#penn and teller: bullshit!

[jimgandolfini]

I love this show

[academicelephant]

I'm just gonna leave this here

[reshadowofmyself]

Cryptozoology, Penn & Teller: Bullshit!

[kiefbowl]

this is going to sound silly but it isn't silly, and I'm seriously saying this. I do think there is a slight feminist concern to alien abduction stories in so far as we can assume that when people, especially women, talk about their abductions and their abilities to communicate with extra terrestrials et cetera, they are someone who is mentally unwell and who has likely experienced something traumatic. alien abduction stories tend to have common elements even if there are details wildly different from each individual. those details are different because they likely didn't happen, but the common elements tend to be things like being taken from home, being violated, being exposed, having things implanted in the body, experiencing pregnancy, having secret knowledge, having a special connection to the extra terrestrials...

you can start putting some pieces together. yes, sometimes these elements are shared because they are what's heard in pop culture. you're more likely to imagine the details of a book you read or a tv show you saw than come up with something so fantastically new and original. you can imagine, for example, if someone is a say a seven year old girl being manipulated into sexual favors by a trusted adult and doesn't understand what's happening to her and has seen alien media and perhaps even has other messaging around her wrt sin, purity, worthiness, karma (what have you), and also perhaps is predisposed to mental illness, it's easier to believe she's a special person being abducted by other worldly creatures who don't truly mean her harm. you can see how a vivid child's imagination could lead to an adult believing memories that never happened.

and so the feminist concern is to not treat these stories as complete jokes and hoaxes and roll our eyes. I'm just reminded today of something I saw years ago. I think it was a Penn and Teller Bullshit episode on aliens, and they had a group of hard core believers talking about their experiences with aliens, and it felt like we were supposed to be laughing at them when at least one of them was a woman who truly believed an alien husband took her way sometimes and forced her to give birth and she had several children she didn't get to see in space, and she was clearly not very well adjusted socially. all I could think was is this a woman who's been raped? is this a woman who has been forced to have abortions? is this a woman who has had multiple miscarriages? is this a woman experiencing domestic abuse from a husband or boyfriend? but the episode wasn't interested in exploring that, and she stuck out as "one of these things is not like the others" when juxtaposed to fake professors trying to sell their weirdo books as a living or whatever else was in the episode.

when we say believe women, that includes "crazy" women. women who say ghosts are trying to kill them, who talk about people living in their walls coming out at night to steal their body parts, women who believe they are married to alien overlords since they were 12 and have birth 50 alien babies. these women are probably telling us something and I think we can say "I believe something has happened to you" rather than make a mockery of them.

[8one6]

Ever since I was in high school (in the before times, in the long, long ago) I had dreamed of taking road trip. Just me, my car (in high school it was a Cadillac Hearse that got absolutely awful gas mileage and high school me used to bitch about gas when it went over a $1 a gallon), and the open road, but I never managed to do it. Sometimes it was money, sometimes it was lack of opportunity, sometimes it was just the fear of doing something new.

In my mid-30s I finally did it and let me tell you it was one of the best experiences of my life.

A few years ago (2022 to be exact) my boss made me take a vacation in the spring (mostly because I had two years of pto from not using it during the lockdown years, but also because he was legitimately concerned with my stress levels, but anyway) and that year I decided to take two weeks to see all three Meow Wolf locations in one big trip. (Convergence Station is the coolest one btw, with Omega-Mart a close second.)

I70 through Kansas is a zen experience if you make the drive at night. Endless fields of stars and farmland, accompanied by whatever podcast you queued up for the drive.

Visited family in Denver, spent a day at Convergence Station, and the drive to Santa Fe was like driving through a postcard!

The House of Eternal Return was neat (IMO it relies a little too much on backstory you can only really get from sitting down and reading a lot of the SCP-style documents lying around the house, but unless you rented the entire place for the day you're competing with dozens of other people who are also trying to read the same thing.), I stayed at this cool, fully restored Route 66 vintage motel called the El Rey Court (A++, would stay again), and then I was off to Las Vegas.

There's a trick i40 plays on you. You'll be driving through some incredibly beautiful but still harsh desert wasteland (I passed more than one husk of an abandoned building on that stretch of highway) and then all of a sudden you're in a lush green forest. It was seriously as close to passing from one Minecraft biome to another as you can get in real life. (I also stopped at Meteor Crater National Landmark. It was cool.)

