#the spectacular failure of the Star Wars hotel

[likeabitchylamb]

the biggest roast of the Jenny Nicholson video was her comparing the gameplay to handing a child an unplugged controller

[tinseltownie]

Been watching The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel and hats off to Jenny Nicholson, you have a new forever fan. I am in awe you are a filmmaker like no other

[oatmealnebraska]

This moment, for me, encapsulates just how badly the Disney execs missed the mark.

Because the magic of LARPing is in committing to the bit, and the moments of inspired improv that arise from that (and I count the water dish as inspired even if it wasn't the individual server who came up with the idea, because that means that somewhere in the brainstorming process it was proposed and agreed that servers do this for all guests with character plushies and that too would be brilliant - that would be the Disney magic working as it should).

But that means really relying on your front-line workers - hiring them in sufficient numbers, supporting them with in-depth training, listening to their feedback, and trusting them to respond well to both the expected and the unexpected. There's some risk to all that - so, for corporate types concerned with ensuring everyone's experience is easily replicable and completely brand-approved, I understand the temptation to rely heavily instead on scripted character moments, basic arcade games, and pre-programmed text prompts in an app.

But that is SO not what they said they were selling. And having watched the various Disney suits breathlessly hyping the interactivity and the IMMERSION and the range of opportunities for making choices and having an impact on game play - and seeing that all turn out to be *checks notes* scanning QR codes on crates ... kudos to Jenny for the fantastic marketing montage but OMG that was excruciating to watch.

Even if the world can be benumbed, cold, and stingy, it's adorable that an employee brought out a little water dish for Jenny's plushie Skippy with the standard drinks. Be the bit of magic you want to see in the world.

[thecurioustale]

My Thoughts on Jenny Nicholson and the Star Wars Hotel

I watched Jenny Nicholson's four-hour "The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel" video essay that YouTube showed me recently but which till now I couldn't bring myself to construct a day around. She's in great form here, and I'm pleased to say I go back as a fan of her work all the way to her Friendship Is Witchcraft days. (Blows my mind that she voiced all Mane Six characters, and others, so well.)

Anyway, long story short, Disney built a Star Wars hotel at Disneyworld in 2022 that was themed as a voyage on a spaceship, then proceeded to charge thousands of dollars per person per night, the most expensive publicly-available Disney theme park hotel experience by miles and miles, and then closed the hotel in 2023 after having spent hundreds of millions of dollars. Jenny went into the experience as a member of the core target demographic and spent four hours talking about all the ways it was an underwhelming or outright disappointing experience.

Her video reminded me of Hasbro's own misadventures in corporate greed with Magic: The Gathering, which has suffered in recent years from price increases, disengagement from the fan community, and a huge proliferation of product spam—i.e. more products overall, more ways to buy a given product (e.g., the proliferation of different boxes, which eventually killed the original draft booster box that had powered Magic for 30 years), and more variants of individual cards within and between products.

Hasbro and Disney are very similar in the economic space they operate in, and also utilize similar business strategies. Disney is essentially the S-tier megacorporation to Hasbro's B-tier, and we have seen many of the same corporate trends play out in both companies.

When it comes to Disney theme parks, they have massively increased ticket prices over the years, well beyond the rate of inflation, and have also implemented advance-scheduling systems for faster access to rides that has made the process of exploring a Disney theme park much less spontaneous and a lot more regimented and stressful.

Disney realized, years ago, that their limited number of theme parks—they only really have two, not counting the various sub-parks: Disneyland on the West Coast and Disneyworld on the East Coast—together with Disney's entrenched status as a cultural icon with lots of goodwill and brand recognition among the public, are vastly underserving public demand, allowing them to inflate the price of a single trip almost arbitrarily, well into the four digits—or even the five-digits if you're taking the family and spending several days.

The Star Wars hotel was Disney's "Magic 30": a product so ludicrously expensive as to incur immediate and universal condemnation by their own fans. It's clear to me what Disney was doing: They'd happily turned the conventional price knob up and up and up for years. Now they wanted to experiment with a fundamentally more expensive product class, basically five to ten times more expensive. They wanted to see if the market could support it. Because the growing disparity of wealth in America, together with America's obscene wealth as a nation relative to the rest of the world, means that it's definitely possible: There are definitely millions of people out there who could book a stay at the Star Wars hotel if they wanted to. And Disney was like "Let's see if they will."

And you know what? I think it could have succeeded. Because there really is an obscene excess of wealth in this country, even though most of us don't have any access to it. And we are a culture whose zeitgeist is ever ravenous for the next big, flashy experience.

