No. 23449Anonymous 16th December 2020 Wednesday 11:00 pm23449What are you watching right now?
I suppose we need a /v/ equivalent of the /e/ and /beat/ threads.
I've started watching Life on Mars again, but this time in HD on Netflix, and have only just realised it was filmed on... film. That or transferred to film and re-digitised for Netflix. The version Netflix has is absolutely covered in dust marks.
>>24390 Mainly, >>24393 was right, but also I have downloaded a different keyboard on my phone so Google can't steal my thoughts, and this keyboard does that a lot more. I try to fix it whenever it happens, but sometimes I miss one. On this occasion, I missed two in a row and I'm very sorry.
>>24342 >>24346 >>24347 I watched this today and I don't really see why Theroux comes in for such criticism. These are by far the most irritating people he has ever grappled with and if they refuse to engage in any meaningful way what's he supposed to do? How would you get to the core of a thirty-something man who bobs up and down on a couch to his own song about how "Twitter is gay"? Personally I'd blast him with a flamethrower, but the BBC frowns on that sort of thing. Ultimately the subjects do wind up feeling very familar in terms of Theroux's canon; the outwardly charming, to a point, who can not or will not admit to what anybody with eyes can and will see. Specifically I'm recalling the incarcerated paedophiles and the Las Vegas fixers who facilitate people's gambling addictions, I don't recall either having a Damascene conversion or even admitting the reality of their situations, but they revealed themselves all the same. I think he could have tried to get someone to explaint he differences between white nationalism and the myriad terms these cretins hide behind, but it seems impossible when they have a meltdown at even the most obvious of queries.
>>24398 >if they refuse to engage in any meaningful way what's he supposed to do?
>>24346 >disarm the people he interviews and bait them into opening up a bit more than they might with a more conventional interviewer.
I'll admit I didn't watch any of the other episodes. Maybe those episodes were fine. But, for example, why didn't he ask any of them if they could see themselves falling with a different group if that group had welcomed them instead? It would be fascinating to see someone who loves Donald Trump admit that they could just as easily have supported Bernie Sanders. Or if they weren't willing to accept that they could just as easily have turned into communists, why not? Or militant atheists? Atheists can also be obnoxious trolls who offend the traditional American establishment, but instead several of his interviewees have embraced "tradcath" religious fundamentalism, which is honestly not that iconoclastic in a lot of America. If all someone wants to do is upset people with their edginess, ask about the Black Panthers. Ask about horseshoe theory. Ask about rare Pepes and the cult of Kek. My problem with the whole programme was that I don't think Louis Theroux has bothered to learn what any of those last three even are. He approached these people with such a surface-level understanding that they didn't need to strop out for me not to get answers to my own questions; my own questions never even came close to being asked.
I thought it was interesting to see Brittany Venti on there. She's a good bullshitter but I suspect Theroux would have seen through it if she'd been doing it then.
>>24399 That's not an unfair position. The problem is, with the exception of Baked Alaska, all of these people appeared to be wholly committed to the far-right and showed no signs of just being BS merchants or lost souls swept up in the first group who'd take them. The latter part may well apply to some of their followers, but I don't know why you would ask people who don't think women should be legally allowed to vote "but did you ever think about being a social democrat"? It's not a one-for-one comparison, but you wouldn't ask a marxist-leninist "how come you aren't just a Tory though?" It's self-evident why not, because it's antithetical to their core beliefs.
>>24400 From her interview, which is all I've ever seen of her, she might have been one of those "lost souls". However, you have to be bewilderingly naive to think these apes are joking. Then again when I was in school just over ten years ago "Jew" became a default pejorative amongst some, so perhaps more people than I'd readily imagine would be able to stand in a crowd of screeching Nazis and think it was a lark.
>>24401 From what I can tell, she got treated horrendously for being a girl gamer, coming online right at the wrong time and leaned heavily into playing it up ironically as a defence mechanism, to the point she can't really stop as it's how she makes a living. I can easily imagine someone as stuck in an irony poisoned role like that finding camaraderie with others who also delude themselves about the line between jokes and what they actually believe. They're pretty basic survival mentalities; sucking up to and/or playing a role for your bullies.
I reckon your problem here is one of perspective, you're simply not who the show was aimed at. You know more than Louis already, and you're the type of person who knows you can learn more about these people than he ever will just by visiting the right parts of Rudgwick and The Other Place. The mainstream TV audience would be bewildered if he approached this program like somebody as terminally online as you and I, who already knows far more about the rapidly accelerating culture of politics on the internet.
