Hey, remember how the internet was going to end racism?  How the digital revolution would close the gaps between the haves and have-nots?  Maybe eliminate money altogether?

Remember that?

It’s cute when little children assign their toys superpowers.  It’s nothing but trouble when grown-ups do it.

Today we’re told that digital technology will change everything about the study of literature:  quantifying it, taking out all the messy subjectivity, and reveal stunning new insights.

Promises promises.

It is possible to do the academic study of popular culture well.  It just isn’t common.  My hypothesis is that all too often the academic study of popular culture is undertaken by scholars who really just want to write fan fiction.

In the magnificent opening essay of his 1912 masterpiece “The Tragic Sense of Life,” Miguel de Unamuno follows Spinoza to hold that the essence of any being that can be reasonably called such is the will to continue being ourselves.  For all that we change – from moment to moment, from year to year, decade to decade – that is the one thing about us that holds steady.  And should this vanish, so do we.

“Remember when we hated television?”

I’ve had this conversation with several fellow Gen Xers recently.  We circle each other warily until someone mentions liking a TV show, and then someone asks “Do you … like … Television?”

To say “Yes” back in our formative years would have identified you as a philistine:  someone hopelessly out of touch with what’s good in life.   But there’s no cultural cache left in disliking TV.  The words “Golden Age of Television” come up a lot.  It would be a terrible thing to live in a golden age and not know it.

Back in 2009 Omnibucket partner Dave Senecal profiled the artwork of Paglilunga for the Lithopolis Honey Festival.  Why?  Because it's awesome, and you should know about it.  That's why we're reprinting it now.  

Nestled within the hills of southern Ohio, a few minutes drive south of Columbus, a distinct buzz could be felt on the cool September breeze blowing through the normally quiet, and exotically named town of Lithopolis.

Back in 2010 Omnibucket partner Dave Senecal  had a chance to chat with author Dave Wellington. You might recognize Wellington from his “Monster Island” and other web serials. Dave has tons of cool stuff going on and was a contributor to Omnibucket’s own “Brainchild…A Collection of Artifacts” in 2005.

We're re-printing this interview on our new site because, dammit, it's just that cool.

01. What have you been up to? Is there anything you can tell us about new projects in the works?

Charles Barber writes in Salon that we now live in the Age of Trauma.

Every era has a particular mental disorder, you see, and for 21st century America that disorder is PTSD.  He writes:

William Eggington has an essay in the New York Times’ “The Stone” blog about the way in which Borges and Kant(among others) prefigured the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Facebook ergo sum.  Or, by contrast:  I am not on Facebook, therefore I do not exist. 

This is not the conclusion of an extraordinary new article by Rob Horning, “Google Alert for the Soul” – it is the premise. 

I’m going to admit something.

Back when I was a kid, a truly little kid, I would sit in front of the TV and watch the old 60’s Batman show … and didn’t know that it was camp.

Come on.  What did I know from camp?  I vaguely knew how the whole “superhero” thing was supposed to go (I’m not sure how the structure seeped into my brain), and the Adam West “Batman” seemed to hit all the right notes to a still fairly naïve 7-year-old, even if many of the particulars struck me as odd around the edges.