But instead the venture failed spectacularly. Why? Because such reckless corporate greed is, itself, usually a sign of deep organizational rot and incompetency among the board and executive leadership. In other words, their hotel failed for the same reason they tried building it in the first place: Disney has grown stupid.

The way it failed, going by Jenny's video, is down to two independent reasons:

An outrageous degree of "penny-wise, pound foolish" thinking;

A fundamental failure to anticipate the comfort and pleasure of the guest.

The former is the more obvious of the two, and what really stood out to me as emblematic of it in this whole boondoggle were two simple thing: 1) The hotel rooms didn't have complimentary Disney+; and 2) the free loaner umbrellas for hotel guests visiting the Star Wars Land in Disneyworld were either so worn-out or so shoddy to begin with that, unless it was a big coincidence, both Jenny's and Jenny's sister's umbrella failed while in use. This was in the context of Disneyworld's most expensive customer experience ever, by a lot, and Disney was nickel-and-diming them. Jenny's video goes into a great depth of detail on the dozens if not hundreds of corners they cut; it was basically everything but the food. The result was an antagonistic relationship between Disney and their hotel guests where almost everything interesting cost more money (usually a lot more money) while almost everything included in the main ticket price was of cheap quality or stingy in its allotment. Every aspect of the whole process, from the scammy vibes of booking a room in the first place, to the pathetic after-care for customers who reported a problem after their stay, was likely to leave a sour taste in the customer's mouth.

When you're paying the most expensive prices in the history of a product category, you really just need to be given an up-front price that includes all or nearly all of it. You'll know what you're in for, and you can make an informed decision, and then it's really just down to the host to provide an experience and level of service that matches those high dollar outlays. But instead, as Jenny pointed out, it's like you're dealing with Spirit Airlines, where you're gonna pay a fee for literally everything beyond sitting your body quietly on the airplane.

Mind-boggling hubris. Disney needs to be broken up for the monopoly that it is, and this is just one more example of how convinced of their own inevitability and supremacy Disney has become.

The other main failure on Disney's part is the subtler one.

Jenny focused on how the Star Wars themed choose-your-own-adventure game, which was at the heart of the hotels' central conceit of "live your own personal Star Wars story," was irreparably dysfunctional. Not only was the app, through which most of the "experience" was conveyed, horribly designed; and not only were the tasks delivered through this app mostly busywork to anyone other than young children, consisting of little more than walking around and scanning inanimate objects; but the storyline's entry points and decision points were completely impenetrable through reasonable means, to the point of seeming arbitrary. Jenny proactively tried and failed to get into her preferred storyline; then tried and failed to get into any storyline; then was automatically sorted into one the next morning; and ultimately ended up having only one (dubiously) interactive story experience over the whole weekend.

She talked about how the tightly-regimented and incredibly full schedule was so mentally and physically draining that on the final night she fled her dinner table fearing she would vomit and had to stand in her hotel room staring at herself in the mirror for a while, to understand her illness (which turned out to be stress-induced exhaustion) and center herself.

She talked about how she didn't get to see a much-coveted music show during dinner on her first night because she was seated behind a giant column.

Really, these things are manifestations of the larger and more fundamental failure on Disney's part to anticipate the comfort and pleasure of the guest, as I put it.

As I was watching her video, two thoughts came to me in this vein:

First was that this whole experience really needed to be "playtested," as we might say in Magic. I mean, I'm sure there nominally was, but whatever playtesting they did was completely ineffective. Good playtesting would have brought most of these issues to light.

Second was that the Disney of today has completely lost touch with the namesake of their industry: hospitality. This would never have happened at a new luxury resort by an established world-class hotelier a century ago. Because they understood the basics. Little things, like hot towels.

I could tell just from Jenny's video that this whole hotel was decided from the top-down by soulless, disconnected corporate suits who blatantly disregarded whatever good suggestions I'm sure the Imagineers® came up with. For the failures to be as expansive and ubiquitous as Jenny's video documented, no doubt the institutional rot extends down at least as far as the project manager level, if not down to individual Imagineers® and beyond, but there have to be at least some good ones, and clearly they were overruled early and often. Whenever Disney's leadership was faced with a decision between anticipating the comfort and pleasure of the guest, and saving a couple bucks on a guest who was literally laying out several thousands of dollars to be there, leadership chose the latter.

