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I don't think anyone's arguing that the English curriculum in the US shouldn't be challenged and diversified. That change is a necessity for increasing engagement among non-white students.
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Sep 16, 2017 19:02
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Looking back, I'm very fortunate to have had a great English teacher in my senior year of High School. He always tried to emphasize how the language of the story was used to reflect the themes and content, and we had some nice class discussion about both the classics (Joyce, Melville, Shakespeare) and more recent work (Paul Auster, Charles Portis, Flannery O'Connor). He was doing well last I heard, heads up the English department in my town now. 
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Sep 16, 2017 20:54
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H3H3's dicussion on the Pewdiepie racism was actually pretty decent. I was worried Ethan was going to blindly support Felix because they're friends, but he was pretty dissapointed and disgusted in him. Ethan's point was like "it might be funny to poke fun at SJW types and outrage culture, but you should also call out things which are offensive and you shouldn't be afraid to criticise actual hate speech or people doing things that hurt people or encourage a hurtful culture", which was a lot more mature than I expected, I was thinking he was going to pull the 'it's just a word' card, but he was clearly against it. It was actually good and nice to see Ethan being a bit more serious about things sometimes.
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Sep 16, 2017 21:26
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RareAcumen posted:Also, seeing Huck Finn just reminded me of dumb imgur comments about the freeze peach about the book being banned from schools. I'm pretty sure the reason they don't want the book around is because they're trying to limit how many students go around reading the word friend of the family. And even if that was the case, reprints with it uncensored still exist. IIRC the two big reasons people tried to ban it were "I don't want my kids to even be aware of the word" and "It has the word therefore it's irredeemable racist garbage". The latter of which is just completely wrong and shows that the people making the argument didn't pay attention to it. The former, while a noble goal, ignores that America is really loving racist and it's better to expose your kids to it in a controlled environment where it's obviously a bad thing instead of, say, from jokes made by their peers around a campfire or whatever.
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Sep 16, 2017 22:12
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OldMemes posted:H3H3's dicussion on the Pewdiepie racism was actually pretty decent. I was worried Ethan was going to blindly support Felix because they're friends, but he was pretty dissapointed and disgusted in him. Ethan's point was like "it might be funny to poke fun at SJW types and outrage culture, but you should also call out things which are offensive and you shouldn't be afraid to criticise actual hate speech or people doing things that hurt people or encourage a hurtful culture", which was a lot more mature than I expected, I was thinking he was going to pull the 'it's just a word' card, but he was clearly against it. Yeah, all cool sure. I mean, unless you listened to his podcast with Idubbbz beforehand... No disrespect or anything, I just don't get the fella sometimes, like at all.
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Sep 17, 2017 00:36
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Moatman posted:IIRC the two big reasons people tried to ban it were "I don't want my kids to even be aware of the word" and "It has the word therefore it's irredeemable racist garbage". The latter of which is just completely wrong and shows that the people making the argument didn't pay attention to it. The former, while a noble goal, ignores that America is really loving racist and it's better to expose your kids to it in a controlled environment where it's obviously a bad thing instead of, say, from jokes made by their peers around a campfire or whatever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg9VCf5einY
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Sep 17, 2017 00:42
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achillesforever6 posted:I'll never forget in a documentary of HP Lovecraft where Guillermo del toro tried to justify Lovecraft's racism of being part of the times with going "Mark Twain was also racist" which is such a misreading of anything Twain ever wrote. It was a good doc regardless and is free on youtube it just had weird things like that (Gaiman also trying to downplay how Lovecraft's monsters weren't symbolic of how much of a loving racist/xenophobe he was). Hey, now, these monsters also symbolic of his hate of sea food and tall buildings! 
