DTulpa
28d 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
28d 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
1mo 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
1mo 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.
DTulpa
1mo ago
Absolutely that's a part of it. However, when it comes to a company like Disney I think it's just pure flex.
There is something really dispiriting about the death grip of advertising (or its lack thereof) and the way it is cynically wielded. X would be a prime spot to pump your ads, but we are told to believe that the general population would find it unacceptable to hawk your wares on a site that occasionally has a user say 'nigger'. Outside of vocal minorities, I absolutely don't believe the average person would care, and would generally be able to discern that the ads hovering around any given tweet have nothing to do with its content - just like I know an ad for Liberty Mutual has nothing to do with the 3-hour RPG retrospective it's interrupting. I've rambled before about this kind of 'fake free market' where companies are claiming their customers are literally begging them to remove a product or cut off a platform, and said company is just respecting their wishes.
If people really can't disassociate the served-up ads from the content they hover around, you would think the healthy thing to do would be to encourage some maturation on this matter instead of indulging these fainting couch sensibilities. But as I said - I dont believe this is really the case. It has nothing to do with people finding offense and everything to do with boxing out political opponents. Even normal people I know who support the ad bocott against X eventually give this away, but still suggest nothing fucky is happening.
If you're going to imbue 'Black Identity' with cultural cachet, a shared experience, and promote it above others, it is absolutely correct to question whether celebrity politicians honestly reflect it or are grifting.
DTulpa
1mo ago
"I can't believe rightoids think a family from the Midwest is weird" is the same caliber as Joe Biden pulling his "Do I look like a radical?" schtick while he stocks his administration with with fake women and obvious perverts like Sam Brinton.
I get that you can barely contain your relishing this situation where the manufactured optics around it are tilting against the Republicans' favor at the moment, but could you maybe try a little harder.
DTulpa
1mo ago
If you want to make a case for his favorability ratings versus Vance, I won't argue with it. I would contest that this anything to do with him being a 'turbo normie', which you claim as seemingly self-evident.
DTulpa
1mo ago
I too can just baldly assert things. Things like:
Walz does not come off as a turbo normie. And he looked freakin' strange on the stage next to Kamala in a way that Vance doesn't.
DTulpa
1mo ago
She inherited that media. It took literally zero effort on her or her campaign's end to spin up the gaslighting machine in her favor. If you're able to show me a throughline between an action she took or a message she broadcasted and the ridiculously fawning coverage she has received (between bouts of imitating ostriches), please do.
If this is what qualifies as 'expertly-run' under your definition - which is to be understood as third parties doing all the heavy lifting for you -then it means nothing to me.
This is probably just sour grapes on my end, but I think a distinction should be drawn between her campaign itself and the backwinds of one of the softest, non-hostile media environments I have ever seen for a candidate. People are giving Trump crap for his NABJ appearance, but are there any examples of Harris or her surrogates being able to survive a similar waltz through a lions' den? Every interview I've seen with Harris has her nonsensically flubbing through easy lay-ups provided by sympathetic journalists. Then there's the retroactive editing of articles from years ago, the refusal to grill her at all with regards to covering for Biden's obvious unsuitability for office, and an inability to make a case for her beyond riding a coconut with a smile.
Without the aid of the news orgs and a voting base that has totally mindkilled itself in the last few months to justify her ascension, this campaign would be stillborn. The power comes not from some expertly-run campaign, but the media putting its ass on the scale to glide her through. Biden was a beneficiary of this dynamic, too. This isn't a novel whiny excuse. Rightoids have tagged this as the true threat for years, and it doesn't matter if Biden, Harris, or some other thoroughly unimpressive Dem candidate is the avatar being supported.
DTulpa
1mo ago
I think it ebbed a bit, but even the Tyre Nichols case was immediately framed as black cops learning the ways of white cops.
Furthermore, I doubt most people even remember the name 'Tyre Nichols', whereas 'George Floyd' and 'Eric Garner' will still be regularly invoked due to how they were branded on our collective consciousness.
Yes, most people have been socially conditioned to still expect men to carry the weight of themselves and others. Even those who have gotten completely tanked on "Women don't need men" narratives for the better part of a decade or more clearly believe this. This doesn't make it right, fair, or justified. Nor is there any assurance that this state of affairs is permanent.
I'm not sure how much weight being a self-interested asshole will carry in the future when we have turned into a nation of self-interested assholes. Or when the thing you're banking on to carry forth this duty (masculinity) has been discarded as either a historical myth or a vacant shape not exclusive to one gender ("girls can be just as strong/powerful/responsible/horny/aggressive as men"). I need to pay child support because I'm a man, but 'man' doesn't have a definition any more, traditionalism is dead, and I'm supposed to keep this going because Outlaw83 prefers it this way?
Good luck with that. No way this will ever collapse, I'm sure.
You vaguely gesture towards some "responsibility" that you can't even coherently define. And when pressed, you collapse into threats from the state and just-so social sanctioning. You can't offer anything else, just sticks. Said threats are certainly salient to this dynamic, but if that's all that's on offer, then I wouldn't be be so assured of this being an enduring constant.
DTulpa
1mo ago
I'm sure that plays well to traditionalist boomers. I really don't know what load-bearing social scaffolding in modern times you expect to bolster this sense of responsibility.
DTulpa
1mo ago
I think this is completely fair. But then my takeaway is that more attention and effort should have been paid to the border itself and its enforcement. I get the image of the admin plugging their fingers in the holes of a dam while it collapses on the sides, and whatever good work she performed is undecut by a strategic failure to keep an eye on the ball - or to even ackowledge the ball at all.
DTulpa
1mo ago
Biden wasn't going to be able to do this even if he was still in the race, and so it just reminds me that Dems were protecting an invalid. It's also a rare view of the man when he's not in bully mode. If any fence-sitters have concerns that the 'madman' routine is how he is down to his core, displays like this serve as a bit of an antidote.
It's also noteworthy that this did not trigger the automatic kiss of death or moral outrage that is usually given to celebrities who dare to 'normalize Trump'. 'Member when Fallon got scorched for jokingly touching Trump's hair? I certainly do.
DTulpa
1mo ago
Meanwhile, you could just make the fucking Barbie movie and get all the wimminz' moneys without pissing on your other properties. God forbid you make a distinct product that appeals to ladies specifically instead of flattening your other golden geese with a rolling pin.
DTulpa
1mo ago
I'm sure they'd prefer to keep beating on Biden, but I'm not quite convinced that Republicans are 'freaking out' about Kamala switching with Joe. As is usual in partisan politics, the game is to criticize them for everything they do and to not allow any win conditions. First you yell at them for entrusting the country with a man who obviously needs to go, then you criticize them again for backstabbing/ousting their dear leader when they actually do away with him. Superficially, this looks inconsistent or hypocritical, but eh. I think this is totally normal.
It's also easier to justify if the argument is "I am criticizing literally every thing you do because they are all consequences of your enormous unforced errors", like an inverted Xanatos Gambit.
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.
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