"Dark Brandon, first of his name, wearer of aviators, passer of major legislation, slayer of republican bullshit, Commander commander." @AndreaR9Md https://t.co/VJ40xGYI8C
— Sharon Barrett (she, her) ?? (@sbarrt) August 8, 2022
When the vibes shift, as the era changes, a new meme rises…
It's called law and order, and we're going to have it pic.twitter.com/lYMccepGtL
— snek ???? (@thee_snek) August 8, 2022
The “Dark Brandon” meme is probably one of the most organic and effect repurposing of a negative slogan I’ve seen in a long time.
Good job, y’all. pic.twitter.com/9ZZn1oCThc— Maya Contreras (@mayatcontreras) August 7, 2022
True story!
The funniest thing about Dark Brandon is that the meme was originally invented by Chinese propaganda cartoonists. pic.twitter.com/Ouj8UV9evu
— Noah Smith ?????? (@Noahpinion) August 7, 2022
https://t.co/GaLNaBsiUb pic.twitter.com/yj1f2NEW1K
— William B. Fuckley (@opinonhaver) August 8, 2022
dude won the election because he was like nah those online weirdos are fuckin nerds I’m gonna tell goofy old man stories and be nice to people and ignore the internet sickos, it’s objectively hilarious the sickos are now concern trolling over a joke about this
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) August 8, 2022
mr president, the nerds are doing funny pictures about you on the internet. yes, a bit like that that vegetable thing, the onion it was called, sir, that's right https://t.co/VbXIONIxCY
— flglmn (@flglmn) August 8, 2022
Agreed. This is why Dark Brandon works: because it's Joe-freaking-Biden, the moderate's moderate for 50 years, a grandpa who likes cycling and ice cream and thinks Delaware is a nice place. He cannot be cringed, but he can make edgy things cringe, and he should. https://t.co/2KjfcDo1IT
— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) August 8, 2022
2/2 I laughed at the Biden /Obama memes in 2016 and I was proud to vote for him in 2020 (no need to hold my nose). I'm proud to have him as my President now. He's a great person and a good president and I truly hope he knows that he makes us so very proud #DarkBrandonToTheRescue
— THEE TreBien (@TreBien_Beauty) August 8, 2022
Baud
I was wondering who came up with it.
Kropacetic
Keep up the Joementum!
Betty Cracker
I mentioned downstairs that I had to explain the genesis of the “Brandon” thing to my normie husband last night so he could comprehend the “Dark Brandon” memes. As my gran used to say, when life gives you stupid lemons, make stupid lemonade.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Stupid can be fun when the power is used for good.
ETA: That said, memes don’t vote. Need people to turn out. (Or Dark Brandon will get you).
Anne Laurie
@Baud: I first ran across it on James Palmer‘s twitter feed, if you have the google-fu to track back a couple months…
Oops, May 2021, actually…
Baud
@Anne Laurie:
I wonder if the concept was some sort of secret protest by a dissident artist.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Pretty much.
I guess I’m very on-line, not quite extremely on-line, and I can guess at what “chan culture” is and have a vague idea why it’s bad, from context I’m guessing that “fashwave” refers to fascist, not fashion, but I wouldn’t bet a lot on that. Also, too, I don’t really care. I’m a bit surprised the guy worried about “chan culture” works for Bloomberg and not…. whatever now fills the place Salon or Gawker had ten or twelve years ago.
lowtechcyclist
I hadn’t even heard of Dark Brandon before yesterday. Now I want him on a t-shirt. (And yes, there are t-shirts.)
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
You can tell who’s a Republican by how their feelings are hurt by things that help Democrats.
Betty Cracker
@Baud:
That’s the aspirational motto engraved on the Cracker coat of arms!
Scout211
@Betty Cracker:
I had the same exact experience with my normie husband on our walk yesterday morning. I told him the whole story from the beginning and he was quite amused about how the initial insult has been transformed. We were driving home from errands later that day when he pointed out a “let’s go Brandon” flag on a house. I had to roll my eyes (secretly) because that’s how normie he really is. The number of those signs and flags on homes and businesses is actually decreasing right now but yesterday is the first time he noticed one. LOL
Is this meme silly? Yes, for most of us it is. But it’s not silly at all for the younger, social media-engaged voters. I like that it seems to hook younger people into an enthusiastic response to Biden. We need a way to keep them engaged and feeling positive enough to vote for Democrats.
So I do approve of this silly meme.
SFAW
@Betty Cracker:
What are you talking about? What/who is “Brandon”? Are we talking about former-child-actor Brandon Cruz? Because that’s the only “Brandon” that comes to mind.
NB: Please don’t make me face-palm by ‘splaining, OK BC?
SFAW
@Betty Cracker:
Does your coat of arms have one arm uplifted, giving a single-finger salute?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
“he cannot be cringed, but he can make edgy things cringe”
reading that sentence is a gaze into the abyss
lowtechcyclist
@SFAW:
Brandon (FL) Eagles, of course!
zhena gogolia
@Scout211: Me too. I think it’s brilliant.
zhena gogolia
I also like that the name “Brandon” has been rescued. I felt sorry for that race-car driver.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
That second tweet makes me wonder two things: does Liz Cheney have His Kevin on any more tapes that she totally didn’t know were being recorded?
Do we, or the 1/6 Committee, or the DoJ, have sworn testimony about Meadows burning documents?
schrodingers_cat
There is something exciting going on in the apartment complex where SIL lives.
Trapping a pair of monkeys!
different-church-lady
This is a great flip: finally we have some so idiotic it’s driving them up the wall.
eversor
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Sigh… nobody is going to like any of this but… here we go
Once upon a time when we all played Quake (the original) and it was like 56k with a good connection there was a place called Quakenet. If you were to crazy for that you could go to SA. The people that were too bonkers for that went out and founded 4chan which is based off a Japanese type forum and rapidly turned into Nazis and kiddy porn (I blame anime). Also one of those people founded twitter of all damn things. 4chan turned into 8chan and got us Q. One of the SA admins got killed in Benghazi (he worked for the State Department and played EVE online). Another one got held in a Syrian prison for fighting ISIS, there might be one or two idiots in Ukraine. SA is dirtbag left now, 4chan, 8chan are hard Nazi. Twitter its well twitter. They also gave birth to kiwifarms which is dedicated to doxing people and helped take women out of starwars, drove a couple people to suicide as well. There’s also dedicated links to anynonmous on all these places and someone from SA was actual antifa and then got arrested for shooting a Proud Boy.
This is leaving out stuff like SRK and it’s roots on usenet and of the quote “an orgasm is the moment a womens love of cock overcomes the shame of being penetrated” which fought back sexism charges with the “but we are almost all minorities” of fighting video games fame! And then also burst into flame over child porn and rampant racism but hey, they have corporate sponsors and trans people in cat costumes so, who’s to judge! There’s a lot of cross polination now though.
