Partial Objects

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We welcome critical thinkers and analytical minds to share their perspectives on art, culture, media, and politics. Submissions are welcome, and routinely make the front page. To get an idea of what makes a good post see the About page. Comments, questions and suggestions are welcome and can be sent to seen@partialobjects.com.

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Pastabagel | Comments Off

5+1 Sentences On The Walking Dead: “Triggerfinger” s2e9

If you follow the logic of the show, when God dies we retreat to the safety of old school biblical values: men become hunter/gatherers, women become homemakers/babymakers, and though men “rule” the women are the ones who really decide the alliances and ok the selfishness. Maggie’s need for Glenn makes him almost give up his… Read the rest

Posted on February 20, 2012 by TheLastPsychiatrist | Tagged the walking dead | 8 Comments

How Target Knows Everything About You, Even If You Pay In Cash

A Forbes article describes Target is able to determine a teenage girl is pregnant before her father through massively complex data mining and pattern recognition techniques. The gist of the story is that every time you and everyone else pays with a credit card, they store all that data, look for patterns and exploit them.

As Pole’s computers crawled

… Read the rest

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Pastabagel | Tagged advertising, marketing, shopping, software | 25 Comments

5+1 Sentences On The Walking Dead: s2e8 “Nebraska”

God is dead, announces formerly religious Hershel by breaking a twenty year flirtation with sobriety and relapsing into alcohol; too much reality to believe in miracles anymore. But two Bad Guys, evidenced by their penile motivations (peeing on the floor and calling women “cooze”,) show up looking to join their camp, and Policeman Rick has a… Read the rest

Posted on February 15, 2012 by TheLastPsychiatrist | Tagged the waslking dead | 5 Comments

Motion Pictures

I’ve seen a few cracked.com posts linked here, so I thought I’d share one that seemed particularly appropriate.
A more digestible form of some themes that pop up here from time to time.
A ?new? breed of narcissism with our projected identity at the center. Others pieces in the set work, characters in our narrative. All this driven by… Read the rest

Posted on February 11, 2012 by Frozen | Tagged media | 3 Comments

Facebook Parenting

This is Tommy Jordan, and he is going to be an Internet sensation.

Long story short: Daughter says mean things about father on Facebook in a private note to her friends. Dad finds it. Dad tapes himself putting eight (8) .45 caliber hollow-points through her laptop, and shows it to Planet Earth.
An excerpt from ZDNet (http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/father-puts-45-through-teen-daughters-laptop-over-facebook-post/15147):
“My daughter thought… Read the rest

Posted on February 11, 2012 by Mac | Tagged YouTube | 27 Comments

Viola Davis Is Hotter Than Charlize Theron

This video is so gut wrenchingly douchy that I am warning you not to watch it if you are prone to bowel obstruction.

“I’m a 46-year-old black woman who really doesn’t look like Halle Berry, and Halle Berry is having a hard time,” said Davis.
Katherine Heigel interrupts and says, “You have to stop saying that, because you’re hot… Read the rest

Posted on February 9, 2012 by TheLastPsychiatrist | Tagged movies, racism | 14 Comments

The Hidden Reference to Scientology in Air Force One

Before I show you what I’m about to show you, I want you to understand that this is something I saw nearly 15 years ago. When I saw it, I tried to convince my friends sitting next to me in the theater that I saw it, and they didn’t believe me.
And for the next decade or so, I couldn’t… Read the rest

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Pastabagel | Tagged cinema, codebreaking, film, insanity, movies, scientology | 11 Comments

Want to freak out a college student?

Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.
And that’s how we ended up in a world where the snuggie is a thing.
Asking a current college student, usually in their 3rd year or less for best results, the following.
“What would you do if college… Read the rest

Posted on February 5, 2012 by vandal | Tagged college, cracked, engineering | 16 Comments

North Dakota’s ads aren’t about North Dakota

North Dakota officials unveil new tourism campaign

State tourism officials … have unveiled the state’s for the year: Arrive a guest. Leave a Legend.

Tourism Division Director Sara Otte Coleman says the idea is that once visitors cross the border into North Dakota, everything and anything is possible.

