unbibium

for fuck's sake, I started hiding those stupid quizzes and as revenge I'm getting flooded with conservative propaganda in random "suggested for you" posts.

funny thing is, in the preceding months, there's a bunch of further-left actual-socialist stuff suggested in my feed. And when it does make sense, I've usually been afraid to click "like" on any of it because I've been worried about what gets attached to my name on this thing.

Funnier thing is, most of the rightist stuff is telling us which people are bad (Biden, AOC, Fauci, the CDC) and which people are good (only Trump and cops). It's just there to isolate conservatives from information sources, and to prevent cooperation with the enemy, and to the extent that Facebook allows, to prolong the pandemic.

But none of the far-left stuff is about which politicians are bad. it's all actual statements like "the system that keeps people homeless is unjust" and "we only have a weekend because of the labor movement" and "cops do constant and demonstrable harm to civil rights protestors". It's stuff that's as true today as it was in any other time – I've seen a lot of cartoon panels that claim to be from the 1920s. If anyone's being called "bad" then it's usually a kind of profession that they deem to be keeping the working class down, like investors, landlords, or cops. If anyone's being called "good" then it's usually a historical figure who won some right that we enjoy today.

The most hostile left-wing content I've seen on Facebook has been in the Star Trek meme groups I'm in. Every few months I see a big cluster of "throw TERFs out the airlock" memes. Even the LGBT people in my feed never post revenge fantasies like that. As a cis man, I can't really comment "hey that's a little hostile innit?" without getting called out, and that feels stifling. Indeed, if I were of a more paranoid mindset, I'd wonder if that was the point: to post something problematic that's pro-LGBT, and make cis people think "I wish I could criticize that," and thus make us open to the right's "the queers are censoring you" narrative.

anyway I gotta get off that hellsite but it's 75% of my social life, please send help.

I checked to see if pruane2forever got the braces off or if his voice changed; no such luck.

I think I have more celebrities on my Twitter list than friends.

But, a few minor celebrities have responded to me: Lore Sjoberg, Martin Sargent, and the Mars Phoenix rover. Yes, I got a tweet from a robot on another planet.

And Greg Behrendt actually sent me an @-response unsolicited.

But today, I found out John Cleese has not only a twitter account, and that video interview about Sarah Palin, but also a rather extensive web presence.

And in more mundane news, a lot of people I don't recognize are following me. And that was even before I started trolling the election topics.

Twitter listed "ACORN" as a hot political topic. I still don't know why, but I created the tinyURL http://tinyurl.com/acorn08 -- it leads to an acorn flour recipe that was on BoingBoing this week.

I linked to the BoingBoing post itself, instead of the recipe it linked to. I wonder if that's good or bad, because a lot of angry folks are going to click that link.

Nico Nico Douga reminds me of dotsub.

Both are for user-contributed video, with other-user-contributed subtitles.

But NND has an ignorable EULA and a hands-off approach to copyright enfortcement and quality control alike. So there's lots of content, and lots of comment. There are two full-length South Park episodes in English, with a complete set of user-contributed subtitles.

Dotsub makes you qualify to become a translator, and makes you declare the copyright status of everything you upload. As a result, there's nothing there, or there was last time I checked, which was ages ago.

Once again, the best news source: the Doo-Dah News Ticker. Now more than ever during election seasno.

From The 5 Most Annoying Banner Ads On The Internet: 

Worse, they're targeting the most annoying demographic on the planet: the "I only watch it for the ads" vacuum-headed smirkers. This is a public service announcement: SAYING YOU DO NOT LIKE SOMETHING POPULAR DOES NOT MAKE YOU INDIVIDUAL AND EDGY. It makes you dumbass- at least the unoriginal hooting herd enjoy the damn game. You're being equally unoriginal, dumber, and deliberately spending time to point out how you don't like it. Do you think a monkey that repeatedly eats stones and complains about it is the "cool, unique" monkey in among his friends? No, he's the stupid one even in a group whose main hobbies are masturbating in public and throwing shit at each other

The article is an "Americans are dumb and this is proof" rant that I usually don't approve of, but for the past several years, excluding this one, t_h_e_m has been hosting "commercial-watching" parties during the Super Bowl, even though a lot of people really do follow the game. We then voted on te winners, and those of us who didn't follow the game at least had each other to hang out around.

