#on this page we hate elon musk | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jewelpit · 11 months

Text

How not to ring in pride by plugging a Matt Walsh film, courtesy of Ars Technica

(I'm posting this today because I wanted to give them the weekend to respond to it, and it's now nearly 1:00 PM EDT and there's still no official response or even message that the article has been edited, s here we are)

So I don't know how many of my friend on here read science and tech news, but for several years my favorite source for these subjects was Ars Technica, which seemed (emphasis on the past tense here) to have a higher level of journalistic quality than most of the free sci/tech news sites out there. They've even earned a reputation for being moderately progressive, with articles covering the reality of climate change and the effectiveness of vaccines.

This weekend, we learned that this veneer of progressiveness has a sharp and painful limit: LGBTQ+ issues.

Last week, Twitter's safety chief resigned after Elon Musk ordered her to surface an anti-trans propaganda piece, What Is A Woman, by Matt Walsh, a prominent anti-LGBTQ+ hate figure and major popularizer of the current push to label all LGBTQ+ people as sexual predators and groomers.

This could have been an easy slam dunk for Ars. Cover the departure, cover even the tiniest bit of backstory into Matt Walsh and why he's such a shitty guy, and then wait for the ad dollars from your progressive-leaning audience to roll in.

Instead, we got this (Wayback link here):

That was it. That was the whole article.

No mention of Matt Walsh proudly talking on Twitter about how he helped spread the "all queers are groomers" rhetoric that's spreading strong throughout much of the US (and it's only a matter of time before that breaches containment). No mention of how Chloe Cole holds rallies to try to make try to make puberty blockers and hormone treatment (which collectively have a regret rate that hovers around 1%) illegal for anyone to access until they're 18 and puberty has already permanently changed their body.

Ars' failure doesn't stop here, though I wish it did. Let's check the comment count:

Now for people who don't read Ars, that number might not mean much. Here it is in context:

Eight times as many comments as half the stories around it. Three times as many comments as an article about EA and gaming NFTs, topics that are guaranteed to create discussion. The only story that even comes close is a multi-page article about Starliner, a topic which consistently creates strong engagement on a site that cares enough about space to have its own purely-rocket themed sub-periodical.

Remember above when I said that Ars got a reputation as a semi-progressive site because they supported vaccines and the reality of climate change? That extended to the comments section, where their moderators would remove comments that called climate change fake or vaccines a scam. Let's see what kind of comments they're leaving up on this article:

Interesting how some topics are tightly moderated, and others, when they concern human rights, are left to the Ars community (which thankfully downvoted these posts into oblivion).

Save your downvote fingers, though, because these comments are locked to hell and back. No upvotes, no downvotes, no further comments. Just this:

"Culture war topics." "It should go without saying that the intent was not to spread hate." "This story was really about Ella Irwin's resignation... [and] Twitter is becoming less safe for some people seemingly by the hour."

I wonder if Ken Fisher, the founder and editor-in-chief, has any experience with running a site that's becoming less safe for "some people" by the hour? Given how they handled this this weekend, the first weekend of Pride month, I'd say he does.

Catch that part where he said the story is being updated? Here's a Wayback link to the updated version: linkle. Unfortunately it's now long enough to be a multi-page article, which means that putting it into the Wayback machine is a hassle, and it's so much longer that I'm not going to link it in here, but I suggest giving it a read.

Notice anything missing? Anything like... any kind of notice that the article was updated? A timestamp for updates? Nope, gonna just drop a modified version and pretend that this was the only version that ever existed. Thanks for the great article and amazing updates, Jon Brodkin.

...

Wait a second. So Jon Brodkin wrote an article that uncritically parroted talking points from an anti-trans propaganda piece made by an openly transphobic Christian nationalist. Is this an honest mistake, or is Jon in on the bit? Let's check who he follows on Twitter (sourced from https://twitter.com/jbrodkin/following).

...and of course:

He follows some green people too, but it's just politicians and fiction writers. No pro-trans publications or pro-trans nonfiction writers. At this point, the lazy response from the journalism team at Ars Technica is pretty clear. Rather than this being a case of uninformed allies making a mistake and trying to cover it up rather than own it, it seems a lot more likely that they have an actual transphobic employee, who intentionally published an actual transphobic article, and the leadership team cares more about protecting his professional reputation than they do about not spreading hate.

Happy fucking Pride.

#ars technica #transphobia #matt walsh #jon brodkin #pride #happy fucking pride i guess #bad journalism #trans rights are human rights

67 notes · View notes

teyamsatan · 6 months

Note

Ngl, I kinda get the haters. Seeing beautiful girls who are also kind and talented and have a career/job going, is kinda intimidating. I would be a hater, too. :')

I feel like this is going about it the wrong way? I understand the urge because there’s a lot of internalised misogyny that we are brought up with that tells us we have to compete or be jealous of girls we perceive as “threats”, but this is something you can grow out of. I never look at a girl who’s prettier/smarter/wealthier/doing better than me and think “i need to take her down a peg/i need to be jealous/hate on her”. I think “that’s so incredible, that she managed to achieve this/how kind she is/how talented she is, i aspire to be this way, i want to learn to be more like her”. We need to stop thinking of each other as competition, and think of each other as allies, as inspiration.

Men do it. Men drool and jack off over the men they perceive as “better” - elon musk, steve jobs, warren buffet. They have podcasts and instagram pages dedicated to worshipping these men, to emulating them - they dress like them, they talk like them, they invest like them. They don’t feel the need to tear them down, talk about their physical imperfections or flaws, talk about how others do it “better”, or are “more handsome” etc.

They want us to tear each other down. They want us to be enemies, to fight, so they can stay on top. Don’t give into the urge. Be better than that. Be smarter than that. Life is so much better when you stand with women, instead of against them, I promise. x

#☾⋆｡𖦹 °✩ 𝓆 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒶 #⋆˚✿˖° 𝒶𝓃𝒹𝓇𝒶'𝓈 𝒶𝓃𝑜𝓃𝓃𝒾𝑒𝓈

17 notes · View notes

dreamhot · 7 months

Note

i could say something about these people throwing a tandrum over sapnap streaming on kick vs them paying elon musk but we all know it anyway

Anonymous asked: funny how if you look at stans with checkmarks and browse their page many of them are very adamant about hating on sapnaps kick contract how they wont watch and earn kick add money and so on. and then they give musk??? money?

i wasn't gonna say it but um

#smile.ask #anon

12 notes · View notes

tastytofusoup · 9 months

Text

Okay so, my sympathetic guess is @staff are operating on the misconception that Twitter was all fine and good before Elon Musk came along.

'People are looking for a replacement for Twitter, and we want that to be us. Tons of people used Twitter before him, and it seems he's the one messing everything up. So if we copy it, people will see something they used to like, and be happy here instead - and - make our site easier to use for new people, because it'll be the same familiar.'

The problem with this is that it was not great before him.

Their web layout alone is something basically everyone I know and follow, myself included, hated. It's a mobile layout - they don't just work if you port them over to a web page on a widescreen monitor. Everything is too big, or everything is smooshed in the middle of the screen with wasted blank space at the sides, or bits of both. And it tends in general to not be user-friendly on a computer. We recognised that with the current Twitter layout when it rolled out. We didn't like it because of that. There was at least one browser addon that reverted it to the older, nicer, more browser-appropriate layout, which we clung to before it eventually stopped working.

