Skeletor
18d ago
But is it possible to go back to the early web? I don't know.
No, normies would have the people trying put to death first.
Contrary to popular opinion, the government is not required to indulge iamverysmart people who think they’ve found a clever loophole.
Contrary to your own opinion, repeating this doesn't just magically bail out this shitty poorly-formed idea. Nor is it at all helped by telling us how the plan is to just make the law really vague and then selectively prosecute whatever you happen to dislike.
Why the fuck would anyone want this? What problem is it even solving at this point? Oh hey 75% of the internet is dead, every website that's left wants twenty bucks a month, and we've turned most of human expression over to some guy who wants to fundamentally rewrite speech and property law but thinks saying "here be dragons" covers for not being able to articulate what he wants in a legally definable fashion.
Yeah I'll just put up with the status quo. My adblocker works just fine, everything is great, thanks.
Skeletor
18d ago
Or, being a wicked megacorp, I can roll my media and retail operations into a single domain with a single logo (or whatever kind of vague shit you're trying to legislate based upon) and give you the finger. Then I can sit back and cackle wickedly as every competitor who doesn't already have world-class operations in both of these fields is functionally banned from marketing and dies. At no point will I contemplate letting Twitch run without ads.
Skeletor
18d ago
then people on twitch.amazon.com or amazon.twitch.com are on that site for streaming. If they were there to be sold things they would be on shopping.amazon.com or the reverse.
If I slap a popup on my streaming site that directs you to buy shit, guess what, now it's a site for selling shit to you. Seriously what kind of garbage is this? You're going to penalize people over what a court thinks people think the purpose of their website is supposed to be? Give up, you guys just keep digging deeper.
Skeletor
19d ago
Shall we just resort to "libtard" and "republithug" now?
I mean I'm down if he is, I feel like he's getting the short end of the stick as far as epithets go.
Skeletor
19d ago
The Dems just got done puppeting a diaper-shitting corpse through the presidency while nobody bought it and people laughed at them, until the old fart finally started dissociating and dribbling so badly in public that he had to be forced out of his own reelection campaign in disgrace.
I know Dumbo Drumpf is Mega Hitler because he wants Mexicans to live in Mexico, etc. etc. etc. and that finding new ways to say it after all this time has to be really hard, but maybe find a way to do it that doesn't so directly contrast with the opposition's most ludicrous failure in modern history.
Skeletor
20d ago
Also: the box office gross of the movies hardly matters, the profits all come from things like toys, video games, and amusement park rides.
Yeah they've had shit luck with all that too. It might shuffle on indefinitely in tertiary media, like some Depression-era comic strip no one realizes is still running, but it's dying as a cultural phenomenon.
Skeletor
20d ago
I want to talk about what a pulverized skullfucked corpse Star Wars is anymore without the Culture War Thread's pretense of being edifying in any way, so here we are.
Yeah so listen, there's a Star Wars movie coming out like four months from now and as far as I can tell no one gives a shit at all. There's just zero hype or awareness. I know there's a big marketing push yet to come, but come on, think of what the prelude to a Star Wars movie was like back in the pre-TLJ world where people still gave a shit.
But even when the marketing does hit?
"Hey guys remember the Mandalorian? It was on Disney Plus a few years ago. Okay yeah I know the last season was kind of bad, but remember when it was popular? Oh and attention everyone in the entire fucking world who isn't a Disney Plus subscriber, remember Baby Yoda from like keychains and plushies and stuff? Well he's part of a show called the Mandalorian that you didn't watch but will hopefully want to turn up to a theatrical movie for."
Like good fucking luck with that pitch. Star Wars is screwed and they know it. They're so screwed with this movie that Kathleen Kennedy couldn't wait another four months to retire. Seriously the timing of her stepping down is a huge red flag to me. If she really thought the movie was going to get anywhere she'd stay unretired for another twelve or thirteen weeks and go out on a high note.
I bet this is the last Star Wars movie ever made. They've been prevaricating on everything else waiting for this to flop so they can call it.
Giving that this is CW, it is probably about Star Wars being too woke?