But the first part of the article is right: TV ads are the part of the program we skip on our TiVo, and until digital downloads came around, they were the only way to pay for the part of the programming we care about. Ad-worship is more than a little perverse. It's like a Stockholm Syndrome for consumers. Commercials are not our friends.

Penn's back! Kinda. A small video blog series. Not as good as the radio show, but one of the things I liked most about the radio show was how Penn always had something to say about current events that was 90 degrees off center.

The first one I saw: MAGIC UNDERWEAR!. (It's a little snarky about religion, but don't worry; he agrees with the Pope.)

But, the radio show had the advantage that if he wanted to talk about something he didn't know about, like for example gangs in LA, eventually someone would call in and fill in the blanks or correct him, and often times it would be an expert on the subject with a lot to say. We don't have that here.

This is certainly the best movie I've ever seen with ASCII art in it. (Monar should have had a bigger part!) But if anyone at all finds the two main characters believable, you've got some explaining to do. Maybe it's different in Japan, and maybe the brand of geek I hang out with is of a higher tier of social awareness than that guy. And they make sense in the Romantic Comedy Universe.

One thing that does work in the real universe is how the drunk guy on the train doesn't get confronted by anyone else on the train, and the answer was that Japanese people keep to themselves. That's the one thing that did ring true; countless psychological experiments (and a Dateline episode or two) establish that people in crowds are less prone to heroism, because everyone secretly hopes someone else will be the hero. I wonder how much of Tokyo's culture, and inner city culture throughout the world, is just a result of being in a crowd all the time. It makes the feat of confronting him all that much more extraordinary, and certainly Train Man's stuttery behavior seems natural for someone who's found himself in way over his head.

But, Train Man surprised me by never getting out of stammering mode. At first I didn't buy this, but then I remembered what I was like when I was 21 and attempting to date. I was just as over-apologetic, and stilted, and even self-deprecating. None of the side-splitting wit I'd been famous for online showed through.

Thus, Hermess (the woman) surprised me by cutting him a superhuman level of slack. Is the "friend zone" some unique American tradition that Japanese women don't have as an option? Or was there some chemistry going on that I wasn't tuned into? She gives him more slack than any woman I've ever met has given me, because she meets him way more than halfway. This must be where the movie spends its dramatic license as a romantic comedy. Indeed, this movie is just like an American romantic comedy, but without the Baxter.

The "battlefield manga guys" cutaways, and the commentary also, promote some emerging Japanese ideal that relationships, sex, and all the temptation of the "real world", are only a distraction from anime, manga, and the more important "fantasy world", and the commentary even draws the parallel between otaku and monks. Monks just live in a different kind of fantasy world.

Mostly, I kept comparing the anonymous posters of the mild-mannered text BBS 2ch to what I've read so far on 4chan. The movie depicts Anonymous as a handful of individuals, just like they are in real life, though perhaps not such a small and consistent group of them. But an American Anonymous would have probably been influenced by 4chan and Fox 11, depicted as a single green-faced man in a black suit, spouting all the opinions and advice like a single guy with multiple personalities, and every poignant thing he said would have been followed immediately by "STICK IT IN HER POOPER". For all I know, that's how it went down on 2ch, and the spam and racial slurs and other crap was filtered from the movie, to avoid killing the dramatic buzz and maintain sympathy for the protagonist.

I do think t_h_e_m needs to screen it once. I've heard a lot of random-sounding Japanese titles being flung across the dinner table, and "Densha Otoko" isn't one of them. It'll certainly provoke some discussion.

In this week's diggnation, Kevin and Alex call shenanigans on Tay Zonday, citing as evidence that his youtube profile was too well-produced and the photos too carefully posed to have really been an amateur effort, and the whole point was to get something viral on the web like lonelygirl15.

so, wait... all this for a new Dr. Pepper variation? I don't think so. Too much effort to have kept the secret long for such a minor product. It's been seven months, someone would have figured it out and traced the corporate affiliation back like the old Buddy Lee virals.

But it's a sad statement that every time something gets big, we have to wrap it in a conspiracy theory.

Hey, remember Super Greg?