Yes he's a video game system, but she is so much more than that!! BMO from the fantastic show Adventure Time identifies as both male and female, and because of that expresses the ideals of Third Wave Feminism!! Third Wave Feminism questions if gender is actually binary, tied to our biological sex. Is our understanding of masculinity and femininity fair, or even ACCURATE? Of course, BMO has no biological gender, so there's no cultural expectations that anchors her (him?) down. But it all seems a non-issue in the Adventure Time world.

Like us, you may not have initially realized the significance of Animal Crossing. Sure it's a simple game for kids, with cute animals and bright colors. But could it be true that it inspires otaku citizenship?! Otaku, if you don't know, means obsessive interest and collection, usually associated with Japanese culture, but it can apply to ANYTHING. In Animal Crossing, as mayor of your town, success is defined by maintaining friendships with your townspeople and collecting natural resources to cultivate the perfect town.

Global warming exists! But how do we know that? It may seem like a simple process of just looking at the temperature from year to year, but it is SO MUCH MORE than that! Our understanding of the global climate comes from a compendium of data including measured and tracked temperature, humidity, wind speed, and barometric pressure, spanning over 100 years of observation!! To study this massive amount of information and be able to surmise that the increasingly extreme and bizarre weather patterns are a result of human influence... it's truly an incredible accomplishment. So everyone who says during a blizzard "so much for global warming"... shut up. You're wrong.

As our South Korean friends can confirm, video games can most definitely be a spectator sport. But will they ever catch on in a huge way in the good ol' U.S. of A? Well, pro leagues already exist, but to know if they'll ever reach the levels of March Madness and Superbowl Sunday, we need to take a closer look at traditional sports spectatorship to figure out the REAL reason we watch. It's more than just winning and losing: there are characters, rivalries, histories, and a host of other background information that coalesce into an AMAZING story, and we're dying to know the ending.

Zombies are EVERYWHERE!! Wait, don't panic- we mean in pop culture, not outside your window. But why is that? Bad guys and monsters seem to go through phases: one decade there's a dozen movies about aliens, ten years later it's vampires. And right now, it's zombies. And monsters don't pop up for no reason at all. There must be something that makes us fixate on one antagonist trope; some qualities they hold that echo a deeper cultural fear... So what are we afraid of now? It might just be technology.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is about everything. Life, the Universe, everything. If you've read these amazing books, you know the answer is 42, but what's the question? To find out what the question was, they built a giant computer we call Earth. And though it seems silly, perhaps Douglas Adams was correct, and that not just earth, but the WHOLE UNIVERSE is an incredibility complex computational system, processing the answer to some unknown question. The universe IS made up of information, similar to a computer, and physics (you know, the basis of the universe) certainly is based on computational principles.

Math is invisible. Unlike physics, chemistry, and biology we can't see it, smell it, or even directly observe it in the universe. And so that has made a lot of really smart people ask, does it actually even EXIST?!?! Similar to the tree falling in the forest, there are people who believe that if no person existed to count, math wouldn't be around . .at ALL!!!! But is this true? Do we live in a mathless universe? Or if math is a real entity that exists, are there formulas and mathematical concepts out there in the universe that are undiscovered? Or is it all fiction? Whew!! So many questions, so many theories...

If you're even the slightest bit familiar with pop culture from the past 50 years, you know that we've been anxiously awaiting robots to become a part of our daily lives. From R2-D2 to the Jetsons, our future robot companions promise to be helpful and handy! But many people have their concerns: will the development of artificial intelligence end up REPLACING humans in the work force, pushing already high unemployment through the roof?!?! These new laborers will likely do not just undesirable jobs (janitorial, coal mining, etc), but also the high paying premium jobs, like surgeons and lawyers.

Be it Elliott Smith or Queen, classical or dub step, there's usually a clear understanding that some songs are sad, and some songs are happy. But what is it about the music that makes us feel these feelings we're feeling? You might think it has something to do with the notes or how our brain's natural response to these sounds, but you're wrong. Or at the very least incomplete in your thinking. We've just been culturally trained to respond to music in certain ways because if you ignore the lyrics, music itself doesn't actually contain any emotion at all.

Here's an idea: a DOS attack is a weapon. Denial of Service (DOS) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks take down servers by distracting them with meaningless traffic until basically they can't take it any more. Scientology, Westboro Baptist Church, and others like them have been hit, and if you look at the coverage of these events, the descriptive words "attacks," "violent," and "weapons" are telling. The way we talk about the result of a software program reflects the way we view "online", and the value we place on its content, be it the FBI homepage or cat videos on YouTube.

Here's an idea: a tagged Instagram is more than just a photo. Sure, Instagram is pretty awesome, but it's even more #INTERESTING than you think! The hashtag, so simple and ubiquitous, raises the image from mere photo to a new complex entity. An extension of the social media aspect of the Instagram app, the hashtag enhances searchability and allows connection to a variety of communities.

If you play video games, you've shot a gun. And those guns are REALISTIC. So real that many are actually LICENSED by IRL arms dealers. Which means that when you buy a video game, you're also putting money in the pockets of those gun manufacturers. That's fine and dandy if you're a fan of guns, but if you are someone who considers themselves anti-gun, this creates quite the moral quandary.

Here's an idea: Community is a postmodern masterpiece. Though the TV show Community has never achieved huge ratings, it has a passionate cult following, including us here at Idea Channel. The show plays with genre and narrative in such a creative way that it brings to mind the cultural and artistic theory of Postmodernism. Previous TV series have been self-referential and culturally reflective, but none so successfully as Community. The show flips traditional expectations so consistently that it questions their importance in the first place. And it has brought the word "meta" into the cultural vernacular, to boot.

You may have heard about the recent overwhelming success of the Veronica Mars movie Kickstarter, or you might be a "Marshmallow" yourself and have contributed. This is a big moment for fan communities, with Kickstarter giving them the opportunity to challenge the closed gates of the Hollywood system. Although it's funding is nowhere NEAR the amount Hollywood invests in moviemaking each year, crowdfunding is a way better indicator of what the audience wants to see, the one area Hollywood has failed in time and time again.

Here's an idea: Game Of Thrones owes its success to piracy. If you're like us, you LOVE Game of Thrones. But if you're also like us, you may not, technically, have... cable. So how are we seeing this amazing show on HBO, which is stuck behind a pay wall? A huge amount of viewers (not us of course, no no no) are downloading the show illegally.