PJH Studios

Category: Pop Culture

Popular culture, culture that seems to spread beyond more than three people

  • Jewish seniors are offering to hide their Haitian caregivers

    The saying goes, “history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.” In Florida, Jewish seniors are offering to hide their Haitian caregivers.

    About 500 seniors live at Sinai Residences in Boca Raton, Florida, including many Holocaust survivors. Recently, some of them asked if they could hide the building’s Haitian staff in their apartments.

    “That reminds me of Anne Frank,” Rachel Blumberg, president and CEO of the center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “There’s a kindred bond between our residents being Jewish and seeing the place that the Haitians have gone through.”

    The seniors were aware of something that is only beginning to dawn on the rest of the country: that in addition to the aggressive immigration enforcement operations underway in Minnesota and elsewhere, the Trump administration has moved to cancel Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from a handful of countries once deemed too unsafe to return to.

  • Bluesky sports starter packs

    One of the more interesting features of Bluesky is the concept of starter packs, where people can create a list of accounts for a certain topic. Since sports are the last bastion of real time reaction culture, it would be natural for communities within sports to play out commentary in real time. Denny Carter collated a list of starter packs for a variety of sports.

  • John Mellencamp’s exclusive Indiana Stadium box

    John Mellencamp supported Indiana football long before their recent championship rise, donating funds during “the down years.” In return, the school built an exclusive shack on top of the stadium just for him.

    Not that Mellencamp always minded. What he got in exchange for his support was not a championship run but a curious sort of VIP treatment. He had started going to Hoosiers games as a kid, when he lived in Bloomington and his brother was enrolled at the university, and in the years since had come to appreciate a perk of the sparsely populated contests: He was able to indulge his cigarette habit in the mostly empty stands.

    In recent years, the school gifted the Rock and Roll Hall-of-Famer a wooden shack affixed to the top of the stadium. There, Mellencamp—a self-described “anti-social guy”—could take in a game exactly the way he wanted to.

  • The scale of Minnesota resistance

    An aggregated Bluesky thread from Margaret Killjoy details the scale and scope of resistance in Minnesota.

    Half the street corners around here have people–from every walk of life, including republicans–standing guard to watch for suspicious vehicles, which are reported to a robust and entirely decentralized network that tracks ICE vehicles and mobilizes responders.

    I have been actively involved in protest movements for 24 years. I have never seen anything approaching this scale. Minneapolis is not accepting what’s happening here. ICE fucking murdered a woman for participating in this, and all that did is bring out more people, from more walks of life.

  • Claw machine competitions

    Operating a claw machine is becoming a competitive sport.

    …the competitive claw machine community has grown. Aspiring clawmasters share tips and tricks online. Clawcades host tournaments for local players. The cost to play depends on location and prizes, but on average is still between a quarter and $2 per play. They’re especially popular in Japan, where a woman named Yuka Nakajima holds the Guinness World Record for most claw-machine wins at 3.5k.

  • Pokémon fossil museum

    In Japan, there is a Pokémon fossil museum.

  • 3D Snake game

    Here is a variation of the classic snake game, where you control a snake, and it gets longer each time it eats a little dot on the screen. But this version is on a three dimensional sphere.

  • Finland teaches media literacy early as three years old

    There are many different kinds of literacy, more than just being able to read words and understand them. Media literacy is the ability to understand and distinguish what is being communicated through various means of mass communication – TV, news, Internet, and more. This is critically important as our society and becoming more and more saturated on propaganda or entertainment by contains questionable content. Finland began teaching media literacy at age 3 as Russian propaganda is a pervasive issue in their society.

  • Medical Aide in Dying

    In 2016, voters passed the End of Life Options Act, which makes it legal for terminally ill adult Coloradans to obtain and self-administer a fatal dose of prescribed medication. Roughly 1,100 people have used MAID in the state, and recent legislation increased access for the sickest patients.

    Robert Sanchez humanizes how those with terminal illnesses are empowered to die with dignity.

  • An airplane meet cute

    If you have ever flown solo on an airplane, you know how much of a gamble it is who your seats will be for the duration of your flight. Most of the time, it’s a non-event. You sit there. They sit there. Maybe you share basic pleasantries or small talk. Every now and then, you luck out into somebody who was willing to have a conversation. And for some lucky people, you might meet the love of your life.

    Anesu grabbed his backpack and walked down the plane. He prepared himself to apologize to the fellow passenger who’d previously won the seat lottery — a whole row to herself — who was now set to share the space with his long legs. He hoped it wouldn’t be awkward. He just wanted to switch off and focus on getting home.

    “But as soon as I sat down, she was very nice to me. She had a big smile. I think she made a joke: ‘Welcome to Paradise.’ Something like that… That was almost the opposite reaction I was imagining or expecting in my head, if I was expecting anything at all,” recalls Anesu.

    “I just remember from that moment onward, it was an unexpected kindness. Someone being really nice to me at a moment that I really needed it. And we just started speaking.”