They were so arrogant that they believed, without noticing or questioning it (unless Disney's leadership is in fact cartoon evil), that they would tell the customer what constitutes a good experience, and the customer would pay top dollar for it. And so you get a guest experience where customers who are actively trying to pick a given storyline can't get any storyline and are later seated for the dinner show behind a giant fucking column.

It's sad, and we should all be glad that their hotel failed. Not that Disney is likely to learn the right lessons from their failure, but the long-term solution here is for leisure dollars to be directed toward other companies. For the several thousand bucks that Jenny paid, she could have had a true luxury vacation in most parts of the world—and for longer than two nights.

One thing that I noticed during the four hours of her video was that Disney, or at least the people in charge of developing this hotel, didn't seem to understand what constitutes an enjoyable story experience. I am forgiving of the low level of complexity in the various puzzles, since the public is famously stupid plus a lot of these guests are going to be children. But there was so little imagination in the actual plot beats: Chewie sneaks in, gets arrested, and busts out. You get to help some Resistance fighters smuggle their luggage. Like, it's insipid. I mean, ultimately, most pop storytelling is insipid, but what I mean is that the dressings were insipid too. Dressing a story up is what makes stories great, at least at the mainstream level. There was no pomp and flourish; no clever interweaving; no electric events that put people on the edge of their seats. Just walking around on your phone for two days scanning crates and occasionally being in the same room while somebody busts Chewie out of the clink—assuming you even make it to the story events in time, since they often fired early.

The whole thing smacks of rule by committee, too many cooks, and suits suits suits all the way down.

I think it's a sign of the times that this is happening. We are once again in Robber-Baron territory in this land. The big corporations and the oligarchs who run them have become so obscenely rich and so utterly disconnected from ordinary life, and their corporate cultures have become so masturbatory and so officious, that they are increasingly creating products for idealized, phantom audiences. They increasingly don't understand real people or real life.

And we can and should bring the weight of the government down on them, more to break up monopolies and allow new and established competitors to seriously challenge them than to actively punish these companies for making money, but even more so we just need to spend our dollars elsewhere. I mean, I'm speaking hypothetically here; I am poor so none of this even applies to me in the first place.

Hence why, even after inflation, this is still just my two cents.

[kolbisneat]

MONTHLY MEDIA: May 2024

Hey it's May! Big X-Men month over here but also lots of other great stuff. Here's how I spent the last 31 days!

……….FILM……���.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) Impossible to live up to my expectations, given how much I love Mad Max: Fury Road. I liked the bits with new characters, I liked the bits that felt like Fury Road, and I surprisingly liked how it tied into the previous film during the credits. It's a different beast and given it succeeds as a prequel, I gotta respect it for what it is.

……….TELEVISION……….

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Episode 1.01 to 1.06) Shockingly violent but it does a good job of setting the tone for the series in the first scenes. Love it when something fantastically (spy life) is used to highlight the mundane (stages of a romantic relationship). Big fan.

Delicious in Dungeon (Episode 1.18 to 1.22) Uuuuugh so close to the end of the season and I'm not looking forward to the wait between now and season 2.

X-Men '97 (Episode 1.08 to 1.10) Hey a really tight season of television! Maybe a little too tight at moments (strangely it feels like it could've benefited from 1 or 2 more eps in the middle there) but I really do prefer a fast pace over a slog. Now I'm gonna go read some X-Men comics.

Succession (Episode 4.03 to 4.10) Somehow avoided having the ending spoiled and it was a perfect culmination of great characters and writing. What I love about this series is how consistently it puts the core trio in the same room, and how the score is practically all just variations of the intro song. Loved it.

……….YOUTUBE……….

The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel by Jenny Nicholson I've been watching Nicholson's videos for years and it's great to see this one break out of its core community for a few reasons: 1. it shows that thoughtful and thorough art can connect and has value and 2. towards the end it becomes a scathing indictment of cynical corporations. Much like blockbuster cinema slowly dying, it confirms that the general public can discern art from content and won't support the latter. The Star Wars Hotel was overpriced content and it failed. VIDEO

……….READING……….

The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin (Compelte) I don't know what I was thinking when I read and disliked A Wizard of Earthsea. This and The Tombs of Atuan are so thoroughly fantastic that I feel the need to go back and reread the first book after I finish the series. Such economical and poetic storytelling.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams (Complete) Big fan of the Hitchhiker's Trilogy but maybe that set the bar too high for this one. It never quite came together and if asked what the book was about, I'd have a hard time landing on something. Maybe that works for some folks and I'm in full support of the journey being the adventure, but it just wasn't for me.

