Audio Johnapedia 34--Previewing the 2013-14 Academy Awards

0:00--Intros
1:22--Best Picture
14:16--Best Director
21:08--Best Actor
28:22--Best Actress
35:39--Gabe runs down some notable omissions from Picture/Director/Actor/Actress nominations
45:37--Best Supporting Actor
50:25--Best Supporting Actress
56:28--Best Original Screenplay
59:23--Best Adapted Screenplay
1:00:57--Some random Oscar observations (including a conversation about watching Forrest Gump in public schools, for some reason)

This is the longest Audio Johnapedia by a fairly large margin, but it was a fun one to record. Special guests Katie (@kfleming107) and Gabe (@thestlcardsfan4) help to compensate for my lack of knowledge of the 2014 Academy Award nominees.

The End of Grobitch

After 683 days, Grobitch is coming to an end.

It was a fun account to run, and hopefully it was a fun account to follow, but the time has arrived. It probably arrived a few months ago, but in the case of the Twitter account @grobitch20, there seems to be something borderline poetic about hanging on to something for too long. Regardless, it is time for Grobitch to stop.

I would understand somebody who believes that Grobitch is past its prime, though I also disagree. I created Grobitch as a satirical take designed for a specific point in time—it began on April 2, 2012 and it lampooned a college senior. It is now February 14, 2014, and the same things that worked for embodying a student are not necessarily (in fact, they’re not usually) applicable to a young adult who, instead of tweeting about going out, tweets about working long hours. There’s not much to satirize. Even if there were more humor in the current situation, Grobitch has more or less adopted his own character—a character which would be unrecognizable as a take on the personality of @grobot20 in 2014. At a point, Grobitch had to decide to either maintain stringently mocking @grobot20 or to maintain the fairly absurd caricature of a persona it had almost accidentally acquired—the latter was funnier so we went with that. But at that point, the account still made some sense. Now, it doesn’t. And rather than make a radical change or turn into the kind of “parody” account that doesn’t actually resemble the “target” in any actual way, it’s best to retire.

I don’t think anyone affiliated with this account has genuinely enjoyed writing tweets for it for months. Occasionally I come up with a Grobitch tweet organically and am psyched to tweet it because it makes me feel like that’s just one less tweet that I’m forced to miserably squeeze out so that the account wouldn’t die on its own terms. The tweets were always formulaic—brahs, asshats, Bud Selects, ladies, if you’ve read this far you’re probably well aware of all of the familiar tropes—but at least when they were formulaic in 2012, the jokes hadn’t been done completely to death. Now they have.

But I don’t want to attack the product, even after I got kind of sick of it, because a lot of people seemed to enjoy it, and for that, I thank you. I thank you for buying into the concept. I thank you for engaging with the account.

Very soon, the plan is to make the account private. If you want to go back and relive Grobitch’s glory days (I would find this pretty weird, but as somebody who created a parody account of a non-celebrity, I don’t think I have too much room to judge anyone’s Twitter behavior), you will be able to do so. But as the concept has been deemed concluded, so is the account.

Thank you,

John (@johnjf125)

Founder, @grobitch20

Audio Johnapedia 33

Some thoughts on Michael Sam.