tiktok is such an awful app, it's almost designed to feed you misinformation and expose you to insane discourse. unlike beloved tumblr, the app that feeds me misinformation and exposes me to insane discourse

No, no, no, you see on tiktok an algorithm feeds you misinformation. On Tumblr I feed myself misinformation from my charcuterie board of hand-selected unhinged mutuals.

None of that mass market junk. Only artisanal, small batch, sustainably cultivated, fair trade horseshit.

I think I've figured out why the fact that so many people I know use generative ai to do things like write emails for them bothers me so much is that. Like. You're not even participating in your own life. I get that emails are boring and sometimes even challenging to write but you are communicating with other humans. The words written will represent your ideas and your feelings and you as a person. If you can't be bothered to do that, if you're so far removed from human connection that you don't care if people get the real you or a computer imitating you, then you've already lost. We've all lost.

I applied for work, to my shame, at a company as a copywriter to train AI to write better and more emotionally tactful and realistic text. And one of the exercises I was given as part of the application was a couple of questions on how to reword a letter to someone thanking them for a book that had been given as a birthday present that they may have already had. I think that if someone I knew was checked out of our relationship enough to use AI to write me a thank you letter for a book I gave them and I found out, they'd likely never hear from me again. It's honestly a step below a form letter level of insulting. At least at one point, you composed the form letter yourself. Or maybe if you're a bougie you had a secretary do it. (See Roger Thornhill: North By Northwest near the beginning.) Here? Nah. You just had a computer 'think' for you because I'm unimportant enough for you to even use thought in my direction in an email. I got two words for that. Fuck and You.

My main visceral reaction to people using generative AI for stuff like coming up with characters for RPGs is "How fucking DARE you play a collaborative storytelling game when you care so little about it that you're outsourcing your fucking imagination to a computer?"

The saga continues....

I’m watching Splash (1984) which is a romcom about a guy who falls in love with a mermaid, and when she chooses a human name she chooses Madison and guy says “that’s not a real name, but alright” which seems to imply that Madison was not a name until at least the 80’s and all girls named Madison are actually named after the mermaid. thought you should know

I think...you might be right

what the fuck

it's fucking me up how tv shows, movies, and even video games can't be "niche" content anymore

like nothing can be underrated anymore. it HAS to be a success. cartoons have to either be spongebob level successes with immediate marketing or they're shelved a season or two in.

Movies have such inflated budgets that they NEED to break a billion in the box office just to make back what they cost. Anything less than a blockbuster smash is turned into a tax write-off.

a single triple A video game can destroy an entire studio if it doesn't meet expectations, which are already lofty enough as it is.

and everything has to appeal to the widest demographic possible, which can mean sterilizing anything creative about the work so it becomes as palatable as possible.

idk im just sad about this

Indie video games are filling the niche for niche entertainment on that side of things, but the main portion of the industry has absolutely gotten to that point.

The chase for more and more insane graphics, framerates and resolutions well beyond what any human can even perceive, has directly caused the costs and timeframes for game development to balloon to horrifying heights, and the games end up looking dated far more quickly than games that don't participate in that chase. There's a reason one of the people behind Fallout called it "The Fidelity Death Cult".

And Indie gaming has only really exploded the way it has because Steam and its competitors have opened the way for developers to not have to deal with publishers at all. There's not really any alternative to studios when it comes to getting movies and TV series made, so they're hit far worse with it.

Next step: kiwifarms

A fucking womb transplant, what an incredible thing. Fair play to all involved. A positive news story amidst all the dire shite.

while being depressing, this is also sort of fascinating to me bc there’s something so…inauthentic here. what i mean is that if you saw something like this back in say 2001 (which you probably wouldn’t, at least for carl’s jr. but i digress) it would seem tacky but in a “sex sells” sort of way.

seeing this in 2025, it’s clearly purely a political statement and you can tell partially bc the image itself is so oddly sexless. it’s like there’s more titillation in the prospect of “owning the libs” than in the image of the scantily clad blonde white woman itself.

