DTulpa
1mo ago
He's a Republican, he has troll energy, and he has Matt Gaetz's face.
That last one is a little jokey, but I do think that's what tilts it into a furor relative to any average Republican the left hates. He has a supremely punchable face that screams "douchebag", even to me. And I think he even knows it.
DTulpa
1mo ago
I don't get it. I can't reconcile "she ran a pretty good campaign" and then several paragraphs later read that her doing interviews was essentially a liability with nothing to gain.
Surely this speaks to big problems that can't be papered over with "hey, she never took a dump on stage!".
DTulpa
1mo ago
I think wokeness was on the ascent prior to Trump descending the escalator. While it did get turbo-charged under Trump, it also clearly revealed itself and was increasingly unable to sanewash its prescriptions through anodyne description (ie. "Do you seriously take issue with an academic approach to female representation in media? Seriously, a problem with academics?"). Without Trump, I think the poison pills could have gone unnoticed for longer.
And 2024 is not 2016. There was a period where culture makers could more freely indulge their fantasies of a mythical Modern Audience that would monetarily reward their tainted output. In the time since, we have had major, recurring flops across multiple industries, and some clear indicators that audiences aren't chomping on this hook. There will be some token displays of staying in the fight, but this experiment has mostly failed. Important money men will want to pivot away.
DTulpa
1mo ago
Mine was a unicorn shitting glitter or something.
I really, really hate it.
DTulpa
1mo ago
His recent episode with the Triggernometry guys had discussion on it. He thinks it was ill-advised for a political event, but... eh, predictable consensus is that this is nothing.
DTulpa
1mo ago
Within 24 hours of Tony's joke, I saw the Kamala campaign go all-out with some rhetoric to help/'save' Puerto Rico. Like they saw this as a moment to seize and run with, but it just radiates opportunism and desparation.
There's an insufferable, overprotective maternal vibe the Dems give off when talking about blacks or LGBTQ or whatever else. Extending that act to a stale PR joke is quite a look, and I don't know anybody who is impressed with it.
My brother once put it to me this way: Imagine you have a favorite band with several albums of theirs on your top-faves list. You've followed them for years, or maybe even decades. It's not even necessary for this thought experiment, but for a little extra you've even watched or read interviews with them, so you have a sense of their character, history, etc. And then one day it is revealed to you that all of it was generated by an AI instead of human beings. How would you feel?
I think I would feel a profound sense of loneliness. I would never revisit those albums again. And I don't think this basic feeling can be hacked through with some extra applications of rationalism or what have you. This feeling precedes thinking on a very deep level for me.
I don't have much sympathy for the various creative professions getting their oxen gored. Partly because social media has made me lose respect for many of them, their output quality is not commensurate with their whining, and I won't be sad to see them needing employment elsewhere. But also because I can't even see my own regular 'office job' being spared once the tech is good enough. I'm rather clear-eyed about the inevitabilities of this stuff. But I also foresee further alienation that humans may learn to live with but won't necessarily solve.
I think many women are lovely enough right up until you hit a hair trigger about Trump, politics, or whatever. And the tragedy of this situation is that this obstacle seems misguidedly imposed from one side of the gender dynamic. To quote a line from a pop song I can't really remember: "You're standing in your own way".
Is this kind of filtering 'working'? I guess you could say it is on an individual level, although I think even that's questionable, as I believe a lot of women are missing out on good catches with this zero-tolerance approach. Is this a good dynamic for dating writ large? Probably not given the endless bitching about it and the metrics getting fairly sloped.
A smaller irritant in the mix is watching the fuse on this behavior run down. I know women now in their late 30s or early 40s who suddenly pine for 'traditionally masculine' types, with their younger and luckier cohorts marrying red-hat yokels that take care of them - after years of setting up razor wire around that type of guy. You wish they'd gotten the act out of their system earlier. By comparison men will swallot a lot from their partners as long you're not screaming in their face or getting nasty about what TikTok has you mad about this week. A moderate 'blue hair' could be entirely dateable to most woke-averse men (assuming decently attractive and yada yada) as long as being political isn't the front and center of their being or a lense everything is seen through.
I used to see more couples in my life argue about politics without it ending in breakup or divorce. It seemed normal to me: you bicker about the 8 PM news a bit, you silently roll your eyes at thing your partner said, then you go to bed together before the next day of life's experiences - you know, the important part. To see this done away with so trivially is sad.
Are you interested in converting Republicans en masse overnight, or chipping away at this distrust over time? If you're hoping for some audit to prove the election's integrity and get everybody to issue a mea culpa that same day - good luck. I think you're setting yourself up for the "Gosh, they're so unreachable" conclusion you seem to be angling for. And I'd expect said mea culpa to arrive at the same time as the many others I'd want from Democrats by now - which is never.
Best you can hope for is people quietly dropping it out of embarrassment, in much the same way many Republicans quietly stopped supporting the War On Terror when that albatross got too fat.
I'm more suspicious of Hollywood's activities lately than you are, but I'll grant that the money men are likely signing off on wokeness and subversion under the hilarously wrong belief that there is a Modern Audience waiting to be tapped like a goldmine. It's what looks like doubling down in the face of failures that raises my eyebrow. But we'll see how that shakes out soon enough given the time delays inherently baked into producing a work.