We were then stuck with it. We were stuck with ALL of the decisions we didn't like that the previous management made.

Twitter pre-Elon wasn't a perfect model that everyone liked, that should be copied (SO blatantly and embarassingly) to improve your own site.

Musk took an existing turd and is flushing it down the toilet.

I struggle to believe that nobody working for Tumblr, around the office, in meetings, whatever, didn't see the problems with this redesign before it got pushed forward. Didn't see that we - on mass - would dislike it. That everyone would immediately screenshot it alongside Twitter and show how they're almost the same, and mock the staff for it. I really can't believe there was no-one. I suggest you give anyone who voiced their concerns a pay rise, and listen to them more in future.

11 notes · View notes

booksandwords · 6 months

Text

100 Tales from Australia’s Most Haunted Places by Ben Pobjie

Read time: 4 Days Rating: 5/5 Stars

The quote: For as long as human beings have been dying, they have been turning into ghosts. Or maybe they haven't. That's the great thing about ghosts: nobody knows if they're real, so they are endlessly entertaining, like Bigfoot or Elon Musk. — Introduction

Warnings: We are talking ghosts here and it often takes bad stuff to create a ghost. So some warnings: death, murder, suicide, torture, racism, classism and ableism. Among possibly other things.

Okay, I should probably start with where I stand on ghosts real or not. My stance on ghosts basically comes down to a quote from a book "I'm not sure whether I believe in ghosts, but two centuries worth of suffering has to leave a mark." (Billy, The Little Wartime Library). In Australia's case, it's not two centuries our Anglo-Saxon history doesn't go back that far but the point stands. Essentially I'm not above believing in ghosts because of human suffering.

I'm very glad I read this. Ben Pobjie has a fantastic sense of humour (he is a comedian, so massive shock that), and that sense of humour lands in all the right places to keep the mood where it should be. Some of these tales are truly dark, the humour is necessary to lighten to mood. Though I did find myself wondering what was with the (joking) hate on Tassie, and to a lesser degree South Australia. Don't get me wrong I laughed but I found myself curious. I found this to be quite informative in its own way. I have an interest in anthropology and this scratches that itch. It tells stories of everyday people and even ghosts are a part of that field. Some warnings for content death and murder are possibly to be expected in a book about ghosts, it takes death to create a ghost and suicide and torture are others that may be unsurprising. Other warnings that might be less obvious include racism (because you know Australia), classism (because British Empire) and ableism (because 19th century everything). Ben Pobjie is not an author I'd read before, though I do want to read more.

I appreciate the introduction it sets the tone and engages the reader. Pobjie gives his potential reasons for the belief in ghosts. They're pretty on point. The first entry is important, it is the one that grabs the reader and sets the tone. Nurse Kerry, about Aradale Lunatic Asylum, is the right choice. She is perfectly distressing. Not that her patients are sunshine and rainbows. The Bushranger Hotel feels like an odd choice to end on. But it does reference something Australia is known for, Bushrangers (in specific Ben Hall and Jack Dunn) and leaves the reader with a friendly and helpful ghost in the Quirks. The two of them are the right kind of entries to bookend the book. They balance well asylums and pubs are both common in the book, even more so when you look at them as a place of incarceration vs a place of rest and relaxation. I did find it to be quite well organised. The places that had multiple entries were spread out, the types of ghosts are varied and not repetitive in their order. Each chapter is two or three pages long with a relevant title, either the ghosts name, the location or a joke, under that is the geographic location by town and state. If the location isn't in the title it is usually in one of the first two paragraphs. It all just works so well.

Some quotes and comments. It's not for all of them but there are quite a few.

• Frederick Carr was hanged in 1929 at Adelaide Gaol. He's an oddly jovial ghost despite the injustices against him. He was hanged for the murder of his wife Maud. He's presentation has changed over time. Going from faceless to having a face and no one knows why. I just like that he's not angry.

• There is an intriguing dichotomy to the young ladies of Young & Jackson's the nameless ghost and Chloé. One is highly celebrated and prized while the other is nameless, lost and alone.

• The former denizens of the old convict settlement close in around you, insistent and suffocating, as soon as you arrive. If you can't hear them, you can feel them: the souls of thousands of the tortured, the abused and the murdered. The very air is weighted and perfumed with the pain and anger and sadness of a place built specifically to inflict those things. — I love this quote okay it's just so visceral. I like the way Port Arthur is managed. There are only a couple of brief examples. It feels like a yeah of course there are bloody ghosts here. It was a place of death and misery. (p.11, Ghosts of Port Arthur). Much the same thing is done with The North Head Quarantine Station, though there the story of the Gravedigger's cottage.

• There is something highly amusing about Pobjie not rant exactly but a paragraph that could have gone there about darkrooms being extremely spooky. I had never thought of it.

• Late one night, early in his residence, Bishop Trower awoke to find his bedroom awash with an unearthly light. The illumination emanated from a man who had, rather impolitely, entered his bedchamber without so much as a by-your-leave. — In the same chapter but a different point. There is something highly amusing about a pearl, The Rosinate Pearl, having vaguely homicidal tendencies. That (perhaps fictional) pearl has quite a high body count. (p.17, The Pearl Buyer of Broome)

• The Liftman is written in an interesting way. It's the only one written from a dual perspective and I like it.

• Under the laws of the time, suicide, or felo-de-se ('felon of himself' in Latin) was a crime equivalent to murder, — I knew this law existed but I never knew the Latin for it. What I found more interesting was that being found guilty of felo-de-se allowed the state to seize your assets. Francis Grote also has a pretty good ghost. (p.26, The Huntsman of Rostrevor)

• Catherine Spense broke my heart but she is exactly the kind of woman you aspire for your daughters to be.

• And to this day, every November, Campbelltown celebrates the Fisher's Ghost Festival, an event which brings together the whole town to celebrate community and ghosts. — This celebration is kinda weird to me, and I'm guessing a lot of others. Fisher has only had one appearance, unfinished business and all that. He's a bit different among this collection. (p.35, Fisher's Ghost)

• It could be that the sandhills themselves are simply replaying their own memory of the nightmare that descended upon them that chilly autumn night. — The feel of the unknown in the sandhills. It's different, and I like the imagery. (p.38, The Murdering Sandhills)

• I adore Albert Ogilvie so much as a ghost. He was a legend as a man too.

• Even in the olden days, when hanging people was more a fun family day out than a law-enforcement technique, slipping the noose around a female neck was something not done lightly. — This is about Martha Rendell and my response was essentially Jesus Christ you what? (p.43, The Stepmother from Hell)

• Marybank's protective ghosts are great. Allowing themselves to be heard but not seen by the occupants of the house, the descendants of the first family, the Fox's. But more than willing to reveal themselves to guests. It's a bit of a quirk among the entries.

• the Miracle House of Guildford in Western Sydney is fascinating. If you believe the story (and this one I am sceptical of) Mike Tannerous fulfilled his life goal to help people. I had to laugh when I read this entry though. Just days ago my mother and I were talking about canonisation in the Catholic church.

