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  • To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Blue's Clues. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also Blue's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realise that they're not just funny- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Blue's Clues truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in Blue's existential catchphrase "a clue a clue," which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Traci Paige Johnson's genius wit unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools.. how I pity them. 😂

    And yes, by the way, i DO have a Blue's Clues tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid 😎

    • ☝️ This comment changed my life 🙏🙏🙌

    • Can this comment become a legendary copy pasta of lemmy?

    • Blues Clues and "Scott's Tots". High IQ required or don't even bother

    • Nice Rick&Morty copypasta you got there.

    • Why can't they be of higher IQ than you?

      And why 5 points, doesn't communication gap theory push for 15?

    • Bold of such a casual watcher to opine on her motivations.

      If you had actually been paying attention, each clue represents one of the 12 arcana given context by the way it is revealed, each episode being a tarot reading that gives depth and context to her character.

      A true fan would watch in order, and would discover each season clearly describes the fools journey with a reading for each step - at that point it just. It then repeats, revealing more of her backstory each season

      I'll give the broad strokes, since I'm sure that's all a casual viewer like you is interested in.

      Blue was born as the deity of a small tribe on the coast of modern day France. She loved her people and worked for them tirelessly, and they loved her as she lavished them with bountiful harvests and artistic inspiration. Her people were kind and righteous, creating beautiful sculptures and cloth that they traded generously. Then the sea people attacked.

      It's unclear who they were, but her people were slaughtered and enslaved, her power slipping away, for she had given back all her people gave her, not considering her own needs. Slowly they died out, and knowledge of her name slowly died out.

      Fading and in desperation she bound herself to a place, a cave in modern day Paris. Her heart broken by loss, she changed in those dark centuries. Her presence still brought fortune and so her former people's land was taken by others, but she no longer had love in her heart. She compelled them to bury their dead in the caverns under the city, where she feasted upon souls of the dead for generation after generation. But none knew her name, and so she barely was able to sustain her existence.

      At the advent of WWII, knowledge of the occult reached a peak. The Nazi leadership heard of the abnormal luck of the city, and so made a deal with the French - they only wanted access to the city without revealing their goal.

      The Nazis took the city, and drove the resistance down into the catacombs, giving them an excuse to seek her out.

      They succeeded, and they found her. She was almost feral at this point, but after heavy losses they managed to imprison her in a relic, an urn containing scraps of bones of her people. On this urn, they engraved an inscription, a binding to a single person. That person would gain eternal youth and funnel power to her, but they misunderstood what she was - in effect, those bound to her died quickly.

      The relic was captured at the end of the war, and ended up in Hollywood along with many other odds and ends. After several high profile deaths, they discovered that attention from children could sustain the needs of this unnamed being. By destroying their potential, a little at a time, the host would not age or be drained by the relic.

      What no one expected was how well this would scale. The fallen deity known as "Blue" has swiftly recovered, and there's many fan theories about what this means.

      And just to spell it out for the slower among you, this is a clear metaphor for capitalism, the effects of the industrial revolution, and the how in an effort to make children subservient , we reduce the future prospects of everyone, including those at the top

  • They Thought They Were Free. Book caused me to reevaluate exactly how politics at individual and social levels happened and how fascism works without any individual being inherently "evil." Class politics and interests followed closely behind to explain how evil can arise among populations that all consider themselves "good people"

    • "This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

      https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

      • Honestly, I see this text often quoted form the book but I don't find it super useful as a way to understand fascism. The steps and reforms were all taken for a reason and people agreed with that reason, even the apprehensive agreed enough to stay seated. I think this "separation" isn't the best thesis out of this book, because the Nazi Party didn't shift too much in terms of popularity throughout these shifts, except to grow more popular during wartime. The government promised something and many accepted those conditions or at least lent moral license to the achieving the goal and were unwilling to oppose the conditions.

        Fascism is Liberalism when and where Liberalism fails to accomplish it's promises and must consume the people and stuff at the periphery to achieve its goals. A government is just as "far" from its people when it is doing good things that it's people desire as when it does bad things.

        I love the book but have major issues with the ideological assumptions, mostly surrounding fascism's relationship to its people and to other ideologies

  • Max Payne 2 had a huge influence on my interest in narratives in general and also ingrained noir into my skull permanently.

    Terminator 2 made me want to get into movies and cameras. Along with The Thing

    Dead Labor: Toward a Political Economy of Premature death does an excellent job at breaking down how capitalism literally profits off of your death.

  • Homestuck.

    Not in the reading of it, which I did out of the momentum of Bard quest and Problem Sleuth, but in the way that it rippled through the online media landscape and affected discourse and things like Undertale, webcomics, and crowd funding.

    Not in any "profound" way, but in a measurably gigantic one.

  • Podcasts count? Huberman Lab has been such a life-changing listen! Lots of great information about sleep and how our body functions

  • The Illuminatus Trilogy did a lot of heavy lifting in inspiring a sense of meta-skeptical relativism, though largely by offering a central hub for many other rabbit holes.

    Gurren Lagann instilled me with a sense of inextinguishable optimistic determination, for myself individually and as a part of the human race

    There are plenty of others, but these two had the most profound effects.

    Edit: I almost forgot about this webcomic that lived in the back of my brain until I got a bidet.

129 comments