BabaIsPissed [he/him]

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  • 34 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2022

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  • It reads as parody so much that I was actually kind of enjoying it. I mean the scene with the Teslas crashing, Havana Syndrome, “Death to America, I remember it from the videogame”, the 13 year old girl quoting West Wing, all the nonsense pontificating about random bullshit like Friends, the camera zooming and twisting for no discernible reason, I thought I was picking up on some deep contempt for lib neurosis and vapidness and it got a laugh out of me a couple of times. Pausing it to check out who made it was a mistake, soured the rest of the thing. It might have been ruined by the runtime anyway so no big loss.



  • The video consists of like 2 hours of some examples of youtube plagiarism, with discussion of content mills and the beginning of an interesting point about how plagiarists view the people they steal from as lesser, which is not expanded upon as much as it should IMO.

    The other 2 hours are about James Somerston, a gay video essayist that basically Frakensteined a bunch (if not all) of his videos from queer authors, some well known, a lot of them not. By the end Hbomb makes a good point about erasure, and how young queer people don’t understand their history in part because of people like Somerston.

    I’m generally not annoyed by length since I’m a zoomer and watch everything at 2x or more, but in this case I get the point because it actually took me 2 real time hours to watch and I felt there was a lot that could have been cut. I still won’t watch the 3 hour scorcese movie, fuck all of you, movies ARE too long now.

    I went on a ramble about the video that should probably be a separate comment, feel free to ignore

    So regarding video length I think there’s some value in going into detail about how plagiarism takes place. Some of this context is also relevant as a way to preempt any shitty response (for example he took the time to explain that Somerston’s assistant writer is most likely not in on it and how his boss has shown signs of setting him up as a scapegoat).

    He also seems to genuinely care about James’s plagiarism because he’s bi himself. I’m currently having a bout of insomnia, and was reading The Gentrification of the Mind before making the mistake of opening hexbear and seeing a new hbomb video was out, and while these two are not comparable in content, I found it interesting to experience them back to back, and since a bit of the vibe is there, I believe Harris is sincere about why he cares about it (also Vito Russo’s name popped up in both, so I guess this is a sign that I should add The Celluloid Closet to my reading list).

    However, the video does feel petty. Hbomb has this mean streak to him that served him really well when he was directly responding to right wing talking points, but is a lot less useful when talking about stuff like this, which becomes a problem when it’s a large chunk of the video. He kind of recognizes it too, saying this feels like a drama video, and how he’s donating all ad revenue to people James plagiarized from.

    It does feel more appropriate when you consider that most of these people are reactionary pieces of shit and that should have been a much larger part of the video. He mentions it a bit (the first guy is a chud, internet historian tries to hide that he’s a chud, Somerston came from business school and seems to hate women) and talks about contempt for the people they copy from, but I feel there’s a lot more to dig into. What about contempt for the audience? What is the frame of mind of people that trend chase for years, sometimes decades, in order to garner an audience? That think regurtitating Wikipedia is worthy of other people’s time? He says it was always like this mentioning AVGN copycats, but was it really? While the incentive structure didn’t change how plagiarism takes place, didn’t the kind of people that did the plagiarizing change? I think exploring this thoroughly is a lot more interesting than “showing the receipts” by comparing the copied work to the original for most of the runtime.

    I still think it was worth a watch, but that’s because I was already familiar with Somerston and some of the other people and they gave me the video essay equivalent of the ick. This should have been 2 hours at most.







  • They do once their depression gets better though? Anhedonia, loss of interest/libido/attention/whatever the fuck else are symptoms of depression. I’m all for self-improvement, my own mental health improved greatly as a result of trying to improve myself, to the point I consider myself no longer depressed. But we’re social creatures and no one builds self-confidence and mental resilience in a vacuum. It’s often up to the depressed person to put themselves out in situations where this can happen, but sometimes it does not work out for whatever reason and the whole thing is a long process. In this situation self-compassion is a lot better than telling yourself you’re a sack of shit.

    Also, isn’t the interesting life thing all backwards? If you like a person you get curious and find them interesting. If I like a guy I’ll find what they are into cool, be it singing, playing chess or knowing a lot about bugs.

    No one is owed that kind of attention, but most people are worthy of compassion.







  • 1 - Some of the appeal of the books is present in the series, specially early seasons, so there’s that. More cynically, it’s probably the first instance of medieval fantasy prestige TV (I know there was other stuff like Pillars of the Earth and whatnot but those didn’t have the HBO brand) so there was some novelty to it. Borrowing from Lindsay Ellis, it’s “hot fantasy that FUCKS”. It’s juvenile as all hell and eyeroll inducing but it was key to marketing it to general audiences.

    2 - decent 7 while it was running because of the whole social aspect and no hindsight of how shit it was going to get, light 3 now, and a 0 if you’re in any way averse to gratuitous violence/sex.

    3 - I think the appeal of the books that transfers to the series is a) some of the characters and b) the politicking.

    The problem with the characters is that they get flanderized to all hell later on, or sometimes it becomes clear the showrunners didn’t really understand them, or at least didn’t know what to do with them. But still, some of them are compelling, even if they are fucking assholes.

    I think the core appeal of GoT though is seeing an inflection point in the history of this fictional world. Not because there’s wars going on, but because characters like Jon and Daenarys (not coincidentally fan favorites) are struggling to surpass the “might makes right” world they live in, and sometimes succeeding. Also because of the growing presence of supernatural shit. It gives this feeling of this new world peeking in and all the promise and terror that comes with this kind of change. The show fumbles both os these aspects REALLY hard later on though. That’s because it bought into the “dark fantasy” meme and played down the supernatural aspects (nerd shit) and made a U turn back to the status quo (the last few episodes reek of liberalism).

    4 - Typical to early seasons in some ways in the sense that it borrows heavily from the books, but the focus shifts to war stuff so there’s some distinction there.

    5 - it’ been a while since I’ve seen the series, but seasons 1-4 are pretty decent, 5 is okayish, 6 was pretty bad and 7-8 are atrocious.

    6 - Dunno, not a native speaker. I was fine with subtitles off most of the time though.

    7 - Haven’t watched The Sopranos yet, but GoT has probably one of the worst endings I’ve ever seen.







  • u did the thing we designed the game to push you towards doing don’t you feel bad u monster lolololol

    To be fair to the game that’s only the bait and switch at the very start with Toriel, designed to make the player reload and introduce the save meta-fuckery with Flowey. From then on the only incentive to do violence is getting stuck at a puzzle or completionism (which is at the heart of the meta-narrative).

    The commentary on violence by itself is naive though (even the game points it out at one point) and if you don’t like the characters or roll your eyes at 4th wall stuff the whole thing falls apart pretty quick.