Open Thread

Open Thread #353

Aaron "Sleazy" Elias

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47 thoughts on “Open Thread #353”

    1. Pop music completely fell off a cliff in the early 2000s. You could probably make a very good argument that the last great band was Nirvana, which had ended its run in 1994. Of course, Kurt Cobain’s suicide led to a boost in popularity but if the singer of some other indie band today would kill himself, nobody would even care. The demise of music is largely due to the Internet removing barriers of entry. There are too many bands and musicians out there. Yet, attention is constant, meaning that even the bigger stars are much less popular than they used to be. People often bring up Taylor Swift as the biggest star in music today, but she is nothing compared to Michael Jackson in the 1980s and 1990s. I would argue that even people like David Bowie or Iggy Pop have had much more cultural impact than Taylor Swift.

    1. Taylor Swift was a down home girl from the American south who made teenage country music. She (or her parents and agent) discovered she could make lots more money making pop music, and her pretty blonde all-American girl appearance filled a gap in a music business where there weren’t many such young girls, who could appeal to both girls and guys (though for different reasons, heh).

      She stayed apolitical and made song after song that was catchy, good music, but nothing special. The marketing was so successful that we kept seeing her as a pure young girl despite the fact that she was a serial ho, and almost every song testified of her latest sexual partner.

      Then of course her looks started fading, which coincided with her suddenly taking a hard leftward turn and releasing a pro-gay “anthem” dissing conservatives and celebrating sexual deviancy.

      Probably just random chance that this switch to sustain popularity through the message of her songs happened around the same time her looks started to fade… 😉

    2. I always saw Gwen as a better looking and more talented Madonna.

      I think I’m biased because I’m from the Orange County punk scene.

    3. GLAS:

      Nah, you’re not biased. I and everyone I knew also immediately thought of Madonna when we first saw her. 🙂

    4. I still have a crush on Gwen. She’s, bar none, the ONLY celebrity I GAF about.

    5. I don’t know what she looks like now (and probably wouldn’t want to know), but as she was back then, for sure! 🙂

    6. I like maybe 6 or 7 Gwen songs, most of them from her time in No Doubt of course. This one’s my favorite from her:

      youtube.com/watch?v=kRpZJ9EgJho

      The song basically screams “please, would somebody knock me up?” It’s low-key a very based song, because it speaks from a woman’s most basic motherhood instinct when she’s approaching the wall and it hasn’t happened for her yet (she was already 30 here).

      Fortunately for her, she’s rich and rich women can get access to the best fertility/obstetrics treatment, so she finally had kids in her late 30’s.

    7. Yes, she’s old now. But Gwen is the type of old school woman that you would want to age along with ????

    9. @GLAS: you had to copy and paste it in the browsing bar. Apparently, I don’t know how to post links that work as links.

      The song is “Simple kind of life”.

    10. Ohhh, now I remember. She’s had so many hits, it’s hard to distinguish. Gwen always had an allure to her. I first thought she was a typical angry 90s girl. But NO!

      She just wanted a hubby and babies 🙂

    12. I’ve often wondered how these female stars come out…are they industry plugs?

      Like, Olivia Rodrigo is some star but her music sounds awful to me.

      I’m more into no names you can find on Bandcamp.

      Some artists are apparently able to get discovered on TikTok, such as Nessa Barrett… don’t mind this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWNYFyZyQNg

    1. I am not going to click on this video. The preview image is enough. In Germany, there are similar incidents. Apparently the foreign doctors and engineers running rampant are experts at “dick game”, i.e. they just jerk off in front of women in public. There was even a case recently where an expert engineer was caught putting his dick into the mouth of a woman who was unlucky enough to have fallen asleep on a train. I am sure this was not a case of rape because she did not object to it.

    2. Yeah, it’s pretty nasty. The urban gentleman urinates not only all over the floor, but also on his own jacket.

      Haven’t heard of “dick game” earlier – charming invention! Doesn’t surprise me, though. Compared to the gang rapes it’s almost civilized…

    4. This video has already disappeared. It is quite horrible how prevalent online censorship nowadays is. Twitter is probably not the best medium for such content anyway. TikTok is less censorious. Telegram may be the best option but sharing content outside of Telegram itself via links does not seem to be possible.

    5. It’s still there for me.

      Are you logged in to Twitter, Aaron? I’ve noticed that over the past few months a lot of tweets are only visible if you’re logged in.