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Sep 17, 2017 00:44
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Down The Rabbit Hole goes down the rabbit hole of bizarre YouTube videos aimed at young children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NceTdz8KlYU
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Sep 17, 2017 00:46
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Kim Justice posted:Yeah, all cool sure. I mean, unless you listened to his podcast with Idubbbz beforehand... Idubbz is wierd. Like, the guy is funny, and it's pretty clear that HE'S meant to be the butt of all his jokes rather than anyone else, but his delivery and tone is so mean spirited that even if it's not punching down, it still feels....off? I dunno, he's a bit too dark for my tastes, but his squirrel relocating videos are oddly watchable. Ethan is a lot more likable, but I think he's a bit too over eager to be liked, and it leads him to stick up for some people because he's friends with them, but he has a clear line in the sand that he doesn't cross, and the pewdiepie thing was one of them. I like how H3H3 don't dunk on people personally, like they'll make a video poking fun at a video or a trend, then fly them out to have a chat on the podcast and see what makes them tick as a person. The problem is the H3H3 audience can be pretty toxic - there's an interesting video where they go to Tai Lopez's house, and since they made fun of his infomericals, the comments are full of angry fans wanting to know why Ethan didn't confront him. But by being pleasant to him, Ethan gets Tai to open up, and there's some really interesting moments where we can see why Tai is how he is, which is more interesting than if Ethan had gone aggressive and shouting memes in his face. He's said he's a big fan of Louis Theroux and that really shows when he's being more serious. Yeah Ethan makes some wierd decisions and statements, but H3H3 is one of the better Youtube channels and Ethan made the right move to criticise Pewdiepie and not make excuses for him. Idubbz is an 'every once in a while' Youtuber, H3H3 is better.
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Sep 17, 2017 00:48
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OldMemes posted:Idubbz is wierd. Like, the guy is funny, and it's pretty clear that HE'S meant to be the butt of all his jokes rather than anyone else, but his delivery and tone is so mean spirited that even if it's not punching down, it still feels....off? I dunno, he's a bit too dark for my tastes, but his squirrel relocating videos are oddly watchable. I think H3 and Dubz are both pretty great Youtubers, especially when they're on their game. I mean, Dubz certainly does have a big mean streak at times for sure, but then his more dark stuff kinda falls in with my kind of humour and Content Cops are one of those stop everything watches for me...I just find it a bit weird for Ethan to criticise Pewdiepie after dropping N-bombs all over the place in another vid. I dunno...sometimes it feels a little like he's reaching for audiences at times instead of just doing his natural poo poo, like when he became all about Buzzfeed and MTV for a bit. BTW, if y'all like podcasts on YouTube and don't mind a big arse sweary lad-bloke from Newcastle, y'all should check out the True Geordie Podcast. He kinda goes a bit for that Joe Rogan type vibe and he's had some really interesting people on as well as UK 'Tubers and the like (yr KSI's, Spencer FC's, Joe Wellers etc.). Highly recommended, awesome channel.
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Sep 17, 2017 01:08
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probably because H3H3 has done a lot of "SJWS MAD ABOUT WORDS????" kinda poo poo while Idubbz may be kinda more harsh than his persona may allow but his basic stance has always been 'the joke is that I'M the rear end in a top hat even if I'm not wrong here'. Like, I don't know if Dubz has said anything proper but the point of all his jokes is the character he plays regardless of if you like it or not IS one of toxicity and dark poo poo. Ethan tries to both be sincere and be funny youtube limits testing boy and it winds up just coming off like he has no actual beliefs. Him going right from "THE SJWS WANT TO BAN NAUGHTY WORDS??? FREE SPEECH MY NIGGERS" to "Felix saying friend of the family was very bad and I'm glad we're all mad at him and he deserves to be punished for it" makes people just think he doesn't actually give a poo poo either way but wants to cash in on whatever's current.
