I second most of these other recommendations, but since I haven’t seen them said yet, The Magnetic Fields. Somehow manages to be funny while also being very geniune and touching, which I think is kind of what I look for in a band.

“What do you know about bionicles lore?”

Yeah no I hate songs in books. Most of the time it’s pretty hard to figure out what the actual tune of the song is supposed to be sung like, unless the author’s pretty good at it, and most aren’t.

I dunno, I’m sure there’s a more complicated and interconnected series of events which lead to them truly being popular, not least of which was the movies, but in terms of how they’re structured, it kind of makes sense to me why they were a successful fiction. The various different houses, even though they’re mostly indistinguishable from one another internal to the books, give kids something to identify with and self-categorize into, which is something that teenagers kind of love doing in a struggle for identity. They’re also part of the hidden world subgenre, which means it’s even easier for tweens to self-insert into.

Then, I think it also helps that they’re kind of poorly written, weirdly enough. Every character isn’t usually a real, fleshed out individual, they’re just an archetype, and a shorthand, a common trope. I think this is probably desirable for a tween audience, and I think probably also a simple to follow plot and set of plot elements is also more desirable. There’s no lore to keep up with, it’s just like you’ve taken a bunch of other tropes from other, better works and compressed them into an easily digestible series of books full of melodrama. It’s not super hard to understand. Those other books, they’re like the various PDAs and shit you’d see floating around in the 90’s, they’re explicit works of art constructed for a singular purpose. Harry potter is like an ipod touch, or an iphone, or something, it’s just engineered to have more mass appeal at the expense of complexity and possibly quality.

i’m a paid troll.

Wait, you guys are getting paid?

cause it’s cool and I like it, which should be reason enough. more practically it works for cases when you lose your remote, maybe cases where you want to change the channel on some TV in a pub somewhere, shit like that. it’s fun.

Every time it comes up I must lament the switch to screens too tall to watch content, the decision to remove wired 3.5mm jacks in order to drive sales of wireless headphones, the switch to increasingly fewer physical buttons. No more IR blaster.

“Dead in the middle of Little Italy, little did we know that we riddled some middlemen who didn’t do diddily.”

Yeah. I just kinda write how I talk a lot of the time. The commas end up being necessary because I kind of naturally talk backwards, yoda-style. If I had/wanted to commit more time to this, I also probably would’ve written a shorter letter.

Yeah, but I’m conscious of it. I’ve kind of thrown out conceptions of unbiased news as being something that even exists in the first place anyways, so I’d rather at least have something that sort of, is given from a perspective I understand, and which conforms to whatever my standards for information are, rather than just having like, unbiased reporting on events.

The decision of what events to cover isn’t necessarily going to be unbiased, the decision of what language to use when covering those events isn’t necessarily unbiased, the decision of which sources the “unbiased” news trusts for their reporting isn’t necessarily unbiased. I would kind of rather just have a news source that I can sort of, trust to do it’s job, and present me with information that I can understand, and know what to do with, rather than a news source where I have to do my own journalism to find out whether or not their story really means anything as a whole.

If you understand and can more thoroughly comprehend the bias of the news you’re given, it’s easier to kind of push it through the framework and turn it into easy to consume gelatinous news paste.

Stupidly, anything that requires too much of a time commitment, which has led me easily to death by a million cuts. I’m conscious of my zoomer mentality in this respect, but it’s much easier to generally piss away all your time on like, 50 tiktoks, that all last 5 seconds, compared to a TV show or a movie or whatever. The secondary effect, understated, I think, of this, and I think this is the kind of, horrible advantage of those platforms, is that you will inevitably spend more time trying to find stuff to look at that interests you, rather than actually watching content, so I think they can skate by a little more with a little less content. More efficient for them, less efficient for you.

I find myself doing the same thing with 10 minute youtube videos, but I also will end up watching multiple hour long video essays on random garbage, so I don’t really know what that’s about. Maybe just easier to convince myself that it’s a “productive” activity, to learn about some random nonsense, as compared to engaging in some sort of probably wholly escapist form of media, that might in reality lend itself towards an easier foothold for conversations with other people? I dunno, maybe the problem is just kind of trying to look at media in terms of its pure utility value, rather than looking at media through some other lens.

Certainly, I think the biggest contributing factor is just environment. I’m on my computer and phone a lot more than on my e-reader or my TV, so I naturally engage with the easier to access forms of media found on those platforms. Regression to the lowest condom domino gator, or whatever.

Also, I feel like I’ve seen enough people answer “anime” that the anime… subs? boards? communities? communities sounds a little too long. Anyways, it should be more popular, but I really haven’t seen any engagement on any of them, the anime holes.

I’ve watched “some more news” a couple of times, I found them pretty alright. They’re pretty clearly biased, they’re just biased in a direction that I tend to like more than others. Still kind of, full of stupid skits though, and for the comedy, ymmv, certainly, it doesn’t really land for me at all. Quality of the information is kind of. Iffy, it would seem like, but I haven’t looked into it that hard.

don’t knock the choccy milk protein shake powder, that stuff can be pretty good sometimes. it’s mostly just that you gotta shell out a buttload for it most of the time, for the stuff that actually tastes good.

have you tried chocolate milk flavored protein shake? or does that not quite hit the same, for you?

I tend to think that twd is fiction, and the people who negan piss off, who want to kill negan, only need to get lucky once, while negan needs to keep succeeding over and over (I’ve never seen the walking dead tho I’m just kind of going based on vibes).

I’m not the smartest guy or the most well read or what have you, but the idea is basically that whenever someone becomes overtly greedy or authoritarian, the mutual benefits of co-operation kind of ensure that this is a non-issue. Everyone that’s co-operating would simply choose not to co-operate with that person, or that organization, and then they end up not getting very far. Maybe if it turns violent, then the same thing happens, just in that everyone kind of mutually crushes the organization, or dissolves it, or what have you.

You know I think the point most people fire back with is that authoritarianism tends to be thought of as like, more effective, right, because they can “make the trains run on time”, or some such nonsense, but I think they’re just conflating this with the idea that authoritarianism is more effective in a crisis, which is partially why authoritarianism is constantly inventing crises to combat. The idea, basically, is that if you have a singular leader, you can pivot and accommodate things more easily, make judgement calls easier, and you gain a capacity for rapid response. This is, you know, questionable, things end up being more complicated in practice, and leaving everything to a singular point of failure is a pretty easy way to make a brittle system. At the same time, even were it completely true, it’s still only true for the short term, that it’s more effective for short term gains. Long term gains, mutual co-operation, is much more effective.

Basically, the refutation is that greed isn’t really a fundamental component of humanity insomuch as it is a choice, and anarchism tends to think that greed is a pretty bad one. Not only for everyone but the greedy, but just generally, for mutual, long term gains. If you change the environment significantly enough that you can ensure this is more overwhelmingly the case at the macro scale, then you’ve kind of “won” anarchism, in a sense, you’ve won the game.