Just outside of Vegas I got two incredibly singular experiences. The first was seeing a tumbleweed in real life for the first time. I swear, I was alone in my car and I said out loud "Holy shit they're real!!!" The second was driving through an actual sand storm. In hindsight I should have pulled over and let it pass, but no one else on the road was doing it, so I just crawled through it at 30mph.

I spent a few nights in Las Vegas. Visited Omega-Mart (super cool, I recommend it), watched Blue Man Group (also very cool, also highly recommend), got to see a Penn & Teller show live (a fucking dream of mine since I was a little kid!!!), and had the best meal of my life.

Honestly, before that trip if you told me there was a difference between a $20 steak from Longhorn and a $100 steak from an actual steak restaurant I'd have called bullshit. I was in Las Vegas, I figured "This is likely the last time I'll take a trip like this, fuck it, why not splurge."

Oh my sweet raptor christ! The $100 steak was worth every cent!

What followed was a day of driving through beautiful parts of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado, including the most nerve-wracking stretch of highway through the mountains (literally through them in one spot. The Eisenhower tunnel is a little more than a mile and a half of tunnel bored straight through the spine of the Americas). A brief stop to sleep, and then 14 hours straight on home.

It was a fantastic trip. Two weeks away from home, from work, from any responsibility, the first time off since 2019. Two weeks of moving to my own schedule and crossing things off of the bucket list.

[fruityyamenrunner]

what happened to penn and teller anyway. they were big anti-woo names in the 2000s, i mean they were also big names in libertarianism so maybe that's the answer right there.

like look at all these

[brightlotusmoon]

You know that feeling when you stretch your arm out and your elbow suddenly feels like a weak rubber band, and it feels like if you keep stretching, your elbow will just yeet your forearm and it'll be dislocated and sad?

Stretching is painful.

I don't want to Do Yoga, it sounds cultish at this point.

I do, however, want to stretch the right way. My mom teaches restorative yoga to fellow seniors, and we have this talk at least twice a month. I don't have to call it a yoga pose but those names are really useful. Child Pose, Cat Cow, Warrior. I know, I know, no matter what you call it, it's stretching. Penn And Teller did a whole Bullshit episode on it. My physiotherapist said yoga was mostly to keep a yogi limber enough to maintain a meditation pose for hours and hours.

I don't have to call it yoga. I don't have to listen to that yoga teacher who kept bullying me for "disparaging yoga" which is untrue, I was kvetching mightily but I was not disparaging. It's fine.

A while back, someone in the cerebral palsy support group posted a video of two carers helping her move into a cat cow pose. It reminded me of how we absolutely do have limits, and sometimes the best way to push those limits is with other people literally helping you move.

There is no shame in that. It is not a weakness. It is power.

Yoga is great. It's not something I enjoy. Get used to me kvetching while stretching and satirizing.

I'm going back to sleep. My brain keeps waking me up wanting to Say Things To Tumblr.

(Mom, if you read this, I promise I'm working on my erratic sleep schedule. Insomnia is a hell of a

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Apparently Penn Jillette stopped being a libertarian after getting an e-mail from a libertarian group to head their anti-mask protest and he had to reevaluate his political stances. Though it seems the cracks started forming when libertarians started rallying behind Trump.

Guess that was the real teller for Penn that libertarians are bullshit

[isitcorrect]

love this blog, it’s a modern day version of the old penn & teller show “bullshit!”

Thanks!

[adultswim2021]

Moral Orel #29: “Nature” | July 9, 2007 - 12:15AM | S02E19

This is an incredible episode. The first of a two-parter that caps off season two in a similar fashion to season one (if you watched it in production order and not airdate order, that is [this will always be a thing, sorry]). A Moral Orel episode where the facade of Moralton begins to crack and we’re let in on how real this world actually is. This one starts off slightly atypically: in Clay’s study, post-Orel-being-punished for some vague offense. The tone is pretty typical Moral Orel, bleakly-tinged darkly-comic dialogue and one-liners, a conventional story beginning to unfold that will soon have some wicked twist applied to it, strong visual storytelling and amusing background details, etc. All the shit you expect from Moral Orel.  