Just think though. One day we'll be the boomers. The kids will be on about something totally new, for them it will be all about libertarian post-mod revival anti-sex VR culture, and we'll still be referring to our political opponents as frog memers and SJWs. We will be hopelessly lost to understand them, because we will still be stuck thinking in terms of r/politicalcompassmemes.
>Then again when I was in school just over ten years ago "Jew" became a default pejorative amongst some
When I was at school just over fifteen years ago, it was pretty much literally anything goes. Today's culture is shocking and difficult to cope with even to me, because the odd no-no word will slip out that I sincerely don't mean in a nasty way, it's just a lingering habit. If there was some minor irritation, the mildest thing you could possibly say was "that's gay", but it wasn't uncommon to hear people refer to someone stealing things as "jewing", "Anon jew'd my best Parker Pen off me!" for instance. Perhaps worth noting that as a Sarf Leeds lad there were a lot (I mean a lot) of Asian kids at my school, but nobody ever seemed to care about racism. I distinctly remember a load of us yelling at a man wearing a turban as the bus drove by and calling him Bin Laden, just after 9/11.
This is perhaps what has solidified my view that the people who are the most sensitive over issues like that, are the ones who have never directly been exposed much to other cultures, or environments where these groups actually mix. They didn't have a lad at school everybody called laplander Shop because he was brown and his parents owned a shop, but were good mates with regardless.
I dunno. It's interesting how quickly times change I suppose, it's not like I was at school in the 70s when Bernard Manning was still on telly, things might have felt different then. But still.
>>24404 >This is perhaps what has solidified my view that the people who are the most sensitive over issues like that, are the ones who have never directly been exposed much to other cultures, or environments where these groups actually mix. They didn't have a lad at school everybody called laplander Shop because he was brown and his parents owned a shop, but were good mates with regardless.
I dunno, lad. I grew up in Hull in the 90s, which was almost exclusively white at the time, and I definitely remember a lot of casually racist jokes, e.g. "what do you call a constipated laplander? Mustafa Babba". There certainly wasn't any malice there, we just thought they were funny. I think back then it was a lot easier to be oblivious about why something could be deemed offensive. Context definitely matters, someone I work with is Asian and he's the most racist person I know so we're always saying racist things to one another that you wouldn't say to someone you'd just met but that goes for a lot of things really.
I don't now why it's stuck with me, but about five years ago I was at Brimham Rocks and I overheard a man saying to his son "don't be a puff". The kid looked about six or seven. I couldn't believe it because of how dated it sounded. Not that it was offensive, just how old-fashioned it felt to hear it. I've always assumed using gay to mean lame or Jew to mean cheap was from growing up with South Park, but I could be wrong.
>>24401 The thing is that I had the same experience in a school of about 1,000, and the neighbouring schools had similar cultures. But everyone in my group was voting left wing as soon as our first election came round, our sixth form politics class was a blend of needs, seizure socialists, and utter toffs. We all laughed at the same edgy, naughty words though. So why didn't we all grow up to be ladding about at nazi rallies?
You're kind of showing how worryingly polarised things are now, and how brainworms have infected discourse nowadays. I wonder if it's a product of the same school of thought that insists on "with us or against us", but instead expressed as "if you use language deriding x then you actively hate x" as a way to make more enemies through perspective rather than anything substantial.
It's like with how huge the horn effect seems to be online - oh someone did/said something bad? They must be capable of doing every bad thing.
Not to segue too wildly away, but I think normal people without enough knowledge being exposed to statistics seem to live through the lens of big data, assuming that if there's a 60/40 split in behaviours or proclivities between two demographics, then that obviously means that everyone in the first demographic can be assumed to engage in that behaviour and everyone in the second can be assumed to not be like that.
>>24403 In pictured /pol/ meet, it seems a big chunk of the attendees are also not white. Don't know if it's some sort of internalised racism, or if it reveals the true face of the typical /pol/chud being POC LARPing as whites.
I only see asians and latinos there. They're not valourised by identity politics, so if you view the "alt right" as more or less entirely a reactionary response to contemporary "woke" race and gender politics (because that's what it is), it makes perfect sense. The opposite side treats them no better than it does whites.
I see this attitude as quite naive to start with though honestly. Like when people act confused or surprised that working class people or immigrants voted conservative or UKIP or what have you. They have agency, they're not mindless ants. They might well be dafties voting against their interest, but you're an even bigger daftie if you think they're a hivemind which will automatically align with the side that says it supports them.