The internet subculture around gaming, tabletop games, and anime is very, very, very, very, very, (do this 10x more) insane on all levels. And it controls most of what’s on the internet. Cat pictures? Yeah that started out by the same people that run Nazi stuff now and you are mimicking Nazis. Food porn? Same damn thing.
There’s a whole nother level to stuff that for those like me who were very online in the 90s in gaming networks is blatantly obvious and it’s comedic when liberals post stuff that’s flagrantly Nazi in it’s roots and then if you look over you can see them being laughed at by the hard right as owned the libs, and the hard left as stupid shit libs.
I got started shipping VHS tapes of fighting games to learn other tactics and play styles from around the US in high school and also playing Quake online. The rabbit hole that this started is insane. But yeah, that Dark Brandon stuff, along with a lot of the humor on Balloon Juice, farther right than the altright. It’s easier to see when it’s in a picture. But cat pics have been farther right and longer far right than milk pics and OK symbols.
Anyway
@Betty Cracker:
I’ve read the explanation a few times and still go “wha..?” — it’s so dumb. I can’t believe the RW got energized by something so stupid. It’s all about the inside jokes for them.
Miss Bianca
I gotta say I am totally here for the Dark Brandon stuff. LMAO right now.
different-church-lady
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yeah, Garland’s like, “I have all my documents right here in my office filing cabinets, just like I always have throughout my entire career.”
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Film it for TikTok!
lowtechcyclist
@eversor: You realize this makes even less sense than your take on Christianity.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Stupid Alabama. They had an awesome Senator for a little while and they just threw it away.
Miss Bianca
@schrodingers_cat: Trapping a pair of monkeys? And here I bet you were worried that your trip wasn’t going to be exciting enough!//
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@eversor: now that’s some authentic (new) frontier gibberish
(I skimmed it since you addressed it to me, and that’s far more attention than I give most of your posts. Please don’t feel the need to type any more at me)
different-church-lady
@eversor: So we on-line normies are constantly taking edgy darknet phenomenons and making them tame and lame?
RSA
The devil glowing-eyes ‘shops of Obama were intended to make him look powerful, ominous, and “other”.
But the pics of Biden with laser eyes just say, “Be afraid of a 79-year-old man.”
Kropacetic
@lowtechcyclist: A stretch worthy of an olympic gymnast.
Suzanne
So, when I was a college freshman, apparently some joker in the Residence Life office thought it would be hilarious to make an entire dorm floor of guys named Brandon. So they did it. It was discovered right before letters of assignment to the dorms went out and the multitude of Brandons got scattered across the dorms/floors.
I think of this when I think of Dark Brandon.
Spawn the Elder has had classmates/friends named Aiden, Brayden, Hayden, Jayden, and Caden. And various spellings.
Amir Khalid
@schrodingers_cat:
Something not entirely dissimilar was happening at Mar-a-Lago yesterday, and it seems some people are still getting worked up about it.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Dark Normies.
@Amir Khalid:
Hahahaha.
different-church-lady
@RSA: It’s something so ridiculous that it’s potent. The very absurdity is what give it power.
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
I think my kiddo’s filled that bingo card, between friends and relatives. Kids’ names sure are different from what they used to be.
schrodingers_cat
@eversor:
I have read peer reviewed scholarly articles in German that were easier to read than this gibberish.
Geminid
@SFAW:Yesterday the WaPo had article about the spinoffs from the trucker convoy that hang out on the National Mall and hold demonstrations every day. A few of the onlookers give them a thumbs up but more often it’s the middle finger, so now these wingnuts call that the “freedom finger.”
satby
Not first, just first tweet 😂
My sons would be so proud if they were as extremely online as me, but they have lives.
schrodingers_cat
@Amir Khalid: These pair of monkeys is super cute though can’t say the same about the swamp monster who was the former president.
different-church-lady
@Kropacetic: Hell, we ought to feel more shame about driving Volkswagens.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
“And I don’t speak German.”
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I am on the sixth floor.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: That is indeed true. I was going to add that. My conversational German is non-existent.
different-church-lady
@Amir Khalid: Stiill? But that was over 18 hours ago!
Mike J
Grrr. I got put in twitter jail for quoting “We’ll hang Jeff Davis from the sour apple tree” in a thread about the doofi wanting a civil war.
Betty Cracker
@Anyway: Shortly after the original Brandon meme was minted, Ron DeSantis traveled hundreds of miles at taxpayer expense to a Tampa suburb, the town of Brandon, and held a press conference that had nothing to do with that town. Just to capitalize on that meme. It’s insanely stupid, and I guess it goes right over most people’s heads. Like you said, inside jokes.
Kropacetic
@different-church-lady: If I spent my whole life worrying about my actions tangentially helping awful people do awful things; I’d be living in the woods, dressed in mud and leaves, eating earthworms.
schrodingers_cat
@Miss Bianca: One of them is pregnant. The other one is think is another child. It is smaller than the pregnant one. The pregnant one has been trapped. She was lured by, wait for it, bananas.
The smaller one is on the trap, desperate to reach her mama. They are trying to lure this one in the same trap. The trap is big enough for both of them.
To be continued..
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: Now Ted Cruz, a U. S. Senator, thinks it’s extremely clever to begin all his speeches with, “My pronouns are kiss my ass.” He is a slug, a slime, a piece of shit.
Baud
@satby:
👍
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Release The Warrant!
or
Let’s Go Warren!
sorry
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Since we don’t know what his pronouns are, I suggest we use, it.
Geminid
@Kropacetic: Luther rejected the Diet of Worms 500 years ago. I don’t blame him.
Kropacetic
Two of those words aren’t pronouns. One out of three is pretty bad.
MazeDancer
When go you think Trump releases the Long Form Warrant?
He has the only copy.
Ken
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Why won’t Trump release the long-form warrant? Show us the long-form warrant!
EDIT: Missed it by that much. I salute you, MazeDancer.
Miss Bianca
@Suzanne: How about Addison and Madison?
ETA: Strangely, no one seems to be going for “Edison”.
Kropacetic
The google search you just sent me on brought me some retroactive mirth.
eversor
@different-church-lady:
Pretty much. Put it this way. Thinks start on the crazy side of the internet, move to the main internet, then move into media. Then it comes up in very not in clue places like here. Then the core moves on.
Entire books and papers have been published on this, https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250189745/itcamefromsomethingawful and it’s not good.
What you see is only the top of the iceberg. You’re missing the bulk of what’s actually going on. Things happen on some forums or places like discord and then leak into facebook, and the people creating it know full well what they can do. There’s a whole side to this thing that goes off in crazy directions. To the far right Dark Biden is a culture victory for them, to the far left this is an admission that liberals are the real fascists. So while people here may snark and laugh, the problem is now worse. But you can’t see below the surface so you don’t know what you don’t know.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊😊😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Suzanne
@zhena gogolia:
I mean, I think his gerunds are asskissing and motherfucking, maybe he should start his speech with those.
zhena gogolia
@Suzanne: Hahaha
Miss Bianca
@rikyrah: Good morning! And ain’t it a fine, lovely day?
different-church-lady
@zhena gogolia: Gonna be even funnier when people start actually using it.