• The fact that Old Tailem Town was constructed Frankenstein-style, from historic buildings from elsewhere, means that it occupies a unique place among ghostly locations. Rather than being haunted by those who died on the spot, spirits have been trucked in from myriad other spots to rub shoulders on the pioneer village. — They are some pretty unique ghosts though. I do like the idea of a Frankenstein-style construction of a town. (p.75-6, Terror of Tailem Town)

• I am absolutely unsurprised that the Old Melbourne Goal is in here. The ghost of choice is Cell 17, a notorious and extremely physical ghost. I do quite appreciate Ned Kelly's silence on spectral matters.

• Quinn's Light is fascinating. But questions... I have questions.

• Indeed, as there are plenty of other spirits haunting the North Kapunda Hotel — hence its 'most haunted' appellation — the Man in Black likes to keep busy menacing them as well. It's a rare and particularly obnoxious ghost who devotes his time to spooking other spooks, but that's the Man in Black all over: a total jerk. — The North Kapunda Hotel is the place with the most entries. Dr Blood (no seriously his real name), The Man in Black, Sarah and Emily and her sister. They are all different and I like that are all here. The Man in Black is a total jerk and I kinda like it. (p.102, The Man in Black)

• But seriously: if you want to know how terrifying an old maternity hospital can be, just think about babies. Lots of babies. Crying. Screaming, sobbing, wailing. In the night. — Nope, nope, nope. How about nope. (p.104, The Evil Matron)

• I'd heard of George Grover, convict and all-round toss pot. But I didn't know he went ghost.

• Adelaide Arcade has more than a few ghosts, but us was the family case that got me.

• I'm honestly not surprised Mad Dan Morgan has a ghost and a nasty one at that. And that is two headless horsemen in Australia. What does surprise me is the lack of bushrangers with ghosts in general. It kinda gives a beaten by the better men or death wish to their life choices/ actions.

• George Ferguson Bowen had a well travelled and illustrious career. That his ghost settled in Brisbane makes me wonder... why?

• I appreciate the inclusion of the modern ghosts in The Road to Capalaba. I wish we knew their story. But in a way not having it is even better. Because they could be everyone.

• There are three chapters on The spooks of Monte Christo, with Monte Christo being a Homestead in Junee, New South Wales. They are all very different ghosts. The maid that found herself in a delicate condition was completely unsurprising fukn men in power. But it is Harold, Harold that broke me. Instead, going by the most cutting-edge medical and psychological advice available at the time, they decided to help Harold to live a rich and fulfilling life by chaining him to a wall. (p.140, ) Hahaha... NO. He was chained to a wall for 40 years. 🤬 No wonder he became a ghost. It was horrifying. The only shock is that he's a friendly ghost. As in he just was to make friends 😢.

• Melbourne's Princess Theatre opened in December 1886 and has been haunted since March 1888. That's impressive. I didn't know about the vacant seat tradition. Though it is hardly the only theatre with that kind of tradition.

• How have I never heard Elizabeth Scott's story before now (Poor Elizabeth Scott)? Hanged at the Old Melbourne Goal in 1863 for conspiring to kill her husband. She was married off to her husband at 13 (a little young even for the time) and of course, he was an abusive pos. The shotgun blast to his head fixed that malady (good). And because I can't resist.

• But there's something sweet and hopeful about the sight of Blanche and Dave wandering St Mark's together, because that's exactly what they are: together. Being a ghost seems like a lonely lifestyle, and all the moreso for a child. If these two youngsters, talked by tragedy and separated by six decades, have in afterlife found each other, their friendship might b cause for uplift in that grim and sombre place. —(p.178, The Cemetery Children)

• Sometimes the presentation of the ghost feels like true indication of the rest of their story. Like the milliner mourning her own death in the fashions of the day and in the art (trade if you must) that was her life.

• All countries have ghost stories, but only one turned a ghost story into its most popular patriotic song. Of course, 'Waltzing Matilda' isn't just a ghost story: it's also a cheerful tale of suicide and depending on your point of view an account of either justice or injustice done. —I really like all the falsehoods in the song but that original story should not be forgotten. (p188, And His Ghost My Be Heard...)

• I'm pleased there are ghost animals in here. Animals may be more disconcerting than humans.

• The hangings at the Old Windmill (Brisbane) in July 1841 were horrifying. If you want to hang someone hang them, not whatever that was.

• The current proprietors of the Albany Convict Gaol have, in the interests of giving their customers value for money in the frights department, adorned the rooms of the old building with a variety of dummies of frankly nightmarish aspect. They set them in chairs to stare at you so that when you turn to go into a room, you jump out of your skin and let out an embarrassingly high-pitched nose because there's some kind of deformed evil gypsy watching you with one bulging eye. —The book actually contains an image of one of the mannequins and they scare me more than any ghost in that place could I think. (p.242, The Black Hole) There are baby cries... baby cries in a convict gaol? I think not thank you. It's just so very wrong. The title The Black Hole is a sensory deprivation cell. Again no thank you. And I'm pretty sure they are still used.

• Oh man, the ghosts in Steiglitz outnumber the people... by quite a way.

• I did not know that Australia even had a monastic town, let alone that it had its own guardian ghost. New Norcia in W.A. was settled by Spanish Benedictine Monks in 1847. The ghost, known as The Blue Nun, is that of Sister Maria Harispe.

• The best known and most seen of Gaiety's cast of spirits is Ava, the theatre's proud addition to the pantheon of little-girl ghosts. — Honestly Ava sounds kinda adorable. She just kinda ignores people and goes about her business. (p.261, Ghosts of the Gaiety) There really in a pantheon little-girl ghosts. I'm just going to put a couple of them here. The little girl at Larundel Asylum is so heartbreaking, her music box would be disturbing though. The young girls at Spook Cemetery are horrifying. As much as more of these places would be great to visit not his one. You need nice hands. The last little-girl ghost we meet is at the Coach & Horses, she just wants friends, appearing mostly to children.

• Determinig whether the Royal Derwent Hospital, popularly known as Willow Court is haunted is a relatively simple process. Just ask the question, 'Is Willow Court Australia's oldest mental health facility?' If the answer is 'yes,' then OF COURSE, IT'S HAUNTED, YOU IDIOT. I mean, surely we know by know: if it's old and it once housed the mentally ill, there will be ghosts fizzing about inside it. — There is so much going on at this place nearly all of it bad. 'Asylum's abortion chair' is just three words that do not belong together here, unsurprisingly that chair has its own ghost. (p.263, Winston of Ward 5)

• It's interesting The Poinciana Woman echoes a few female folk tales globally. A huge injustice was committed against her I'm glad that the tale exists. Like so many of her sister tales she has become both a caregiver and an angel of vengeance.

• And they stare at you with their lifeless eyes, as if you say, 'As soon as you turn your back is turned, we are going to jump you and sink our mannequin fangs into your tender flesh like those statues from Doctor Who.' — I really did not expect a Faraway Tree. Yeah, they are pretty damn odd. Oh and we get this Doctor Who reference in the same entry as a treat. What other Doctor Who monster are we going to reference other than Weeping Angels. (p. 93, The Grouch Major)

#100 tales from australia's most haunted places #ghosts #read australian #ben pobjie #book review #ktreviews #read 2022 #booklr #haunting #non fiction #tw death #tw murder #tw suicide #tw torture #tw racism #tw classism #tw ablism

3 notes · View notes

sobbingdistantnoises · 10 months

Note

I am a little confused about the ask game buttttt

i just found this and i can’t stop laughing

also do you have any weird stories you’d like to tell?