>>24406 >We all laughed at the same edgy, naughty words though. So why didn't we all grow up to be ladding about at nazi rallies?
I have noticed that, at some point, the type of lad I went to school with who posts bad taste jokes on Facebook has inevitably had an argument with someone who has found their material offensive because they pull no punches and take a pop at everyone.
I can see how that could make people reactionary and end up supporting the alt-right as it's almost always some "lefty snowflake" whom they've managed to upset. A bit like when Suzanne Moore, or whichever lefty journalist of your choice, has a massive teary about being silenced over their views on trans-rights and decides to become a regular columnist for The Telegraph instead.
>>24409 >I have noticed that, at some point, the type of lad I went to school with who posts bad taste jokes on Facebook has inevitably had an argument with someone who has found their material offensive because they pull no punches and take a pop at everyone.
I suppose the question we can ask is how we managed to keep those people so under the wraps in the 00s that we could even make edgy jokes about dead babies. Do we not have the same lads that we used to?
>>24410 Because if you made a joke in the 90s along the lines of "Did you know Princess Diana had dandruff? They found her head and shoulders in the dashboard." that would pretty much be the end of it. You'd say it to your mates, laugh and move on.
If you do something similar on Facebook it lingers long after the post is made. You'll also be sending it to a much wider audience than when you're cracking the joke with your mates, some of whom you may not know that well beyond having in common you went to the same school so may take it very differently.
If one of them posted this, for example, I'd know they're not being racist but I can see how people could interpret it that way. I'd just think they were being edgy.
I do hope that you're not about to prove us all right, but please share. Be a shame if you didn't actually have any counterpoint to contribute. Why not just say what you think on the topic instead of typing in twitterese?
>>24411 See I don't know about this, the whole mess seemed to start around 2012 but Myspace long predates it and Web 2.0 really took off around 2007. People still get their lives ruined by posts they made nearly 20 years ago that weren't too outrageous at the time. Then there's of course other cultures that get along fine even today.
Maybe people are just wise to the permeance of social media but it seems like all this is being driven by a certain type of person - the over-socialised, all too eager to play moral superiority in a webspace we all now live-in that's defined by moral norms controlled by corporations. This naturally reaching the point that merely associating or not-challenging a jokester is a moral failing on your part and which we all forgot that the person piping up is a quisling and the whole structure can just be ignored if we really wanted to.
>>24413 First off, I haven't had a Twitter account since 2012, you big shit. As for the rest of this thread, the fact everyone here seems to be stuck in 2016 regarding their understanding of the far-right is the problem, combined with "my mate's dead racist" lad thinking anyone cares.
>>24415 So you're behind the times and frustrated that we all understand what's meant by 'alt right' in modern discourse while you don't? You must have an awful time with 'socialism' then.
It would be interesting to see some solid data but it feels like there was a fairly major demographic shift around the early 2010s. Before then the Internet's population was mostly technical hobbyist types, creative people who saw it as a way to share their work with the world and disparate subcultures. It also seemed to skew more towards nerdy and/or creative teenagers and students with lots of free time who wanted to hang around with similar people in a time when nerds were "sad" and creativity was "gay" IRL.
I think a combination of smartphones and social media were mostly responsible for this. Smartphones allowed the borderline computer illiterate types (many of whom were busy shitting on "sad computer nerds" a year or two before) to post stuff online easily with minimal effort and social media gave them the platform to do so. In the 2000s there were sites which were essentially what we now call social media, but they were either subject specific (eg. Flickr and Deviantart) or dominated by a specific demographic (Myspace). It wasn't until "general use" social media like Twitter and Facebook came along that
>a certain type of person - the over-socialised, all too eager to play moral superiority
had a platform.
>>24417 Normies ruined the internet - that's one of our slogans, isn't it?
Some other aspects of this I don't see mentioned often - the dumbing down of end user tech. Yeah it's great we don't have to fuck around with the hardware whenever we want to run a different program, but this is a bit far. SaaS is a poverty trap in action and also just bad for consumers in general, especially those who aren't neurotypical, and this one's a bit iffy but it *must* be doing some damage that information is so accessible now and no longer requires reading around a topic, or risking reading contrary views - you can just find the information, decontexualised, with whatever assumed knowledge on behalf of the author omitted because they didn't anticipate having to pad everything they say with a priori assumptions to account for people just cherry picking the bare facts to be used any which way they choose.
