Author: Fiver
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Stop the cap. Everyone knows what “woke” is.
We have now reached peak bullshit. When asked in a recent interview for El País if the reelection of Donald Trump meant “the woke is broke,” Judith Butler responded, “I don’t even know what the woke is. It’s just a slur that the right wing uses.” This is the bleeding edge of rhetorical acumen, folks,…
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Review: I Want to Die, but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki
I Sat Down with the International Smash Hit Earlier this year, the English speaking world was treated with the sequel to Baek Sehee’s best-selling memoir/self-help book, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki. The original, which was self-published in Korea in 2018 and received its translation and international release in 2022, became…
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Review of What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy
“I know that the majority of people who are not only regarded as intelligent but are indeed intelligent, capable of understanding the most difficult scientific, mathematical and philosophical reasonings, are very rarely capable of understanding a most simple and obvious truth, if it is such as requires that they admit that a judgement they have…
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Low Effort Movie Reviews: Smile 2
Lackluster Concept / Great Execution I think this series gets unfairly written off as bottom-of-the-barrel slop –mostly due to its premise. High-concept horror generally lends itself to the kind of low-quality-and-we-know-it dreck that people will only watch when they’re getting hammered in the dorm rooms or you’ve crammed them in an airplane for ten hours.…
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The Flawed Beauty of Deadpool & Wolverine (and the emptiness of nerd sh*t)
I sometimes think about those awful Ninja Turtles movies from the mid 2010s. The ones with Megan Fox and Will Arnett and…Johnny Knoxville? …Really? The ones that weren’t directed by Michael Bay or J.J. Abrams even though you could be forgiven for thinking it was either or both. Where the character designs for the turtles…
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Escaping the Cool Kid Panopticon
The pursuit of meaning isn’t a weekend retreat My undergraduate degree was in philosophy, and early in my coursework, I took a class on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Naturally, we didn’t read the whole thing. It’s massive. But our professor, who was an Aussie and who, every time he said Kant’s name, sounded as if…
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Is Finding a Purpose for Losers?
The Bourgeois Man Makes His Case. Going by the title, you might assume that this book would be some religious self-help text about strengthening one’s faith. You’d be wrong. Published in the aftermath of WWII, The True Believer is instead an attempt to describe the psychology of the individual member of a mass movement, any…
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Answers for Ben Cremer about the Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies
Christ-baiting Is a Time-Honored Tradition Well friends, the internet is in a tizzy again. In the last few days since the Olympics opening ceremony, people have been outraged that part of the ceremony involved a scene in which a group of drag queens had been organized so as to resemble Da Vinci’s painting “The Last Supper.”…
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To the Little Black Girl in the Bottom Left-Hand Corner of That Horrifically Cringey Biden Clip
I started this essay some months ago without much idea of how I would end it. I had some idea of what I wanted to say, but there was something missing, and this prevented me from finishing the essay for a long time. But sometimes, the universe seems to rise up and place the answers…
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On Marvel, Martin Scorsese, and the EFAP Lads
I’ve been a fan of Mauler since I discovered him in 2018. I often listen to his videos or clips from the EFAP streams when I’m either trying to sleep, in the gym, or taking care of chores around the house. Today I happened to be listening to their discussion of some remarks that Martin…
The Barking Years 