HELPPHDJSJAKKA, THAT'S AMAZING, hdjsjaj. Don't you just hate when your subconuous mind makes you build shelves? </3

BUT WEIRD STORIES, hm.

OKAY I THOUGHT OF SOMETHING. Basically, context: I've had the same history teacher and class for two years, and said teacher has taught at the school for since it was built. Therefore he was there for its whole history

What's also to note is that my course was a 2 year course with both freshmen and sophomores, and we had about 60 kids in the classroom. Therefore we needed a BIG classroom. The school didn't initially have classrooms big enough, so what they ended up doing was knocking a wall down between two small classrooms to form a big history classroom. However, because there used to be a wall in the middle of the classroom, there still needed to be a pole for integral structural support or whatever. Thus, my classroom had a 1x1 foot pole towards the front of it

Now (time), the teachers have put stuff on it, like Caravaggio paintings, some student's drawing of a theoretical mid evil (<- can't figure out how to spell it) kingdom ensignia (<- I should really use words I can spell) for my teacher, and Raphael's School of Athens. However, what my teacher told us last year is that that wasn't ALWAYS the case. Because several years back, some girl put a picture of some celebrity on it, then someone else did the same, etc etc. Basically, for a few years, it became known as the pole of hotness

However, for some reason, the hot people went away, and no one has added anything else to it.....UNTIL NOW.

You see, this year, I liked and became friends with the 3 people that sat at my table. So we hatched a PLAN ("plan") somewhere in the middle of the year to go and put someone on the pole of hotness "one day". However, then exams happened and we cried and forgot to do this until the second to last Thursday of school. Then forgot to do it until Friday morning, which was the last day of the normal school schedule and our last chance to pull it off

We all basically frantically tried to think of hot people that would be more or less universally known. Through a combination of none of us knowing universally known hot people or not wanting to confess to finding someone attractive, we settled on. Wait for it. Dante Alighieri's hat.

This is Dante ^ He was a mid evil Italian who wrote a long poem about going to hell with his friend Virgil (dead Roman poet) who he may or may not have either fatherzoned or had a celebrity crush on. Not sure if I'm honest. But either way, I don't recall his hat ever being important

STILL I managed to get a fixation on this hat. Let's go through a list of what I have done

Wrote "Dante Alighieri's dumb hat" in response to the question of the day, "what is your pet peeve". My friend drew him underneath, and my teacher pointed it out to the whole class and called it "the most humanities student thing ever" the next day

Wrote 6 pages of crossover crack fanfiction between Dante, his hat (which I named Lauren after the fact that laurel leaves exist and John Laurens (I didn't watch Hamilton by this point but I think I read a few fanfics)), and Paul Revere based on the idea that Lauren could talk for an assignment

(Not hat specific but) wrote about wanting to time travel to the moment Dante finished writing the Divine Comedy in order to appear as a divine being and scare him on my FINAL EXAM ESSAY (the whole essay was slightly unhinged in general but shh)

Added Dante's hat to a slideshow my friend's friends made called "chest hair history" in which they put a lot of shirtless people and shared with the history teachers at the end of the year (MY FULL NAME IS ALSO ON THIS THING. ON THE FIRST SLIDE) (unrelated but this whole slideshow is so dumb, there's Elon Musk, Michelangelo's David, Bruce Dickinson (I LATER FOUND OUT MY TEACHER IS AN IRON MAIDEN FAN, dying), Steven Adler, and one of Genghis Khan's grandchildren, among others)

And now we have come to the point at which a fifth point will be added. But first, my friends and I frantically panicked as we realized that I was afraid to ask my art teacher (who is actually so nice, 10/10 teacher, I just fear things) to use the printer but was the only one with a period where I could effectively do whatever since it was the last days of school

So instead, I spent 40 minutes drawing, and then it was time to go to history, equipped with a colored pencil'd notebook paper drawing of his hat

Putting it on the pole was simultaneously both simpler and more difficult that we assumed (we had no plan). My teacher talked at the start of class, we realized we had no tape, we schemed (panicked) and didn't know what to do. My teacher finished went away to his farther away desk. We decided to go steal some tape from the teacher's table that was ~two meters away from us. (ALSO NOTE. WE WERE NOT SLY. WE SAT AT THE FRONT OF THE ROOM, AND DANTE'S HAT IS BRIGHT RED.)

Tape acquired, we all looked at each other in our seats not knowing when to get up nor who will get up to put the paper on the wall. So impulsively, I took the paper, walked a few meters over to an emptier side of the pole, STUCK IT ON THERE, speedwalked back to my seat. And then the paper fell and I had to tape it again not a full 15 seconds later whilst the teacher had actually TURNED SO THAT I THINK I WAS IN VIEW while I did the deed, hfjsjaka. (And there was also a group of guys sitting right in front of the pole who looked at the new addition so ???ly, FJSJAJA)

And that is. the story of how I indirectly called some old dead guy's hat hot and subtly announced this to my history classroom for hopefully years to come (we shall see whether it's still up next year). I will also now pray that no one irl finds this post (I think at least one of the three friends has tumblr so. Fear.)

#asks #kk #dante alighieri

6 notes · View notes

hylianengineer · 4 months

Text

So, my parents have the Elon Musk satellite internet. It's not their fault, they live in a rural area where very few options are available and this is the most functional one. However, this internet comes with its own streaming service. It's called Simply The Best TV and it is the WORST streaming service I have ever seen.

Things it has done when I attempt to watch movies:

Mysterious lack of audio

Everything is frozen

All audio is now in French

Oops, we can't load that page, but instead of giving you an error message or saying why we're just gonna pretend nothing happened

Other stupid things about it:

Search terms must be exact - if you type MASH instead of M*A*S*H you will get nothing.

Adding things to your favorites list only works like 10% of the time.

Movies and TV shows are in separate parts of the site.

Worst organization system ever invented (by tv channel instead of genre)

Complete and utter lack of captions

Absolutely everything about the UI

The fucking ironic name that makes me want to punch something

It has one upside and that is that it has more variety that, say, Netflix. You will find things here you never thought to look for. Some of them will be good and some of them will be horrible (looking at you DaVinci's Demons).

Other than that, it's a disaster and I hate it. I go to watch something and half the time I can't because of one of the aforementioned bugs. Tonight it was French. I did not ask for French. It is not a French show. There is not an option to play this show in multiple languages. It's just in French. Only the audio, mind you, not the text on the intro screens or the description or anything else. This is my third attempt to watch the pilot episode of Ted Lasso because the time before this it wouldn't load and the time before that it froze and refused to un-freeze.

I'm so frustrated.

