INFLUENCE

It should come as no surprise that LEGO is big on the Internet, but one LEGO filmmaking community has been thriving online since 2000, long before YouTube was even a thing.This week, Alli and Lindsey talk with Sean Willis and Chris Wynn, two admins from Bricks in Motion, a forum and Discord community that emerged from the ashes of Brickfilms, which was instrumental in bringing amateur stop-motion LEGO animation online for the world to share.Willis and Wynn explain how link directories brought LEGO filmmakers together on the early Web, and how the official LEGO movies can trace their lineage back to this online creativity.Support 2G1P on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/2G1PJoin the 2G1P Discord community: http://discord.gg/2g1pJoin the 2G1P Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2girls1podcast/Email us: 2G1Podcast@gmail.comCall the show and leave a message! (347) 871-6548   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Internet and the World Wide Web began as an open, inter-operable commons with limitless potential and creativity. So how did everything get so corporate? Author and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff believes the next chapter(s) of the Internet could take a cue from Wikipedia or the communal kibbutz, rather than a for-profit metaverse ... if we want it.Alli and Lindsey talk with Rushkoff about the aspirational origins of the Web, what we can do to program a better future, and why millions of digital cottage industries are probably better than 5 insatiable tech conglomerates.Rushkoff will be teaching a university course on this topic in New York: https://rushkoff.medium.com/re-designing-the-internet-2593fe7dae8dAnd you'll enjoy his podcast, Team Human: https://www.teamhuman.fm/Follow Douglas: https://twitter.com/rushkoffSupport 2G1P on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/2G1PJoin the 2G1P Discord community:http://discord.gg/2g1pJoin the 2G1P Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2girls1podcast/Email us: 2G1Podcast@gmail.comCall the show and leave a message! (347) 871-6548   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all who celebrate! We're taking some time off this week for travel and family fun, but looking forward to sharing new episodes soon. For now, a watershed moment for our community: The Macrophilia episode, #93 from July 22, 2019. Enjoy!-Original Show Notes-Macrophilia is a surprisingly popular fetish involving sexual fantasies about giants — specifically, giant women. Being at the mercy of giants, or being coddled or crushed by them are staples of the community, but size change motifs also are common. Stories and media about giants (like the 1958 horror B-movie Attack of the 50 Foot Woman) or size change (1989's Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) have become touch points for the macrophilia community, though many have also taken to making their own media and pornography using visual effects.Alli and Jen talk with Pete, the webmaster of Giantess City, one of the largest online content and community hubs for macrophiles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

