WhiningCoil
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User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
27d ago
We're All Sitcom Characters Now
If you've ever watched a successful long running sitcom, you've seen it happen. The characters start out mostly normal with a quirk or two. Maybe a little neurotic, or slow, or promiscuous. Four seasons in and the characters have all become deranged parodies of themselves. All their most entertaining qualities have been heightened, everything relatable or normal has been squeezed out. The character that was a little slow is now a straight up drooling retard. The promiscuous character obsessively fucks everything that moves. The neurotic character is only a step removed from Howard Hughes in his final days. You watch the last episode and the first episode of a sitcom, and you'll barely recognize the characters.
It's obvious why it happens though. The writers and actors give the audiences what they want. Sitcoms are (or were?) a cuttroat business. There was little room for artistic integrity, vision, or any other high minded concepts. Give the audiences what they want, or they'll change the channel and the show will be cancelled. Just shut up and do it!
I regret to inform you that we are all on a sitcom now. Everyone is enmeshed with an attention economy. Be it farming engagement on twitter, or upvotes on a reddit clone. And unlike actors who only have to inhabit their roles for hours a day, for a shooting schedule that might be weeks or months out of a year, those enmeshed in the attention economy must be in character 24/7. On social media, on streaming, on podcast, on youtube, all at once, all the time.
Some have whole heartedly embraced this. Twitter is full of people being characters, allowing the algorithm or engagement to tweak the dials on their personality. Like a second subconscious that lives in the cloud. Catgirl Kulak comes to mind. He's out there using an AI catgirl as an avatar, staying more and more in character as some sort of neo pagan feral/trad nordic catgirl with hot takes. It's a dangerous game he's playing, existing more and more in a fictional role. But there are others. The preposterous performative pro-Elon or pro-Trump nonsense I saw and tried to avoid on twitter this last week was really something. Twitter super users who've built their brand on being staunch partisans like Catturd out there acting like absolute charicatures of themselves. They're just sitcom characters anymore, and rapidly approaching the braindeath of the latter seasons. Others I don't think fully understand what was happening to them. I wonder how much upvote driven personality disorders had to do with certain flameouts here.
Because eventually every sitcom hits the wall. The characters have been intellectually and emotionally abused and lobotomized to such a point where there is no humanity left in them to ritualistically beat out for the amusement of the audience. It gets it's final season where the writers attempt to rehabilitate them just enough to send them off into the sunset.
There are no writers to rehabilitate you when the algorithm is done with you, and you've lived inside a cartoonish and horrifying version of yourself for attention for years on end.
WhiningCoil
30d ago
Hah, not yet. I actually didn't know that myself.
WhiningCoil
30d ago
I think America is already dead. There are almost certainly other theories, but look at the utter collapse of our state capacity.
Sometimes I see people point to Vietnam as the point where America "lost the ability to win wars", the first Iraq War not withstanding. We can fight wars. We can fight wars for decades. But we haven't achieved our geopolitical goals after a war in decades.
But there is more to running a nation than adventurism over seas! Sadly since Obama basically the state has failed at every initiative it ever undertook, and fails harder, faster and more obviously as time goes on. And yet people connected to government keep getting fantastically wealthy!
The corruption and graft is so out of control, we've become like Africa where nothing gets built, but the people accepting the contracts all live in mansions. And it's hard to ignore that the multi-ethnic low trust society we've all been forced into seems to have paved the way for this.
I'm no longer confident the US will be around in my old age. I just wonder which ethnic group or coalition will be lead by some modern day Atilla or Clovis will seize control of large portions of the US under a forced "reorganization" of state and federal power because the feds no longer have the state capacity to stop them. After all, we've seen such a decline in state capacity everywhere else, why should we expect them to hold the country together, push comes to shove? You think the 20 million illegals that flooded the country, or the 60-100 million descendants they'll have in 50 years in their ethnic ghettos care about the continuity of the American project? They came here for a better life, and that doesn't necessarily include us.
WhiningCoil
30d ago
If you don't watch the ADV Films dub of Evangelion, complete with nepotistic casting of Asuka voiced by the wife of the ADV president, you are doing it wrong. Yes it's terrible. Yes it's obnoxious. Yes it's horribly unprofessional and undermines the quality of the entire show.
But damnit, it was the 90's and that's just how old anime was done.
WhiningCoil
30d ago
Only thing that would have made it better is if the execution came at the end of several intractable arguments where the victim was repeatedly accused of being too hard headed.
