Explanation Point

Keanu: "I have chosen not to use the golden power of veto. I have also set the house on fire. Having thoroughly reviewed the Big Brother comprehensive rules, if you leave the house for any reason - including threat of bodily harm - you will forfeit the game. I will be staying. Make your choice."

There is an oldest cricket in the world right now. One whose skeleton has suffered the knicks and scars of endless months. One whose legs are rubbed smooth from countless moons of song. Every cricket that once hopped over earth when it was born has now returned to the dirt, and it doesn't even know.

YouTube video by Hank Green Why do Billionaires do Super Bowl Ads???

Not saying that they're *not* selling out for the love of the game. I don't know these people. But Hank Green made a video last year about why celebrities sometimes take these seemingly stupid commercial deals. It *might* be more complicated than that.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHzr...

It's that feeling of connectedness and community that really makes Inside something special. How it reminds us not that everything will be okay, but that everything *can* be okay. Not that we shouldn't despair, but that we should remember to despair together.

And I just think that's neat.

But, even though it doesn't give any answers or tell everyone that everything's going to be okay, it also has a quiet warmth to it that I can't quite describe. It's not saying that the world isn't going to fall apart. Instead, it reminds the viewer that they aren't alone in feeling that it will.

It would've been so easy to make a special like this and have it purely be about how much everything sucks and how nothing is going to get better, but Burnham didn't do that. Yes, the show is certainly filled with doomerism and jokes about the inevitable, upcoming apocalypse.

The dread and discomfort elicited by this song's presentation are wrapped up in the story of Burnham's *successful* mental health journey. Of someone breaking down completely and going through a personal crisis that nobody reading this thread can fully understand, and then coming out the other side.

Except that the framing narrative of this section of the special is Burnham's recovery from trauma. The "joke" is that he was having panic attacks on stage and took a few years off to get better, and now that he feels like performing again, he can't. But he *does* feel like performing again.

So, we find ourselves in this weird situation where isolation is a shared experience. Watching this silly, edgelord teenager from the late aughts do a stupid dance in his room. Holding each-other's hands through a worldwide trauma that we're never going to fully recover from.

And you realize after a second that everyone in the world is going through this experience right now. We're all at the same shitty concert and the band won't stop doing encores. We've all got the same feeling of hopelessness. The same dread. The same knowledge of how fragile everything really is.

Except, there is a crowd, isn't there? When Burnham picks up his handheld camera and swings it wildly around his bedroom, filming an audience that isn't there, millions of people were watching. Millions of people were staring at their screens, solemnly nodding. Empathizing. Unshaven. Hair uncut.

Burnham emphasizes that feeling with his canned applause and his laugh tracks, but he really hammers it home in the beginning when he's doing nothing but staring right into the camera. Locking eyes with the viewer. Making that one-on-one connection that emphasizes the fact that there is no crowd.

He's unshaven. Hair uncut. Standing in his bedroom, alone, singing into a microphone for nobody. And that's something that every single person who lived through Covid can relate to. The feeling that the world got smaller. That standards got lower. How it felt like the world was hibernating.

when we can hear the sound of an audience laughing, an audience cheering, just the usual sounds that one would hear if they'd gone to a Bo Burnham concert. But, of course, there's nobody around. There's a dirty, cluttered bedroom. Burnham is wearing an old t-shirt and boxers.

There are a lot of parts of this sequence that I could really sink my teeth into, but the one that strikes me most is near the end when Burnham walks up, grabs the camera, and starts waving it around like he's filming his audience at the end of a long concert. There are a few times during the song

Thumbnail of Bo Burnham's "All Eyes on Me" Youtube video. Close-up on Bo's face (thirty-year-old Caucasian male) tinted by blue light. His mouth is angled toward the lower-left corner of the image, but it is covered by his out-of-focus hand. His eyes are focused on the viewer.

"And then, the funniest thing happened."

I've always felt like Inside was going to be one of the seminal works of art of the '20s, and every time I go back to it, I find something new that I want to latch on to. This time, it's "All Eyes on Me." If you haven't seen it in a while, go rewatch it.

(To be fair, I went through all the shows that could possibly have been nominated, and Solo Leveling does still somehow make it into my top ten. It was a terrible year for anime.)

Just saw the results of the Crunchyroll Awards from ages ago, and you know, I'm starting to think that this whole "end of democracy" thing might not be such a bad idea.

(Allow room for two prequels. Megone and one that's just called M3gan 2.)

M3gan
Meg4n
Megan5
Me6an
Meven

Does our chinchilla mean to run on her wheel, or is she just walkin' around when she happens to step on a bit of ground that moves underneath her, making her go "OH FUCK" and run so that she doesn't slam her face into the aluminum?

Hello!
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(This is an ad campaign running on Hulu that *seems* to be saying, "People think Tinder is just for hookups, but you can totally find a life partner here, too!" But what it actually says is, "It's great to be wrong about Tinder," and that just doesn't seem like a great way to get customers to me.)

I'm not a marketing guy, but I really don't get this "it's great to be wrong about Tinder" ad campaign. Who are you talking to? You're either advertising to people who have a bad opinion of your service, or you're telling people who have a good opinion of your service that they're wrong.

Then again, there's also a scene where a man proposes to a woman, and they had him saying, "This man is my fiance. I'm going to marry him." So. . . maybe *just* have them committed.

My god. They're using tildes for ~emphasis~.

And what the HELL is up with this funky punctuation mark that I think is supposed to signify someone calling from off-screen?

Whoever subbed this needs to be committed, and then called "a genius who wasn't understood in their day" after all of us are dead.

(It was The Dinner Table Detective)

I just watched an anime where a character screamed wordlessly and it was translated as "Crikey!"

That's the kind of boldness translators need.

Ah, yeah, man. I meant for this to just be a comment, but I'm accidentally quote posting instead. Could happen to anyone.