House of X / Powers of X by Jonathan Hickman, Pepe Larraz, R.B. Silva, and Marte Gracia (Complete) Hey the new show has me in the mood to read some X-Men comics! I appreciated the series more on this reread but still find the pacing of the "reveal" to undersell the gravity of what it's suggesting. I'm keen to get into the rest of the series even though it's a convoluted jumble of multiple titles. Comics!

Dawn of X Volume 1 by Jonathan Hickman and a whole slew of talented folks (Complete) Reading single issues from different teams back-to-back really highlights individual strengths and weaknesses. I really dug some issues and was bored by others but I'm going to keep going with these collected volumes to see what sticks.

Delicious in Dungeon Vol 7 & 8 by Ryoko Kui (Complete) I really forgot most of these volumes. Izutsumi is such a good foil for the group (especially now that Marcille is barely resistant to eating monsters at this point) but I always have trouble with the moody loner types.

……….AUDIO……….

Hyperdrama by Justice (2024) You know I haven't listened to this since the start of the month. Some standout tracks but the album as a whole didn't leave me with much of an impression.

The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast (Podcast) The Lonely Island digital shorts were a foundational part of my youth and listening to how they were made, along with behind-the-scenes stuff with SNL, is a great listen.

……….GAMING……….

OZ: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting (Andrews McMeel Publishing) Tuesday crew is beginning to see the aftermath of their political assassination (you can read all about it here!) and the Mof1 crew is actively sabotaging a memorial to the lives lost in a catastrophic explosion they caused.

And that's it. See you in June!

[capinve]

Jenny Nicholson - The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0CpOYZZZW4

According to the judgement of the Oratrice Mecanique d'Analyse Cardinale: Not worth it.

In the "Worth it?" section, Jenny Nicholson reminded everyone that visiting Disneyland is established in American culture as a "rite of passage" that middle class families might get into financial burden to "splurge" on Disney theme parks.

In the final 2 chapters of this 4-hour video, Jenny Nicholson talked about how the Galactic Starcruiser experience was a watered down version of an immersive theme park concept due to the cost of staffing and maintenance. The existence of Galactic Starcruiser partly owes to the Disneyland's monetization strategy of (1) moving the free and "cool stuff" behind additional costs ("paywall") and (2) monetizing long line ups (FastPass).

[uncloseted]

i feel like your taste is so chic and effortlessly cool, so what are your current favorites? anything as far as trinkets, skincare, movies, foods, creators, music ect! I feel like you spend so much time giving advice that it would be fun to learn a lil more about what makes you happy lately! hope you're having a good day!!!

That's so nice of you! I've been collecting the things I've been loving over the past few days and here's what I came up with:

Clothes, makeup, and hair:

Essie Expressie Seize the Minute quick dry nail polish, which is a really nice red with blue undertones

Lisa Says Gah Museo Bianco Elizabeth Dress, which I bought secondhand off Depop. I got it for my trip to Greece but I'm worried it's a little too on the nose so I'm not sure if I'll bring it yet (still very cute though)

Uniqlo Wide Straight Jeans. They're just the right amount of slouchy

This matching set from Amazon. I've been wanting a set like this for a few months now and I ended up being so pleasantly surprised with this one. It ended up being way cuter than in the product pictures and fitting really well

Inkey List Vitamin C Serum. It's made my skin tone way more even and bright, and they're a clean, cruelty free brand

Tir Tir Red Cushion foundation. Mostly I bought it because I think the packaging looks really chic, but the product provides a really nice, buildable coverage as well

Jones Road Miracle Balm in Au Natural. This one I got as a gift and at first I didn't really get how you were supposed to use it, but now I'm really into it. It gives the nicest dewy glow without looking shiny.

Video Essays:

Jenny Nicholson's "The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel". She hated the part of the experience that I worked on as much as I hated working on it, so I feel vindicated 😭. If you've ever wondered what it was like to stay at Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, this answers that question in such intricate detail that by the end of it you'll feel like you actually went

Quinton Reviews' "The Failure of Victorious" and "The End of Victorious". As you might guess from the titles, it's about the Nickelodeon show Victorious and why it was such a failure. Is this the second time I've watched all thirteen hours of this? Yes. Do I regret it? No, not really.

PhilosophyTube in general, but especially her recent video "I Read The Most Misunderstood Philosopher in the World" which is about Judith Butler's philosophy of gender.

