Realistically we didn’t need it before YouTube existed and I should be fine without it, but I think it’ll be tough, I don’t have an aerial for FTA tv anymore, nor a tv in my bedroom and I don’t really want to sign up for a subscription streaming service. Plus a decent chunk of my employers use YouTube as end point for the videos I edit so that could be a bit of a hit too. There’s always reading I guess, that might be doubly necessary if I end up poorer and can’t afford much else.
This sounds like an absolutely terrible idea. Aside from the people that will hurt themselves trying to break that glass, it’s a public bus stop. People will hurt bystanders and damage the bus stop and make it in general a place no one wants to be because of idiots constantly hurling stuff around or kicking it while you’re trying to wait for the bus.
A throne that has seen so much shit, it’s become jaded.
Holy shit that’s some serious preplanning and manipulation. It’s impressive and kind of fucked up all at once. Everyone else was here was just fucking around.
Haha we all did that one. So funny watching angry teachers trying to click on things that were just screenshots. We also did it with things that were like annoying pop ups so you’d be really motivated to click to get rid of it.
Did anyone summarise the porn site?
It also doesn’t make any sense why it would be the Christian god if that’s the reasoning because I think rather a lot of different religions would happily take credit for whatever it is they thought made the world “perfect” so why would the Christian claim to this perfection be any stronger than any other?
Hahaha I love that this is written as “he had a religious experience WHILE talking to a chair”, not “he had a religious experience AND talked to a chair”. Dude’s just having a normal conversation with a chair and then something weird and unexplained occurred that put him on the path to god. I wonder if the chair was as convinced.
I wouldn’t say it was weird, I think it’s one of the better arguments since it only relies on pure hard nosed practicality, but it still doesn’t hold water for the reasons you say. I think at least within the constructs of what it considers, it’s logical, it’s just that it fails to consider too much, among which, whether or not belief in the existence of something like that can just be chosen on the basis of what would be practically expedient.
It could be demonstrated to me that belief in Santa Claus can have material benefits, and failure to believe will mean that, if he does exist, you will no longer receive gifts. With that logic it would make more sense to believe in Santa Claus than not to, since there’s no downside to believing and being wrong and a potentially negative consequence to lacking that belief and being wrong. The problem is that, I can’t sincerely believe in something that for all intents and purposes I can say I “know” isn’t real simply because I would like to enjoy the hypothetical benefits and avoid the hypothetical consequences. I can say I believed in Santa Clause, if doing so meant that someone was going to give me gifts, but saying it and believing it are distinct concepts so the wager would be more persuasive as a means of deciding whether or not to declare belief in something than believe it.
forever alone together?
Yes and no in the worst kinds of ways. I noticed at maybe a relatively young age in my mid to late 20s that there was a small number of references I actually literally just didn’t get, made by people I worked with in their early 20s. This scared me a little bit because out of some kind of fairly stupid snobbery I kind of privately prided myself on not knowing a lot of the stuff I felt was frivolous in modern pop culture as if that somehow made me superior. This more conscious habit of deliberately avoiding too much exposure to whole categories of art worked as intended however I would have to know about something to avoid it, so while I’d be ignorant of it by design, I could never be fully ignorant since it had to enter my orbit for me to reject it. This would mean I sorta knew at a very surface level what people were talking about when referencing things out there in the general zeitgeist so I never really felt “out of touch” so much as “too smart to care about this shit”. This meant that when I started encountering the first references that were actually truly foreign and completely unknown to me it was a rude shock. Who’d have thought actively making it your mission to close your ears and “lalalalala” much of modern culture to smuggly feel above it actually eventually is a self-fulfilling prophecy that makes you really become out of touch and feel old and weird potentially before you had to. I don’t say that to imply that one ought to make it a personal goal to stay up to date with it culture, or to imply that a lot of it isn’t banal and perhaps not worth your time, only to say that, deliberately trying not to know because you think it’s all stupid is well… stupid.
From there the natural progression of becoming old and just genuinely not encountering stuff without any need to consciously create that that ignorance took course and I now quite frequently don’t know what people younger than myself are talking about, which is to be expected, but still feels really surreal and strange and kind of sad. I’m sure that’s exactly how it felt to everyone older than myself when I was in my teens and in my 20s. I didn’t imagine myself being spared this fate, but somehow you can never prepare for the way that feels no matter how much you expect it and know that it’s coming - forewarned is not forearmed in this case.
