Archive link: https://archive.ph/oEbD7

I was recently watching the entirety of DS9 with a friend who hadn’t seen the show before. I was super keen for us to get to the point where Word showed up, because I had previously spoken about how he’s so underdeveloped in TNG compared to DS9 (though my friend hasn’t seen TNG either, so it’s not like she had much context for this. She is very patient and I love her for indulging my rants).

Scenes like this are why I was so excited for Worf to join DS9. It’s suchna funny dynamic and it makes so much sense

I love the fact that you wrote this in a science meme sub. I like getting learning alongside my memes

(I’m a biochemist, so I didn’t learn anything in this particular instance, but I frequently find my day brightened by helpful people like yourself, who take the time to explain stuff)

Pole dancing actually requires an incredible level of athleticism, and as such, is a pretty fun way to get in shape. Some people who install a stripper pole in their home will no doubt be the kind of people you describe, but that’s not the only kind of person who might install a pole at home.

I know a couple of people who do pole dancing as a sport and have a pole installed in their home. They’re both people who seem like archetypical examples of people who have their shit together. For these people, installing a pole in their home is analogous to a weightlifter purchasing a squat rack so they can lift at home — basically just a way to practice without having to travel.

I’m not trying to suggest that your caution is unwarranted — if I were the person in the OP, I would feel pretty anxious about knocking on their door about the problem, because it’d feel like a bit of a coin-flip: are they going to be the kind of person who has a full fledged liquor bar in their kitchen, or someone who engages pole-sport as a productive way to stay fit? Because one of those people would likely be much less easy to work through issues with.

I guess my goal in writing this is to convince you that there are at least some people who install a pole in their home who are nothing like the archetype you’re envisioning. I’m not suggesting that they are the majority — I have no idea what the relative prevalence of these different archetypes are. However, they do exist.

Did anything improve after that?

I feel like the target audience is “temporarily embarrassed [billionaires]”^[1]

That is, people who are not billionaires, but like to imagine themselves as having the ability to become one.

[1] the original quote that this is from uses “millionaires” but years of the upwards flow of wealth meant the quote needed some updating.

I am overcome with the desperate desire to share this meme with someone, but I don’t know who.

The tone of voice that William Jackson Harper (Chidi) took in his reply absolutely makes the joke

I have a friend who uses snuff tobacco, and occasionally she’ll add some cocaine to it — she calls it “spicy snuff”

The idea of copyright is to protect the financial rights of creatives, thus incentivising people to make more stuff, right?

Well even before AI, it wasn’t doing its job very well on that front. The only ones with the power and money to be able to leverage copyright to protect their rights are those who are already so powerful that they don’t need those protections — big music labels and the like. Individual creatives were already being fucked over by the system long before AI.

If you haven’t read the article, I’d encourage you to give it a try. Or perhaps this one, which goes into depth on the intrinsic tensions within copyright law.

An extended story that I recently read (or rather, listened to) was “There is no Antiemetics Division”, by qntm. The channel J&V SCP archives have an excellent audiobook-style reading of it, if that’s your thing. It’s not especially scary (though it does have its moments), but stumbling across it really reignited my enjoyment of SCP.

Yeah, it blew my mind.

The thing that did it for me is that I realised that if I tried to imagine an apple, then it wouldn’t have a colour before someone asked me what colour it was. Like, I was simultaneously imagining an apple that was deep red, like what the witch gave to Snow White. But I’m also imagining a green apple, like a granny smith. Or a pink and green one, like a Pink Lady.

Except that doesn’t make sense, because one apple can’t be three different colours simultaneously. I realised that I wasn’t so much visualising an apple, but more like accessing a database entry for apples. e.g.

Apples:

• Can be deep red
• Can be green
• can be pink and green
• can be other colours
• apples are on the first aisle in the big grocery store

Stuff like that.

