Content Consumed: Babylon, Sunday Scaries, Embedded, and more

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Content Consumed

5 min readMar 28, 2023

Hey! Happy Tuesday. Still thinking about Succession? Same. Don’t forget to read my recap and review from this week’s episode here.

But in today’s edition of Content Consumed, we’re chatting about…
🤢 Triangle of Sadness and Babylon were too gnarly for me
🎧 Podcast: Sunday Scaries + Celebrity Memoir Book Club
📬 E-newsletter: Embedded with JP Brammer

Puke, shit, and more from Triangle of Sadness and Babylon

I have a certain threshold for vomit, poop, and other gross human substances. I think we all do.

Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness passed that threshold about an hour in.

I managed to push through Babylon until the end, but they hit that ~shock value~ button hard in the first couple of scenes.

Triangle of Sadness

I think it was when one of the passengers was sliding around on the floor in her cabin bathroom, hitting the walls as the ship lurched this way and that, covered head to toe sopping wet in her own feces and puke and other fluids, that I said: nope! I’m out! Tapping out! I’m done!

I understand the point they’re making. Even the wealthiest humans can’t control everything, let alone food poisoning. It’s a metaphor for excess and indulgence, sure. But good lord. Gnarly stuff.

Apparently, there are pirates throwing grenades immediately after this, but I didn’t get to that. Maybe, once I feel I’m fully recovered from experiencing the first part of the movie, I’ll finish the rest of it.

Babylon

Babylon really tried to get me. Between an elephant violently pooping on a group of guys to a piss-oriented sex scene, I was ready to call it quits just ten minutes in. Mind you, this was also after Triangle of Sadness the night before.

But I pushed through.

Babylon was an entertaining movie. If you’re looking for a Saturday afternoon rainy-day flick, this is it. I don’t know if it was a good movie. It thought it was a lot deeper than it actually was, as emphasized by the longest wrap-up montage of all time.

All-star cast, too, between Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt and Tobey Maguire. I’d like to personally thank them for introducing me to Diego Calva as well.

Podcast: Sunday Scaries x Celebrity Memoir Book Club

Call me cringe: I had a dream podcast collab and it actually happened.

I’ve been listening to various Will deFries podcasts since I was in college and he worked for Grandex, a Barstool rival that ended up going under. You might be familiar with Grandex’s primary brand, Total Frat Move. Anyways, Will was a host on the Touching Base with Post Grad Problems podcast, which eventually shut down too. But he and the other two hosts broke off to start their own successful media company, and that’s the platform that Sunday Scaries is on now.

But Will’s been doing Sunday Scaries, described as “your cure for the Sunday blues” for almost a decade on his own. It’s a great podcast and also a great Instagram follow.

And you have to know about my parasocial love affair with Celebrity Memoir Book Club by now. I’ve mentioned them enough times here. I’m even seeing Claire and Ashley live tomorrow at a Portland comedy club, where they have a tour stop.

Anyways, the three podcasters met up in Austin. They had me cracking up within a minute and a half over a discussion on unrefrigerated flan. It’s a great listen, even if you haven’t heard of either pod before. Listen here.

Read this newsletter: Embedded

How do other people use the Internet?

Do they use it like me? What do they use Reddit for, or Twitter? How much time do they spend on Instagram?

Embedded is a newsletter that asks and answers these questions through a series called “My Internet”, where they quiz a “very online” person for their essential guide to what’s good on the internet.

You know I’m a fan of JP Brammer, the author of Hola Papi! and a great Twitter follow. He was the focus of this week’s column, answering questions such as…

EMBEDDED: Which big celebrity has your favorite internet presence, and why?
JOHN PAUL BRAMMER: I’m going to go with Pope Francis. Very earnest tweets about Catholicism. It’s kind of nice to see someone using Twitter the way it was originally conceived to be used. Everyone I know is irony-poisoned, but the Pope is just sort of like, “Welcome to Lent, everyone.”
EMBEDDED: Do you have an opinion about Tumblr?
JOHN PAUL BRAMMER: I am a former child of Tumblr. I think it was very instructional for navigating the internet for me. People were having fights on Tumblr in 2012 that mirror the ones the entire media industry is reckoning with today.
EMBEDDED: Have you had posts go viral? What is that experience like?
JOHN PAUL BRAMMER: I’ve gone viral a few times, most of which have been on Twitter. I now know to immediately mute the post and ignore it. Going viral isn’t good. It brings absolute lunatics to your lawn, and no amount of shouting will get them off your lawn. It will just attract more of them. The best situation is getting solid numbers on a niche tweet that brings in a few more readers. Everything else, be it silence or going viral, sucks.
EMBEDDED: What’s your go-to emoji, and what does it mean to you?
JOHN PAUL BRAMMER: I use the salute emoji all the time. It’s so funny to me. I’m not even sure what it means. It feels like he’s about to drown on the Titanic.

The salute emoji is also my most-used, in case you were wondering.

Anyways, subscribe to Embedded here.