      Twitter has actually turned pretty good under Elon Musk. He’s slowly been rolling back unreasonable rules and expanding freedom of speech.

      You can’t say anything illegal or threaten people, and if you drop the n-word in a tweet it will be censored, but other than that it’s almost a free-for-all.

      A friend of mine made a troll account and stress-tested the system for a bit over a week last month. My friend repeatedly posted things to major Twitter users calling homosexuals “deviants,” trannies “degenerates,” actively posted to black pastors complaining about white supremacy that maybe blacks would be treated better if they didn’t keep attacking and raping people, and so on.

      Not a single strike against him. 🙂

      He only eventually got suspended when he started encouraging people to go to the campus protests in the USA and burning the protesters alive. He encouraged them to target the pro-Palestinians so his post would have a pro-Israeli bias, in order that nobody would worry about a “Jewish influence” adulterating the results of his test.

      So I guess that’s where the line is drawn now: actual incitement and threats. 🙂

    6. Interesting. I wonder why Twitter does not display some tweets to visitors who are not logged in. It could be to conserve bandwidth or perhaps the idea is that this will lead to more users signing up. I am not even sure if I still have an account on there.

    7. I’m pretty sure it’s to get more sign-ups. Apparently a lot of people stopped using the service after Elon took over, either due to personal dislike for him, or due to some of the policy changes he instituted. How well Twitter has done recovering from this in terms of numbers I do not know, but it seems quite a vibrant and active place atm at least. 🙂

    1. The problem is more about the protestant churches in general than with Trump here. The Catholic Church has its problems, nowhere as big as in the US (the pederasty issue is overwhelmingly concentrated there), but protestants are the ones putting up LGBT flags and shit. They’re a cancer for Christianity.

    2. Well, “Protestant” covers a large group of denominations. I’d say both the worst and the most conservative are Protestants. But yeah, I agree that on average, Protestants are worse than Catholicism and Orthodoxy (and the other few that exist).

      Still, it was Trump who chose a female (wtf?) Protestant “pastor” as his adviser.

  6. Betting on woke vidya is not working out. A recent major offender, Alan Wake 2, which replaced a white character of the original game with a fat, black woman has not even made its budget back:
    https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/alan-wake-2-budget-remedy-financials
    The studio behind this game, Remedy, probably should have been closed a decade ago. After the first two Max Payne games they did not produce a single hit. Instead, it seems they survive by signing exclusivity deals.

    Reply

    1. Well, if the information is correct they were married for 13 years, until he decided to cheat on her. Can’t get married and tap the children’s nanny. I don’t fault anyone, man or woman, for divorcing if their partner cheats on them.

      That being said, I don’t know for sure if the information is true or not.

    2. I thought it was common knowledge that Gavin fucked the nanny. Never heard it disputed, not even by Gavin. There’s also a story that Gavin fucked some other male celebrity. I think he admitted to these things.

      But his music in the 90s kicked ass.

    3. Yeah, I have no idea about any of that, man. I just think that divorce is pretty much always justified after adultery.

    4. Agreed. I have to reemphasize that she was my crush when I was young. And I don’t follow these types of stories at all usually. This is literally the only one.

  10. Here’s common scam among Pajeets which further illustrates how backwards they are as a culture.

    Reply

    1. Scamming people by squirting poop onto their shoes and afterwards charging them money for wiping it off sounds like the quintessential Indian pastime. The scam is pretty idiotic. How can anyone in this situation not be suspicious that there is a guy waiting around just to wipe poo off someone’s shoes?

    1. This video was unintentionally hilarious. This is the real India, not the carefully curated version you may get in the West. At this point, though, I think there is a pretty good awareness among the population that India is not quite at the level of the West. There is also growing anti-pajeet sentiment. In tech this is certainly the case. Too many of these people can barely do their job, or can’t actually do it, yet are absolutely obnoxious and entitled.

    2. According to this video, “India is open-defecation free”. I have my doubts. There are statistics on open defecation and toilet usage. For some completely unknown reasons, the data you get from India (or on Wikipedia) differ quite a bit from the observations of third parties.

  14. Twitter never fails to deliver a look at society’s degeneracy:

    https://twitter.com/Alphafox78/status/1786956448414544123

    Interesting to see how genetic material mixes. When whites and Asians have children, their daughters often come out looking like fairytale princesses. The kids in the video above look like they were purchased at the pet store, except for the tallest daughter, but she’s no great beauty. She looks like a poor man’s Zendaya.

    Reply

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