#no one is surprised that something else made by elon musk is a disaster but i'm not used to having to actually deal with them up close #this thing is comically nonfunctional #hylian rambles

2 notes · View notes

caliboron · 1 year

Text

man twitter sucks so bad. majority of people who use it don’t even realize how bad they have it. tumblr is just so fundamentally better, and I mean this genuinely. way longer character limit in posts, WAY easier to navigate and neatly organized tagging system, the ability to CUSTOMIZE YOUR PROFILE beyond just pfp and banner, hell you can have a full on decked out customized blog theme and MUSIC playing on your page if you really want to. Just so much more fuckin life and freedom here. the fact that celebrities and the goddamn PRESIDENT aren’t here, which okay, it has always felt so bizarre to me that the president of the US can just HAVE a Twitter and interact with folks, it just confuses me, idk. but we can EDIT POSTS WITHOUT PAYING MONEY… what the hell??? and if you post too many times in a row on Twitter you get fuckin *suspended*?? it’s so much easier to find content on here and yet so many cool people I admire are on Twitter so I have to use it if I wanna see what they’re creating and show them fan creations I’ve done aaaaa I hate it. hell world hell world. Elon Musk you have a fuckin shitty social media site and it runs like crap, also your cars suck ass and you’re a huge ass head shit face. It’s funny your spaceship exploded or whatever boom boom psshhhooo just like your reputation. hell and suffering on planet earth for eternity

7 notes · View notes

splathousefiction · 7 months

Text

At the time, no

BSky lacks too many extremely basic security elements for me to recommend it in good faith

Edit: Because I answered this on mobile and wanted to get to a solid keyboard

Things BSky Lacks At The Moment:

You can't upload GIFs or video of any length.

No Two-factor authentication

There's a single recovery mail option, but no SMS/Alternative mail recovery option. SMS isn't secure, but the fact even /that/ isn't there really bothers me as an IT person.

These severely impact my ability to both be a sex worker and feel safe using the service. I should stress that Bsky is literally in it's infancy and was very obviously cobbled together when elon started his rampage of gutting twitter as a service (BTW, if there was any doubts he bought it for transphobic reasons, let me clear that up for you). The service is less than a year old, but the fact it's lacking even extremely basic, totally normal safety features is pretty absurd.

My next critique comes in the form of BSky's invite system-it's literally to keep the service from crashing due to a mass migration from Twitter, and that's the only reason. As I'm typing this I have both services open in my browser, and they look identical. Millions of users would likely leave Twitter in an instant if the service was open, which would cause outtages that lasted gods know how long. Gatekeeping as a means of keeping the service up is absolutely a choice-but it also means that there straight up is nobody there that you really know.

I've never been massively popular and think follow counts are stupid; but I've only been able to find like, 2-4 people I know, who also aren't posting on the service ATM simply because there's nothing really to react to.

Bsky also isn't doing a whole lot about hate groups. Hategroups appearing on every platform is an inevitability because many americans still don't wash their ass or know the caress of the sun, but Bsky's method of dealing with this is a mass-hiding option under the user control panel-an option that will "seed out" hate speech based on an algorithm. Which, if you know anything about hate groups and how they communicate, is fucking lazy as hell when active moderation towards such people would send both a positive message about the platform's stance and make people feel safe.

With all of this stated, here's some things I actually like about BSky:

*The Devs are very open about the fact they're actively working on improving the service, and are more or less transparent about what they're currently working on. This is leagues better than anything we had on Twitter even before Musk took over.

*It's a great way to "start anew" on a twitter-like service. I'm currently using mine as a way of hopefully building attention towards my Fansly page, and gaining funding to shoot more porn.

*People in power aren't protected. What I mean by that is you can scream at billionaires again and they absolutely will see it. The service is currently tending left politically, with many users falling under the LGBT spectrum. It's nice and notably different than Twitter.

All of this can change in an instance for any reason whatsoever. For the mean time, if you get a code there's no harm in making an account; but be aware the service is very much a rickety schaffold of what it should be.

5 notes · View notes

coochiequeens · 1 year

Text

Elon and Jordan Peterson are both dicks but no one should be banned for stating someone’s birth name.

If you’re still clinging to the floundering ship that is Twitter, you may have noticed that reporting tweets for harassing and abusing transgender people seems to have an even lower success rate than usual. Many LGBTQ+ users tied this phenomenon to Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform in October 2022, and subsequent reports from internal sources that Musk wanted to roll back protections for trans users.

But we now have official confirmation that the dying bird app is indeed scaling back enforcement of its past policies against anti-trans conduct.

On Monday, Twitter announced new changes to their policies regarding disinformation and hateful conduct. Although the social network previously removed posts that were found to contain hate speech, this will no longer be the case for most tweets, as the company laid out in a Twitter Safety blog post; instead, such posts will be hidden behind a warning message. “Starting soon, we will add publicly visible labels to Tweets identified as potentially violating our policies letting you know we’ve limited their visibility,” the statement reads.

But that Twitter Safety statement left out another major change to Twitter’s hateful conduct policy. As of Monday’s policy update, the site has now also removed its ban on “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals,” originally implemented in 2018, from the category of “slurs and tropes.” Twitter’s content policy now stands in stark contrast to other major social media platforms like TikTok, which banned deadnaming and misgendering last year.

According to a November 2022 Bloomberg reportthat cited sources inside the company, Musk pushed for a review of policies regulating anti-trans harassment mere days after purchasing the company. Musk appears to have his own weird grudge against trans people, escalating from a simple message of “pronouns suck” in 2020 to suggesting that doctors who treat trans kids should be imprisoned for life just last week.

The bird app owner is now openly spreading transphobic propaganda on his crumbling platform.

That grudge has turned into a bludgeon for trans folks online since Musk’s Twitter acquisition; Jordan Peterson, who was banned from posting on Twitter after deadnaming and misgendering Elliot Page in a bizarre rant, was one of the first people Musk reinstated after taking over the company. The new policy changes are, in effect, a gift from Musk to Peterson’s ilk, allowing them to misgender, deadname, and otherwise verbally abuse trans people to their withered hearts’ content — something which right-wing ideologues like Matt Walsh have been explicitly excited about since Musk’s takeover began.

“Twitter’s decision to covertly roll back its longtime policy is the latest example of just how unsafe the company is for users and advertisers alike,” said GLAAD CEO and president Sarah Kate Ellis in a statement to ABC, emphasizing that “anti-transgender rhetoric online is leading to real world discrimination and violence.”

Of course, for Musk and his weird obsession with trans people, that may also be more of a feature than a bug. After all, this is a guy whose whole deal is failing upwards; why should he stop making bad decisions that bring misery to others now?

#Twitter #elon musk #pronouns suck #It’s not deadnaming it’s calling someone their birth name #The TQ+ could just make their own platform if they hate Twitter so much

6 notes · View notes

getawayp4dru · 10 months

Text

I can't stand Elon Musk anymore, the guy has money and wants us to page verified and now we have a limit to see tweets????? I HATE this guy, this guy is damn

1 note · View note

controlledchaosetc · 1 year

Text

So I had to write a final essay for my Intro to Media Studies class about "speculative media", where I look at a specific piece of media or medium and try to predict where its going in 1 to 10 years.