There’s this idea on the right that the libs or wokes hate blonde, busty, conventionally attractive white women. I believe it’s a conviction borne of projection: they hate us and all our beliefs and aesthetics, therefore we must do the same. We see this in the idolization of Sydney Sweeney that lasted all of minute until they realized she wasn’t one of them. We see this in the Fox News hostess/Republican Stepford Wife look. Of course it’s nonsense, I love busty blondes as much as the next lesbian, but there’s this conviction that waving a conventionally attractive blonde woman in our faces is owning us.

Of course it is a signifier. Desire is a product of culture. A blonde, youthful, white but tanned, light-eyed, skinny woman: you don’t need to be a sociologist to see the cultural forces, most obviously white supremacy, which would generate and reinforce that as the epitome of sexual attractiveness.

But with the original, as the OP notes, it was sincere and unexamined. It was calculated, yes, but calculated to sell burgers. Here is the all-American Beauty—Marilyn Monroe, Farrah Fawcett, Pamela Anderson—and a burger. You want the girl, because every piece of media you’ve seen since birth days that is what beauty is and that you should desire her, she’s eating a burger, and enjoying it, almost as much as she’d enjoy you, so now you want the burger! Maybe they briefly considered that it’d piss off feminists or conservatives but hey, that’d be free publicity, advertising for the advertising! Now it’s purely a product not to sell a product but to signify a place in the culture war. “Trump won, chud culture is ascendant, therefore we’re going back to our pre-woke ways! Not out of conviction or desire, but to signal out allegiance to the president and his base we’re on their team!”

The original was selling the American Dream: a hot, juicy burger, an ice cold Coke, getting lucky with the girl next door in a new American made car. This is selling a simulacra, the phantom of the American Dream not for its own sake, not to enjoy, but to show contempt for those you hate.

My partner and I were discussing this post, and he pointed out the weirdly bad Photoshop in the ad. While I recognize that it probably was a decision made to be cheap as fuck, it further speaks to this sanitization of the original. The old Carl's commercials were about the experience--her hands dug into the bun, the sauce dripping on the titties. In this ad, she's clearly not even actually holding anything in her hand. She's not looking like she's enjoying the visceral experience. For being a sex-sells ad, it's downright prudish.

Maybe it's just because the people they're siding with hate the idea of anyone ever enjoying anything?

The rich assholes running things are so consumed with greed that they're incapable of joy, so they want everyone else just as miserable as they are.

When the health food store unionized, something wild happened that I thought was just a goofy one-off, but makes more sense now.

There was a big push to eliminate "degrading jobs" but the strategy was to eliminate the position, then create a new position outside of the bargaining unit to do the work. So like, we wouldn't have dishwashers, but we'd have people who washed dishes that weren't eligible to be in the union.

I was like A) what the actual fuck? Dish washing isn't "degrading", it's fucking vital. B) What the actual fuck? You want to create a union just to exploit different people?

There were enough of us to be like "Absolutely the fuck not," and put a stop to it, but I was absolutely flummoxed that people involved in a union would say that out loud. Working with more leftists now, it makes sense.

I think it was coming from a background that viewed labor as necessary to accomplish anything, but advocated for the equitable distribution of the gains made by labor... and then being thrown in with people who just thought labor was icky.

The first time someone told me that busing tables was "degrading", I was like "Oh, uhh, yeah, like it's very necessary work but under compensated for how vital it is?" and they responded "No, touching plates that other people have eaten off of is disgusting."

But I want to eat off of clean plates. So somebody is going to have to touch/clean those plates. And I respect that person and want them to be able to afford to live.

Those people sound like a guy I'd make up to be mad at.

I mean, that job definitely had a Truman Show vibe. If they hadn't been in-person interactions, I'd think I was getting trolled.

Just to put a bow on it:

In bargaining, someone on the Union side suggested that we eliminate all the cashiers and exclusively use self-checkouts (they were a cashier and didn't like it). The organizer told them that the union wasn't in the habit of eliminating bargaining unit positions. (This is the same person I've talked about how said that "as a prison abolitionist" we just needed to execute most criminals.)

When I explained holiday scheduling (time off requests granted in order of seniority, shifts assigned in reverse order of seniority). Someone was angry and said that time off requests potentially being denied "wasn't in the spirit of the union". When I pointed out that our departments made like 30% of our annual revenue between Thanksgiving and New Years and that required production staff to be working, they said that we just needed to create a class of positions ineligible for the bargaining unit that wouldn't be able to request time off. (Which again, most of us figured we'd just rotate holidays or something, but assumed that some holiday production was mandatory.)

