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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:18:08 — 62.6MB)

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You’ve got podcast! In our latest episode, we’re flashing back to the bygone days of floppy disks, away messages, and actually disconnecting from the world wide web sometimes. It’s a two-part When We Were Young Net-rospective as we reminisce on all things internet, including the cyber-conspiracy thrillers that were Hollywood’s first attempt at cashing in on the dot-com boom of the 90s. In Part 1, our hosts recall their earliest memories of both the net and THE NET — the 1995 techno-thriller that raised issues of online privacy long before social media made being tracked and manipulated by sinister forces part of our everyday lives.

First, we share our memories of chat rooms, CD-ROMs, and what it was like to dial-up with a modem every time we wanted to get online. Then, we learn a little about why 1995 was such a seminal year for the information superhighway, before diving into that year’s surprisingly prescient Sandra Bullock flick — made back when ordering a pizza on the internet was still just a bit of movie magic.

So close out that chat with CyberBob, get a virtual fire started, and whatever you do, don’t push the ESC key — because we’ve only just begun hacking into the 90s!

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @WWWYshow, on Facebook at Facebook.com/WWWYShow and email episode suggestions to wwwyshow@gmail.com. Don’t forget to subscribe and review us on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts so more folks check out the show!

Help us defray the costs of creating this show, which includes purchasing movies/shows/music to review, delivery food to eat our feelings, and producing & editing in-house at the MFP Studio in Los Angeles, California, by donating to our Patreon account at patreon.com/WhenWeWereYoung

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:15:21 — 61.5MB)

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Last time on the podcast, we shared our own histories with the X-Files from back When We Were Young – so listen to Episode 78 for Part 1 of this conversation. Here in the second installment, we talk about some of the most impactful and fan-favorite episodes from the course of the show, as well as the X-Files Movie: Fight The Future – and we discuss the cultural impact of The X-Files and its online fan community.

Do we get drawn deeply into the mythology arc where Mulder and Scully seek to uncover the truth about extraterrestrial life? Do we think David Duchovny can actually act? And in the inevitable Buffy vs X-Files showdown, can any of us truly win?

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @WWWYshow, on Facebook at Facebook.com/WWWYShow and email episode suggestions to wwwyshow@gmail.com. Don’t forget to subscribe and review us on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts so more folks check out the show!

Help us defray the costs of creating this show, which includes purchasing movies/shows/music to review, delivery food to eat our feelings, and producing & editing in-house at the MFP Studio in Los Angeles, California, by donating to our Patreon account at patreon.com/WhenWeWereYoung

Pointing to Trump as The Crazy Guy, and not the embodiment of an entire ideological worldview America needs to actively reject for good, is really hurting every effort to stop him. Donald Trump is like all the bad ju-ju of America converging in one pulchritudinous host.

Trump is the bilge emanating from hundreds of years of fundamental American racism and warmongering, 60 years of The Southern Strategy (GOP appealing to racism to win elections), and over 30 years of Reaganomics (drown the government in the bathtub) and reactionary right-wing radio and television.

At the end of a resounding and thunderous two days for this country, I am reminded of a speech given in 1996 by civil rights hero and Congressman John Lewis. He helped form the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and was one of the Freedom Riders who publicly and peacefully defied segregation, and he was nearly beaten to death by racist assholes trying to keep Jim Crow in US law now and forever in the 1950s and 60s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_to_Montgomery_marches).

But he didn’t stop fighting for basic freedom after the Voting Rights Act (which he lived to see the US Supreme Court murder) and Civil Rights Act were signed, or after he became a Congressman in the 80s. In the 1990s when Democrats nationwide were running to the right (most have never run back), John Lewis saw exactly what the “Defense of Marriage Act” was and nailed it to the fucking wall before it ever got voted out of Congress, before it was ever signed into American law by that self-serving corporate toady masquerading as an elder statesman Bill Clinton.

In case you ever need help divining or recalibrating your moral orientation, John Lewis’s compass tends to point true north.*

“Why do you not want your fellow men and women, your fellow Americans to be happy? Why do you attack them? Why do you want to destroy the love they hold in their hearts? Why do you want to crush their hopes, their dreams, their longings, their aspirations? We are talking about human beings, people like you, people who want to get married, buy a house, and spend their lives with the one they love. They have done no wrong.

I will not turn my back on another American. I will not oppress my fellow human being. I have fought too hard and too long against discrimination based on race and color not to stand up against discrimination based on sexual orientation. Mr. Chairman, I have known racism. I have known bigotry. This bill stinks of the same fear, hatred and intolerance. It should not be called the Defense of Marriage Act. It should be called the defense of mean-spirited bigots act.”

Two end notes and that asterisk:

*Except, unfortunately, he did the 09/2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force that launched America’s Forever War against a tactic… only one Congressman, California’s Barbara Lee, was brave enough to vote against the AUMF.

1) Watch this video clip of most of John Lewis’s 1996 DOMA soliloquy here and remain completely unmoved. I dare ya. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MorAz0WqR9c

2) From his Wikipedia page: “John Lewis opposed the U.S. waging of the 1991 Gulf War, NAFTA, and the 2000 trade agreement with China that passed the House. Lewis opposed the Clinton administration on NAFTA and welfare reform. After welfare reform passed, Lewis was described as outraged; he said, ‘Where is the sense of decency? What does it profit a great nation to conquer the world, only to lose its soul?'”