I unironically wrote 7 pages and almost 2000 words about the possible rebirth of Tumblr. Enjoy

Social media, as people know it in 2022, is an upheaval. Technology stocks plummeted with an economic downturn marked by the aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic. This wave of instability resulted in significant changes and news stories in the social media sphere. Although Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has mainly been in the news due to their foray into the “metaverse,” one platform has dominated recent headlines like no other: Twitter. Twitter, one of the largest text-based social media websites, is no longer a publicly traded company after Elon Musk bought the platform for an unprecedented 44 billion dollars. However, this is not an essay on Twitter, at least not primarily. After Musk’s takeover, Twitter saw a 21% increase in downloads; In this same period, there was a 96% U.S. increase in downloads for a surprising site: Tumblr (Delouya). While there was an even more significant increase for Mastodon, a newer platformer derivative of Twitter, Tumblr was unexpected as a platform many labeled as dead. As a new user of Tumblr myself, it made me consider how Tumblr rivals other social media websites. Compared to the decline of Twitter, Tumblr offers a haven to Twitter refugees and new users alike, with features that improve open those on other platforms, those that few other social media websites have, and an attitude towards consumers and its experience reminiscent of an older internet and unlike like any seen on the modern web. With all these factors in mind, Twitter will see a slow decline, and Tumblr will see a rebirth as an alternative social media platform within the decade.

To begin analyzing the rebirth of Tumblr, its catalyst must be discussed first. Tumblr might have languished in its current state if it wasn’t for Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, as discussed in the introduction. The effects of Musk’s Twitter are vast, varied, and many of them negative. The one most relevant for a Twitter exodus is the rise of hate speech and far-right ideology on the platform. According to the New York Times, “Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Mr. Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day” (Conger and Frenkel). Antisemitic posts “soared more than 61%”, and more alarmingly, slurs against African Americans rose over 300% (Conger and Frenkel). Unfortunately, this is not surprising. Over half of Twitter’s workforce have either been fired or quit, including many members of the content moderation and safety team and Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of trust and safety. Far-right figures like Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neonazi website The Daily Stormer, have been unbanned. Musk himself has pushed far-right conspiracy theories and ideology, such as the conspiracy that the man who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband was his gay prostitute, and indirectly accusing Yoel Roth, a gay man and again, a former senior member of Twitter, of supporting the sexualization of children, a common anti-LGBTQ+ dog whistle. There is story after story after story that Twitter is becoming increasingly hostile to members of minority groups. This is incredibly disheartening who already face disproportionate online harassment. As Yeal Eisenstat, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League, stated, “‘[Musk’s] actions to date show that he is not committed to a transparent process where he incorporates the best practices we have learned from civil society groups. Instead, he has emboldened racists, homophobes, and antisemites’” (Conger and Frenkel). As such, it is no surprise that people who face this harassment and allies are beginning to leave the platform or at least explore other options. However, why Tumblr? Let’s analyze Tumblr’s history, a minority space on Twitter, and how Tumblr can replicate a similar space.

Tumblr’s space is largely supportive and inclusive, as represented by its history. Tumblr’s users have historically largely been queer teenage women and nonbinary people. These marginalized demographics coopted Tumblr as a safe space to speak about their interests and to people similar to them. However, these communities were predominantly white, so while ethnic minority communities do exist on Tumblr, they are the best example of a minority group to grow further by people moving from Twitter. In “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as Cultural Conversation,” André Brock analyzes the concept of Black Twitter, the elements of Twitter that enable this cultural space, and why the space came to be. The primary element that enables cultural communication is a signifyin’ hashtag. A hashtag with cultural significance, both in content and in semantics, can help signify the tweet's intended audience and introduce group discussion and discourse for other people to join (530). Tumblr does not have hashtags, but they have an equivalent feature called “tags.” As the name would imply, tags allow posts to be found in searches and recommended if a user follows a particular tag. However, they have an additional feature adopted by the general Tumblr community. While they were initially created to be like hashtags, users also utilize the tags to add comments to the original post that are more conversational toward their followers and thoughts that the user does not deem necessary to be added to a broader sphere. Tags add an additional level of intimacy to posts by creating a separation of public statements in the post and statements that, while still public, are seen as personal additions and more private as they are harder to find if the post is reblogged (Tumblr’s equivalent to retweeting). This inherently can create a tighter community, both between a user and their mutuals and a user and their general sphere. Tumblr is already known to have close-knit communities, primarily those of “fandoms” of a particular piece of media. However, this has expanded to cultural communities, such as Black Tumblr. This allows Black Twitter users, off-put by the negative direction of Twitter, to smoothly move to a platform that allows a similar exchange to what they are used to.

Additionally, Tumblr’s features allow a greater range of posts, better functionality, and an arguably better user experience. How a user interacts with a website is predominantly determined by its procedural rhetoric. In Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric, Ian Bogost explores how programmed rules and outlined constraints in video games can form their own rhetoric to persuade the player (3). While the book focuses only on video games, anything with procedures, like social media websites, can have procedural rhetoric. Returning to the functionality of tags, this is a clear example of procedural rhetoric. Tags have already been discussed as an elaboration on hashtags. By being limited to one word and emphasizing use in the trending tab and search optimization, hashtags are highlighted to users as a categorizing tool with limited expression. However, for tags, users could type full-spaced sentences without impacting the character count of the post, and Tumblr has a complete de-emphasis on trending topics. These factors influenced more user creativity to express their thoughts of categorization, resulting in custom self-sorting tags and a subsection of the post itself for thoughts. A more open, user-expressive rhetoric continues throughout the website’s design. Reblogs, while compared to retweets earlier, have entirely different rhetoric. While allowing users to respond to a tweet on their account in a separate tweet, retweets display the response first, only allow users to see two tweets in what may be a longer retweet chain, and attribute engagement to the response and not the original tweet. This results in rhetoric that not only encourages limited communication through retweets but instead encourages pointing at the previous tweet with a comment of their own, most often a negative, jeering response. On the other hand, reblogs are additive, with the original post at the top and all reblogged responses sorted chronologically under it, and interactions are additive to the overall post, not individual. This rhetoric encourages a fuller, more conversational attitude when posting on Tumblr that is often more positive and more civil. The ability for users to post images, hyperlinks, and even different-sized and colored text with unlimited length additionally enforces this rhetoric. By giving users the tools to be more creative and organized, Tumblr encourages users to be fuller with their thoughts and allows more nuanced conversation. Finally, users’ homepages are blogs reminiscent of 90s-era websites, which users customize with provided options or code from the ground up. This is yet another example of Tumblr’s rhetoric allowing extended user freedom that few sites offer. However, the early internet influences run deeper than Tumblr’s rhetoric and blogs. A further examination of Tumblr’s history and corporate mentality to fully understand these aspects.

Considering Tumblr’s corporate history adds a layer of complexity to these recent events with Twitter. Tumblr was founded in 2007 on anti-consumerism and a mission to avoid ads. Six years later, it was bought by Yahoo in 2013 for 1.1 billion dollars. Another six years passed, and multiple acquisitions later, Tumblr was finally sold again for 3 million dollars in 2019. Failed overvalued profit goals, adult content bans to appeal to advertisers, and a lack of technical support for the platform itself marked this decline. Tumblr was not profitable to its new corporate owners, and that doomed the platform. It’s interesting how a similar series of events are occurring on Twitter almost a decade later. In a sense, Tumblr has already gone through the collapse Twitter and other social media companies are currently experiencing. As Balbi and Magaudda write, “digital media history cannot be uncoupled from an understanding of the way these new media emerge, grow and evolve in conjunction with specific economic and political power dynamics in a globalized economy” (31). Both platforms were founded on tenets of connection and anti-consumerism. Both platforms eventually needed to change their ways to appeal to the market. Finally, both platforms were forced onto a downward trajectory in the efforts to grow as the market demands and generate the desired profits. Tumblr has already hit bottom.

