_______ is not real life
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Inside the Right’s Fracking-Meme Campaign
At the moment my career has wandered into the shadow of the energy industry so I have some personally incentivized and economically influenced opinions on things like fracking and pipelines that are probably too caustically aggressive for me to successfully communicate here. However, pro-fracking memes I think are OBJECTIVELY hilarious and should be celebrated as the sweetest distillate of Hello Fellow Kids dot Meme. -B
Issue 72
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Your Pretty Face is Going to Sell
I hate You Tube Face and won't click any video that features a thumbnail with that zoomed in, exaggerated emotional caricature. Am I getting old? -B
I also despise this so-called YTF. I will join you, ye olde man Brian, in the land of Cranky Internet Olds. -C
Issue 71
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Ramee - Terrorists attacking commercial aircraft?!
Ok, so this is one that I'm not really sure how to explain but it is so good that I'm going to try. Bear with me as some of this may seem very very weird.
1) On an internet TV channel called Twitch, people play videogames and stream so that other people can watch them play. This is a very popular thing and the top streamers make a lot of money and are very talented entertainers.
2) The open world game Grand Theft Auto from ~10 years ago has a mod or game version available that allows several hundred players to all roleplay being normal people, but in a video game. Like The Truman Show or The Matrix but everyone (hopefully) is aware they are in a simulation. This is called Grand Theft Auto Roleplay or GTA RP for short.
3) The most popular version of GTA RP is a server called NoPixel. It is extremely popular and the wait list to be one of the people to get into the server and roleplay as a fast food employee or a taxi driver is tens of hours long every day.
4) A lot of Twitch streamers have been placed on a "White List' that more or less allows them to bypass the queue and enter NoPixel at will. This is at least one contributing factor to why the wait list for normies is so long- everyone wants to roleplay with their favorite streamers.
5) In NoPixel there is normal life, there are normal cops played by normal people, and there are a small subset of players who basically have permission to be criminals. Most of the criminals and a lot of the cops are streamers. You still with me on this?
6) The criminals do things like set up art galleries as legitimate fronts for their businesses. They steal explosives and run narcotics. And they take hostages and rob banks. And the cops try to prevent all this. A common "scene" is for the criminals to take a hostage, rob a bank by hacking the safe, and then turn over their hostage and take off in a car to try to outrun or otherwise outwit the cops. This leads to extended car chases and elaborate getaway plans that end up either with the criminals dead in the streets (to be treated and brought back to life by people roleplaying doctors in a hospital) or getting away and stashing their ill-gotten gains at a secret gang hidey-hole.
7) In this particular scene the cops had recently been given a new airplane and were trying it out. A bank robbery had just taken place and the criminals (this group in particular is known as the Chang Gang (yes I spelled that correctly)) were running from the cops down a highway by the ocean. A third (fourth?) group of people in a helicopter thought the plane had been hijacked and came in to try to help.
8) I've collected a couple of short clips of various players viewpoints of what happened next. I'd just like to mention I watched this in real time from one of the criminals perspectives. It was an emergent, hysterical and dramatic, spontaneous movie as good (or better) than a lot of tedious action movies.
9) Yes... I probably could spend a portion of my adult life in ways that aren't me watching other adults play video games that involve them pretending to be normal people while thousands of people watch and cheer them on... but I'm not going to. -B
Issue 70
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“Amid” is the favorite word of the media during the Trump administration. It allows them to string together completely unrelated stories to give the hint of a scandal.
Americans, myself very much included, have decided over the last 4-12 years that the media isn't interested in telling us the truth but instead explicitly and implicitly uses "contextualizing" and other rhetorical tricks to disguise opinion as reporting. I hadn't thought about this trick in particular till now but of course now I'm seeing it everywhere. -B
Issue 66
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So the main link above is a definition (most of you can probably safely ignore). Below are two examples I've clumsily picked to try to show you this from the left and from the right equally. I'm interested to know if one or the other rubs you as worse than the other. It might mean something about our own inner biases.
*-Brian
Brian just tell us what it means I'm too lazy to click three links. -C
Issue 64
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No more going viral: why not apply social distancing to social media?
To do this (limit the max number of people that can see a post) would be really going against the grain of the business model. But man, wouldn't it cool things down just a bit for just a second so we can all catch our gosh darned breaths. -B
Issue 64
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The hidden benefit to avoiding online shaming
Now my social media feed is full of people scolding others who have the audacity to try to salvage a shred of joy and pleasure from their lives. The lens seems largely political: as if anyone experiencing pleasure or expressing joy while Trump is president is tacitly endorsing Trump. The communally encouraged state of being is dread and misery and rage. People who eat at restaurants, people who let their kids play on playgrounds, people who walk around the lake without a mask — all condemnable, contemptible. Selfish. How dare they?
I worry that in the absence of the real, nourishing pleasure of togetherness, we’re increasingly turning to the more toxic, shallow pleasure of judgement and moral superiority.
YES. And maybe our need to share everything we do on the internet or we don't feel like it really happened is the real problem. There's something freeing about just being where you are and not trying to frame where you are for the 'gram. -B
This column / email / newsletter / post or whatever-things-are-now basically summarized a lot of the feelings I've had lately that have been a long time marinating. In some ways I prefer the much smaller social circle, the preciousness of hanging out with friends, and the delightful nothing moments that I previously took for granted. But there are still lots of things I miss about the way things were before. One of my BFFs sent me a picture of us at a Grizzlies game a few hours ago. I want stuff like that back, but there have been some great realizations about relationships and my own behavior that I've had this year that are worth holding onto. - C
Issue 64
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Why Your Social Media Groups are Making You Dumber
I suggest the following exercise. Examine one of your social media circles and ask yourself: “What would happen if I expressed an opinion that disagreed with the group?” If the answer is: “A spirited and well-reasoned discussion of the topic would ensue... Then you might be in a good place. If the answer is: “Immediate and virulent ad hominem and censure. Possible exclusion from the group or targeted harassment” LEAVE THAT GROUP. That is a bad place for your brain.
- B
Issue 61
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Meet the Mystery Meme-Makers Behind the Popular Instagram ‘Daquan’
Another new category will give us more focus for the eponymous theme of how awful social media is for our kids, our politics, our culture, and our mental health. -Brian
Listen, man, I give you admin privileges on this Internet tool and you're just making categories willy-nilly... - Calvin
Issue 60