Leto
Bit OT:(WaPo) Why does the IRS need $80 billion? Just look at its cafeteria.
Catherine Rampell was given a guided tour through the Austin, TX IRS branch, and shows just what that $80B will be used for. Tons of pics.
different-church-lady
@Kropacetic: Well now you know how my days go.
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: The GOP nominee for Michigan governor — a person whose parents named her after a British royal house or a luxury watch brand — is running hard with the anti-trans bullshit, taunting Governor Whitmer by saying “elect a REAL woman.” Jesus, I hate these people. I hope Whitmer squashes her like a bug.
NotMax
Thing I learned this week:
Next year will be the 100th anniversary of the first foray into raising chickens commercially as meat in America.
A bit more from another link:
Even more recently, within living memory:
CaseyL
Morning, everyone!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
and there are dozens of us! DOZENS!!!!
different-church-lady
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: And make sure it’s the “long form” warrant!
Lobo
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Dark Brandon is the abyss
Amir Khalid
@different-church-lady:
Oh, they’ll be getting worked up about this for months.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Cool. Then we’ll be seeing the right embrace Dark Brandon wholeheartedly any minute now.
different-church-lady
@eversor: I’m not really seeing this bit of ridiculousness as a problem.
Kropacetic
@Ever Sore: To the far right Dark Biden is a culture victory for them, to the far left this is an admission that liberals are the real fascists
The dark Brandon meme has been appropriated to celebrate the victories of a broad, moderate coalition of Democrats and to poi t out the absurdity of calling Biden an authoritarian leftist.
The current use is more important *now* than the intent of whoever originated the meme 50,000 copies ago. Our side took something back as an act of empowerment.
These memes, if employed with good intentions are not sowing seeds of fascism.
Betty Cracker
@eversor: Are you saying that because nutty extremists at either end of the spectrum interpret this crap in insane ways that are invisible to the vast majority of people, it’s a victory for extremism? I’m not sure how that works.
Lyrebird
@Betty Cracker: Love that from your grandmother.
@Scout211:
@zhena gogolia:
I imagine Biden-Harris rallies next year where the crowd chants,
Way to go Brandon, Way-to-go!
I don’t know who Ben Collins is, but I think he is underestimating Joey O’Biden big time.
Love my President!
Gin & Tonic
Interrupting the Mar-a-Lago schadenfreudeliciousness with some from Crimea, where videos are circulating of massive explosions at a russian airfield.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: Wow, you distilled his gibberish succinctly. Excellent precis. I am in awe.
Kropacetic
Embedded in these memes is a virus that is transmissible from computers to the human brain. The memes get passed along appearing harmless, even celebrating team good.
But once that virus is in your brain it starts running subroutines to reprogram your mind. One day you wake up a fascist and never know anything even changed.
Steeplejack
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Thanks. This is the succinct comeback I couldn’t think of.
raven
@Gin & Tonic: Bringin smoke!
different-church-lady
“JOHNNY! DON’T TOUCH THAT MEME! IT’S DIRTY AND IT’S GOT ANTS ALL OVER IT!!!”
Leto
@Kropacetic: “There are only, THREE LIGHTS!”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
hehe, it’s being throw back in their face how shallow their mem culture really is.
schrodingers_cat
Second monkey has been caught now they are trying to put the monkey teen in the trap.
FastEdD
Yeah, I think Dark Brandon works because it is against type. Kinda like calling something Gordita (Little large thing.) Portraying Obama as being strong and powerful doesn’t, because physically he was energetic. Portraying the friendly Grandpa as a dark overlord is so silly, yet it points out the original Let’s Go Brandon is really stupid too. All right, I’ve spent enough time on this, now back to explaining the Whip Inflation Now bill.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Wait, there are three monkeys?
Baud
@FastEdD:
It’s basically like what a McNaughton painting is to the wingnuts. Except our side is in on the joke.
lee
Holy Shirtballs!!!!
I found Cleek’s Law in the wild on reddit!!!!
I have mentioned it several times before on reddit. This is the first time I’ve seen someone else use it.
Direct Link to comment
Another Scott
@eversor: Needs more fnord.
Cheers,
Scott.
different-church-lady
Y’know, for some liberals there’s nothing worse in the world than seeing other liberals enjoying something.
prostratedragon
@Geminid: When I first learned of it as a kid, I marvelled that life could be so easy, so well-marked.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Crab bucket politics.
prostratedragon
@eversor:
You’re missing the bulk of what’s actually going on.
And damn glad of that. It remains to be seen whether much direct engagement there, as opposed to somewhere productive, is of use.
Another Scott
@Gin & Tonic: Impressive.
In the More Tweets footer:
https://mobile.twitter.com/DarthPutinKGB/status/1556845707314741260
Cheers,
Scott.
Betty Cracker
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Speaking of DOZENS…
At least they had an appropriate soundtrack.
Redshift
@zhena gogolia: The appropriate response: “good to know, we’ll call you ‘ass’ for short.”
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Looking forward to the vigil outside the prison.
raven
@Betty Cracker: Don’t feed it.
Kropacetic
We can haz enjoyment once the workers’ utopia is established.
Dark Brandon undercuts a right wing meme and makes Biden look good in a way that points out the absurdity of an entire branch of right wing argumentation.
I say more of this.
raven
@Betty Cracker: I see the Cubano’s are on it!
schrodingers_cat
@different-church-lady: Left wing populists are not very liberal.
Ken
I am choosing to read this as referring to the Mar-a-Lago warrant.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Two monkeys
Pregnant monkey
Teen monkey
Teen monkey is caught by a handler but he/she is not in the trap.
3 if you are Alito.
raven
My wife just took some flowers over to the poor crippled lady across the street and got the full “FBI Raid freakout”. She countered with “well he took official documents and would give them back”! She got “well, there are three parties and one is god. I pray for you both and Artie”!
Jinchi
@eversor: I followed that all the way up until you mentioned ‘milk pics’.
I mean cats are clearly fascists, but ….. milk?
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Haha.
Baud
@raven:
God can’t hide from Dark Garland.
ETA: Just kidding BTW. Everyone knows God is on our side.
different-church-lady
@schrodingers_cat: They’re also not much fun at parties.
Lobo
Beware Dark Brandon and his army of dark normies. They will take you to the abyss of progressive paradise. Chilling!
different-church-lady
@Baud: I mean, who else could give Brandon laser eyes? Only God could do that.
