PJH Studios

Category: Pop Culture

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

  • Tactical frivolity

    The current administration deemed protesters violent and menacing. You know what isn’t? A person in an inflatable chicken costume, a protest tactic called tactical frivolity.

    This humorous form of protest, known as tactical frivolity, shows the absurdity of the charge that all the protesters are armed militants. In contravention of the Trump administration’s claims that the protesters were all Hamas agents or antifa interns, the protest in Chicago was wholesome, nonaggressive and almost shockingly middle-of-the-road. It’s hard to call an inflatable chicken dangerous.

  • Being social alone on the rise

    In the UK, there is a rise in people going to social events solo.

    “If I go to an event with someone else, I can very much spend the night doing their night, as they would want it,” says Anaïs Espinosa, a 26-year-old from London. “When I’m alone, I get to do whatever I want in the moment, whether that’s going to get a drink or being right at the front where the DJ is. You just act on pure instinct. I feel like a little video game character in a funny story.”

    I never had a problem going to an event solo. Yeah, it’d be cool to share the experience with a friend, but I wouldn’t let that stop me from checking out a movie, concert, or restaurant.

  • 80-year-old grandmother becomes oldest woman to finish the Ironman World Championship

    80-year-old grandmother becomes oldest woman to finish the Ironman World Championship

    Grabow, who lives in Mountain Lakes, N.J., plunged into the ocean water of Kailua Bay on Saturday morning. She swam 2.4 miles and then hopped on her bike to cycle 112 miles on a highway twisting through lava fields and notorious coastal crosswinds. She then ran the 26.2-mile road course — the length of a marathon — where steep stretches contribute to an elevation gain of more than 1,000 feet. She finished the unforgiving course well within the race’s 17-hour cutoff time, at 16:45:26, on a day when more than 60 other athletes in the field of more than 1,600failed to finish.

  • The craze of 6 7

    most previous Internet meme trends were based in some grounding of logic. 6 7, however, has become a prime example of how brain rot can ascend into pop culture.

    Now teachers avoid breaking kids into groups of six or seven, or asking them to turn to page 67, or instructing them to take six or seven minutes for a task. Six is a perfect number, and seven is a prime number, but only a glutton for punishment would put them together in front of a bunch of 13-year-olds.

  • Adopting a coffee name

    There are lots of different reasons to adopt a coffee name, giving a barista a name other than your own.

  • The bankification of everything

    Every company offers credit card now. This has led to every company becoming an unregulated bank.

    Upward of 40 percent of Americans now pay for basic items like groceries and health care using borrowed money — and this excludes credit cards. A third of younger Americans hold their savings on nonbank tech platforms like Venmo, and industries from retail to transportation derive anywhere from 14 percent to half of their profits from partnerships with credit card companies.

    While this new type of financialization takes many different forms, the endgame is the same: Most major corporations now aspire to become unregulated banks, opening up new avenues to make even more money hand over fist. Banks operating credit cards are the highest-profit-margin enterprises in the economy. Every company wants a share of the loot, amassed from high fees and low overhead costs.

  • Geoguessing

    Did you know that there are competitions surrounding identifying a certain geographic, location, a.k.a.geoguessing? Like, could you identify a location in 30 seconds based on a single image?

  • Playing SimCity 2000 as adult

    SimCity 2000 was a fun sandbox game as a kid, and looking back, building an airport first wasn’t a good choice. Ars Technia played the game with an adult lens.

    Can I live my values by sparing some money in a tight budget for homeless shelters or anti-smoking initiatives? Should I trust my police captain when he says crime is out of control, or should I wonder if he’s just protecting his own livelihood? Do I really want to spend more money and land space on solar power plants, or is a little pollution from the cheaper coal plant worth the trade-off?

    While these kinds of decisions plague me now in a way they never did as a child, the trade-offs I don’t have to make in SimCity 2000 also stand out. If I want to build a train line in SimCity 2000, I can literally pause time and just drag the tracks across the entirety of downtown. Here in the real world of suburban DC, I’ve watched as construction of the Purple Line light rail has dragged on outside my window for years, snarling traffic and running up costs in the process.

  • Closed captions are all the rage

    For various reasons is it any surprise closed captioning keeps growing in popularity?

    The poll suggests many young adults use subtitles because they are watching in noisy environments, whereas older adults choose them to better hear or understand what is being said.

    That makes sense to David Barber, a sound editor and mixer and president of the Motion Picture Sound Editors.

    “Part of it is cultural,” Barber says. “What the younger kids are doing is, a lot of them will multitask. They’ll listen to music while they’re watching a show. So they’re catching bits and pieces of this, bits and pieces of that. I think they probably are half-listening and half-watching. It’s an interesting phenomenon.”

  • A conservative concentration of media power

    Margaret Sullivan with an astute and sobering take on the consolidation of conservative media power:

    In 2020, only a tiny fraction of Americans got news from TikTok. These days, that number has soared to one in five.

    For young adults, those figures are much higher, with almost half of adults under 30 getting news there, according to the Pew Research Center.

    But who will own that hugely influential purveyor of information?

    As with so much of American media – from television networks to some of the largest newspapers – the answer is shaping up to be as simple and short as a TikTok video: the ultra-rich.

    As President Trump moved this week to clear the path to sell the platform’s US assets to a group of American investors, the metastasizing reality of media-by-oligarchy threatened to become even more extreme.