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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.
Kulak is a dude who shilled rich man's aella, Addison Moore, a super high end escort who is active on twitter.
Hearing about him makes me a little sad. He's slightly older than me and would post long detailed threads on the subreddit when I was just starting university. He had an accident that @FiveHourMarathon linked to once and became deranged.
His final post was for calling for arms against Mirpuris in the UK, something I'd encourage in an ideal world, unfortunately, fedposting gets you and your movement killed since people actively look for ways to stereotype you (hello charlottesville). Calling for violence online is stupid, doing it for a right wing cause is even worse.
Him and Trace changed after leaving, kulak changed a lot more but trace did too. There are plenty of alums that are popular on twitter, covfefe anon, cremieuxrecueil (allegedly trannyporn0).
People I know who are unaware of themotte genuinely think he's a Canadian girl of rhodesian ancestry. He plays along despite fucking podcasts where his voice is octaves deeper than the average guy.
Wait, what? I always wondered what happened to TP0. That would be interesting if it were true.
Yes, he's neither cat, nor girl, nor kulak. It's always amusing to me when people think he's a woman.
I looked at his Twitter this am and regret it. Essentially, and this hasn't always been true I think, I am on the opposite side of most of his rants. I won't link them because they don't need signal boosting. I also notice he is followed by Jordan Peterson, for some bizarre reason.
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I just assumed they were Trans.
He seems unhappy, I wish I could have spoken with him when he would comment on my posts. He is quite smart, canda is a good example as to why you should not have mass migration, the migrants there are rarely decent ones, many blue collar punjabis and gujratis who explicitly have very narrow views with regards to ethnic loyalty.
I get why people miss the 90s. Back then, the quality of people moving was not as bad. His accident, increasing amounts of fedposting, the canadian situation explains his current views. I hope he comes out of it ok. There are very real legal ramifications for what he posts at least in Canada. People here have been quite helpful to me, seeing someone whose name i recognize and have spoken with before spiraling hurts a little.
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I saw one of his tweets shared in a random (very left-leaning) discord server. I had no idea how to explain that he was legitimately unhinged.
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I do think a lot of the conversations that used to happen here have moved to TPOT and postrat twitter. It’s a great space and there are surprising number of present and former mottizens there. Mostly pseudonymous of course but occasionally it’s come up in PMs or via dogwhistles. The notable thing with Trace and Kulak is that they kept their pseudonyms constant between here and there. A lot of people either have separate aliases on twitter or just post under their real name. I’m still trying to figure out which of you here is JD Vance.
What is TPOT? As with acronyms in general, Google is pretty useless at figuring it out.
It stands for "This part of twitter" and there's a know-your-meme about it here.
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“That Part Of Twitter”. Not that it’ll make it any easier to search.
I don’t know what their deal is, but I think they’re related to the “vibecamp” thing. Which is also intentionally vague and a e s t h e t i c.
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What are you referring to?
He had a biking accident that caused him issues with his arm, his hand took a while to get back to typing properly again. The libertarian ideals you can skirt by in college when you wish to use them to avoid showing off your power levels don't work after a while.
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Oh! What is the proof for that? Or is it just wishful thinking?
I have heard credible testimony to the contrary from a guy who definitely knows one and claims to know the other, but no hard proof of the negative. They are, as you'd expect, pretty similar people.
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It's been alleged here by many multiple times, unless it's an inside joke I'm unaware of, many strongly suspect that he was trannyporn0.
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He was unfortunately doxxed. It actually happened a while ago but he was until recently not famous enough for anyone to pay attention. As per longstanding convention on this board I won’t link to it; suffice it to say he was an interesting poster then and still is now, although nobody is immune to the negative effects of Twitter power-use and hot take bait.
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I am a little bit torn on this one. For instance with Trace, I think he is more authentic after leaving his anonymous motte persona, except at least from what I observed he is now more into gay stuff and mormonism - probably stemming more from his personal experience and history. I think he was more interesting in his fictional anonymous personality writing about whatever here on The Motte, when he had to mold himself into The Motte ethos. In a sense rules here are also some sort of algorithm forcing some people into writing style, that may not be natural to them. And they may be better for it.
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