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Sep 17, 2017 01:14
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Kim Justice posted:Yeah, all cool sure. I mean, unless you listened to his podcast with Idubbbz beforehand... He believes context changes the meaning. And I think it does for some cases. Idubbbz is repeating what people are calling him rather than calling anyone that word specifically. Ethan just believes anything is allowed for comedy so long as you're telling a joke. Pewds was not telling a joke. Ian, usually is. Ethan doesn't hate social justice, just people who are ready to be outraged at everything. The pewds thing made it pretty clear for me I think. CelticPredator fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Sep 17, 2017 |
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Sep 17, 2017 01:51
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achillesforever6 posted:I'll never forget in a documentary of HP Lovecraft where Guillermo del toro tried to justify Lovecraft's racism of being part of the times with going "Mark Twain was also racist" which is such a misreading of anything Twain ever wrote. It was a good doc regardless and is free on youtube it just had weird things like that (Gaiman also trying to downplay how Lovecraft's monsters weren't symbolic of how much of a loving racist/xenophobe he was). Is that the same one where the dude is talking about space fungi and starts rambling about islamo-fascism
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Sep 17, 2017 04:10
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Are there any good Internet Critics® who focus on books? I'd like to hear more book discourse but I get the feeling that medium doesn't mesh well with Youtube videos.
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Sep 17, 2017 04:18
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Solitair posted:Are there any good Internet Critics® who focus on books? I'd like to hear more book discourse but I get the feeling that medium doesn't mesh well with Youtube videos. BookTube is it's whole own huge thing. I'm only glancingly familiar with its geography, but my buddy Brock (@LetsRead on Twitter, he's been on my stream a couple times) is all over that stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=user?brocksbookbag?videos
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Sep 17, 2017 05:23
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Is that the same one where the dude is talking about space fungi and starts rambling about islamo-fascism  Its also the one where Neil Gaiman correctly talks about how clunky and overbearing Lovecraft's writing and people in the comments are really salty about it.
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Sep 17, 2017 05:26
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My time in a New Jersey public middle and high school spanned from 1998-2005. I'm counting summer reading in this list. Middle School Books: Hatchet, Number the Stars, Bridge to Terabithia, Tom Sawyer, My Brother Sam Is Dad, The Bloody Country, Night, A Day No Pigs Would Die, Anne Frank, Siddhartha, Locked in Time High School Books: Scarlet Letter, Speak, Catcher in the Rye, The Hobbit, 1984, Animal Farm, Things Fall Apart, Anthem, Gulliver's Travels, Beowulf, Julius Caesar, Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth, Lord of the Flies, The Crucible, Frankenstein, The Odyssey, Canterbury Tales I missed out on Gatsby and Brave New World. I wasn't really good at "reading" what I was assigned. The only book out of those that I aggressively hated was Anthem. I remembered the teacher I had for Frankenstein was very open that he hated the book and was only teaching it because he had to.
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Sep 17, 2017 07:23
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So was my school the only one that had Catch-22 and Grapes of Wrath/East of Eden on their reading list? I thought those puppies were standard.