Music:

Chappell Roan. It's Pride month, I'm a queer woman, enough said

I've been getting back into Marina lately, especially her newest album, Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land. She's always been my pick out of the Tumblr sad girl musicians and I'm really impressed with how her music (and her public persona) has grown and changed over the years

I Only Have Eyes for You by Tashaki Miyaki. I heard this song years ago and it randomly popped into my head the other day and would not leave. It's just very vibey

TV:

Doctor Who with Ncuti Gatwa. I'm in love with him and I think his take on The Doctor is perfect.

Legion. I mostly started watching this because my girl Lauren Tsai is in the third season, but I love it. I think it's a really unique take on the superhero genre.

Bee and Puppycat. This is a show about a girl named Bee and her best friend/pet who is a mysterious creature who looks kind of like a cat and kind of like a dog. They take temporary jobs so that they can afford to buy snacks and leather jackets. It's a really special show, and I've watched it a few times now. The original series is on YouTube, and there's also a series on Netflix that expands on the original episodes.

Books:

Babel by RF Kuang. I'm reading this for a book club and I'm really enjoying it so far. It's about a child in an alternative-reality 1830s England who is adopted from China and taken to Oxford University to study the art of translation.

Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey. I've actually never read The Odyssey before because I am bad at being Greek and also at being a supposed descendant of Homer. Dr. Wilson is the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English

Games:

I just finished playing Planet of Lana, which is a really gorgeous puzzle-platformer inspired by the aesthetics of Studio Ghibli films and the gameplay of Playdead games such as Limbo and Inside. It has a great story about a girl who's looking for her sister, who has been abducted by hostile alien machines.

Places:

Wasteland secondhand stores in LA. I've been finding a lot of really great pieces there in the past few weeks, and the pieces I've found there have been around 75-90% off their original price.

La La Kind Cafe. I go to these when I need to convince myself to leave my house. They have a good vibe and the drinks are great.

Miscellaneous Stuff:

Nicola Coughlan. I've been watching all of the interviews she's doing for Bridgerton and I'm obsessed with her whole vibe. Her new dark comedy show about a woman with bipolar disorder, Big Mood, is also really great.

Earscapes. I reopened a bunch of old piercings I had and I'm having so much fun trying different combinations of earrings in them. I honestly can't believe I left them closed for so long.

Using lipstick as blush. I have such a hard time finding blush colors that work for me and then finding a blush that goes with my lipstick. So instead what I've been doing lately is putting on my lipstick, blotting it with my finger, and then using the leftover on my cheeks. It works super well and it means I can stop buying new blush products

This sardine tin makeup pouch. I haven't gotten it yet so I can't tell you how it is, but I just thought it looked so cute, and I needed a makeup bag for travel. I'll let you know if it ends up being good

Baths, just as a general concept. My old apartment didn't have enough hot water to fill up a bath, so I never used to take them, but they're so great? I got this full body bath pillow, which has made it was more comfortable to just relax there.

[cinemacentury]

Wednesday, May 29, 2024

"Here's my supporting evidence: The hotel went out of business!"

201. THE SPECTACULAR FAILURE OF THE STAR WARS HOTEL (Jenny Nicholson, 2024) - United States - Streaming - YouTube - 245 minutes. New to me #183.

[autie-j]

Nobody:

Me, worlds biggest Webby fan watching The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel: Webby cameo! Webby cameo! Webby cameo! Glowing red eyes? Evil...Webby cameo??

[stellanslashgeode]

The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel

Click for a thorough postmortem of Galactic Starcruiser, stay for a shocking explanation of the enshitification of the Disney parks.

[nicad13]

The "good, the bad, and the ugly" on Jenny Nicholson's Starcruiser video. TLDR: she did experience some legitimately bad glitches, but she didn't do her research and made stuff up about what was actually supposed to happen and presented the whole thing as journalism, which is an ethically shitty thing to do.

Of possible interest to @dindjarindiaries

[bookclub4m]

Episode 195 - Pop(ular) Culture Non-Fiction

This episode we’re discussing the topic of non-fiction Pop Culture books! We talk about cult classics, the Disney channel, the futch scale, and being Eldritch Millennials. 

You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast delivery system.

In this episode

Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | Jam Edwards

Join our Discord Server!

Things We Read (or tried to…)

Street Unicorns: Extravagant Fashion Photography from NYC Streets and Beyond by Robbie Quinn

Poisoned Chalice: The Extremely Long and Incredibly Complex Story of Marvelman by Pádraig Ó Méalóid

Part 0: Introduction

I Am the Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future by Michael Molcher

And Don't F&%k It Up: An Oral History of RuPaul's Drag Race by María Elena Fernández

The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture by Grace Perry

Note: Anna didn’t have the Disney Channel because she lived in the woods in Alaska. It also did not exist in Canada until 2015.