"Come to North Dakota," said the voice… Read the rest

Posted on February 5, 2012 by NotAnother | Tagged ads, branding, north dakota, tourism | 5 Comments

Somebody Gotye Used To Know

Gotye’s song, Somebody That I Used To Know has 58 million views on YouTube.

It’s extremely catchy, which often means no one bothers to listen to the words. Gotye himself said this about the piece:
“It wasn’t a nasty break-up, but it was messy in the sense that we hurt each other more than we needed to because it wasn’t… Read the rest

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Mac | Tagged pop culture | 14 Comments

Wikipedia’s Meta-commentary on SOPA

So this is a little late for me to be jumping on the bandwagon. I thought this was kind of interesting at the time, but others responded with things like “what’s SOPA?”, “you’re overthinking this” and in one case, “what’s Wikipedia?”. So perhaps it was just a product of an altered state[1].
Regardless. Whether you’re for or against ruthless corporations… Read the rest

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Lopt | Tagged ayahuasca, sopa, wikipedia | 5 Comments

Nissan thinks you are a dumb hippie

If I do get a chance to appear on this site, it might be mostly with captions.
Nissan leaf is a new all electric car. It uses no gas. Now look at this picture very quickly and immediately tell me – How many miles per gallon does this newly invented car get?
But wait, there is worse:

Posted on February 5, 2012 by DGS | Tagged advertising, cars, hybrid | 6 Comments

Is telling another person what’s on the test cheating?

Get ready, you’re about to be lied to.

Posted on February 4, 2012 by TheLastPsychiatrist | Tagged cheating, education, tests | 2 Comments

“The humanities aren’t totally useless.” Well, the useless ones are

From The Daily Beast, “The humanities aren’t totally useless after all.”

The typical justification for the humanities is that they foster critical thinking, awareness, a historical context, etc. Which are true, I guess.
Inside Higher Ed takes a similar stance:

We would be the last to argue that traditional ways of valuing the

… Read the rest

Posted on February 4, 2012 by TheLastPsychiatrist | 11 Comments

Google (or: privacy that smiles)

observe: http://tinyurl.com/7e65pxr

So, all this furor over Google signalling they’ll be merging over sixty privacy policies into one, refining accidental bureaucracies everywhere, moving deeper toward the bottom line..
Why?
The prospect of Gmail having access to your YouTube search history? Cats as a new kind of social faux pas amongst some of the more contemporary, esoteric… Read the rest

Posted on February 4, 2012 by GibberellinLong | Tagged google, identity, privacy | 2 Comments

Book Review: Dan Simmons’s Flashback

The best science fiction, the science fiction that is most enjoyable, that hangs together, that is believable and doesn’t strand the reader uses a simple formula: a story set in our world, that plays by our physical rules with one exception. In Asimov’s world, robots existed and lived among us. What happens if time travel is really possible? We… Read the rest

Posted on February 4, 2012 by stucky | Tagged books, fiction, politics | 8 Comments

Viral Fotoshop by Adobé (or really by Adobe?)

This commercial isn’t real, neither are society’s standards of beauty.

“I was watching TV one sleepless night and stumbled upon an infomercial for some beauty product. The commercial showed before and after portraits that, to my eye, looked like the same photo just photoshopped. I laughed to myself. Then I made this video,” filmmaker Jesse Rosten said of… Read the rest

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Marcas | Tagged ads, advertising, marketing, media, viral | 1 Comment

Why are so many 20-somethings unemployed?

The article describes a selection of students big on dreams and low on hopes. The future is bleak for them, and they know it.
I am, of course, not insensitive to the way media crafts its narratives, but of the ten or so 20-somethings they interviewed, two were chefs, one an interior designer, one… Read the rest

Posted on February 2, 2012 by TheLastPsychiatrist | Tagged college, education, unemployment | 34 Comments

Nietzsche was only half right

Not dead yet

Posted on February 2, 2012 by TheLastPsychiatrist | Tagged atheism, guilt, nietzsche, religion | 15 Comments

Are Hollywood Leading Men Are Becoming More Gay? They Certainly Are Smoking Less

So what happened?

Posted on January 26, 2012 by TheLastPsychiatrist | Tagged feminism, masculinity, movies | 10 Comments