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Sep 17, 2017 08:47
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Terrible Opinions posted:So was my school the only one that had Catch-22 and Grapes of Wrath/East of Eden on their reading list? I thought those puppies were standard. My school's 4 years of English were all dedicated to different things and the specific works in the year we focused on these sorts of "contemporary-ish literary novels" was obviously somewhat strained for time since it was only one year, especially since there were other modules like slam poetry that took up a good amount of that year. As I recall, we did Catch-22, Grapes of Wrath, Huck Finn, and Gatsby that year, but it varied by instructor and they rotated the books (probably for various reasons including minimizing test reuse, teachers getting bored of the same books, and so on). I know another year did To Kill A Mockingbird and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, for instance. Other years we focused largely on classics (Dante's Inferno, The Odyssey, a couple Shakespeares, etc), multicultural and minority literature (largely books by American minorities), and a year where we focused on broader theories about literature as a medium, reading a wide range of novels from Shakespeare to fictionalized semi-autobiographical novels by Korean-American immigrants, though with a specific module on existentialism which included authors like James Joyce and Sartre. E: There are really probably 100 or so books that kind of make up the "high school canon" so to speak, and while there's going to be overlap, there are still enough that a lot of people probably weren't assigned a specific one you read. Linear Zoetrope fucked around with this message at 09:09 on Sep 17, 2017 |
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Sep 17, 2017 09:02
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Solitair posted:Are there any good Internet Critics® who focus on books? I'd like to hear more book discourse but I get the feeling that medium doesn't mesh well with Youtube videos. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPtiXdv7RoU8IkrJeNY73qw/videos FoldableHuman posted:BookTube is it's whole own huge thing. I'm only glancingly familiar with its geography, but my buddy Brock (@LetsRead on Twitter, he's been on my stream a couple times) is all over that stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=user?brocksbookbag?videos 
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Sep 17, 2017 09:49
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Echo Chamber posted:My time in a New Jersey public middle and high school spanned from 1998-2005. I'm counting summer reading in this list. I'd love to know the fuckery that got Ayn Rand on a high-school reading list. My guess is a local car dealer or someone wanted to give some money to the district, but had some strings attached.
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Sep 17, 2017 11:35
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Also just caught up with recent thread stuff, and I'm kind of embarrassed to have read that Blake Butler hot take, because that's an author I recognize who got recommended to me through the cosmic horror thread in TBB. Still looking forward to reading Scorch Atlas, though.FoldableHuman posted:BookTube is it's whole own huge thing. I'm only glancingly familiar with its geography, but my buddy Brock (@LetsRead on Twitter, he's been on my stream a couple times) is all over that stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=user?brocksbookbag?videos Thanks for the tip! Thanks also for your great Suicide Squad and Fight Club videos!
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Sep 17, 2017 11:48
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achillesforever6 posted:Yeah I don't know how anyone can deny that Lovecraft is a poor writer. He is incredibly clunky and overly verbose. But it's a testament to his imagination that those stories still work, even though you have to avoid the real odious racism that runs through his work.
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Sep 17, 2017 12:08
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business hammocks posted:I'd love to know the fuckery that got Ayn Rand on a high-school reading list. My guess is a local car dealer or someone wanted to give some money to the district, but had some strings attached. Honestly it was probably one of the weird objectivist 'foundations' making a donation. I know that there was a full crate of Anthem in one HS english class I took which they offered the school, for some kind of scholarship 'opportunity' to anyone who read it and wrote an essay. I could easily see a more hard up school taking something like that and going "FREE TEXTBOOKS, it's curriculum"
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Sep 17, 2017 12:31
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Solitair posted:Are there any good Internet Critics® who focus on books? I'd like to hear more book discourse but I get the feeling that medium doesn't mesh well with Youtube videos. Depends on the genre. I follow booktubers who mostly focus on YA fantasy, as that is what I read. I like Piera Forde because she does monthly videos that are just "everything I've read this month." She rambles a bit but tends to be able to actually explain her opinions mostly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsU4GDXl3G4
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Sep 17, 2017 13:13
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END ME SCOOB posted:Honestly it was probably one of the weird objectivist 'foundations' making a donation. I know that there was a full crate of Anthem in one HS english class I took which they offered the school, for some kind of scholarship 'opportunity' to anyone who read it and wrote an essay. I could easily see a more hard up school taking something like that and going "FREE TEXTBOOKS, it's curriculum" Yeah, they did this at my high school too, and I suspect it's very widespread. It's Anthem for the younger kids and The Fountainhead for upperclassmen. We never actually spent any class time on them though, just "If anyone wants a free book"
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Sep 17, 2017 13:35
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In my high school class, Anthem was just assigned. Even if I didn't have 1984 to compare it with, it was quite obvious it was insufferably preachy and poorly written. And I wasn't a seasoned reader who read a lot of well written novels. I'm not against Rand's books being taught, considering how influential they are. But I don't think high school English teachers are all ready to tell kids that the books they read might suck, and that it's good if you understand why they suck but struck a nerve.