In this stalled state, Tumblr remains as an internet relic. However, this is what fundamentally sets Tumblr apart from modern internet platforms: it’s not a modern internet platform. Tumblr is of an earlier time when metrics and engagement weren’t prioritized, and algorithms were optional and less intrusive. Additionally, this lack of expectation in the market allows relative freedom from the demands it faced previously. Posts are sorted chronologically from when it was posted or reblogged. Recommendations for content the user might enjoy is optional, unlike on Twitter and many other platforms. Posts from multiple years ago resurface as the users of Tumblr decide what is popular and should be seen again, not the algorithm. In the modern social media landscape mired by platforms seeking to addict their users, capitalize on engagement, and incentivize profit above consumers, Tumblr is a breath of fresh air.

To quote Thomas Ridgewall on the decline of Twitter, “Death is a rare mercy.” Despite Musk’s claims, with the amount of debt Twitter has, profits will be impossible. If Tumblr’s history is any indication, Twitter will slowly diminish in the coming years, marked by unpopular changes, multiple devaluations, and sales to other companies at lower costs. A general sentiment of longing for the older internet will continue to grow in the general online public. Tumblr will continue regrowth, and other companies inspired by its formula may grow alongside it. Tumblr may not change much, but this possibly marks a shift in the larger social media space towards smaller, more manageable, and more accessible platforms. However, this rebirth is not without its concerns. If its popularity and user base continue to increase, Tumblr may find itself in the same capitalist predicament it found itself in almost a decade ago.

#i got an A lmao #this literally came from an inclass discussion where I brought up tumblr #and how ive actually really enjoyed using it #and she was like “oh i'd love to read that as a final essay!”#i didnt have any other topic sooooo #here we are

3 notes · View notes

posttexasstressdisorder · 1 year

Text

Today’s Lefsetz Letter

Lefsetz Letter

Archives

Subscribe to the Lefsetz Letter

The Post-Political Era

You can go back to your normally scheduled programming.

Our six year national nightmare might not be completely over, but you can safely quit your addiction to the news, you can rejuggle your priorities, you can go back to regular life.

Donald Trump will never be president again. Oh, he could possibly win the nomination, although I doubt it, but he could never win. You see America saw the movie and didn’t like it, didn’t like much of what Trump touched. And the slow drip of truth being revealed is leaving a stink on a man who might be indicted and even go to jail.

As for last week’s shenanigans in the House…

The headlines were enough. Insanity on parade. Nitwits. These are the people we have to be afraid of? Sure, they can get elected in their right wing red gerrymandered districts, but the rest of America wants nothing to do with them. Sure, nothing will get accomplished for two years, and they’ll investigate Hunter Biden and his laptop, but this isn’t going to rivet the public, they just can’t see how Trump’s kids and his son-in-law can skate completely, having all been involved in their father’s business, never mind administration, and Hunter’s activities were supervised by his father and therefore a penalty should be paid. As for trading on the fame and power of their father, can you say Ivanka and her clothing line?

Case closed. Oh, not for the Trumpers. It’s just that that constituency is nowhere near the majority, its power has been neutered. D.C. might be a source of headlines for the next two years, but you don’t have to focus on the stories, go in-depth beyond the headlines. Actually, you can laugh, because happy days are here again!

Not really. There’s a looming recession, and the economists can’t agree whether it’s coming or not. And rampant income inequality. And homelessness. But…

You can have a life. You don’t have to worry about politics coming up and dividing friends and family. It’s on the back burner. Democracy has been saved, at least for now. And it’s a great relief. (And if you live in an oppressive red state I can only give you Sam Kinison’s advice to the starving in Africa…MOVE!)

What does this mean?

Plenty.

Culture becomes king once again. And what will that culture be?

We’ve done mindless for nearly two decades, but now we’re older and wiser. It’s not like we learned nothing in the past six years. We learned if we’re somnambulant, not paying attention, rust never sleeps and our entire society can be corroded. Thinking people got a boost. The put-down of intellectualism did not triumph. As for Elon Musk and Twitter… It’s now even left the news, all we’ve got is the shell of a social media network and a declining Tesla. Not only did Musk bring down his car company, he put a dent in the image of techies everywhere. It’s kind of like lawyers after Watergate, they still have not recovered their status in society, they’re not hated as much as the cable company, but most people have no faith in lawyers, they look down upon them. Same deal hereafter with tech. Just because you’re rich and successful in one vertical…that does not mean you know anything about anything else.

However, the last six years have taught us that we all live in our own niche, our own vertical, and this will not change. Politics brought us together, it was the one thing we could all talk about. Now…

Be into your band, your streaming TV show, just don’t assume everybody’s heard it or seen it. Sure, there will be national news items now and again, like school shootings, but we’ve already seen them fall off the front page quickly. Everything top-line lasts shorter than ever before. If you want to appeal to everybody, you’re going to find that you don’t last. And if you’re appealing to the top, to the media, oftentimes your core abandons you, if there was a core at all to begin with.

What we’ve learned from TikTok is humanity sells. And everybody is playing. And if you want to win…

Check out the comedians. There’s a plethora on TikTok. They all can’t earn a living. Multiply by a zillion when it comes to music. The competition is stiffer than ever before. And if you’re not great, the surfer skips and the algorithm never shows your face again. Funny how we’ve heard about the power of the algorithm forever, but it’s really only triumphed now, with TikTok, the computer is in control of what we see, and ultimately our culture.

The movie business is dying. Theatre chains are going bankrupt. You see movies are like tech, what you did yesterday does not count. Oh, to a degree you can build on a franchise, but if you don’t come up with something new…

This is like the smartphone killing computer manufacturers. Do you even need a computer anymore? Many people survive without one, or use a tablet, which is just a giant smartphone.

As for the two-dimensional reality stars… That’s so last decade. Famous for nothing, even TikTok stars have a greater identity, and more creativity.

I’m not saying we’re returning to an age of gravitas, but that we are not just going back to 2016, or even 2020. We’ve seen that there are bigger things than money, like democracy. And if you let the blowhards talk long enough they’ll indict themselves, show their flaws.

ChatGPT? Very interesting, but it has nowhere near the impact and footprint of MySpace, never mind Facebook. We expect technological breakthroughs. College graduates have not only never known an era without the internet, they’ve never known an era without broadband. They don’t e-mail, they text. The ship has sailed, the world has been wired, everybody has been connected and if you’re worried about your privacy, you must live off the grid and never go online, but even then your house will show up in Google Maps. The battle between the boomers and the younger generations is over. The younger generations won. Anti-internet screeds are laughable. Stop telling us about the deleterious effects of something so fulfilling. You can’t even ban football, never mind Coke (of either variety!), yet you think you can stop the internet train? Give me a break.