I was on leftie tiktok (as a creator) for a bit and I saw this attitude there as well. I specifically remember one argument around cleaners where someone said that employing a cleaner was, like, ethically bad, and that "after the revolution" we wouldn't have cleaners.

It got me thinking, along with Ann Russell talking about how to treat cleaners (being a cleaner herself), about how we conceptualise domestic service as particularly degrading in all its forms, when, really, why is that? Why is paying someone to do something intrinsically bad?

Like, even in a moneyless, gift economy society, there would still be people whose primary contribution to their communities would be cleaning. Some people like to clean, and are really rather good at it.

I've talked ad nauseam in the past about how British attitudes towards cleaners and other service based positions today are the descendants of Victorian attitudes. That is, both the attitudes of conservatives and many progressives of that time. The trade union movement was particularly exclusionary towards service workers.

I think people on the left thinking about forms of labour can sometimes be worse than people on the right. People who have taken these positions generally just conceptualise them as something you need to do to get by, and there are particular employers where these positions are degrading but in general the jobs themselves aren't.

Yeah, that really sums it up. There's stuff that needs to get done, so I'll never be of the opinion that it's degrading work. I worked in kitchens for a long time, and every other position is reliant on having clean dishes, so nobody can really be "above" washing dishes. The shitty thing about washing dishes or busing tables is how people treat the people doing it. The work itself is vital.

And some of those jobs are like, sure, you can throw almost any warm body at it and get it done adequately, but you still run into people where you're like "Holy shit, you're good at this."

People doing a job most people don't want to do should be paid MORE in order to get people to do it. That's how it would work if we weren't mired in a schema assuming that less-frequently-desired jobs are the province of people who "can't do better" and "deserve" poverty because they have less value as people.

Spent 20 minutes editing the Casino Royale poker scene to be chutes and ladders instead of finishing my English homework.

"No, Mister Bond, I expect you to slide."

[ID: An edited screenshot from Casino Royale. James Bond and Le Chiffre sit on opposite sides of a poker table. Between them is a chutes and ladders board along with the cardboard spinner. END ID]

"Do you have wood for my sheep, Mister Bond?"

comrade danny

And this is why we love Danny DeVito

reblog to give your headache to elon musk instead

On the topic of English people being shitheads towards Welsh people - This fucking dude today on AITA

Yeah pretty sure we’re all hoping for a divorce on this one lol

how did this fucker say it’s “not as bad as it sounds” and then somehow end up being even worse than it sounds by the fourth sentence

That’s what we call growth.

biggest reason i make so many flop posts on here is because everything i do reeks of the desperation to make a popular tumblr post. this is deliberate, because it is what protects me from ACTUALLY making a popular tumblr post. so long as i crave it, tumblr fame will never find me. it is only when i turn away, and accept my fate of obscurity, that people will lay their eyes upon me. and it WILL be because i tripped and fell on my stupid face while i was turning

time for people to do the funniest thing ever

Do not.

STOP no more live-action remakes. We're going the other way now. Animated Casablanca. Animated The Godfather. Animated Oppenheimer. Animated Fight Club.

Animated Goncharov.

Definitely that one.

unless, hear me out...

Muppet Goncharov

Look at these idiots who haven't seen Gonzorov (1993).

Reblogging entirely for Gonzorov.

Jk’s having another tantrum.

as if any one in the mainstream actually cares enough about ace people and asexuality day to warrant this big of a crashout.

we don’t even get recognized by our own community and ace people are just kinda a little slice of the internet bc of all of the fucking hate we get for no reason.

‘not wanting a shag’ exists just as much as men liking men. both can exist. i do not understand why… why this has anything to do with her?

like you aren’t lgb AND you hate trans people AND this isn’t a womens’ issue (and you’re not making it one) so why? genuinely trying to fathom where this came from and how anyone can claim she isn’t just an attention seeking ignorant bully after this.

She just keeps digging deeper and deeper into the HP Lovecraft Memorial Cesspit to find a place to shove her legacy.