Category Archives: cyberculture

Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association 2013

Home again after the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference, which was a 4 day whirlwind. Think I’m kidding about the whirlwind part? Here’s the pdf of the schedule – it’s 501 pages long.

(The conference is actually going on until 9:45 tonight but we attended 3 panels between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. and then our brains melted. Well, I can’t speak for Husband, but I can assure you mine did. While I’m writing this, I’m watching Project Runway and I’m having trouble following the plot. Yikes).

My conference paper on the TV show Supernatural was well-received and everyone else on the panel was fascinating so I was in great company:

horror (text, media, culture): television and New Media horror

“Translating tradition: domesticating seasonal horror through television.”
Derek Johnston (panel chair)

“Beyond salt and fire: the agency of human remains in the Supernatural Universe.”
Rebecca Stone Gordon

“Control is Being taken away from You”, Marble hornets and transmedia horror.
Ralph Beliveau and Amanda Kehrberg

I should probably edit the draft of my first TED DeExtinction post so I can get that online tomorrow. I intended to post about that last week and so it concludes with the delusional statement that I’d blog from the PCAACA conference. We can see how well that worked out.

Remember the Lovecraftian horror that was Windows 95 with a new Tumblr

http://windows95tips.com/

When we got Windows 95 (probably sometime in 1998), it took our admins about 30 seconds to see the true purpose of the system alerts. The first one I got read, “Report to the roof immediately, await further instructions.” It took some people longer than others to catch on that not all windows alerts were created equally.

Some of my former co-workers may still be up on the roof, actually. Someone should probably check into that…

This morning on facebook, a friend posted this AV Club post about a tumblr devoted to the Lovecraftian horror of Windows 95:

If you’re old enough—and Lord, does it make us sad that this is now something you can remember if you’re “old enough,” like there are now, “You know you’re a child of the ‘90s if…” e-mail forwards—then you remember that great, shimmering bastard of an operating system, Windows 95.

Posted about their post? There must be a less awkward way to say that.

The rest of their description is funny so you should visit the AV Club before you mosey over to tumblr to relive Windows 95 Tips, Tricks and Tweaks, and possibly open a gateway to another dimension.