I find this a bit of a strange objection. "Oh, I am fine with Disney pimping out the rotting corpse of a once beloved, childhood-defining franchise for as long as there is anyone still wanting to pay for it, but I draw the line at politics I disagree with."
This but unironically. I will absolutely not tolerate a single drop of progressive preaching in my media ever again, I'm just so god damned sick of it. It makes me want to throw up in my mouth. You and every other baffled liberal who participates in this discourse can just continue being confused over the ongoing funeral pyres of every Western male-centered IP. It's just entertainment, there's always more and we don't owe anyone anything.
Skeletor
21d ago
"Lock her up!" was a big part of Trump's platform in 2016. I'm not sure why some random podcaster saying this is particularly interesting,
Yeah this pretty much sums up the whole thing for me.
Skeletor
21d ago
Store brand "donut shop" coffee brewed in the finest whatever machine was cheapest last time the coffeemaker broke, strong and black and a couple hours too old, with a big scoop of Ovaltine in it. Chug that shit and feel your power level rise like Goku. Yeah motherfucker, you're not enjoying an artisinal craft, you're getting ready to start a 3AM shift overseeing a loading dock and you need the RAW POWER to SCREAM at people who probably don't know English until they admit that they do and stop fucking up.
Skeletor
21d ago
Today is the first time I might feel something akin to national pride.
As a Trump voter who farts in Europe's general direction, I just want to say, I'm fine with this. I'm fine with you guys acting like real countries again, if you decide to try. Because Europe you are just a god damn mess. Everyone loves talking about the decline of the American Empire but Europe holy shit what have you even been doing for the last thirty-five years?
You've regulated your tech industry into non-existence and become a relative backwater, watching your share of global GDP decline by like half. You imported a million zillion Third Worlders who were supposed to prop up your pension systems but mostly just pump up the rape stats. No one will ever let you dismantle the welfare state and something has to give, so you've let your militaries go totally and completely to shit thinking history was over anyway. Now you just sit around begging us for help because a fat old hasbeen like Russia is being mean again, with its GPD like a tenth the size of yours. It's embarrassing.
You never take pride in yourselves? It fuckin' shows. Stand up, if you still can.
Skeletor
21d ago
But does it mean Star Wars is dead in the water?
Yes. The Mandalorian movie is going to do jack shit at the box office and that will pretty much be the deathblow as far as Disney is concerned. I'll bet they know it, too. If they thought it was going to do a billion dollars or something Kennedy would have hung around for another few months and retired on a win.
Speaking of which, there's a Star Wars movie coming out in a few months and nobody gives a shit. I haven't heard a peep about it anywhere else.
Skeletor
22d ago
A world with zero homelessness and starvation is not just conceivable but something I have conceived, something that lives always within my heart.
Man what if we just want the mother fucking feces off the streets and any time anyone who sounds like you gets power it just piles higher? Christ, some of us have to live in the world.
Skeletor
22d ago
A while back I made a post about WorldBox God Simulator, and how my chosen world had become an endless throng of insane cannibal rhino men living under the lash of a race of wicked angels.
https://www.themotte.org/post/3382/friday-fun-thread-for-november-21/386100?context=8#context
Recently this had become a bit stale, so I wiped the angels out of existence (at least in this timeline), put some rhino guys into their isolated mountain lair instead, and then wiped out all life outside the lair.
Centuries passed as the rhinos sat trapped in their mountain, their hunger having been temporarily removed by divine intervention so that they could survive this way. Over time new civilizations emerged. Elves and druids and cat people and all sorts of things. Once they had several thriving kingdoms and seemed to be heavily engrossed in their own politics, it was time to make a hole in the side of the mountain, and to make the boys hungry again.
That's right, monsters from before the dawn of civilization, God's chosen world-eaters. They immediately established a large warmongering empire that split the main continent in two, prompting everyone in the world to declare war on them in turn.
The thing is, these guys are basically feeder mice for my evil angels, sure, but they're still far stronger on an individual basis than any naturally evolved species. The world's counteroffensive is getting smashed. Not only that, but the rhino religion gives access to a devastating set of strategic-level ritual spells. It's going to start raining demons and meteors across the planet as soon as the rhino leadership can get its hands free for five minutes straight.