Also I kind of want to see the whopper of a cromag skull this guy was sporting.
WhiningCoil
30d ago
I'm still slowly making my way through The Essential Ellison: A 35 Year Retrospective. I know there was an update 50 year version, but I'm not sure I care.
It's a lot. I've read my share of Harlan before. But getting through 200 pages of Harlan is significantly different from 1000 pages. Harlan is such a committed misanthrope, it really starts to wear on you after enough of it back to back. And of course, in this collection especially, there is an emphasis on how much these stories relate to Harlan the author. Little tidbits about Harlan are included by the editor in short prefaces to each section that lay bare how autobiographical many of the stories are. Many of his characters have had 4 divorces just like Harlan. Many of them are short, or did a brief stint in the army, or ran away from home, or had their father die young, or have spent time in jail, or are also authors.
Funnily enough, few of his self inserts copy his famously cantankerous nature. They are just obviously correct about most situations. I guess every author has his blind spot.
He really doesn't disguise his self inserts that much, but they also never meet good ends. They serve more for self flagellation than wish fulfillment.
All in all, past the first 300 pages I find it to be a challenging read, an exercise in spiritual endurance. But I'm past the 600 page mark and the end is in sight so I'm trying to commit to reading it more. I have other books I'd like to get through that I anticipate being brisker reads.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I don't know if Adam Friedland will seize the day to become the ironic Bill Maher for under-40s
Is becoming Bill Maher supposed to be some sort of accomplishment? His schtick mostly seems to be begging the Democrats not to be crazy (and failing) for 1.5 years, and then spending the other 0.5 years during peak election season (midterm and presidential) sheep herding all the audience he grown being "contrarian" into voting Blue No Matter Who anyways because "The Republicans are still worse."
It's working less and less well as time goes on. And every time he goes "I was wrong, here are some of the good points Republicans make" for a few months. But then another election comes up and the mask of reason falls and the pure partisan comes back out.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
In theory this could have been me, once upon a time. I was more inclined to go the "Save as much as possible, invest, move to a low cost of living country" route. I had spreadsheets once upon a time with some rough calculations of how much I'd need to save to live in Romania without any dependents for the rest of my life. I'd more or less given up on women, my girlfriend having left me for another man the day before my father died.
Tangent, that was almost 20 years ago now. Sometimes I actually forget that I was seeing a girl around that time, and she had in fact dumped me the day before my father died. All I remember anymore is the day he died. When I do remember that lady, it's almost like a curiosity. Some weird anecdote that happened to someone else. Not me, happily married with a kid.
Back on point, when I was in my 20's I was an asshole. I mean, I still am an asshole, but in my 20's I was a major asshole. But when I think back, everyone in my 20's was a major asshole. We were high off youth, and whatever minor achievements we'd made. Maybe our brand new degree. Maybe some job that seems like hot shit to us at the time, but was really just another job. A lot of women loved showing off engagement rings for marriages that have long since collapsed. May have had something to do with them also bragging about how short a leash they kept their husbands on, or how "well trained" they'd gotten them. Sometimes I cite 25 as peak cockiness. Something about that feels about right to me as the apex of youthful exuberance. It doesn't fall off immediately after that. But if bad things haven't humbled you yet, they probably start to.
I don't know how you get two assholes to pair off and endure each other until they stop being assholes. I don't know how you get 25 year olds to not be assholes. I don't know how you make the whole experience of having your ego sandblasted off by other assholes so demoralizing you don't tune out of society all together. I have no idea how any of this used to work, or what other generations experienced. I was raised on self esteem and main characters like Zack Morris, Ferris Bueller and Parker Lewis.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Going bald isn't the end of the world but it's pretty traumatic. People get hair transplants that look terrible or wear a hair systems to cope with it.
And some people accept their fate and choose to get jacked. Because fat and bald sucks. Fit and bald is a definite look though. All in all I'm pretty happy with my choice.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I should note my own prior here; you're much better off with a priest than a shrink.
I would not be shocked to see a study with a dataset supporting that exorcism is a better mental health intervention than therapy.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I mean, yes. But also, that requires a lower time preference than most narcissist are capable of. They don't want to give up attention now for more attention later. They want all the attention, right now, all the time. And especially their exact favorite type of attention, not a different type that's better in some ways and worse in others.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Maybe.
Alternately, Transhausen by Proxy.
All things under the sun are possible, even horrible things that make you weep at the tragedy of it.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I think they have a problem with narcissism.