As to the “No” part of this, I have in the past decade or so become less and less social, had fewer and fewer friends and generally just don’t really get out much. It took me by surprise recently to learn how much this has meant my life is increasingly lived online. I always kind of knew that was the case, because I was always an awkward nerd even in my youth but I have only recently begun to realise that when I do get out, if it’s not with other, similar, people of my own age and situation in life (people who also likely spend much of their time online), almost all I have to talk about, or almost all the ways in which I can relate when someone else has something to talk about, is in references to things that pretty much exclusively have their context online or in forums or as memes. This is upsetting to me because well, I’ve come across people like that before and I didn’t especially like being around them. I like to think my personality is a bit less off than them and the type of internet references I make are different, but nevertheless the thought that that’s probably what I look like is depressing. Existing in this mode is great when you’re online but it doesn’t translate very well to general conversation unless you’re literally occupying those same online spaces and don’t need to explain context. It kind of gives off neckbeard vibes and quite frequently people don’t know what I’m talking about which has me feeling awkward. It’s also kind of weird just how American I’ve become since I don’t even live there. I don’t know if others notice it but when I find myself over analysing all my recent interactions with people, as I often do, I can see that no one else seems to have absorbed Americana quite the same way and I don’t particularly like that either. So I both, don’t really keep up very well with modern pop-culture and I also seem to keep up with it better than others when that refers to a largely North American-centric internet bubble that I had kind of unthinkingly felt more people were in or at least around but as it turns out, really aren’t.
Future topic of a chubby emu video in the making.
Isn’t jock kind of pejorative though? Athlete wouldn’t communicate the same disdain.
Klapaucius!;!;!
I was walking through one of the dodgier parts of my city fairly late at night with not too many people around. I could see these 2 drunk weirdo guys with a kind of homeless vibe. There was an older guy and a younger dude, sitting on a bench, I could hear the older guy. Imagine this with a thick crocodile Dundee Aussie accent.
“I don’t believe it, I CAN’T believe it, after all I’ve done for you. I was nice to you. I bought you cheese, I… … …”
An awkward 4 to 5 second silence followed as it slowly dawned on the older guy that his list of benevolent acts only had 1 item before he followed up with
“I bought you CHEESE mate!”
RIP slaveRat’s computer/phone
Wasn’t that interested before but it does give it a certain allure now to be sure.
In many ways he’s a unique figure. When he entered the political scene in his first campaign. The establishment republicans and conservatives didn’t appear to think he’d really become a serious force. They were wrong. His ideological opponents also seemed to think he was too silly, and too extreme to be taken seriously and his domination of the right, albeit surprising, was anomalous and would never translate to electoral victory. They were also wrong. He seemed not to know how to play the game properly and was too foolish even to realise it. He probably wouldn’t have been the first whack job to fail to heed his advisors and PR team and would surely fail like all of them. Viewed in that light his somehow successful manoeuvres could seem only baffling than inspired, like watching someone win at roulette by just always betting one colour. This gives his rising successes a spooky and uncanny air and not something his rivals or opponents could simply emulate themselves because when a normal person does this they just lose.
If he’d had that final Big Mac attack in 2015 or maybe even as late as 2016, his brand of politics and the movement it seems to have inspired might have died with him but sadly it looks like now, plenty of proteges will be there to pick up the reigns. For all that can be said of the man, it appears he tapped in to and unleashed something that was waiting for its time and it’s unlikely even his death will put that genie back in its bottle. The next in line might be a shrewd and clever cynic, who’s studied the MAGA playbook and will exploit it to the hilt to grasp power for their own ends with no belief in the irrational or fantastical elements of this new orthodoxy. It might be an actual true believer, straight from the ranks of the deranged and mentally disturbed that Trump previously manipulated, now believing they’re seeing the many real and imagined prophecies Trump used to rile them coming true. Maybe it’ll be something in between, someone more like Trump himself with what seems to be more of an instinctive knack for playing these emboldened fanatics rather than a geniusly thought out strategy, they’ll sometimes believe what they’re saying sometimes not, a value system infinitely malleable, but reliably selfish. Either way Trump being dead will be a relief for little more than a day and after that you can either look forward to an heir apparent who’ll keep it all going or a dangerous power struggle between dangerous people happy to expend lives and treasure to pick up the mantle.
Well yes there’s always the seven seas I guess. They were always a refuge for me before YouTube as well.