Betty Cracker
@raven: There’s a clip in that thread of a reporter’s interview with one of the dwindling number of actual exiles. She’s wearing a MAGA hat and complaining about the government persecuting political opponents. I’d bet my last dollar she never said dick when the Trump admin was egregiously abusing power to persecute political opponents. She was probably screaming LOCK HER UP along with the rest of the meatheads. Fuck em.
prostratedragon
@NotMax: That’s interesting that it’s so recent. Born in 1952, I remember things like going to a “poultry market” to get fresh-killed and dressed birds. The flock was suitable in size for neighborhood* trade I suppose, and you could see them running about in their pen, and pick the one you wanted, getting a wrapped package about 10 minutes later after minimal squawking. Place was very clean, so much so that I was amazed to learn years later what a stinking mess chicken shit is. Also, you could still get fryers rather than broilers, which in my memory were better eating than now. And come to think of it, how to dress a plucked chicken was standard knowledge of my mother and aunts.
____
*Lilydale-North Roseland neighborhoods of Chicago, which back then seemed suburban bordering on rural; where the Red Line has that big new terminal now.
lowtechcyclist
@eversor: Back when I was hanging out with fundies fifty years ago, they came up with logic that reminds me of this. Stuff like the word translated ‘sorcery’ in the New Testament has the same root as ‘pharmacy’ so illegal drugs are bad.
I was too young then to just look at them and say, “you realize this doesn’t make the least bit of sense,” but I can say it now.
raven
@prostratedragon:
Lace up your boots and we’ll broom on down
To a knocked out shack on the edge of town
There’s an eight beat combo that just won’t quit
Keep walkin’ ’til you see a blue light lit
Fall in there and we’ll see some sights
At the house of blue lights
There’s fryers and broilers and Detroit barbecue ribs
prostratedragon
@raven: Maybe I should eat something. I thought at first you meant sandwiches, even though I knew something about the composition of the circus act down there.
Miss Bianca
@different-church-lady: LOL!!
@schrodingers_cat: Wait, there are *three* monkeys now? I’m so confused.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Kropacetic: That makes just about as much sense as the plot of a Metal Gear game.
In fact, I’m not sure but what it might be the plot of a Metal Gear game.
FastEdD
@Baud: Exactly.
Miss Bianca
@Kropacetic: I’m with you on this one.
lowtechcyclist
@NotMax: And the next thing you know, there was Kentucky Fried Chicken.
That’s not a joke really, KFC couldn’t have existed without a steady supply of decent-quality chicken.
lowtechcyclist
And it’s looking back at us, with those laser eyes!
raven
@prostratedragon: God, we’ve been doing this “intermittent fasting” (with ZERO weight loss) for 4 months. I get to eat in11 minutes and I’m starving!
lowtechcyclist
@Kropacetic:
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, cyber version!
Mike E
@Betty Cracker: according to google translate, your crest is an engraver’s dream:
Stultus esse potest iocum, cum potentia ad bonum adhibetu
different-church-lady
@lowtechcyclist: If you stare into the abyss, the abyss says, “Bug off, creep!”
Kropacetic
Not convoluted enough. That’s 30 hours of in game video we need to fill.
Baud
@raven:
I’ve been thinking of trying that. But not if it doesn’t result on weight loss.
Ken
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: The idea’s been used in several science-fiction stories, like David Langford’s “BLIT“. Charles Stross also uses it in his Laundry novels, where bad actors incorporate the mind-destroying software into PowerPoint presentation backgrounds. Chillingly authentic to anyone who’s sat through a PP presentation…
NotMax
@prostratedragon
Yup yup. Can remember when both the butcher shop and the neighborhood poultry mart routinely spread sawdust on the floors.
prostratedragon
@raven: Counting the hours and the minutes too, eh?
Cute video with all the bands. I even recognized a few.
Bon appetit!
Mike in NC
Seen a new nickname going around for the criminal of Mar-A-Lago: Donald OJ Trump
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Two monkeys:
Pregnant one in the trap
Teen monkey caught but not in the trap.
They are rocking the teen monkey like it is a baby now and feeding it bananas. It refuses to go into the trap.
There are 4 people involved in this operation
Plus onlookers.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@eversor: Go read The Illuminatus! Trilogy which was published in 1973, which parodies such tropes as “feminism is really a tool of the hard right” and “pandemics are the creation of secrete Nazis in the FDA ” along with “JFK is alive and hiding in a secret bunker under Daley Plaza” and much, much more and you will find that the crazy long predates the internet.
Baud
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I knew it!
UncleEbeneezer
@raven: She should use the question I use for FreeAssange people who object to his extradition: “Why don’t you want him to have his day in court to prove his innocence?”
lee
@Baud:
There was a study recently (or maybe a study of studies) that determined that intermittent fasting had no increase of weight loss as compared to just eating less.
geg6
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yes, the young woman who was his assistant who testified at the J6 hearing talked about catching Meadows burning documents.
Kropacetic
Signs you may need a gland removed…
NotMax
@lowtechcyclist
Puts into perspective what a novelty were the chain of restaurants Joan Crawford’s character started in Mildred Pierce.
scav
Has anyone tried the bananas for trapping Trump? Ok, maybe bananas in a McDonalds wrapper . . .
Layer8Problem
@different-church-lady: My abyss usually yells “Ocupado, man!!”
Jinchi
@schrodingers_cat:
He’s told us his pronouns.
I suggest going with ‘ass’.
Baud
@lee:
Thanks.
prostratedragon
@NotMax: Yes! There and in old fish markets are where I learned of its wonderful properties.
Tell Shakin’ Boxcar Joe we got sawdust on the floor.
lowtechcyclist
@Another Scott:
So you see them too, huh? ;-)
Miki
@eversor: But do you know The Secret Handshake?
prostratedragon
@schrodingers_cat: Sounds like quite a show. See tune linked in comment below.
Subsole
@eversor: Impressive. One question: wtf is a VHS??
More seriously: you may be joking about who you’re blaming for pedobear, but I legit think anime was the vector. I mean, there’s…a lot of that stuff in anime. And a lot of Japanese Lost Causers, too. At least, that was my view of it, from outside that community.
@lowtechcyclist: What’s absolutely thigh-slappingly hilarious, though, is that he is pretty much right.
A whole bunch of grimy, stank-ass otaku Libertarians finally figured out they were Nazis. And here we are.
Spanky
Meanwhile over here in blue Maryland, we have this bit of performative art:
Layer8Problem
@Spanky: OMFG, he used “weaponization” in a sentence! The gloves are off now.
raven
@lee: There’s a study to prove anything. Here’s a meta analysis from Harvard
A systematic review of 40 studies found that intermittent fasting was effective for weight loss, with a typical loss of 7-11 pounds over 10 weeks. [2] There was much variability in the studies, ranging in size from 4 to 334 subjects, and followed from 2 to 104 weeks. It is important to note that different study designs and methods of intermittent fasting were used, and participant characteristics differed (lean vs. obese). Half of the studies were controlled trials comparing the fasting group to a comparison group and/or a control group (either continuous calorie restriction or usual lifestyle), with the other half examining an intermittent fasting group alone. A brief summary of their findings:
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Jinchi: I was on the internet in the 90s when it was mostly BBS’s and the precursor of Reddit, Usenet. I even played Quake. I don’t remember any of that stuff. I guess I just wasn’t paying attention.
