Advice

Find someone who cares about you as much as Google News cares about telling me who might own Hulu someday. 

(This is the kind of high quality content Bluesky is missing out on by not sending me an invite.)

Dystopia New Game +

It’s funny, I think of myself as pretty pessimistic these days, but if you’d asked me a couple of days ago, “Hey, Bryan, if a random citizen decided to kill a homeless person in the NYC subway by putting him in a headlock for 15 minutes, how would establishment institutions and media treat it?” my answer wouldn’t have been “like a perfectly normal thing anyone could, and, in fact, should do in that situation.”

I mean, I know we’ve been dehumanizing people experiencing homelessness for decades. And I know even supposedly blue cities have policies around getting rid of those people instead of helping them. And I know the past year, especially, the right has been leveraging the increased in unhoused populations as part of their “Democrat cities are full of poop and murder” narrative. I just thought opening day of hunting season was still a few years away. 

Insert Hod Dog Guy GIF Here

Yes, will McCarthy be able to defuse that time bomb, that, according to this NBC News headline, just spontaneously appeared for no reason at all in Kevin McCarthy’s lap?

If only there were some string of news stories NBC News had a way to access, showing some kind of history or pattern of one group of people refusing to raise the debt ceiling until their wildly impractical, ideological, and unconnected demands are met. Heck, let’s go a step further. Imagine if that existed AND Kevin McCarthy was able to be connected, in some way, with that group? 

It’s like that would recontextualize the whole situation from a public servant struggling to defuse a situation out of his control to a story of an inept asshat who took over a dozen tries to even get his job being in way over his head in a situation entirely his own doing. Oh well! No way to know for sure!

Successfully

 Fox Business making some interesting tweaks to the English language to fluff Elon even when his penis-extension disastrously explodes.

CROSSPOST: My Figure Photography Magnum Opus Is Complete

https://www.oldnerd.net/2023/04/fig-photo-series-my-magnum-opus-is.html

Rare But Nice

Gotta say, it’s refreshing to see barricades being put up to prevent right-wing violence against law enforcement and public institutions. I usually only see those kinds of measures being employed when a cop is about to be acquitted of murdering an innocent Black person.

I don’t know if Donnie Boy is going to be indicted tomorrow, although obviously I hope he is, and also in Georgia and also anywhere else they can get his hands on him. I also very much want to see the Patriot Moat the usual gang of idiots are discussing down in Mar A Lago because that’ll be hilarious.

Obviously, as we’ve seen, the odds of a few well-heeled assholes committing acts of domestic terrorism and hurting people are higher than they should be, and the odds of them forming any kind of coherent force that accomplishes more than smearing shit on society’s collective walls is way lower than they think it is. Much like with Jan 6, they are simultaneously dangerous and ineffective, to the point where you don’t want them to try some shit, but you kinda want ‘em to try some shit. 

Pointy-Headed Racist

This is super-obvious, but it bears repeating that one week ago, Scott Adams was an unhinged dingus that no publication with any of the values or principles they claimed to have THIS weekend should have been supporting in the first place  

You can be plenty awful in today’s society and still keep your core career and livelihood. You can, in fact, be MORE awful now and get away with it than you could have been at any point in the last 30 years, and the constant vilification and complaining about cancel culture (FKA political correctness) exists for the sole purpose of letting awful people get away with being awful to a degree that was formerly unacceptable.

Now, in order to suffer consequences, you have to be VERY racist in a way that gets publicly noticed to a degree that a few big players feel compelled to take public action, which creates the environment in which other, more timid big players realize that the disadvantages of not replacing Dilbert with some other bullshit the people who still read the funny pages will glance over out of habit outweigh the brief onslaught of right-wing How Dare You’s who swarm when one of Their Own is threatened.

The degree to which you have to fuck up is roughly proportional to how much money you make for other people. You make a LOT of money for other people, and you have to publicly say you like Hitler in order for capitalism to jettison you. Scott Adams makes SOME money for other people, but it’s mostly out of habit at this point, so he only had to be very, very racist on a podcast whose contents got widely publicized for him to finally be cast off.

I assume, as is traditional, that Martyr Syndrome will kick in shortly and offers to speak at a plethora of low-standard wingnut gatherings will pour in for a couple of years, since nothing Adams said falls that far outside the boundaries of mainstream conservative thought. But if this finally removes Dilbert from the public consciousness two decades after it stopped being even remotely relevant, , I’ll take it.

CROSSPOST: Danhausen Gorilla-Press Slams An Increasingly Ridiculous Series Of Things

 https://www.oldnerd.net/2023/02/fig-photo-series-danhausen-gorilla.html

Dys Track

 Dystopia feeling a little extra dystopic this week.