But you know, the rhinos weren't like this when they initially won their own world. They were strong and warlike, but not utterly insane. They had conquered the world, divided up into a few factions in sort of a permanent cold war, and then sat there being so peaceful that God got bored. I had not only made them stronger at that point, but as disagreeable as possible, so that they would continue to fight even when they were the only race or culture to exist.
Yeah these guys turned on each other, for absolutely no good reason, while at war with everyone else. With their strength split in two and fighting bitterly against itself, the elves and druids and cat and dog people and whatever else were able to crush them both and save the world. My pet rhino guys went the way of every over-engineered killer orc race in fiction.
So hey, sometimes good wins, even in my would-be miserable hellworld. I should have been taking screenshots or something. Fun toy, worth picking up, has some gimped free to play options but I don't know about them, I bought the full price version.
Skeletor
23d ago
You live somewhere cute and you see a bum once a month. I don't know why you would relate that little story of yours as if you live in the world. Do you have any idea how silly and twee it sounds to anyone who lives in or near one of these American garbage dump crime cities that have elected nothing but Democrats for sixty years?
Skeletor
24d ago
He wants America to WIN because America is his team, and it's good when your team wins.
And us plebs eat it up. It's so much better than the alternative world, where some sensible Dem mouthpiece yammers a bunch of kindergarten-level pablum about how it's not really about winning and losing, it's about cooperating with our partners to blah blah blah, and oh by the way white man we still don't think you're doing enough for the groups we actually care about, etc.
Skeletor
26d ago
"Sorry guys, the other side broke the rules to let in eleventy million zillion people, so now you're stuck with them forever and ever. I mean it's either that or break the rules yourselves, and that would clearly be unthinkable."
Keep it up champ, you're helping create those people you're so afraid of.
Skeletor
26d ago
If the other side can ignore the rules to let in countless millions of illegals, I'm sure as shit not going to support my side fucking around giving each individual one a full hearing/appeal/whatever before deporting them. That just amounts to giving up. I'll wipe my ass on the constitution and your personal moral opinion first, god knows neither one stopped the Dems from letting anyone in.
Skeletor
27d ago
this insane expectation that we field militaries that can secure your empire.
Look if you're too good to have a bunch of guys with guns who are equipped to go places and shoot people, the amount of fuck anyone outside your borders has to give about your opinion on anything is by necessity decreased.
Honestly it's absurd, with its tech base and economy the EU should be absolutely bullying a shitheel hasbeen like Russia on the world stage. Those guys should be terrified to put a foot wrong lest the EU get in their shit, with its better technology and ten times greater GDP right there on the continent with them.
Instead all it's done in the last thirty years is regulate its way to being a tech backwater while letting its militaries rot so it could spend the money making sure Akhmed and his whole family get to stay in a nice hotel, etc. etc.
Skeletor
27d ago
I'm only surprised by how much americans seem to buy into the resentful narrative about Europe
Europe can be perceived by Americans at the geopolitical level as being kind of worthless and full of unwarranted self-importance, a demilitarized military ally that hasn't done anything of note in eighty years except build a nice welfare system and import a billion Muslims to devour it, but still thinks it's fit to lecture us on literally everything.
Skeletor
29d ago
I really liked Winter Solider and wished Marvel could have found more of that energy rather than just lean into being jokey Star Wars.
Skeletor
29d ago
Even in this unlikely set of circumstances I think Europe just pays France to build an extra nuke sub that'll be done twenty years from now, peddles one buttcheek to China in order to feel reasonably secure playing both sides of the divide, and then continues sliding merrily into irrelevance. Whatever bearded mullahs are running Europe by the time I die won't care about any of this anyway.
My answer is, I don't have to care. I'll ride for free until the wheels fall off, and then I'll pirate everything until copyright enforcement assassins break in through the ceiling and kill me. I will live in a cave and eat bugs and make the rest of humanity join me before I ever watch god damn commercials again.
Y'all gotta stop trying to replace a good system with a fair one.
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