r/SantasLittleHelpers is the subreddit that fulfills the holiday wishes of kids in need. Alli and Lindsey talk with BackpackWayne, the creator/moderator of Santa's Little Helpers, which has been connecting generous redditors with families that have fallen on hard times for the last 10 years. Wayne recounts heartwarming stories of the kindness of Internet strangers, and shares how the charitable initiative — inspired by his mother — has turned into a yearly juggernaut of generosity.Here's a sampling of the joy from last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFcpAHxDt8MSupport 2G1P on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/2G1PJoin the 2G1P Discord community: http://discord.gg/2g1pJoin the 2G1P Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2girls1podcast/Email us: 2G1Podcast@gmail.comCall the show and leave a message! (347) 871-6548   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Internet is a place for everyone to have a voice, but we often take the tools and apps we use to access it for granted. Software engineer Ather Sharif became acutely aware of this about 8 years ago when a car accident left him with a spinal cord injury. Even basic things like typing on a keyboard are now an enormous challenge for him and thousands of others with various disabilities.Lindsey and Alli talk with Ather about how this changed the trajectory of his career. He is now an advocate for accessible and inclusive technologies and a PhD student at the University of Washington where he studies what we can all do to ensure the Internet is for everyone.View the transcript for this episode: https://bit.ly/3HfhP7tSupport 2G1P on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/2G1PJoin the 2G1P Discord community: http://discord.gg/2g1pJoin the 2G1P Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2girls1podcast/Email us: 2G1Podcast@gmail.comCall the show and leave a message! (347) 871-6548   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The only thing bigger than "Bachelor Nation" is "Bachelor Instagram." That's usually where the contestants, stars, villains, and conversations around the Bachelor and Bachelorette franchises go during each season. But educator Suzana Somers had a fresh idea. When she had to start learning Excel for her job, she got bored crunching pivot tables, so she inserted data from The Bachelor instead: How much screen time did each contestant get? Age ranges? Race and ethnic backgrounds? Roses awarded? Instagram followers? The results, which she visualized on Instagram, have been intriguing thousands of fans ever since. @BachelorData has become a big voice in the reality show conversation, and Suzana has turned it into an educational resource for those who want to improve their spreadsheets skills in a non-boring way.Alli and Lindsey chat with Suzana about the origin of the account, the online Bachelor community, and the fascinating conclusions she's drawn from analyzing the franchise over many seasons.Follow the account here: https://www.instagram.com/bachelordata/Support 2G1P on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/2G1PJoin the 2G1P Discord community: http://discord.gg/2g1pJoin the 2G1P Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2girls1podcast/Email us: 2G1Podcast@gmail.comCall the show and leave a message! (347) 871-6548   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We hope you're having a fantastic Thanksgiving! We are thankful for YOU, our listeners. Lots of great interviews to come, but for now, please enjoy this hilarious conversation with the genius creator of We Rate Dogs, from June 2020.-Original Show Notes-With more than 14 million followers across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, WeRateDogs is on a mission that everyone on planet Earth can get behind: Rating cute doggos from the internet on a (dubious!) 10-point scale.This blend of adorable dog pics, comedic captions, and obsessive fan-submitted content has catapulted the novelty account (and its creator, Matt Nelson) into a massive online brand, which uses its influence to entertain millions, sell merch, and help dogs in need.Alli and Jen talk with Nelson about the inspiration for the account, how its explosive popularity changed his life, the serious inflation problem in the Dog Rating Economy, that time J.K. Rowling and Lin-Manuel Miranda followed him, why everything's political on Twitter, and his perfect response when Arnold Schwarzenegger asked him to rate his donkeys.Support 2G1P on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/2G1PJoin the 2G1P Discord community: http://discord.gg/2g1pJoin the 2G1P Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2girls1podcast/Email us: 2G1Podcast@gmail.comCall the show and leave a message! (347) 871-6548   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

National Novel Writing Month has been operating online since 1999! Alli and Lindsey talk with program director Tim Kim about NaNoWriMo's non-profit mission to help writers collaborate and overcome the enormous challenge of getting 50,000 words on the page in a single month. Goal setting and online social accountability are a huge part of it, and the community flourishes across Twitter, Reddit, and Twitch.Support 2G1P on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/2G1PJoin the 2G1P Discord community:http://discord.gg/2g1pJoin the 2G1P Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2girls1podcast/Email us: 2G1Podcast@gmail.comCall the show and leave a message! (347) 871-6548   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we learned that Lindsey went to summer camp with Lando Calrissian. Also, Alli went to Panama to take anal photos and swim in trash water. How are you?Support 2G1P on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/2G1PJoin the 2G1P Discord community: http://discord.gg/2g1pJoin the 2G1P Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2girls1podcast/Email us: 2G1Podcast@gmail.comCall the show and leave a message! (347) 871-6548   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The finance world can seem buttoned-up, even intimidating. But journalist Omar Gallaga found an unlikely (but entirely logical) place for armchair stock market tycoons to share tips and make big plays: Discord.But this community dispenses with the "finance bro" trappings of other day trading services. Xtrades is about learning, teaching, and dare we say it: having fun with the stock market. In the wake of Gamestop, crypto crashes, and the NFT boom, Xtrades is a chill place for legit financial exploration.Omar wrote a compelling piece about his journey to becoming a compensated moderator of this paywalled community, and explains to Alli and Lindsey that while the learning curve is steep, it's entirely worth it.How I Got Sucked Into a Discord Stock-Trading Group and Made Thousands: https://marker.medium.com/how-i-got-sucked-into-a-discord-stock-trading-group-and-made-thousands-59dcb3df6ef6Support 2G1P on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/2G1PJoin the 2G1P Discord community: http://discord.gg/2g1pJoin the 2G1P Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2girls1podcast/Email us: 2G1Podcast@gmail.comCall the show and leave a message! (347) 871-6548   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices