Discover Top Posts Tagged with #media panic

From Mazes and Monsters to Dark Dungeons, D&D was a lot scarier in the 1980s.

The media landscape has never been more fragmented. Used to be everyone would read the same book, watch the same movie, repeat the same catchphrase. Now everything’s niche. There’s no quality bar, no censor with a paternalistic hand on the tiller of Western thought. No show that everyone watches. For God’s sake, you’re reading something right now that a crank in a shed would have had to mimeograph and mail out in nondescript brown paper wrappers not too long ago.

So if you’re a unique snowflake and you consume only a very small amount of the shared Venn diagram of media that others around you know of, how do you relate to the Others? Only a fool would try to convert their coworkers onto their media diet: not only will your fellow office-drones probably not enjoy that anime where the girls are actually 17th century theories about the nature of the atom, they’ll likely resent you for making them draw their attention away from their own fast-moving fetishization.

No, what people need is a good disaster once in awhile. Huge tidal wave, people testing the structural strength of steel, a big 1980s celebrity crying in court just before being jailed for sex crimes. That’s what pulls us back together, keeps us from sinking beneath the surface of these fractal grain silos of infinitely more intense obsessions. Only through the regular application of horrific disasters can we hope to keep the semblance of a society.

I’m not sure, but I think the government figured this out before I did, and is arranging all of these disasters. No wonder they did. With the way that Hollywood production costs keep rising, and the poor defence contractors who are out of work, it is probably a better deal to bang out the occasional weather machine or insanity ray.

#media panic #the media #media fragmentation

Could your loved ones be the next victim of a car-crippling cyberattack? There is simply no way to know, but our experts think that the answer is yes. Tune in tonight to Twenty Questions, as we get to the bottom of The Car With Greetz.

Thank you for joining us, Doctor Hardcase. In your professional opinion, do you think that the time is right for unbridled, shrieking terror the likes of which the American family has never before seen? You do? I’m sorry to cut you off there, Doctor, because we are going live to footage of an autonomous BMW X3 racing out of control through the streets of Los Angeles. This breaking news is brought to you by GoPro, the official camera of “Evidence A.”

As you can now see, the BMW X3 is driving carefully through this suburb, searching for an errant pedestrian to kill. Just minutes ago, its driver fell asleep at the wheel, and the car is now entirely driverless and out for blood. There is nothing we can do now except slowly follow the BMW from Action Chopper One and wait for it to make a fatal mistake. As you can see from the BMW now activating the turn signals and making a polite lane change, no human being is piloting this rolling orgy of death.

Now, the BMW has turned into the garage and parked itself. Doctor Hardcase, how many minutes do we have until the battery banks inside this German Slaughter-Golem burst into roaring lithium fires and consume the entire development? Only a few minutes? You heard the expert, ladies and gentlemen. Soon, soon, you will have a self-reaping car loose across the highways and byways of your very own subdivisions!

We’ll keep you posted all throughout the night, and be sure to visit our social media page where you can tell us just how scared you are. We’ll air the best comments because that’s free content and we’d be stupid not to take it. Don’t change that dial, unless you don’t know what a dial is, in which case just turn the TV off and go back to work. The rest of you should take a break with us and watch this commercial from our sponsors, Old Faulty Life Insurance and Second Mortgage Hut.

#self-driving cars #media panic #doctor hardcase #twenty questions

"Netflix and chill" concerns make the Sunday Times, moral panic about film streaming spreads across the land. Dying.

And don’t tell them what “Baltimora” means.

#media panic #fear #brass eye #chris morris

Ebola and you

How do people become infected with the virus?

Ebola is transmitted through close contact with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected animals. In Africa infection in humans has happened as a result of contact with chimpanzees, gorillas, fruit bats, monkeys, forest antelope and porcupines found ill or dead in the rainforest.

The Ebola virus is fatal in 90 per cent of…

View On WordPress

#Ebola #media panic #The Great Escape