The plot is that Clay simply wants to take Orel hunting, as it’s about that time in a child’s/TV-show’s life when a father does that with his son. Personally, I’ve never hunted. But I came of age at a time and place when and where it was still fairly common shared experience among boys Orel’s age when I was also Orel’s age. Orel doesn’t have it in him to hunt down one of God’s creatures, despite Clay’s insistence that they are merely helping the animals take “nature’s shortcut”; God’s preference to man gave them the wisdom to flee from Nature, putting the animals in a pitiable position of remaining “ungodly”. So, taking them out as a part of a hunting expedition is akin to putting these damned souls out of their misery. It’s tortured logic, but that’s Christianity for you. (Penn & Teller Bullshit theme begins playing). 

Clay gets drunker and drunker and more and more cruel towards Orel. Not only does he shoot a deer in front of Orel against Orel’s wishes, he also kills a random person’s hunting dog, which is terrible. Clay cruelly denies Orel dinner, because he didn’t kill anything himself. Orel eventually calls Clay out on his drunkenness, which causes him to sort of go manic, just dumping nihilism on his son. The show is now a harrowing psycho-drama. Orel is clutching a pistol, which happens to be pointed at his dad. Orel fires. TO BE CONTINUED…

This one is pretty brutal, in the same vein of “Best Christmas Ever”. When Orel hesitantly tells his father that he’s too drunk, and that they need to go home, it breaks your heart. You’re witnessing this kid grow up in real time. Orel is supposed to be an innocent kid. Furthermore, he’s supposed to be a smart-allecky parody of Davey from Davey and Goliath. How could the writers let this happen? 

One really important thing to mention about this episode: In addition to being a “bummer” episode, it’s also exceptionally funny. The jokes in the show are especially strong, and land exquisitely. Maybe I only think this because I was bracing myself for the darker aspects of this episode as a Clay-aged person whose since become less in-denial about how much of an asshole my own father is. I didn’t like, get emotional or anything, but I was just sorta like “DAMN, YES. HOLY SHIT IT DO BE LIKE THAT”. Mine has never been as bad as Clay, but I’ve witnessed a drunken downward spiral from him more than I care to have. 

The events of this episode (as well as the next) will set the stage for season three, which is thirteen episodes (cut down from twenty) of shows that either take place right before or right after the hunting trip, as well as flashback episodes that are spurred by individual moments within this episode. It’s an ambitious and often emotional journey. There are no less than four episodes of season three that have been known to make me sob. This makes me wonder if I remembered all these moments in this episode that tie into other episodes (Orel’s vague references to whatever deed got him punished in the beginning comes to mind). Complex, non-linear chronology and side-stories are explored. Mountain Goats songs are licensed. I’m not reading ahead so I won’t go too deep into what connects with what in this post. But like Jesus and me, it’s coming (I always immediately bust when I finish a write-up).

To Be Continued (this is me edging).

[jimgandolfini]

we love a man in costume!!

[sammysdewysensitiveeyes]

Being a fan of more obscure characters often means that you have to scour through issues for any appearance, and sometimes their appearance winds up being wildly out of character because the writer didn’t bother to do any research for D-list mutant #27.

Which brings me to Spiderman/Deadpool #11, with an completely inexplicable and badly written appearance by the (dead?) Hellion Tarot.

Barely recognizable in her new bad-girl get-up, with her normally red hair apparently died black and pink.  (I actually kinda like her new outfit, aside from all the unnecessary cut-outs.)  Also, she is now distracting people with her tarot card manifestations in order to steal.  Just as a reminder, here is what Tarot was like in her Hellion days, getting rejected by Doug Ramsey:

Doug, you fool!  Tarot was one of the nicest Hellions.  She was one of the team members that, had circumstances not placed her with the White Queen, could have been a New Mutant and eventually an X-Man.  (In fairness, I actually think all the Hellions were potentially redeemable except Empath.)

But in this comic, she is written as ha ha funny French woman who uses her powers to rob people, and literally tries to kill Spiderman.

  Tarot also is supposed to be dead when this comic came out.  In fairness, Tarot’s status as alive or dead has been somewhat confusing.  She first died with her fellow Hellions in a completely gratuitous shock value mass slaughter Sentinel attack.  Much later, she showed up with King Bedlam’s New Hellions, having been somehow resurrected by him, in a way that’s never fully explained.  After King Bedlam lost his powers in M-Day, Tarot must have died again, because she shows up in Necrosha as one of the temporarily resurrected Hellions brought back by Selene.  They are all apparently destroyed again at the end of that story.  (The poor Hellions never get to catch a break.)

