The legacy of the 2015-era socialist podcasters will be the Roganization leftist media. Hope it was worth it just to dunk on Johnathan Chait with the r-slur or give the deeply materialist, dialectic commentary of Trump being gay. Still wondering where these noble normies that amassed around our normal podcasters are. Seems like after a decade of normalizing the left for normal sensibilities there should be something to show for it besides the personal wealth of the hosts. Maybe subscriber count is its own victory. Hey I went to a party of lefists and they knew what a podcast was, I guess we won in the end.

Everyone gets this wrong as nobody really knows or cares about the history of McDonald’s architecture, yet the argument relies on that historical information. This is not new. In the 70s they did this exact same thing. They got rid of the bright and flashy style they had used throughout the 50s and 60s. They used more earth tones and natural materials. Their goal was to make it feel more homey rather than oriented at kids/young people. Imagine going from white, red, yellow with space-age curves, almost Googie architecture, to beige and brown.

The difference between the change in the 70s and the one now is how we react. This reaction is driven by social media outrage. Every minor change any business makes is blown up and added to some kind of culture war narrative. It’s repeated so much that even leftists will be like “this is true but because of dialectical materialism.” It’s not even true. Your 80s/90s McDonald’s, that you totally remember accurately, was colorful because some franchises reverted back to white/yellow/red. People thought the 70s retool was too drab and the earth tones had fallen out of style. Some stores were repainted. It’s not a linear decline in aesthetics, it changes over time. The story here is that a business which relies on stores will change the stores every 20-30 years based on the prevailing style.

I know we are desperately grasping at any canary in a coal mine for the fall of capitalism, but I don’t think it’s correlated to the appearance of McDonald’s.

– The prison camp guard asked before mag-dumping into my brainpan.

Probably not the greatest time to have “Dick Epstein” write an article for your paper.

That was a Star Trek reference/easter egg in a random encounter which is officially non-canon.

Oh so they’re finally doing a real Overwatch 2 after 3 years of battlepass money but ironically removing the 2.

You could probably get a private chef for that much. Not a celebrity private chef, but just someone who can cook good food and doesn’t want to make min wage working in a kitchen. If you do 20 hours a week prepping and cooking for them, that’s $35 an hour. You could probably average the hours down once you get to know their likes and dislikes. Not many part-time jobs pay that much. Get two clients and you make $70 an hour for 40 hours. No kitchen manager, no 16 hour shifts back to back, only a few customers.

Then again I think part of it is that they just like pushing a button and receiving food. The prospect of fielding candidates and actually dealing with another human directly is off-putting. Plus these kinds of people tend to pretend that they don’t like spending money. They’ll pay $700 for frozen Sysco food but scoff at paying even $200 a week for a private chef. They’ll try to haggle an employee down to crumbs but have no problem paying a robot.

The mayor of Portland is on the list.

Maybe it was this I saw (thanks to astronot)

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueAnon/comments/1quqk6q/this_is_where_all_those_equals_signs_in_the/

Really easy to confuse hexbear with r/trueanon since everyone just reposts from there all the time.

I do not. I just spent about 10 mins trying to find it. It’s not in c/technology or c/chapotraphouse, that I can see. Searching “=” or any other relevant key words for posts or comments doesn’t bring it up. IDK.

Moduro

It has something to do with the way servers/protocol broke up emails into lines and stored the lines using = as demarcation. Whenever the emails were assembled, the = remained. We had a thread about it yesterday or the day before.

I wasn’t arguing that the trope didn’t exist in Fallout, I’m arguing that it’s Jon Nolan falling back on his older material and that it’s lazy. If synths exist, then you don’t need to create a different version of that. Because now you have what is essentially the same mystery duplicated.

I also have a major problem with synths existing in Fallout but I will spare you those thoughts. We might as well just demolish the rest of canon and establish time travel too. Fallout can be every other sci-fi franchise story retold in vault suits and iconography from the older games.

Nolan seems to be working his way back into his Westworld plots. Instead of spending seasons on the mystery of who is a robot and who is real, they’re going to do the same with mind control. Pretty boring choice imo when you have the entire world of Fallout. Mind control chips seem like small potatoes.

Not on board with showing the NCR as this force of almost pure good. The game would show you something like that Shady Sands utopia and then the dark side of it. If this was a game you would find out that the NCR used the mind control chips to punish people which is why things are so good. That would be a side quest too. The show feels like the Bethesdization of New Vegas were the iconography of the NCR is more important. On that note, I did stand up and clap when the ranger sniper showed up.