Most women go through their lives being the center of attention. Women Are Wonderful, and most relationships revolve around them and whatever it takes to keep them happy. After all, it's easy for them to replace the men in their lives who fail to live up to their standards.
To a point.
Having a kid takes all the attention they were getting, all the effort people were putting into keeping them happy, and steals it away from them. Now the kid is getting it. There is no comparison to being a man and becoming a father, because nobody gives a fuck about men in the first place. Supposedly becoming a dad is (used to be?) good for your career because people are (or were?) more generous with raises for a family man.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Thanks, I hate it.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Let me put it like this.
I would not be against much maligned literacy test to register to vote. I wouldn't be against banning people on SSRIs from voting. I don't understand why felons ever started getting their rights to vote back, when the last thing we need is a felon voting block, somehow convincing politicians to make their crimes legal or at least unpunishable. I think it might be a worthy experiment to whittle away at universal suffrage "disparate outcomes" be damned.
Sometimes I think of the origin story of sorts for the Slavs. Mostly because Dan Carlin did a podcast on vikings in the east, and then immediately after I heard that Putin summarized largely the same history in his interview with Tucker Carlson. And that origin story, as written by the victors, is that the Slavs were so incapable of ruling themselves, they invited some viking nobles who were much better at ruling down to rule over them. The relentless and short sighted tribal strife largely calmed down, some measure of relative peace and prosperity returned to the region.
Now on the face of it, that sounds like a preposterous story obviously written by the victors. Are we honestly supposed to believe that a people requested from foreign stock a new ruling class? That it's even possible for them to have the self awareness required to realize, as a people, they are temperamentally incapable of governing themselves? It's probably just a story, a myth even. But sometimes I think about it wondering, what if?
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Yeah, Ubuntu was going to be my first choice because it seems so ubiquitous and stuff like Steam claims to only support Ubuntu. But a friend of me talked me out of it because Ubuntu began gathering telemetry or something? And a lot of the places I used to see evangelizing Ubuntu shifted to Mint?
I donno man. I'm an outsider looking in.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
What we can do is work with them, educate them on how to live a better life, and love them.
This has been the political project of the last 50 years, and it's only resulted in the inmates running the asylum.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Why not both? Look, I haven't taken a chemistry class in 20+ years. But by way of a possibly flawed analogy, you can have incredibly stable molecules that get pried apart in the correct solution. Maybe all it takes is water.
No relationship is perfect or without strife. Culture can encourage people to kill their ego and sacrifice to work things out, or it can encourage them to be purely ego driven and destroy their relationships in pursuit of limitless self actualization.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
A cousin at a family function, a high school acquaintance on Facebook, a former student dropping by my office; all rolling in the deep, and every time a Bayesian reckoning lands me on "Leftism is both a cause and effect of acute mental illness" I roll to disbelieve, because I know it can't possibly be that simple--can it?
And much like HBD, an obvious truth gets dismissed because to believe it leads to only a single brutal conclusion. A group of people that you want to enjoy full human rights and political autonomy because that's what we've decided is the bedrock of being a good person, must be marginalized and contained at worst, eliminated at best. Or vice versa? Because it's impossible to share a Republic or a Democracy with a power faction that are literal raving lunatics and/or pants on head retarded.
I have so much whiplash from the 90's. The promises implicitly made to me by the culture (in the absence of parental guidance), the beliefs I took on by osmosis, and the horrifying hellscape of a nation I now live in 30 years later which seems the ultimate fruit of those promises.
Like, as a trivial example. There was a humor site called Pointless Waste of Time, that eventually got rolled into Cracked.com and had all it's best articles memory holed, even from archive.org. There was an article where this guy was trying to catch up with his highschool friends maybe 10 years later. I viewed this author as my peer, just a few years ahead of me. He liked video games, shock humor, and was a sneering atheist who never wanted kids. Over the course of catching up with a bunch of his friends, they'd all changed. He alone remained basically as he had been in highschool. I don't recall the precise score, but something like 2 of his friends overdosed and 5 had gotten married, had kids and found Jesus. He joked that he "lost" more friends to God than to drugs. I laughed. What fucking losers deciding to go to church with your family if you'd made it through your childhood not doing so.
