rwhitisissle
I miss the weird edginess of the internet. The reality is that the internet was a place that kids got warned about being full of weirdos and dangerous types. And they weren’t wrong. The thing is, that also made it interesting and full of fascinating content. And it was largely unregulated and uncensored because the people in power were too old to understand or care about it. Now with things like KOSA and the centralization of the internet around a few megaplatforms, there’s less variety and creativity. The internet has become an endless soup of banal, milquetoast content. Vaguely appealing to everyone, but not greatly appealing to anyone.
From a narrative standpoint, Spider-Man’s entire thing is thematically tied to the idea that “no good deed goes unpunished.” Peter Parker’s academic, professional, and social life all pay a price to enable his crime fighting. Spider-Man 2 does a good job of portraying that. After he stops the train that was about to crash in his fight with Doc Ock, he gets lifted up, arms outstretched, looking like a crucified Jesus. He suffers for the sake of others. It’s honestly a nice contrast to people like Tony Stark for whom being a billionaire playboy superhero has historically (if not in the Marvel movies) been depicted as coming with a fairly comfortable life. Well, at least ignoring the part of his backstory where he went homeless because of his alcoholism. But that was in the eighties, I think.
picture of handwritten note taped to a window that criticizes Gen Z and praises Baby Boomers.
I’m not the brightest cookie in the toolshed but I know bait when I see it.
Edit: The top left hand corner of this is also dated 4/20. As the Brits would say “Someone’s taking the piss.”
follows Velma who is an amazing girl-boss who solves all the mysteries
Velma as a character was a lot of things, but she was mostly an insufferable, pathologically egotistical narcissist with hallucinatory delusions and severe mommy issues. Like, the show was horribly written, don’t get me wrong, but let’s not act like she was a Mary Sue.
Dress codes serve as class signifiers. Like most rules of decorum, they’re cultural artifacts used to delineate the haves from the have-nots. They don’t dislike the fact that Fetterman refuses to wear a suit. They dislike the fact that he dresses like the common people he actually represents. Whereas they dress like the people they represent - capitalist oligarchs. They’re wanting to close ranks and keep people from realizing that not everyone in the senate serves the same masters.
I’m actually a huge fan of scalping and hope it happens more. Here’s why: many of your more dim-witted, more or less middle-class “free market” bros will gladly tell you that the value of a good is set by supply and demand. Hospital care is so expensive because there are comparatively few doctors, MRI machines, etc. in comparison with the entire population. Houses are so expensive because everyone wants a house and it’s an appreciable asset. I’ve seen these people my entire life. They’ll decry socialism and make the age old joke that “socialism is when no potato.” But the second a PS5 gets a street price of 700 bucks, suddenly they become walking “Homer Simpson fading into the hedge and coming back out wearing a different outfit” memes. They’ll say things like “scalping should be illegal” or “the government should step in to make sure that the actual consumers who want one can get one - nobody should be allowed to buy 500 of them and just sit on them forever.” Suddenly, market economics produces a state of inequality that doesn’t directly benefit them, and the guiding hand of the government should be used to ensure equitable distribution of resources. Not that they’d ever reflect on this in any way or consider how their personal experiences indicates a larger set of structural problems with the economic systems that produce such a state of affairs.
Baby Boomers practically invented the participation trophy. It’s why millennials got so many. And I’ve literally never heard a Baby Boomer complain about them. I’ve only ever heard about Gen X folks and below complain about them.
It’s an end of an era. I’ve been on reddit for over a decade, and on youtube for even longer. Crazy to think I might be giving up both of those services within a few months of each other. Feels like the internet is dying. Oh well. Maybe I’ll go back to reading a shitload.