Taking nudes is really difficult. I’ve never taken nudes per se, but recently I was trying to take some photos that included my body, whilst wearing some sexy clothing. That shit takes some skill.

One tip that I discovered is that using your phone’s regular camera rather than your front facing camera makes a big difference. To get this right, you ideally need to use a mirror so that you can see what’s on your screen as you’re getting the angles right. I found that positioning my phone higher and pointing it slightly downwards was best. Finding a way to securely position my phone to make this work was a bitch.

If you’re using your backward facing camera, then you’ll probably need to set your phone to take the image on a timer. Alternatively some smart watches can be used to trigger the photograph without you having to get up from your sexy pose to press the button on your phone (which risks knocking your phone out of position). Alternatively, once you’ve found the right angle and pose, you can try taking a video of you posing and then extracting frames from that video later.

The experience left me with a greater level of respect for people who take good nudes.

I’m younger than you (born 1995), but I share some of your feelings. The internet today is so different from how I remember it as a kid. I am immensely grateful that I got to experience some of that period of rapid change.

The fact that you, a human, asked this question, and got a variety of human replies is why I would say no.

I know that the dead internet theory doesn’t say that all internet activity is bots, but certainly the internet that I experience, there is abundant humanity.

However, I am a nerd who inhabits quite niche spaces, so my experience is far from the typical. Having the knowledge and stubbornness to find spaces like this puts me in a kind of bubble, where it’s hard for me to gauge whether we’re actually at the point of “dead internet”.

In all likelihood, my answer is “no”, because I need it to be. I love the internet. I grew up online, and as a very lonely child, the internet was a key part of my identity formation. As an adult, the internet is how I access community and learning. As grim as things are, I think I’m a utopian at heart.

Like I say, I realise that my online experience is far from what most people experience, and I do find it sad that most people probably do experience a much deader internet than I do. But the reason why I’m here, putting time and care into comments like this is because this is one of the ways that I am trying to keep the internet alive. “Dead” is a binary, which suggests the battle is already over. I believe the internet is dying, for sure, but I can’t reconcile the notion of a dead internet with all the vibrant communities of people who are making stuff they care about, in defiance of the slop economy.

This is a dangerous way of thinking. It’s not far off from the logic that Israelis use to justify the killing of children, who they argue are predisposed to become terrorists.

There is nothing intrinsic to IDF soldiers that make them capable of perpetrating a genocide. The vitriol that fuels them is built up over years of sociocultural conditioning, and no-one is immune to that. It’s important that we recognise this if we want to avoid creating a world with more people who think like this.

I like Riesling, so I’m gonna have to go with slate

I’m intrigued by solo TTRPGs. Is there a particular one you can recommend?

Glad you’re still with us!

I like the vibe of the meme, but it’s a tad ahistorical.

For example, I was recently reading about how the wide farthingale skirt of the 16th and 17th centuries really pissed men off. In modern feminist thought, we often hear women talk about “taking up more space” — well the farthingale was a literal way of doing that.

Of course, fashion trends like this are inextricable from the power of wealth and patriarchy, but the same could be said for the ways in which we struggle against those same power systems today. It surprised me to read of this because I think I used to think about historic fashion as an inconvenient thing that was forced onto women, but it’s far more complex.

In short, if you’re striving to be weird, you’re not doing a thing that was denied to generations of women before you, but in fact building upon a long tradition of fighting for self expression in a world that tries to suppress this. I wrote this comment because I actually find this framing to be even more empowering. It makes me want to be even weirder, to honour the people who came before me who fought to give me this kind of freedom I have.

The freedom we have nowadays comes with many constraints and caveats, but thinking of myself as being the latest in a long line of weird women who refuse to conform makes me think about the people who will come after me. Maybe 100 years from now, historians will be looking at memes like this, or written accounts of women scoffing at men who say shit like “you know, you would be pretty if you didn’t ruin yourself with [short hair / dyed hair / piercings / alternative fashion / black lipstick]”