So anyways, I got married, had kids, and now we go to church as a family. I can scarcely imagine how miserable I'd be had I bitterly clung to some version of myself I thought was "cool" in 1998. What sort of neuroses I'd develop to cope with the objectively lack of meaning, stability or community I'd be adrift in. The idea that "being a father cost me my identity" sounds literally insane to me, any more than not being a sneering 90's teenage atheist anymore "cost me my identity". Maybe 90's teenage me wouldn't understand the life 2020's middle age me lives. I don't care.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
The fact that I'm a Linux newb and it was supposed to be the most user friendly. I don't think I see myself distro hopping either, I just want something that works, and it does. But who knows, maybe I'll find myself with more time than sense and going down rabbit holes.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Man... sometimes it feels like I hit bitcoin at just the right time. It was worth enough to make me take it seriously, it was after Mt Gox so lessons from that were in the zeitgeist, and I was zealous enough to never sell and keep DCAing for almost 10 years. Some people have done better buying it earlier and selling the tops and buying the bottoms. Some people have done a lot worse panic selling the bottoms. All in all I can't complain.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I want so badly to believe in Intel, but it just keeps getting worse. Sorry you got burned.
I'm still happy as a clam with my 5800X3D and an RTX 4070S to go with it. But I'm throwing $50 a month into a "New Computer" fund whenever I decide it's finally time to upgrade. Who knows when that'll be. Since switching to Linux Mint things generally seem much snappier. I know it boots it like 10 seconds versus the 60+ Windows 10 takes these days. Really makes you think how much of that feeling of "Ugh, my computer has gotten slow" is just Windows cruft. Linux Mint feels as fast as the day I first built this thing (when it was a Ryzen 3700X and an RTX 2070S) and was blown away at how much faster a NVMe drive was to boot from.
Stupid planned obsolescence.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
Man, where was I? Making the stretchers for my chairs over again I think?
I had a pretty productive week then I guess. Made the stretchers to the proper length this time. Doing the tenons at an angle was new for me. Starts off the same as any others, but then I had to hand cut the last bits. Fit perfect in the final product this time. The final parts I had to make were the seat bottoms. I got the template done and then routed out the panels I'd glue up last month to shape. Looks fantastic in place. Unfortunately the panels weren't wide enough to give the seats the kind of flourish I would have liked, but they do taper slightly towards the back and round slightly around the front legs.
I decided to tempt fate some, and give the chairs a bit more of a backwards tilt, just 3/4" off the back legs. Adds roughly 2.5 degrees to the tilt of the chair and IMHO made it way more comfortable. I wish this had been built into my template, but I wasn't using CAD software or anything, so I had to figure it out after I had a physical object in my hands. Sadly the best way to cut them was by hand because they were curved and I didn't have a good reference plane to throw it on my tablesaw or miter saw. Also I felt like it would go wrong slower with a handsaw. I think I cut them mostly even. Nothing the felt pads I'm putting on the bottom, or a hand plane and a shooting board worst case, can't fix.
I'm in the end stages of this project. Some light edge profiling, filling in knots and voids with sawdust and glue, sanding, finishing and then final assembly. Probably still going to take me a few more weeks to get through all that. I've decided to finish the parts separately and then assemble them. I don't think having a little shellac around the mortises will weaken them too badly. After all the slot and the tenon are doing most of the work, not the end grain of the shoulder being glued to the work piece. Plus I've just had better luck get a consistent finish when I do smaller parts without inside corners, and then assemble it
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
That sounds terrifying. I'm glad your son fully recovered.
Doctors working with outdated information is the most frustrating part. We're seeing a local doctor who's kept abreast of the changes, largely due to so many of her patients having tick born diseases in recent years. My daughter's school does a pretty good job too because several kids there have AGS, including kids of the staff. It's getting kind of out of control in my area if "I never knew anyone who had this and now I'm encountering it everywhere I go" is any measure.
It depresses us to no end the fact that the outdoors feels so threatening now. We're trying to keep up the love of nature too with the hiking and camping. But then our daughter gets another tick and my wife spends a week contemplating selling everything, moving to a concrete jungle, and getting rid of the dog in case she tracks ticks in too.
Supposedly the AGS gets better after a few years, but the big if is that you have to not get bit by more ticks. That's proving incredibly difficult since we've found 2 more on our daughter just from the yard (or the dog) this spring.
I may elaborate on this in another post, but even assuming zero participation in social media, the algorithm is always listening. Often directly through apps on your cell phone, and indirectly from every link you click, video you watch, search you make, how long your eyes linger on something while you scroll. The degree to which a crude homunculus of yourself is being constructed in the cloud, whispering to you through your screen on the margins of every page you visit is horrifying. It was not a rhetorical flourish to describe it as a second subconscious. I absolutely believe that.
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