So, why is she alive again, drawn off-model and acting completely out of character?  Why, because of a writer that didn’t bother to do any research, and an editor apparently asleep at the wheel, that’s why! 

In fairness, the writer of this issue was apparently Penn Jilette (Penn and Teller guest star in the issue), and I wouldn’t expect him to be up-to-date on every obscure Marvel mutant (that was the editor’s job, which they failed).  In further fairness, Spiderman/Deadpool is a very silly, 4th-wall-breaking series, and this issue leans especially hard into the silliness.  And hey, Tarot might now be completely jaded and cynical with all her deaths and resurrections, and apparently splitting off from King Bedlam.  Maybe she’s gotten nastier as a result.

With all those caveats, though, fuck this bullshit:

My girl Tarot has been put through the ringer being dead then alive then dead again.  All the Hellions, after their gratuitous and unnecessary deaths, have only been pulled out of mothballs when the writers need angst for Emma Frost or James Proudstar or the New Mutants.  Even on Krakoa, where they are all finally resurrected for good this time, they are just cameos and accessories for other people’s stories.  (They really only pop up in Zeb Wells Hellions series, to show that Empath is a piece of shit.  Although Roulette and Catseye do get to beat him up at the Hellfire Gala, that’s a win there.) 

So I’m rather annoyed to see this French caricature that bears no resemblance at all to the Tarot I know pop up in a stupid Deadpool comic as a throwaway villain. 

Especially since there’s another Hellion that would have fit the story much better:

Who’s the blonde?  Why it’s Roulette, Tarot’s team-mate who was one of the nastier Hellions.  Not as nasty as Empath, but definitely a mean-girl type who didn’t shy away from dirty tricks.  I could definitely imagine Roulette using her powers to rob people.

Oh, and did I mention Roulette has luck-based powers?  And she was born in Atlantic City, famous for it’s casinos?

And this Deadpool story......takes place.....in Las Vegas.

This story would have worked so much better with Roulette as the throwaway villain who just wants to cheat people and steal (but then I guess they wouldn’t have been able to make as many French jokes, because those are all super funny, right?).  Roulette was also dead at the time, but that didn’t stop the writers from using Tarot, it shouldn’t stop them from using Jenny.  It would have been great, I wouldn’t have even needed an explanation for her resurrection.

Thank you, this has been my unnecessarily long salt post about a minor character being ooc in a single issue of a comic.  Because nothing makes me hate a comics writer more than them badly writing one of my favorites.

[redpandarascal]

Please tell me there's another TV show coming out soon, about Debunking Bullshit. Mythbusters and Penn and Teller and that show Bill Nye had on netflix, stuff like that, entertainment, is the only way anything really sticks.

[pinkglitteringdemondildos]

Something this whole roe v wade situation has turned up as a side effect is all the religious people coming out to defend themselves and just being utterly annoying and shitty. So many Christians are out here like "jokes on you my religion is the basis for my morals and ethics heehee" and its like

Okaaaayyyyyy so you need to be threatened with the idea of Hell to uphold morals and ethics? You don't just inherently want to help people? If there was no hell, you'd be a despicable bitch at any whim you could find? Then I guess you're not a good person huh!!!! Guess you're a bad person actually huh!!!! I remember that Penn and teller show where one of them was talking about a guy who asked "if you're an atheist, whats stopping you from raping people?" And he said "THE FACT I DONT WANT TO RAPE PEOPLE?????? IF THE ONLY REASON YOU'RE NOT COMMITTING SEXUAL ASSAULT IS GOD THEN THERES SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOU" and that's all I can think about when I see that bullshit

[merlinsbed]

deeply concerned that my world health issues instructor linked to a penn and teller video on bitchute

like what was she doing on bitchute?? did she just google the clip and that was the first place it came up???? does she not know that bitchute is where right wing conspiracy theorists go when they get banned from youtube???????

ASKDJAKSD I JUST GOOGLED PENN AND TELLER BULLSHIT! AND ALL OF THE LINKS WERE FOR PARAMOUNT+ OR YOUTUBE HOW DID SHE END UP ON BITCHUTE????????????

[sawthatmountainburn]

that actually reminded me of penn and teller's bullshit where in one episode thwy were talking about video game violence leading to real world violence (and isn't that just an extremely 2000s sentence) and they took this kid who liked violent video games to a gun range and it made him cry. it was actually kind of uncomfortable to watch.