time and time again people are confused that the content they see is directly related to the people they follow and that they’re absolutely lost navigating the internet without an algorithm force feeding them lowest common denominator dreck
I remember when RSS first started and I realized I could basically curate my own personal newspaper/magazine and it was the greatest thrill of my online life, and ever since I've realized people HATE that, that's the WORST part of online for them, they just want TV you can fave
Yeah, one of the reasons I litter my contemporary work with pop culture references isn't that I think I'm funny (though I am, I'm SO funny) but because little babydorks play these games I write and, like, I want them to know that things exist?
Like, the musical references are there so if that stuff sounds interesting people can explore it and maybe escape the algorithm they're stuck in. It's definitely a reaction to the totalizing isolation, the eternal self-reference, of modern comic book movies and D&D.
I find myself name dropping old artists as a practice a lot more because exposure to that stuff is why so much genre work is excellent these days.
Modern American SFF culture arose out of art nerds integrating those influences and pushing back on the “Art as Engineering” schools before them.
Had this experience, too. It's utterly mind-blowing to me that huge majorities prefer(?!?!?!?) social media sites to serve them random shit from sources that they didn't actively choose to follow.
I felt betrayed when i came back to my Google Reader after my first semester of law school, excited to catch up on the past 3 months of news, blogs, and webcomics, and… finding only 30 days bc that’s as far as it went. This was 2008. I stopped seeking out anything after that
The only thing that I've ever said on here that got outside of the circle of my friends and myself was a post celebrating the death of Henry Kissinger. I had a good laugh and remembered good things can happen sometimes.
that screenshot is the opposite of my experience here! and i feel like i'm finding new and very funny people here to follow all the time! hopefully they are able to find what they want here.
“i made a joke and people responded with serious answers”
yeah well i made a joke and people started hooting like apes and climbing the walls and picking their butts and smelling their fingers and falling off tree branches. skill issue
The fact that we live in a world where we can expect not to be able to enter elevator shafts while the elevators are in motion is the result of policy and power dynamics.
If we did not have the expectation of the elevator not being there, the joke wouldn't be funny.
The right doesn't really have humour or comedy they just signal their beliefs in the form of jokes and anyone who bites by laughing gets a rush of "I'm among my peers and feel powerful" and that's what they think humour is
Idk, it feels pretty dehumanising to declare entire swathes of the population incapable of humour. Of course the right has comedy. Some of it is really shitty, yep. There are probably different trends in how people in different political groups relate to it. But comedy and humour are universal.
depends what you mean by "right." There are people who are/were conservatives that have been blisteringly funny. James Lileks, for one. (although his actually funny shit is not political imo)
Fascists, like all ideologues and autocrats, don't have a sense of humor.
2) Humor depends on more than sadism, whatever Henri Bergson thinks. A sense of the absurd. Play. Imagination. Surprise. Puncturing authority. All things that are anathema to fascism. Fascism can't withstand mockery; it depends on grandiosity, shock and awe, black and white rigidity.