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Sep 17, 2017 17:56
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Echo Chamber posted:In my high school class, Anthem was just assigned. Even if I didn't have 1984 to compare it with, it was quite obvious it was insufferably preachy and poorly written. And I wasn't a seasoned reader who read a lot of well written novels. Yeah I had Anthem assigned too. I told my teacher I thought it was really bad and he pretty much just said "Yeah I get where you're coming from."
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Sep 17, 2017 19:40
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It was not in my class, but i remember other people I knew in Middle School having to read Atlas Shrugged
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Sep 17, 2017 20:11
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I had a young teacher right out of college or grad school who taught an elective novels course that was 90% typical fare like A Farewell to Arms, but she designed the course so that a bunch of it would be taken up by The Fountainhead. I was always puzzled by that. She seemed like a standard bourgeois liberal, probably more left-leaning than most adults in my town, but loved The Fountainhead because it challenges commonsense beliefs about selfishness and selflessness, and she liked Thoreau and notions of self-reliance. I should look her up and see if she ever read an actual book of philosophy and moved on from teaching nonsense. I remember that she told us the district was really concerned about her including a Joyce Carol Oates story about a rapist trying to seduce a lady, but didn't even ask her about the Rand.
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Sep 17, 2017 20:23
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The worst book I was forced to read was in Civics class, because our teacher who was the head of the Republican's Club made us read Barry Goldwater's Conscious of a Conservative.
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Sep 17, 2017 21:58
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My favourite high school English teacher played us a bunch of Dead Kennedys when we had our unit on war.
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Sep 17, 2017 23:06
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neongrey posted:My favourite high school English teacher played us a bunch of Dead Kennedys when we had our unit on war. Our history instructor decided that rather than go with Schindler's List because holocaust was bad, he would show us The Wall because fascism is bad. I think we came out ahead.
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Sep 17, 2017 23:26
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END ME SCOOB posted:Our history instructor decided that rather than go with Schindler's List because holocaust was bad, he would show us The Wall because fascism is bad. my history teacher in middle school split the different and showed us Schindler's while talking about poo poo like Ford hating Jews and the massive 'actually these Nazis seem to have the right idea' movements in America who would have 100% been down with putting our jews in train cars too if asked. It was a genuinely very powerful lesson in how the holocaust was not some magical isolated event but the horrible climax of ages of oppression and hate that took root all over the west not just in Super Evil Nazi Land.
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Sep 18, 2017 05:09
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Mr.Radar posted:Down The Rabbit Hole goes down the rabbit hole of bizarre YouTube videos aimed at young children: Yeah, young kids' youtube is a genuinely unsettling place. If there's such thing as an uncanny valley for early childhood video entertainment, people have found it.
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Sep 18, 2017 05:14
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I was going to make a joke about these videos being the Indian Intelligence Bureau's modern version of numbers stations, but I paused it on the screenshot of bizarre Mickey Mouse pee videos and now I'm just confused. Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse Mommy get Stuck in Escalator. WHAT?
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Sep 18, 2017 11:11
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Paladin posted:I was going to make a joke about these videos being the Indian Intelligence Bureau's modern version of numbers stations, but I paused it on the screenshot of bizarre Mickey Mouse pee videos and now I'm just confused. Slowbeef and TieTuesday have a couple videos reacting to how loving bizarre those particular videos are. It's... It's certainly something.
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Sep 18, 2017 11:36
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Trojan Kaiju posted:Slowbeef and TieTuesday have a couple videos reacting to how loving bizarre those particular videos are. It's... It's certainly something. And for anyone interested who doesn't know what to type to find it, here you go! They don't have a playlist for it so that'll have to do.
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Sep 18, 2017 12:49
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Sep 18, 2017 18:59
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Goofy's got that DONK, ya know
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Sep 18, 2017 19:05
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