>>24416 The fact you think having a Twitter account keeps you informed on anything tells me all I need to know about you and the barely functioning flesh-lump you call a brain.
>>24417 I think it's an error to blame people. It's not difficult to look through geocities and find all sorts of idiots and bores, but it takes on a different light because to be idiots, bores, and boring idiots they had to sit down with notepad and cobble together some HTML, and because they were writing mostly for the sake of themselves or for a small group of friends, rather than to be spread around widely. More important than being general use, I think the big shift between older sites and Facebook, Twitter, etc, is how effectively they've gamed human psychology. Deviantart is fundamentally a website for sharing images and stories, Facebook and Twitter are fundamentally websites for "maximising engagement" - it just so happens that the most effective way to do that is by providing a general-purpose discussion platform.
I take a very "the medium is the message" view - websites shape their userbase more than the userbase shapes the website. The people I dislike the most online today are probably people who I'd have found perfectly agreeable in 2004. In the case of celebrities and public figures, a lot of them are people I found perfectly agreeable in 2004, driven mad by the internet and in particular by Twitter. Even certifiable geniuses and computer nerds turn into absolute dickheads on Twitter, while even some pretty boring people could occasionally put together a nice Geocities page. Smartphones themselves go a long way to facilitating this sort of change, but people forget the period where most of the country was online but smartphone penetration was low, where most people went online with a computer - even if for many of them it was an underpowered EeePC and Internet Explorer 6. Ironically with sort of view, arrogant computer nerds become the villains and not the heroes. They're the ones who go off to work at Google or Facebook or Twitter because it gives them exciting changes to work with fancy new technology at a good wage, even if the purpose of that technology is to bugger us all.
I can't give you solid demographic data, but I can give you inferences: By 2000 about 50% of American adults were online, for Britain that took until about 2004. By 2009 it was 70% of households. Unless we've a far more IT-centric economy than I'd expected, it seems unlikely to me that these people were hobbyists or computer nerds. More instructively, if you look at what websites were founded before 1995, alongside scientific or "nerd" projects you'll find things like the BBC, the Economist, Airline websites, and the Daily Telegraph, which gestures at some pretty unexciting 90s businessmen cohabiting with all of those exciting Wired hackers jumped up on their Californian ideology illusions that they're going to become anything but the next generation of suits, and of course with a small number of genuinely creative and funny people messing about. If you want to go back even further, we can look at the Eternal September - Usenet users thought that AOL users in 1993 constitued a great unwashed coming to ruin their fun. Now the age ruled by that great unwashed is looked back on as the golden era before they started letting the riff-raff in.
>>24421 >I can't give you solid demographic data, but I can give you inferences: By 2000 about 50% of American adults were online, for Britain that took until about 2004. By 2009 it was 70% of households. Unless we've a far more IT-centric economy than I'd expected, it seems unlikely to me that these people were hobbyists or computer nerds.
How is 'online' defined here? I'd not be surprised if it were just email usage and shopping, but 50% of American adults being active contributors to the internet even in the most trivial of ways like bbs etc?
>>24420 It was bait, thicko. Try to contribute something to the conversation next time and you might not get so easily riled.
This is what I meant about solid data, We can easily say stuff like "the majority of of English speaking households had an internet connection in the mid 2000s", but it doesn't say how they were using it. I'd guess the majority of adults with internet access were using it to read websites send email and maybe buy stuff if they were feeling brave, but not really contributing much to online communities.
>>24422 >>24423 I'd take even such basic uses as evidence for my case that it's more about the technology than the people - even if we say that some people are inherently awful, if they can be online without interacting too actively, then the problem is primarily the interactive sites and not the individual having access to a computer.
And though I believe in a much stronger form of the idea - that the right website could make almost anyone interesting - I'd be quite interested to see someone take that version and run with it, with an argument along the lines of "The problem isn't that your mum uses Twitter on her phone, the problem is all the normal-ish-but-not-too-normal people stopped using forums and started using Twitter too. If Twitter was just your mum and people like her, you could just ignore it like it was broadcast televison or scented candles."
I feel a little ripped off that we never got to see another generation raised with computers as their main means of internet use rather than smartphones. It would be interesting to see how well people picked up awareness of how to use a computer over time, and compare that to whether the dumbing down of user interfaces that Smartphones brought genuinely made things more accessible, or whether they made devices less useful in the long-run to gain a temporary advantage with some less prepared users in the short run.