You Got Rowled

“I want to have a serious, important conversation about the difficult topics. Topics on which I have been misunderstood. I never meant to upset anyone. And I’m calling the place I have those conversations ‘The Witch Trials Of JK Rowling because I think it exemplifies how much I down’t want to upset anyone.”

I mean, I knew when I clicked through headlines that sounded like someone was maybe either reconsidering, or, more likely, reframing and retreating in the face of  all the negative press about a video game, that it would be Some Bullshit, but I’m a bit disappointedåå it was That Much Bullshit.

Current Environment

Just saying, if I were piloting the Goodyear Blimp today, I’d see if it had any chaff launchers. 

Carl Fredricksen already learned this lesson the hard way.

Oldnerd On Instagram

It wouldn't work at all for YAD, and it’s deeply suboptimal even for Oldnerd, but in the post-Twitter social media hellscape, Instagram is the most viable home for the promotion/following of the other blog, Oldnerd. 

You’ll notice new links on the left to the Mastodon (ugh) and Post (double ugh) accounts for this site, and also a link to Oldnerd, which then has a link to the Instagram account where I’ll be promoting new stuff that goes up there. Us it if you find it helpful.

It’s amazing to me that in every single way except the ethics of using it, every single social media alternative to Twitter is somehow worse than Twitter.

Fucking Buffoonery

Marjorie Taylor Greene, sneering and giving a thumbs down, in what can only be described as an Apartheid Cruella DeVille coat, during the State of the Union address, is now normal behavior. It's fucking buffoonery, but fucking buffoonery is normal.

This all started 14 years ago, when Joe Wilson shouted "YOU LIE" at Obama during that State of the Union address. It's no surprise that the first major crack in this particular decorum dam involved a white dude yelling at a black dude.

Wilson suffered no consequences for his outburst, got a lot of attention for it, and after that, it was that thing that's played out over and over again. Republicans break an unwritten or unenforced rule. Democrats try to bring the rule back by... still following it even though breaking it gets rewarded and also wagging their fingers and sighing. And so, here we are. Non-stop fucking buffoonery where we used to have nice things. Well, OK. Fucking boring pointless things, but fucking boring pointless things where it was generally considered gauche to make an ass of yourself. 

The honesty would be refreshing, except that the system once again has been gamed and eroded into a raw exercise of numerical power where boorishness, stupidity, sex crimes, and a literal entire fabricated life prior to winning election are all acceptable as long as it means they have one more Aye or Nay button to push than the other guys.

The honesty would be refreshing, except that no amount of boorishness, stupidity, sex crimes, and literal fabricated lives will stop the political press from pretending the system is the same one we all learned about in Schoolhouse Rock and everything is totally fine and none of this is a problem.

And thus, an ever-deeper shit-show of non-stop Fucking Buffoonery.

Algorithmic Warmongering

Look, obviously, algorithmic-driven content and decision-making has done nothing but improve our lives since it’s been implemented. 

But goddammit, Google News, I need a better way to tell you I DO NOT GIVE TWO SHITS ABOUT A CHINESE SPY BALLOON STOP SUMMER OF THE SHARKING ME IN WINTER.

Modern Fable

 “I’m sorry,” the SCORPION said as he stung the frog. “You weren’t complying and I was a bad apple who failed to follow departmental use of force guidelines.”

The Complex Relationship Betwixt Birds And Feathers

Elon Musk coming to Justin Roiland’s defense is so utterly predictable that the only reason I was even remotely surprised by it is that I’ve been actively avoiding thinking about shit like this in 2023.

And, since Twitter cut off access to third party clients, I have to get around to Garbage People Drama through days-later articles in my Google News feed like some kind of Luddite animal.

It’ll be  interesting to see if Roiland goes the Chapelle/Louis CK route of embracing his newfound incel dudebro audience, try to mend fences with the Decent Human Being community, or disappear with his money. If I were a betting man, though, I’d lay odds on the first one. 

Comedy Of Errors

Imagine losing out on your dream promotion three times in one day because 20 of your co-workers thought the guy who let college wrestlers be sexually abused would do a way better job than you would.

I mean, I’ve had some bad days, but…

Whatafors

Kevin McCarthy making an increasingly batshit series of deals and concessions with some of the worst, most racist people on the planet in order to gain and maintain largely meaningless power and prestige is such an obvious metaphor for the entire Republican Party that i’m not sure it’s even fair to call it a metaphor. Or a parallel. It’s just a fucking truism at this point.

The fact that this angle is SO obvious and yet not being taken up by any of the coverage of the Speaker vote is further unnecessary proof that the media’s investment in believing / pretending that our systems haven’t been gamed into oblivion and are instead Just Part Of Normal Everyday Operation is nigh-infinite.