But as for milk pics all I can think of is the UCSD coffee pot. One of the earliest experimental web pages I remember was a page that showed the coffee pot of the physics department at (I’m pretty sure) the University of California San Diego. It not only showed a picture (!) over the WWW (!) but that picture would periodically update (!) automatically (!) Just amazingly impressive.
I guess maybe you had to be there.
Miss Bianca
@Spanky: Is it too much to hope for that thundering silence from the Maryland GOP follows this ringing call to arms?
Bex
@zhena gogolia: And for Charles Brandon, one of Henry VIII’s pals who managed to keep his head.
topclimber
@eversor: If you are saying we should understand that we may be inadvertently promoting Nazi memes, ok. But that seems to mean that they can appropriate any image and we can never use it.
I for one look forward to Pepe the frog (currently in a Nazi prison) morphing into the avatar of all folks LBGTQ. If that happens, it won’t be a victory for the RWNJs.
Let’s claim puppies for the Left before it is too late!!!!
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Spanky:
It’s going to be interesting to hear what the “he has a right to do anything he wants with government documents [*]” crowd will say when we find out what exactly was the concern that prompted this raid with this timing.
Hopefully that will happen before the November elections, for extra Freude on the Shaden.
[*] It goes without saying that none of them would say that Democratic ex-presidents have the same powers, but I wish more reporters would ask the question anyway and catch the cognitive dissidence.
prostratedragon
@Spanky: Reading that too fast, I first saw “blue fairyland.” (MD is where Rooster Brother lives.)
Ken
@Spanky: My hope is that three months from now, Cox is saying “Trump? Is that the guy who brought me coffee? Oh, that Trump. No, I’ve had no contact with him since the arrest, didn’t really like him before that. He started out as a Democrat, you know.”
Splitting Image
@Betty Cracker:
A lot of these theories remind me of the ellipsis in the Underpants Gnome meme.
You know the one:
Step 1: Collect underpants
Step 2: …
Step 3: Profit!
These theories are an articulate delineation of what Step 2 must involve in order for Step 3 to work.
Spanky
@Miss Bianca: I’ve never known a GOPer pol to keep his/her/ass* mouth shut when such a tempting opportunity comes along.
(* h/t Ted Cruz)
prostratedragon
Issey Miyake, d. August 5
tam1MI
@Lyrebird:
While this blasts out of speakers behind them:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mOyLNI4SYV8
Mike E
@topclimber: I watched the documentary on that cartoon frog’s origin called Feels Good Man, it’s a sad cautionary tale about intellectual property…to cut to the chase, license your images or these fcukers will surely ruin your life.
frosty
Good one!
Spanky
@prostratedragon:
I see Miyake didn’t take Baud! into account.
different-church-lady
@topclimber: You’re saying puppies have Nazi origins?!?
Subsole
@eversor: In fairness, both of those groups are kind of foaming at the eyeballs crazy, and tend to declare victory over everything. It’s kind of a “fake it til you make it” thing – but for politicults.
That said, you are absolutely right: there is a great deal of bad, bad shit that metastasizes from those groups.
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: The issue isn’t so much their numbers. It’s that, as mentioned, this shit gets passed around to lots of bored, disaffected kids who maybe don’t have the training or experience to sniff out that it’s garbage. And not just kids.
A lot of those “do something” doomers we gnash our teeth over? Where do you think they get their talking points?
S’why I am STILL angry at that bastard from VT for hiring comms staff who went around megaphoning that shit.
@Baud: No. There’s one monkey, but it’s got three heads.
eclare
Gawd….I hate the whole Dark Brandon meme.
SFBayAreaGal
@SFAW: Let’s not forget Brandon Crawford and Brandon Belt of the SF Giants.
Subsole
@lowtechcyclist: Snow Crash.
NotMax
@prostratedragon
No need to fret over fashion when one can just open a can.
:)
MisterDancer
Hi. You and me, we gonna have a talk, right now.
See, I have bona-fides in this area, too. I lived with 2 roomies in a gaming house; one dude owned gaming servers for Quake/etc., the other ran Ethernet to every room, back when That Was Not Done, and I was the OS guy since I knew Windows, Windows NT, and Linux.
As a Black Man who’s been on the Internet since before Berners-Lee and his CERN buddies slapped together the first webpage, I KNOW. I remember when the groundbreaking Kathy Sierra of (then) Sun Microsystems was literally harassed off the ‘Net, years before GamerGate made that a well-known thing. I saw the rise of what’s on 4chan today back when there was USENET, and the alt.* channels, and some horrific shit I’ll never unsee.
I remember talking to the above roomies about the racism and sexism online, and all of us being horrified and stuck as to how to combat it. As the guy who owned the servers was also in an Interracial relationship, he actually gave a damn. We all gave a damn, and it’s no surprise it all, eventually, fell apart.
So don’t roll up here talking of the deep magic to me, dude. I was there when it was written.
I’m in a position and a mood, today, to say that your rants here are utterly disconnected. They imply that you carry knowledge, but you dispense nothing useful, save that “we” are all ignorant, and “you” are here to tell us that All Memes Are Bad.
I have my well-known beefs with this community. But I’ll never tag ’em for not knowing all the shit I know about how the dark corners of the Internet, came to be. Nor that celebration taking over a meme is bad, no moreso that other reclaiming efforts, across multiple identities.
We have a RIGHT to celebrate not just real-world victories, but also to present our views on social media. And a lot of the issue has been a supine approach to these things, from Pepe the Frog on. That was wrong! We should never cower whenever we appropriate and own a meme for our own purposes — that act is good and powerful and right, and should be celebrated as taking a weapon away from the bad guys!
And I say that, having wished I, and my “crew”, had taken a lot of them away myself, back in the day.
topclimber
@Betty Cracker: To steal from Jim FL, there are dozens, dozens!
Oops, you already stole from him.
Subsole
@Ken: Powerpoints are Roko’s Basilisk?? Who knew?
@Kropacetic: Well, I mean, better out than in…
ian
@Baud:
Fuck their feelings.
Another Scott
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: John Dillinger being in on the JFK assassination plot was genius. The secret sea under Europe was a bit weird though.
Fnord!
Cheers,
Scott.
gwangung
Hm. Liberals and progressives aren’t that unfamiliar to re-purposing words that began as insults. See African Americans and the “n-word” for example
@MisterDancer: CLAP CLAP CLAP
Subsole
@eclare: For a moment I thought you typed “Dank Brandon” and had to go lie down…
Rusty
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I laughed out loud reading this. I read it a second time and laughed out loud all over again.
Quiltingfool
@Gin & Tonic: I may need to make a block with a cat holding a Russian plane in its mouth…
prostratedragon
@NotMax: Forgot about those. I suspect Miyake admired them.
Another Scott
@eclare: I figure it will burn itself out in a few weeks, but get recycled in about 18 months when someone quasi famous posts it on Twitter again.