Finished Babylon 5. I haven't looked this up but I got the distinct impression the fifth series was not part of the Grand Arc that the creators had at the beginning; it felt like the fourth finished in a good place, but the fifth just meandered a bit and left far more open questions than answers.
It was alright, I'd recommend watching it, but I don't think I'll ever re-watch it.
I'd also recommend the first series of Au Service de la France/A Very Secret Service. The first series' visual design and comedic timing is spot on; the second leans too heavily into drama for me, and gets a bit ridiculous.
>>24428 The most recent episode had quite a cliffhanger.
I'm still not sure if the black guy's arse is really that big or if they've padded it out for some reason.
>>24430 It specifies "Fox" rather than "Fox News", so maybe it was a TV documentary or something like that. Although I must admit I don't especially trust that image; I agree that letting people join Facebook from anywhere rather than just universities brought in lots of thick twats, boomers, and zoomers, but I don't see how that would have ruined absolutely everything. Nor do I think "geek culture" can be blamed on The Big Bang Theory. I'm not even entirely sure geek culture is a bad thing, even though I personally don't like it. It certainly promotes secondary-level education, which would surely have cancelled out any influxes of thick twats anywhere else. It's like someone had two or three good points to make, and padded them out with a dozen instances of idiotic bollocks to make a full infographic.
It seems like an episode of Black Mirror stretched out for cash. I like the concept of this and much of BM's output, but many of the latter's ideas were as ephemeral as others were portentious. I may watch Severance at some point, and I will most certainly enjoy the ride, but I don't see Paul Verhoeven involved in this, so it will wait.
>>24430 >>24431 It's the infamous "Hackers On Steroids" fox news piece about 4chan. It's from around the time the mainstream media was starting to notice internet culture and either didn't have a clue and/or didn't care about representing it accurately since it wasn't mainstream enough for too many people to notice.
I don't think it had as much of an effect as the chans vs scientology thing a year later though, since the fox news report mostly got passed around people who were already knew exactly what 4chan and anon were and found it hilarious.
>It's like someone had two or three good points to make, and padded them out with a dozen instances of idiotic bollocks to make a full infographic.
True, I only watched a few episodes of The big bang theory but it always seemed to be taking the piss out of geek culture rather than promoting it. As far as I remember Tumblr was very much internet culture back then as well, but the "furries gays and artists" kind that anon loved to bully (presumably while secretly wanking themselves raw to finely illustrated gay furry porn if 4chan was anything to go by).
I watched Northman last night. It was an odd film, half-norse saga and half-movie where part of the fun is I guess looking at how those two mesh awkwardly together which it manages well enough imo. I'll warn you that it gets pretty brutal and the guts and gore isn't what shocks you at all, the plot feels very similar to Vinland Saga but instead of anime its a bit like a holocaust movie.
Did Vikings really burn the young and old alive in some historical precursor to Come and See? Those scenes were rather intense and it felt a bit ridiculous that they had to go with the protagonist merely being an innocent bystander. I'd also question why there was so little focus on actually trying to stay alive in Medieval Iceland.
That's Robert Eggers' third film, right? If The Witch is anything to go by, he takes historical accuracy (in terms of representing what people really believed) fairly seriously.
I could be wrong but I think The Northman was another one written alongside historians, archaeologists, and various others that know their stuff. It wouldn't surprise me if he also chose to focus on the most brutal elements of that society, given his preoccupation with horror and the sinister side of human culture.
I really enjoyed The Vvitch. My ex wanted me to watch it and I wasn't too interested, but I think I liked it more than she did. I think she was just disappointed because she was hoping it'd have some sort of fisherperson undercurrent to annoy me with, though.
Really not sure how I felt about The Lighthouse mind. I feel like it was definitely a good film, perhaps even a great one, but I'm not entirely convinced I enjoyed it.
I know it's old hack but I'm sick of reddit and I'm drunk and I just finished watching The Hidden Fortress which is pretty fucking brilliant and has a lot of special moments. Although I would recommend against watching it on Prime because the translation's shit and it ruins a few moments.
I've just watched the first episode of the new series of Derry Girls. It's the funniest sitcom I've watched in a while, but I don't know if that's partially because there's a dearth of alternatives these days.
I enjoyed this and it made me tear up a little. It's quite genre bending but I'd call it an absurdist take on Jet Li's the One where kung-fu crosses with comedy and trying to find meaning in your life. It even subtly crosses the fourth wall at points.