I'll also throw in that it looks like there is a schism/rebellion between the bean-counting side and the creatives - or even creative Leads and their subordinates. From another sphere: If the CEO of Ubisoft really wants to assuage concerns about political messaging in his products and deny that's their intent, he will reliably face mini-revolts and public shaming from his very own employees that are dead set on 'doing the right thing'. I very much believe that the latter does not care about profit (at least as much) and is comfortable failing sideways out of the company's carcass to other dev houses where they can repeat it all again while barely losing any skin, if at all. And to boot, they do very much hate me from what I can tell.
If those people largely comprise the tools we have to work with, it may not actually matter what an executive's intentions are.
DTulpa
2mo ago
Everything I've heard and read about this film sounds like it's almost apologizing for audiences liking the first one so much.
DTulpa
2mo ago
Yes, it still means nothing. It's just that very few men would even use the word, or have those experiences described in such a way in pop media.
DTulpa
2mo ago
It was renamed in 2023. You don't think it takes a while for this name update to course through the public consciousness? People will still call it Fort Bragg out of reflex. It also sounds cooler than 'Fort Liberty'.
And is there anything truly terrible about consciously refusing to use its new name if you think the entire sentiment animating "NAME CHANGE FOR JUSTICE NOW" is toxic?
DTulpa
2mo ago
And yet my experience with old people is that they fight tooth and nail not to be dropped at a home, and the ones there lament not being able to stay at their real homes or with family.
Preferable to dying in a street, but not what I'd call 'utopian'.
DTulpa
3mo ago
I actually watched that debate and was stumped by that consensus. I didn't think he crushed her or anything, but he was the clear victor to my eyes.
I think it's worth considering the 'fly factor' for that. The image of a bug stuck to his head wrote all sorts of jokes in the aftermath, and it would be enough to do him in.
DTulpa
3mo ago
To be fair, I do think this particular problem starts with the prequel trilogy. The order of Jedi Knights worked best as background mythology. Before the days of Jar Jar and Young Anakin, they were hazy and a bit nondescript. I think that worked perfectly for the kind of mythic tale the OT was trying to weave. Going back and filling in details did some irreversible damage to the universe's structural integrity, but it was at least offset by the spice of variety: new aliens, new planets, new factions, etc. The playground widened up enough where I think many fans could ignore the mess Lucas made with the core story and play with the toys of their own choosing.
Nu Star Wars instead often seems like its doubling down on the parts few people liked to begin with while offering little else in compensation.
DTulpa
3mo ago
I don't have anything to add here except I love it whenever somebody links to Shamus' blog. Really good stuff if you're a fan of vidya but also like reading walls of SSC or adjacent material.
I kinda stopped checking it once one of his kids took over after his passing. The content really wasn't as interesting and failed to meet Shamus' level of quality. And when I last did, his steadfast 'No Politics' rule had appeared to have been hollowed out entirely for the usual reasons. I was also really dismayed by what looked to me like his kid publicly throwing his corpse under the bus and painting him as some kind of raging anti-feminist behind the scenes.
DTulpa
4mo ago
It was just too fucking perfect that it was preceded by another kind of Real ID controversy. Gaming is nothing if not ahead of the curve!
DTulpa
4mo ago
This week we had a homeless woman fully evacuate her bowels in front of a kids museum, with families and children about. She is apparently known in that area for being aggressive and walking around with no pants. I briefly saw crap like this (haha but not really) when briefly visiting San Francisco, and it's the kind of thing you expect will stay only over there even though you know full well there's nothing stopping it from popping up in your own backyard. I thought I was being trolled when I heard.
The local subreddit has decided this is an issue with lack of public restrooms, and I feel the Hitler rising in me.
I think it's because she seems to have her own gravitational pull that swallows everything in her immediate surroundings. There was a minor controversy this year in the US where it seemed like there was more more interest in her dating Travis Kelce than anything related to the Super Bowl. And it has whiffs of the ongoing 'female encroachment into male hobbies/interests' dispute.
I don't watch sports generally and have little interest in the Bowls, so I don't know how much there is to that. But it kinda appeared that way to me looking at passing headlines around that time.
There is also a very obnoxious subset of her fanbase that can't seem to stop gushing over her and will heatedly defend her honor at the mere suggestion that she's overexposed, and this includes women in their 30s and 40s. But eh... fanbases are fanbases.
Personally, I just don't see the talent matching the success. I think artists like Lady Gaga and Madonna in her prime had more to them, where I could understand their popularity. Swift is a big gray zone in my mind where I can only recall 'Shake it Off'? But at my age and level of disconnect from Pop music generally, that take might as well hold as much weight as my deceased grandfather's.
It's just one more point towards simulation theory. I was having a conversation with somebody in my kitchen while making dinner, half-assedly and uncharitably trying to anticipate the kind of minimizing response one could expect to see to this story (pending corroboration tbf I guess) not even one hour before seeing this post.
And then - there it is. The world is a hologram.
This is the stated theory. Does it actually work? Are they actually successful at drawing in a wider audience? And if so, is the incoming audience large enough to offset losses from the previous one?
I've never been convinced on this.
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