Some of us here are like dogs chasing cars with whatever is all over social media feeds. If tomorrow it’s something else, they would be here scolding us for missing out on the opportunity to radicalize based on that. It’s just chasing whatever is trending online. This coincides with how content creators operate, mining social media for content. The online left is enamored with leftist content creators who spend all day coming up with takes based on social media trends. Therefore the people start to confuse the mechanics of being a career takesmith with doing analysis and the work of assessing public opinion. Normal people become inadvertent Hasan (or Brace or whoever) cosplayers, essentially. This will be the most important issue of our lives and the opportunity to radicalize everyone until the next thing happens and everyone rushes to mine takes from that. Mining takes becomes the necessary work of winning hearts and minds. To criticize the takesmiths is to criticize the idea of winning people over at all. That’s why they get mad and jump directly into accusing you hindering recruitment and radicalization.

The internet has done a number on us and I think the reaction to and discourse around Epstein is more insightful into modern capitalism than the conspiracy itself.

We have a real world example of a project that is ran by alleged Maoists and is centered on Epstein, it’s TrueAnon. In their endeavor to properly analyze and contextualize Epstein withing capitalism they had to spend dozens of hours covering the last 100 years of US and European history. The idea that you can shortcut all that at a party in a weed circle of mixed company is laughable. The pod has “gained support” by gaining patrons. Deciding whether or not a growing consumer market for a podcast, or media consumption habits in general, reflect public opinion is an exercise left to he reader. Then you have to reckon with the mechanics of being a career takesmith again because maybe all that context only exist to mill content. Maybe the issue, as presented by the pod, seemingly connects to so much because the hosts needed more episodes in order to maintain a media career. If you want to be a materialist about it, you can’t disconnect the career objectives of our faves from the format nor the industry nor the subject. This is why you have to do more than listen to podcasts before deciding some issue is THE issue of our time. This is why academic study exists and Brace/Liz would probably be the first to tell you they are not academics.

Finally, we have a real word example of a generation-defining conspiracy with JFK. Look at people treating that conspiracy as a joke and you have Epstein’s destiny. It was a conspiracy with such broad support that the government had hearings about it. The “leftists” of the time didn’t really get much accomplished by dwelling on it. They instead became highly involved in the cottage industry of conspiracy media afterwards (sound familiar?) and then at some point there were more right wing JFK-heads than left-wing. You can argue that they weren’t as good as we are and we just need to provide better analysis. To that I say, where have you been since 2018? If you’re only now deciding it’s time to do real analysis then you already lost the monopoly on it.

Wait until she learns about Los Angeles and the policing there.

It would be interesting if they could get a significant anti-Trump, but still MAGA, movement going in time for 2028, only to see Trump’s 3rd term vs neo-MAGA vs whatever the fuck corporate Zone of Interest shit Dems are cooking up. Probably the worst election of our lifetime (so far). It would be an opportunity to let Trump eat the sin cakes while setting up something a little more stable for the future. Kind of like how the MCU started casting younger leads after Endgame so they wouldn’t age out of future movies. Also like the MCU it will be something nobody really likes but they keep watching for a Trump cameo in 2038. We will go back to two highly unpopular parties with no real energy until they can convince Gen X to vote for Collarbone or whatever that dipshit’s name is.

I reinstalled New Vegas and played it for the first time in probably 14 or so years. I was never was into traditional role playing games like D&D, Cyberpunk, etc. I mean I know it’s kinda obvious that rpg videogames are computer versions of the analog thing, but I was never exposed to the analog thing. I had no frame or reference for why the game was set up that way. More recently I watched people playing traditional RPG games and it all clicked. I now realize that Ron Perlman’s narration is basically just what the DM would say before your campaign. It’s kind of endearing how Obsidian didn’t try to abstract every mechanic just because it’s a computer game. Modern games are so heavy on the abstraction.

girls FTW!

I’m sorry Lenin, just this once…

One of the most pathetic things is these are 60 and 70 year old men (including Bannon in this) who are treating tech wonderkin as their fountain of youth. This is exactly what Musk does too. The proletariat version of this is dirtbag hot couch guys who are in their 30s and hang out at high school parties. Except the poors are much better at policing that shit.