And the boomers have shifted into low gear anyway. They’ve retired, or soon will. They’re all about going to bed early and managing their investments, playing it safe, and we all know progress is made via risk.

Magazines? Like the movies, the pandemic put a dent in them too. So much was wiped away in the past two years. We are not going back to the mall. We are continuing to get our food delivered. Sure, we’re still in the middle of a wrenching transition, but we are absolutely not going back to the way it was.

So where does this leave you?

Well, if you’re working for the man, you’re going to take a haircut. Salaries are being kept flat, they are not keeping up with inflation, because if they do, inflation never dies. So unless you’re rich, you’re going to have to budget, watch your pennies. Not that you’re not going to spend them.

That’s one thing about millennials, they love to have experiences, not only concerts, but travel. Millennials travel in a way their parents never did. Credit the Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card, marketed directly to them and incentivizing them to go. Millennials want those perks and they want to use them. So if you’re marketing to them… Give them something, make it interesting.

Only the pubescent and those younger than them are ignorant. These are the online armies. Ignore them. They might be a mile deep, but they’re not a mile wide. The noise far exceeds the impact, like the Republican Congresspeople. There’s something there, but you can ignore it and not much will change.

Online hate, blowback? It’s here to stay. Grow a thicker skin. We’re all in it together, and the main reason people attack you is because they’re angry they’re not where you are, and if they can’t be, you’ve got to pay a price.

So what’s new on the horizon?

Once again, culture.

Food and restaurants are as big as they ever were, America’s number one form of entertainment.

As for streaming content, despite what the financial pages say, there’s still going to be a ton of it, there has to be, otherwise people won’t subscribe. And it will be a smorgasbord, of not only lowbrow, but highbrow too. Because it’s not about getting everybody to watch the same thing, but delivering shows for individuals so they keep paying. Sure, there will be consolidation amongst the streamers, but it’s akin to sports trades, unless you’re really into inside baseball, you can ignore them.

As for music… The brand phenomenon will continue. And will for as long as we have billionaires, musicians want that money.

But there will be a new cadre, not playing to the back row, who realize the power of music is…to speak truth to power. Who won’t fight for every last dollar. Who will be in bed with their audience, not mobilizing them to fight anybody, but to be fulfilled in the symbiotic relationship.

This is the turning point. Don’t expect radical change tomorrow. But there will be an evolution, because most Americans are breathing a sigh of relief, they don’t have to be on guard 24/7 to save our nation. They’ve got bandwidth for other things now.

And don’t expect tech to fill the vacuum. That’s done. We had multiple decades of innovation, but we’re rarely wowed by new products, hardware or software, today. If anything, we expect them.

It’s just like music, which squandered its power after the classic rock and MTV eras.

Really, it’s the age of the individual, which is contrary to the millennial ethos, which is all about keeping your head down and being a member of the group. We’ve seen the power of one individual, especially with Trump. He’s a beacon that way. If you believe and you want something, you may be able to do it. Take a stand.

Breathe a sigh of relief.

Get back to your life.

--Bob Lefsetz

2 notes · View notes

stephenjaymorrisblog · 1 year

Text

The Nominalistic Tycoon

Elon Musk is no Howard Hughes

Stephen Jay Morris

11/23/2022

Twitter. I never took it seriously. To me, it was just a Cyber bulletin board. However, in time it became a popular, Internet Cyber bulletin board. Luminaries, movie stars, and other types of celebrities were drawn to it. Before long, American politics showed its ugly face on Twitter. What began as polite disagreements ended up as bloody, flame wars. Insults, threat of violence, and profanity filled the pages of Twitter. Propaganda soon revealed its ugly ass.

Despite the ugliness, Twitter had cornered the market of Cyber bulletin boards. Imitators quickly failed. It became damn popular in the United States of America, but the conservatives couldn’t navigate the web site. Oh, but their bullshit was getting through! After their Twitter imitators flopped, one by one, the American, political Right started to whine like colicky infants about how they were being censored on social media. Which was just not true. It was their content that drew rejection, not censorship. Their posts were like the rants of nagging parents. Worse still, it was all a pack of lies, i.e.: “Leftists are the true racists!”

All of this started during the Iraq war, with wall to wall Islamophobia. Muslims were the new niggers of America. In some Right wing circles, Arabs were called “sand niggers.” Regular human beings didn’t want conservatives around. Well, according to Twitter’s previous owners, “the customer is always right.” So, the Twitter executives created rules that posters couldn't use racist terminology or be sexist—among many other dictates. When you take away the right to be racist, then the Right declares that they’ve been censored. Funny, when Elon Musk took charge of Twitter, some poet wrote the word “nigger” ten times and a poster posted it. It was as if he was rejoicing, ‘We can be free to hurt people’s feelings! Yea!!!’

One thing Right wingers hate is when you hit back; they immediately recoil into a fetal position. Over the last two weeks, I did just that. Their posts would insult the so-called Left, and I insulted them right back, twice as hard. The last straw, per Twitter, was when I insulted Ann Coulter. They kicked me out into the San Franciscan night. I instinctively knew that was going to happen, but I never figured it would be on the account of “has been,” Ann Coulter. Oh well.

One thing about Americans, they worship the wealthy as if they are Gods. Americans dream about being rich all night long, all of their lives. They dream about owning acres and acres of property, material possessions, endless hedonism, and being pampered like new born babies. When they can’t attain that wealth, they live vicariously through the lives of actual billionaires.

Me? I couldn’t care less. Though, I did find Howard Hughes fascinating. He was an aviation genius and film maker. Yet, even though he was brilliant, he had personality disorders. He started out as a rich man’s son and he, ultimately, tripled his wealth. He was one of a true American breed of innovators who were dynamic and bravura.

Now, we meet the new breed of tycoons: Enter the Gen X billionaire, Elon Musk, born under the sign of Cancer. His mom was a French Canadian and his dad, a Dutch South African. His mom was some type of model while his dad was filthy rich. Elon was an introverted child and a trust fund kid. He had no quality of intellect and relied on the advice of associates. His wealth was predicated on the lucky sperm club. He is certainly no Howard Hughes; he is more like former president Trump. They don’t make rich pigs like they used to. America has a slew of Nouveau Riche. You know? The “Beverly Hillbillies.” The dignity of the Ruling Class has vanished; it has been replaced by spoiled rich kids.

Elon Musk is like a child who doesn’t like his new toy. So, he throws a tantrum and destroys it. He didn’t really want to buy Twitter, but he got himself sucked into it. He fired 75% of his staff and his biggest advertisers quickly flew the coop, as if the building was on fire. He wants to turn Twitter into a Right wing ghetto and, thus far, he’s succeeding. He is destroying Twitter the way Ayn Rand’s character, Howard Roark, from her book, “The Fountainhead,” destroyed his creation. Architect Roark didn’t like that a real estate developer had added a new feature to his blue print, so he acquired some dynamite and blew up the very building he’d designed! That is Elon Musk.

Hell, Elon’s not even an American!

#stephenjaymorris #poet of tumblr #elon musk twitter #american culture #elon musk #billionarelifestyle #billionaremindset

2 notes · View notes