It’s summertime. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
JanieM
@gwangung:
Seconded.
The Moar You Know
@Kropacetic: Snow Crash is a book about exactly that, albeit in a far more overt manifestation. But the basic idea is absolutely right. I’m very careful about what I let in my brain. I don’t do social media and am very careful about exposing my brain to the internet. It drives my workplace crazy that I refuse to get on a computer on weekends. The brain needs the downtime to get reality resorted.
topclimber
@Spanky: I regretfully suggest that we need to know whether no pants means no underpants as well as no outer pants. We need the answer, not the image, before we can understand whether a longish sweater might discomfort dear Baud.
Ken
Even licensing isn’t that much protection, particularly in the exciting new world of NFTs. “Art Theft” has its own category on Molly White’s “web3 is going great” blog.
Kropacetic
A good friend to have in college.
Subsole
@Kropacetic: Why stop at college??
Quiltingfool
@schrodingers_cat: Monkeys! How exciting! All I see in my yard is a fat groundhog munching on grass!
Kropacetic
@Subsole: He’s followed some internet rabbit holes I dare not speak of since we dropped out.
prostratedragon
@Gin & Tonic: Couldn’t help it: saw that and exclaimed, “Holy smoke!”
schrodingers_cat
Continuation of the monkey saga:
Teen monkey is in the trap. And the rescue crew has left the premises. Monkeys were unhappy being caught. Pregnant mom didn’t seem to mind that much but teen was not happy at all.
It was like putting the cat into its carrier X10. It took 4 trained men as many hours to trap two monkeys.
cain
@Scout211: When we were coming back from LA to PDX – on the shuttle to the airport parking we some gal wearing a jean jacket with a “Let’s go Brandon” caption and one of those “dark” flags.
Honestly, I’m really over all these alternative flags – they seem to be everywhere. Leave Old Glory alone.
Ohio Mom
@schrodingers_cat: Now I have that nursery song stuck in my head:
Five little monkeys jumping on the bed
One fell off and bumped his head
Mama called the doctor and the doctor said
“No more monkeys jumping on the bed!”…
apocalipstick
@eversor: Where do the Illuminati fit in?
SFBayAreaGal
@MisterDancer: Thank you
glc
@Kropacetic:
I can see “ass” as a pronoun. This is Ted Cruz after all. Ass’s choice. It works.
cain
@eversor:
But to be clear, dog pics are ok, right?
The link between cat pics and nazism seems weird to me. Since you know I have 3 cats and I love taking pictures of them.
Miss Bianca
@different-church-lady:
Well, Hitler did love dogs…
Dorothy A. Winsor
Subsole
@Jinchi:
If I am thinking of the same thing they are, it might actually be pretty simple:
What color is plain milk? What color of supremacist are these people?
The sad thing is, for all the damage it does, a lot of this stuff is just the most stupidly pedestrian injoke nonsense you can possibly imagine.
It really isn’t even an in-joke. It’s more like the online version of a codephrase. I hear “honka hmmmm” on youtube, and automatically picture a coordinated Nazi attempt to associate the Pride flag with fascist movements. Because that was actually a thing.
It’s stupid, but the weird thing is, it kind of works. Especially if you are in an online space that is just swimming in that garbage – which I know for certain tabletop gaming is, and most video gaming, too. Kind of a subliminal thing, or a conditioned association. I’m not smart enough to explain it.
But it works. Like, you can know for a fact this shit is bad and still get your head trapped into some really bad feedback loops.
I know it sounds like a Neal Stephenson joint, but I have seen it happen and had it happen to me.
Edit: I think I just admitted to brain damage. Ah well, y’all had plenty of clues. Caveat diadem, or whatever.
Miss Bianca
@MisterDancer: Thank you, friend.
geg6
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Cheetolini has been having a bad week.
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!
piratedan
@MisterDancer:
just wanted to say thank you…..
if the right can appropriate Trump as Superman and co-opt various and sundry hero-for-us-all memes into facebook pages (that originate in St. Petersburg) to be shoved into our collective consciousness, then how can riposting the same methodology from one of their smears and actually generate humor be bad?
the best way to deal with these asshats is thru humor (because violence is not the answer) and appropriating a former dig that they generated an entire media assault and deflecting it back onto them is a chef’s kiss.
in short, fuck those guys… they’ve already done who knows how much irreparable damage with their takes on women’s’ rights, immigration, foreign policy and the economy. If I get a chuckle from siccing their conspiracy theory bs back onto them, I don’t see the harm.
geg6
@MisterDancer:
Beautiful. Thank you, sir.
Miss Bianca
@schrodingers_cat: Dang. Well, now what are you going to do for entertainment?
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
LOL. Cat lovers love posting cat pictures. It doesn’t matter if the poster is on the far right, the far left, and in the middle. Also, as Trump has consistently illustrated, the far right loves running in front of EVERY parade and pretending they are leading it.
Subsole
@Kropacetic: A shame. You’d think regular application of a little purple’d even that out…unless he was a paranoid high?
Steve in the ATL
Late to the thread, but has anyone mentioned the Nazi propaganda of Winston Churchill? They “photoshopped” a picture of him holding a machine gun and dropped it all over England. Turned out to be a big hit with the Brits, who found it inspiring rather than menacing.
cain
@Lyrebird: It’s too bad we can’t have Prince re-brand his song “Let’s go Crazy” from Purple Rain.
Even better, re-purpose “Black Velvet” – I just want to hear that last bit “DarkBrandon, if you please… ” :D
Kropacetic
I always think of it as enhancing the feeling or emotion. Funny gets funnier. Hungry is hungrier. Confusing is inscrutable. And a paranoid mind gets lost.
Subsole
@Kropacetic: Yeah. Sorry to hear it went that way.
Glad I just got loud and giggly and stupid.
NotMax
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Didn’t pan out so well for the Little Tramp.
:)
Birdie
@eversor: In my home country there are two “rival” cities.
City 1: “Hur hur City 2 STUPID”
City 2: <not aware City 1 exists>
I can’t help but think you are sharing the City 1 perspective and not realizing that everyone else doesn’t care.
Weird pictures of pets existed before the Internet. 4chan or whoever didn’t invent them and doesn’t control their meaning. Not to throw post-modernism in your face, but the meaning of a text or image is what the consumer ascribes to it. What the original author intended is irrelevant if there is no influence on meaning and if no one knows the author exists.
Not to explain the joke, but that’s why “Dark Brandon was invented by Chinese propagandists” is funny. The author and the meaning have diverged in an ironic way.
prostratedragon
Lamont Dozier of Holland, Dozier, & Holland
cain
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
I was there too – will never forget the moment I saw openGL driven Quake after getting a 3DFX card. It was lit.
ETA – oh myyyyyyy — 222 – not only a tv show, but triple number!
schrodingers_cat
@Miss Bianca: Rumor has it that these two are a part of bigger troupe of monkeys. They are rhesus macaques.
prostratedragon
@schrodingers_cat: Uh-oh. Does that mean that the wranglers’ work is just beginning?
