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Posts
9
Comments
923
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Gambling addiction is so crazy to me, I could never tell if anyone was addicted though at the counter. I used to work at a pharmacy with a lotto machine so that probably determined customers a bit. The older retired ladies coming in with their pouches was kind of charming and they weren't very big spenders overall, they seemed to just enjoy organizing and managing it all.

    Slot machines in casinos really affect me in a depressing way though, seeing rows of people just pressing buttons over and over while they stare at the machine I find disturbing.

  • We call them a "stupid tax" but infrequently buying them is pretty harmless. I don't mind group lotto either it can be fun to buy in and run the numbers out over a course of a few months. There's some charity lottos I've done before.

  • I doubt anyone who used the site would use "love" and "4chan" in the same sentence lol. The point is if you used it during this time you witnessed something that people who didn't can only morally condemn at a distance, they can't talk about the real experience of using the site and meaningfully criticize it. Likewise being there for the true 00s internet wild west and seeing it turn from that into what it became was a blessing for understanding on a visceral level what we all witnessed in the 2010s with incels and maga etc.

  • Why do we fall prey to the need to comment on something so irrelevant?

    We lack political agency that has any ability to impact the economic arrangements we find ourselves in, instead we react to politics happening, from opposing ends of this economic consensus that alienates us, by engaging in the hyper-real spectacle of politics. This is what the Trump era represents, decaying neoliberal consensus, increasing internalized anxieties, and alienation from political institutions.

  • Popular internet humor as we know it was basically all forged between the slur-stained walls of 4chan anons cursed basements, and people posted way worse things than slurs on there. You wouldn't pick me out as a former /b/slur in real life cause you'd probably be envisioning a straight white male. Ironically there was something very accepting about the site I didn't have in real life which is a sentiment shared by many users of the site from this era.

    One of the mistakes I see otherwise accurate depictions of 4chan making, talking about the very good "Kill All Normies" book and some others, which really focus on 4chan from 2010-onward, is they gloss over the site before this decade and interpret it as a single userbase. I'm sure there's some constant users between these decades but I don't know anyone who used 4chan when I did who continued to use it even into the MLP era. I would point to Project Chanology as the turning point, the infamous 4chan protest against the Church of Scientology, which popularized the idea of "Anonymous," often referred to as "teh cancer killing b" both genuinely and ironically.

    I would argue this is also when the site began succumbing to irony poisioning as people began to sincerely post things the site became infamous for in the 2010s. The "lulz" of baiting corporate media with exploding vans and "Anonymous" had played out and the site now began to adopt an "identity," whereas before these abhorrent things sort of just happened there and the userbase wasn't considered this singular entity. This would have been about when I graduated HS, and when I met former 4chan users in college we mostly all derided the site for being garbage.

    In recent years the nostalgia for what the internet was in this era has to include 4chan, but I don't think anyone who was on the site then would say they were good people for using the site and likely the opposite, nor would we probably have assumed the site from this era would have become so influential.

  • Enforcing the status of America as a hegemon has required the export of fascism since the 50s. The way it's commodified is very similar to how "anti-capitalism" is commodified, it's not the thing that causes fascism it's like a cultural manifestation of this.

  • That's why he does it too, "nobody is paying attention" when it's the biggest thing helping to define his political brand.

    I think they're confusing "not paying attention" with "not doing anything." If the fear is genuine why isn't there a popular front against Trump? People talk online as though they're very concerned but you don't really see anything happening to mount a resistance. Are people signing up to campaign for the Democrats over this, or are they just posting memes about it? Is it that nothing can be done and people feel completely powerless? Maybe everyone is just dug in at this point and we just have to watch this happen. In any case it's pathetic to constantly hear how worried everyone is about fascist Trump while nothing is done about it. It's like everyone is just reacting to politics happening and have no political agency of their own.

  • Until the late 50s Democrats were the safe segregation vote, Brown v Brown in 54 got them some extreme segregationist populists even while the party overall was accommodating the demographic shifts that came with industrialization in the cities. Republicans successfully courted younger voters, and as deindustrialization hit the rural areas and created an economic glut, failure to invest in stimulus for these areas through successive administrations created a population angry at government for legitimate reasons ready to be courted by appealing and directing their base anxieties towards an internal "other."

    It's only been since the 90s that the parties reached the internal consensus they're known for now. When Biden speaks about compromising and working "across the aisle" he's often referencing by name segregationist Democrats. The parties as single ideological units who consent to the same economic arrangement is very recent and creating this post-political stagnation where people have no political agency and are merely reacting to politics happening along ideological lines.

  • Probably pirated almost every artist I've subsequently bought from and go to shows average about once a month. Have professional musicians in the family and they work as studio musicians, composers for media, teaching, play in bands that do covers for corporate events, or as a backing band for a front person. That's probably the majority of musicians unless you're lucky enough to be in a band that gains any notoriety. Most bands are passion projects between musicians who have day jobs and might only play a few small gigs at local venues. So when we're talking about piracy as if it's the most significant thing impacting musicians, really it's a small facet of a very difficult industry to work in.

  • Jack Stratton of Vulfpeck was interviewed on CNBN about the Spotify IPO and gets around to making a good point about it here, "stop whining... me." Artists don't have to use a label and get paid in these "pitties" from Spotify, ultimately its a bizarre consumption model and likely unsustainable.