The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel by Jenny Nicholson

That's So '90s!: A Pop-Cultural Guide to the Raddest Decade by Jo Stewart and Lisa Gillard

The Bizarre World of Fake Video Games by Super Eyepatch Wolf

Junk Film: Why Bad Movies Matter by Katharine Coldiron

Other Media We Mentioned

Attack of the New B Movies: Essays on SYFY Original Films edited by Justin Wigard and Mitch Ploskonka

Introducing Postmodernism: A Graphic Guide by Chris Garratt and  Richard Appignanesi

FRUiTS by Shoichi Aoki

Wikipedia

Miracleman: The Silver Age by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham

RuPaul's Drag Race (Wikipedia)

The Pit Stop S16 E01

Glee (TV series) (Wikipedia)

Euphoria (American TV series) (Wikipedia)

Abbott Elementary (Wikipedia)

The Simpsons is Good Again by Super Eyepatch Wolf

Taskmaster: Series 17, Episode 1

Plan 9 from Outer Space (Wikipedia)

Every Frame a Painting

Links, Articles, and Things

Follow our Twitch channel!

Jam and Matthew will be streaming Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp on Saturday, June 8th at 3pm PT/6pm ET. 

Jam made an image to promote it.

Jam’s Top Ten Video Essays About Media They Haven’t Experienced

Mood board (Wikipedia)

Blockbuster (Wikipedia)

Walkman (Wikipedia)

Milk caps/Pogs (Wikipedia)

Tamagotchi (Wikipedia)

Webring (Wikipedia)

Which Pokémon are the most goth?

20 Pop Culture Non-Fiction Books by BIPOC Authors

Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory Podcasts chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.

A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib

Indigenous Celebrity: Entanglements with Fame edited by Jennifer Adese & Robert Alexander Innes

The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men by Manuel Betancourt

Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture by Zeba Blay

The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love With Me by Keah Brown

She Memes Well by Quinta Brunson

Can't Stop Won't Stop: A Hip-Hop History by Jeff Chang & Dave Cook

Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada by Karrmen Crey

Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me by Aisha Harris

Leslie F*cking Jones by Leslie Jones

K-Drama School: A Pop Culture Inquiry into Why We Love Korean Television by Grace Jung

Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart by Jen Sookfong Lee

Indiginerds: Tales from Modern Indigenous Life edited by Alina Pete

Nerd: Adventures in Fandom from This Universe to the Multiverse by Maya Phillips

The Dead Don't Need Reminding: In Search of Fugitives, Mississippi, and Black TV Nerd Shit by Julian Randall

Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong by Katie Gee Salisbury

First Things First: Hip-Hop Ladies Who Changed the Game by Nadirah Simmons

Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop by Danyel Smith

Making a Scene by Constance Wu

Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now by Jeff Yang, Phil Yu, & Philip Wang

Give us feedback!

Fill out the form to ask for a recommendation or suggest a genre or title for us to read!

Check out our Tumblr, follow us on Instagram, join our Facebook Group or Discord Server, or send us an email!

Join us again on Tuesday, June 18th when it’s time once again for One Book One Podcast as we each pitch a book we think we should read and you (the listeners) get to vote!

Then on Tuesday, July 2nd we’ll be discussing the genre of Law/Legal Non-Fiction!

[not100bees]

"The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel" is my "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" except that Jenny Nicholson is 100x more charming and funny than David Foster Wallace. So really it's just better.

[lilithsaintcrow]

"Released in 1978, this micro-budget production shot on Super 8 film spoofs the ramshackle bombast of the original Star Wars, then still playing in theaters, in the form of a thirteen-minute-long fictional trailer."

[thepastisaroadmap]

[ID: a screenshot of Jenny Nicholson's "The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel" video, about halfway through (in part 11: attractions). Jenny is wearing a large porg mascot head. End ID]

Also speaking of Jenny Nicholson I'm 100% sure she, like many video essayists, is aware that a large portion of her audience is not actively watching the video, they're drawing or gaming or doing something else while listening to it. And she takes full comedic advantage of that in how she plans her outfits. Because I cannot explain to you the feeling of being tabbed over from the video, switching back to pause it, and being looked dead in the eyes by this

[signalwatch]

Schadenfreude Watch and TL;DR discussion: The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel (2024) http://dlvr.it/TCFLZD