior to its Itunes release on the 11th. RT

Unreality’s Nick Verbook has an on-point reflection on piracy and supporting the art and pop culture we love-

Capitalism is the closest thing we have to true democracy. We vote with our money. If a little video game or indie flick made by an innovative artist comes out and can’t get any financial traction, they go away, possibly never to resurface.

This is why I still buy DVD’s, video games, CD’s, and books. I think of it as donating to the cause. Whenever I can, I try to support the cause. But is particularly taxing for a comic book reader and anime fanatic like myself. Comics are a few bucks an issue and anime series are typically released in pricy box sets. And here I am turning my pockets inside out to find only lint.

Comics in particular have been an issue for me. There are a ton of them out there and it’s nigh impossible to keep up, much less acquaint oneself the classics without devoting yourself entirely to it. This is the medium where I lean on file sharing the most, and feel the worst for doing it. It’s an industry I support as much as I can, but to read an entire run of a comic series is a triple digit investment at least.” RT

Fascinating. An experiment with the human body’s natural sleep patterns. “In a hypothetical future world where Bad Kissingen succeeds in letting all of its citizens and visitors live out their chronotypes, the societal benefits would be huge. The town as a whole would be more creative, happier, and more alert. Social interaction would improve, as would the population’s ability to problem-solve. Chronically tired people often struggle with obesity, immune suppression, and mental illness, so the town’s overall health—both mental and physical—would improve.” RT

Caffeinated Links: Wood Design, Breaking Bad, Mumford

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The world’s lightest timber table (8 kilograms!) showed up at the London Design Festival this weekend RT

Grantland beautifully unpacks the latest, heartrending episode of Breaking Bad -“Certain things just aren’t supposed to happen. We’d never seen something so ordinary twisted into something so ugly. Certain people and institutions aren’t supposed to be punished for the sins of one individual. When and if they do come, the metaphorical chickens are meant to roost home-adjacent, not inside the walls of the baby’s nursery.” RT

Birchbox highlights a multi-tasking face cream French women adore RT 

“Your books on your shelves start becoming much more organized and they stop falling over because you’ve got bookends. It’s the main way in which it’s affected our lives, a real tangible way” –Marcus Mumford, on how life changes after winning awards like Grammys, RT
YESSS.  British actress Billie Piper has just signed on to star in our highly anticipated new drama series PENNY DREADFUL. Piper will play “Brona Croft,” an Irish immigrant to Victorian London trying to escape a dark and sordid past. She joins recently announced stars Josh Hartnett, Timothy Dalton, Eva Green, Reeve Carney, Rory Kinnear and Harry Treadaway. RT

Hey, Los Angeles (Caffeinated Break)

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Hugh Laurie’s love letter to Los Angeles in The Telegraph is the kind of defense I wish I could give of LA to the (many) unbelievers I’ve encountered since leaving the City of Angels.

“I love you, I hate you: you might call it a mixed message, if the message weren’t so unmixed. You’re allowed to love Paris, up to a point, New York, more or less, Dublin and Glasgow, definitely, but loving Los Angeles is just plain wrong. Oxymoronic, in fact – if you promise to go easy on the oxy.

…And then, as the drowned man said, there’s the weather. Great, fat dollops of it. On the eighth day, God reached down and set southern California’s thermostat to “lovely”, and he hasn’t really touched it since.

But Los Angeles, if it’s anything, is a place of reinvention, the edge of a continent, both inner and outer, from which you can step off into a new life and a new way of looking at things. Or, if you prefer, you can decide that your old life was just fine. Either way, you end up better off.”

Hugh Laurie’s Los Angeles

And the Huffington Post has a fairly brilliant analysis of a troubling aspect of the ever-increasing collisions between nerd culture and “pop” (as in “popular”) entertainment.

“I enjoyed Star Trek Into Darkness, but the worst part of the movie was the almost complete recreation of the Kirk-Spock death scene from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It’s not so much that J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof did recreate that scene, it’s that they did so in an effort to make people watching say, “Oh, I get it.” Great! I mean, of course you “get it.” How could you not get it? Everyone gets it. That’s the problem. The best kind of fan service is when very few people get it. Being beat over the head with a reference to a prior movie isn’t fun for anyone.

I keep thinking about Whedon’s sentence, “I feel that’s what all of culture is becoming — it’s becoming that moment.”

-Joss Whedon Is Right About ‘Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom’

Friday Five

1) Our 10 Favorite Performances of the SXSW Festival, via Pajiba

2)Why I Stopped Pirating and Started Paying for Media, via Lifehacker

3)Espresso Press plus George Howell Coffee, via Cool Hunting

4)The Veronica Mars Movie Kickstarter Campaign: Don’t You Dare Feel Bad About Chipping In, via TVLine  

“A lot of the time, the Internet is used to tear things down. To mock Smash, to snark about red carpet fashions, to hurt. All from the cozy, oft-anonymous comfort of everyone’s couches.

For 10 thrilling hours on Wednesday, though, 30,000 strangers banded together online to create something.”

5)TV’s New Wave of Women: Smart, Strong, Borderline Insane, via NYT

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