Kropacetic
Names were changed to protect the not-so-innocent. Dank Brandon is like six people, almost an archetype in my life.
Not a bad way to spend downtime.
FledtheUS
@MisterDancer: Thank you! I was there as well (as a woman!) in some of the net.abuse.* groups back around the same time. Your recollections fit much closer to mine than the Other Poster.
no comment
@NotMax:
Wow. As a Gen-Xer, that link is wild! Paper dresses, foil dresses, & dresses from a can? I have several new ideas for Halloween costumes.
Sister Golden Bear
@MisterDancer:
Word.
It’s one of the things that’s powerful about LGBTQ+ people reclaiming “queer” from being a slur.*
It’s not coincidental that there’s a well-known phrase “Not gay as in happy, queer as in ‘fuck you’.”
If we don’t appropriate and own things that have been against us for fear that haters will chuckle that we’ve somehow been “owned,” then we’re letting them set the parameters of discussion.
*That said, it still can be a touchy word for some LGBTQ+ folks, especially older ones who remember it being used against them — often with an implicit or explicit threat of violence.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@FledtheUS: I wasn’t really plugged into the online communities that much. My Usenet was confined mostly to math and physics groups. And alt.fan.cecil-adams (Cecil Adams was the author of the “Straight Dope” column which answered questions about anything and everything) and the urban legends alt.folklore.urban group.
The big names in that latter were also the people who ran and perhaps still run Snopes.
Sasha
There is a academic article begging to be written tracing the evolution of Amtrak Joe Biden to Diamond Joe Biden to Dark Brandon.
CaseyL
@schrodingers_cat: I had a short stint as a volunteer for a private zoo many years back, and worked with macaques. It was awful; almost had my ear torn off by one.
I felt much more bad than I should have, that I was unable to even like them, much less develop a rapport with them: I, who love all animals! Who never met a species she didn’t like!
Years later, I recounted that story (and my guilt-ridden reaction) to another person who’s worked with a lot of animals. Imagine my amazement when they said, “Yeah, macaques are really the assholes of the monkey world.”
That years-long feeling of failure magically lifted.
FledtheUS
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: The idea that cat pictures came about as a nazi thing… no. Fluffy owns Usenet.
Fnord!
schrodingers_cat
@CaseyL: They are smart and have little reason to like us. I don’t blame them really.
They can get quite aggressive so your experience tracks with what I have seen of them.
Eolirin
@eversor: I was there for a lot of that too, and this is utter bullshit. None of those platforms were monolithic like that. Reducing everything that came out of chan culture to being nazi or far right is insanely reductive and inaccurate.
Certain sub-forums on 4chan and 8chan were intensely nazi, but many of the others were not even remotely, and there were anti-fascist shitposters right alongside the antisemetic/racist shitposters.
The chans were mostly defined by unmoderated chaos, with a tolerance for literally anything no matter how vile, but not any one thing in particular, and none of them were fully dominated by vileness. This did drive anyone that was going to get offended by fucked up stuff away, so it was mostly the creepiest people on the internet, but if you’re going to make a claim for a common thread of culture, that thread would be shitposting, not nazism.
NotMax
@
Must have been no later than 1981 when yours truly engaged in something similar, using the about to be phased out and consigned to the junk heap electronic blackboards from Bell Labs, trucked over to a classroom for general purpose use. Phone company was in the process of shuttering their not so successful dedicated teleconferencing rooms.
Drew something or wrote something relevant to the presentation, then pressed the button to send the data over the primitive internet (connection from NY to WI, IIRC), to appear on the receiver’s screen.
Without using the erase function, then added data on the blackboard and pressed send again. Magic!
Several execs and engineers from AT&T happened to be in attendance and collectively engaged in much forehead slapping. “Why didn’t we ever think of doing that?”
zhena gogolia
@Baud: That surprised me too.
Miss Bianca
@schrodingers_cat: Monkeys scare me. Almost as bad as clowns, but as O2 among others will readily tell you, nothing is quite as bad as clowns.
Miss Bianca
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Man, that takes me back. I was part of an alt.werewolves group for a while. (Don’t judge, werewolves get lonely too!)
NotMax
Arrgh
#235 supposed to be @Ceci n est pas mon nym
The Lodger
@NotMax: I asked myself if that chicken house was in Delaware. Of course it was.
schrodingers_cat
@Miss Bianca: They scare my brother too. He is a big guy now but he had some scary encounters with them when growing up.
I admire them and find them cute, from a distance.
Dupe1970
@Mike J:
That’s what you get for replying to me on Twitter. My bad.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat:
Have you seen any of the videos where cat Maru watches macacques in his yard?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5Ro7smK1p4
West of the Rockies
I always loathed Palin saying, “How’s that hopey-change thing workin’ out for ya?” and thinking she was so clever.
Hey, Trump pigs: How’s that dopey orange thing workin’ out for ya?
I should have put that on a bumper sticker five years ago.
Poe Larity
I wasn’t fully listening, but during the CBS PGA broadcast this weekend, there was some young player named Brandon. He holed some long putt and the British old guy announcer said “alright, let’s go Brandon!”
Was kind of shocked at first but he kept raving about the player so it was more like the meme has jumped the snark.
zhena gogolia
@West of the Rockies: Have you seen her lately? She hasn’t aged well.
different-church-lady
@cain: What we need is an amendment that protects the flag from desecration and… wait, what?
Chief Oshkosh
@raven:
@Baud: Hm. I found that it works well for me. Fasting 3 days/week, steadily lost 4 lbs/week for first month, then 2 lbs/week for second month onward. One fast day per week kept me from gaining anymore. Eventually went from 188 to 158. I touched 155, my goal, several times, but just felt too “stretched and thin.” This worked from 2015 until the Covid shutdown and other stressors. I’m back up to 175, but I’m OK with that for now.
I found Michael Mosley’s BBC TV report on this and his follow-up book to be very useful and motivating.
Raven, sorry it isn’t working for you. What program are you following?
different-church-lady
@Miss Bianca: Clowns with monkeys are the worst.
JohnC
@zhena gogolia: You felt sorry for him because you’re a kind person, but….
Why the NASCAR driver linked to an infamous anti-Biden chant may be out of a job
“At first, Brown tried to separate himself from the phenomenon and focus on racing. He told the Times that the political chaos was putting his career in jeopardy.
“I have zero desire to be involved in politics,” he said.
But soon after that story ran, Brown announced a new partnership with a cryptocurrency creator banking on the slogan’s popularity. “Brown is clearly choosing to get political,” Yahoo! Sports reported at the time.
That decision may have cost the driver in the long run, since he hasn’t been able to shore up his funding, and the cryptocurrency is now worth next-to-nothing. There’s “no going back from the decision to get political no matter if it pays off financially or not,” wrote Nick Bromberg for Yahoo!.”
Ken
@different-church-lady: Or monkeys made up as clowns.
(I’m sure I could find pictures, because internet. But I’m also sure it’s something I can’t unsee.)
NotMax
@Miss Bianca
Declaring a pox on monkeys?
:)
Baud
@Miss Bianca:
She still has us.
different-church-lady
@Eolirin:
Which is a thing that happens to every online space that isn’t continuously moderated.
Chief Oshkosh
@Chief Oshkosh: Here’s the Mosley IF documentary: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x370lox
Eolirin
@different-church-lady: Yep, pretty much. I think small communities can maybe avoid that fate, but nothing at scale.
And of course the stuff at scale is not going to be monolithic to start, because it’s really hard to get to scale if you are. The community needs to winnow down, which it will if there’s no attempt to moderate, but that takes time.
But I think times were also really different back then, in terms of alternative platforms. There was a window of time where there was a lot more forced mixing of groups that otherwise would not want to be anywhere near each other.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Every real world space too.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: That is adorable. Indian macaques have long tails. Otherwise they look pretty similar to the Japanese ones.
Frankensteinbeck
@West of the Rockies:
They live in a fantasy world. I was subjected again recently to seeing a conservative list liberal cities as proof of the horrible results of Democratic leadership, and I’m like “LA is great, except for the property values? I lived there and felt safer in South Central than back in Kentucky? And I’ve only visited Portland a couple of times, but it seemed like a beautiful, pleasant to live in city?”
Chris Johnson
@Betty Cracker: eversor’s got some of this right and is out to lunch on other parts of it.
Cat pictures are not alt-right even if it started on 4chan, because 4chan is not your personal army nor is it a directed, coherent, propaganda force with a defined purpose. It’s a mob of sickos. That can be co-opted to an extent, but refer to the ‘not your personal army’ part, that’s not to be forgotten.
Dirtbag left is not actual left, it’s Russian-controlled just like alt-right. That said I have no reason to doubt SA is dirtbag left, sounds plausible to me. Points for knowing about kiwifarms, that’s a deep cut and eversor is 100% accurate there.
Pretty much a good and accurate description of the toxic side of the internet with the caveat: none of this means that when the mainstream adopts it, the trolls ‘win’. Instead they just lose control of the meme, or have it reversed. Dark Brandon is definitely like this. Mainstream Dem consultants taking Dark Brandon and running with it?
“This kills the meme” (which is another meme, possibly a joke only eversor will get :) )
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Ken: I think people would get mad at me if I posted a link to the page I just found on Etsy
Subsole
@Eolirin: When was this? Not trying to argue, so much as compare notes.
Because while I was there, the Nazis were damn near omnipresent. The containment board, /pol? It didn’t contain shit. (Well, I mean, it absolutely did – more of it in one place than most. It just didn’t do a good job holding it in.)
Granted, on the boards I frequented, some folks pushed back. For awhile. I used to enjoy the little assholes wandering into the board with their states-rights talking points and getting utterly dismantled. (Tabletop culture has some traits I don’t much like, but one thing I love is that it also has people who damn well know their history.)
So, I agree it is not entirely a monolith. But there was an awful damn lot of fashposting. And maybe most of it was just ironyposting. But inadvertent propagation is still propagation, no?
It was propagating often enough that after a while it just wasn’t worth wading through the bullshit anymore. Especially as the election ramped up. Trump didn’t unhinge that place, he dehinged it. As in, they unscrewed the hinges and threw them out the window. The one they had just thrown the door through.
I was mostly on /vg, /tg, /vr, and would occasionally pop into /x. I tried /v and /b, but maaaan…those were sewers. That culture WAS a monolith. Of piss.
I agree with you about shitposting being the bedrock of chan culture. But I also want to observe that the Nazis were extremely successful at piggybacking on all the shitposting. That might have been peculiar to the milieu. This was at the crest of Gamergate.
Would be curious to hear your take on it all.
Infinichan though? Nah. Gotta go with Eversor on this one. That place was a straight up afterbirth-fire, at conception. It started with folks who wanted extra Cheese Pizza with their A Wyatt Mann cartoons, and went downhill from there. At speed.
Origuy
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I was a regular on alt.fan.cecil-adams as well. Also alt.folklore.urban and talk.origins.
Subsole
@zhena gogolia: Though I would say, at the risk of being petty, that she has aged extremely accurately…
Subsole
@Chris Johnson:
That poor, poor crab…
Lyrebird
@tam1MI: Oh thank you for linking that! I was a huge Cars fan back in early MTV times.
And this is a really cool idea:
..though the artist himself was on the politically erratic side.
JaneE
I hope some artist re-imagines Dark Brandon as a Dalek.
AWJ
@Subsole: According to this grimly fascinating 2020 Vice article, the departure in 2015 of the site’s original founder was an inflection point for 4chan.
Subsole
@AWJ: Yeah, that matches up with what I saw. I was around when Mootles left. I started in 08. Finally ditched it in 16, because why hang out at a Nazi bar?
I would hesitate to agree that 4chan was leftist at inception. It was contrarian at inception, and the Right was ascendant. Kind of like how Glem Verdwaald got his rep as a progressive champion without having a progressive cell in his vast, rotten, all-consuming spleen.
Otherwise, yeah. That tracks.
Another Scott
@Chief Oshkosh: Thanks for the pointer.
Cheers,
Scott.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
I will amend what I said earlier a little bit. Kitler pictures are definitely Nazi themed.
Feathers
@Suzanne: At band camp one year, someone thought it would be hilarious to have an “-arry” squad. So we were Mary, Cary, Larry, Teri, Terry (M), Terry (F), Ari, and just for fun, Ted. Made for a wonderful year of marching band. But we survived.
Gravenstone
@Suzanne: The tiny dorm I ended my college career in had six variations of the name James my senior year (including me). We got creative.
JAFD
The poultry market that Suzanne Vega sang about is still here, on Madison Street
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJAsVLwB5Ck
http://www.metrolyrics.com/ironbound-fancy-poultry-lyrics-suzanne-vega.html
If any jackals are ever around Newark, we can amble over there.
Hope all of you are staying cool and hydrated !
opiejeanne
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: OMG! I was on the Urban Legends site when it was The Mining Company.
Manxome Bromide
SA was really, really aggressive about containment, to the point that I’d hesitate to put a single political subfaction on it. It also mutated a lot over the decades. In the period when I poked around it, I saw a lot of “dirtbag left”, but it was also the most aggressive trans-rights space I’d seen that wasn’t explicitly founded as one, and those usually don’t mix. It also had regular purges of Nazis, but that required it to be lax enough to let them build up to the point that that was a thing. The guy that ran the place was also a lousy enough human being that his death produced an open celebration across the wider internet of the fact that he was gone.
MisterDancer really does get to the meat of it, though. These tendencies are old and everyone remembers where they found it as the thing that invented it. I recall seeing it claimed more than once that it was Kevin Drum who invented posting cats on the Internet.