I’m 29 so maybe I’m too young for this statement but if you ask me it’s because younger celebrities tend to be the result of nepotism and don’t have any actual talents.
which has always been true
The nepotism part has always been true, and talentless celebrities have been around as long as the concept of “celebrity” has, but the category of celebrities “being famous for no reason” did not truly exist until Paris Hilton. Princesses and Kings aren’t “celebrities”.
Oh honey. Talentless celebrities existed before you were born.
Is that the lady from Green acres? It’s the place to be!
Her sister…
Nope, it’s her sister, you’re thinking of Eva Gabor. Darling I love you but give me Park Avenue.
Don’t half ass the job, kid. Ass it completely!
Zis has been a Filmways presentation dahling.
The chores!
Ze whores!
(You’re telling me that’s not the next line?!)
Goodbye city life!
Speaking of, Paris Hilton’s great grandfather was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor.
there’s a whole rube Goldberg machine of celebrities of that era that are married or related.
Definitely. We still have that to this day, such as the Kardashians. At least with the Internet some people become famous without those moneyed connections but those are still the exception.
I am simultaneously enriched and diminished by knowing that.
Who wasn’t?
before radio, every born noble was famous despite having no talent, with the rare exception of the talented ones
Well, they had political power. So it was pretty darn important to know them around where you lived.
You keep joking about Doop and it’s going to come true.
There’s a whole lot of people who are basically famous with being famous…
And most of them have the surname “Kardashian”.
If you mean the literal Kardashians, they’re only a dozen, but figuratively it’s like a gebericised trademark and there are thousands of people like that.
They’re lucky not to know, doop fell hard off after it was acquired by Skoot Corp.
I’m still so mad at the Skoot Corp CEO for that ridiculous re-skeet where they memed the javalina charrp boys on doop.
Am I having the stroke? Or is everyone else?
We’re all part of the stroke
Is that still called a circlejerk?
Why even care about those “celebrities”? Stuff they do is usually mediocre at best anyways.
Listening to what their interests are is a good way to connect with much younger (or much older!) people. I’ll happily listen to a kid explain Fortnite to me, or my to grandpa talk about his favourite TV show. I’ll ask them some questions about it and get a conversation going.
It’s not about caring, it’s just about even knowing what business they’re in.
Makes sense from that POV, I guess. Although I’d probably rather talk about hobbies and stuff instead
You can do all of the above.
I’m an old coot, I know some names like something paul, mr beast or pewdiepie, from when I was on reddit years ago, I know those guys are “youtuber” because I saw the thumbnail, but I have no clue what they do or what they speak of or why they would be famous?!? I don’t watch youtube, first because comments are toxics, it takes too much time, who spent hours listening/watching some rants by some guy in his basement?!? I’m like an out of touch skinner :)
Youtubers are different than movie, music, and tv stars.
I’m old school too though, i could be wrong at this point.
From what i can tell, YT comments have actually improved over the years. Still plenty of garbage, but it’s bearable and there is some real discussion sometimes now.
Bot spam is now backed by LLM technology
I mean, are they materially worse than Paris Hilton and Kimberly Kardashian? Or the Jersey Shore crowd? I’m not here to judge.
But I didn’t really follow them when I was age-appropriate to care about that shit, anyway. Was too busy reading blogs about the newest feature list of an up-and-coming MMORPG or tearing through the latest edition of my favorite TTRPG, because I was focused on what truly mattered.
At some point, its not an age thing, its just a taste thing. I could probably name more web comix artists and indie board games than C-list celebrities and Reality TV shows, and that’s fine.
I often need to remind myself that Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings are not recent movies.
It’s the same as being a kid in the 80s, which I was, and thinking The Seven Year Itch was a recent movie. Now, I had seen that movie on TV, because my parents liked it, and I thought it was funny, but never did I think of it as “recent”.
Still, you can’t tell me that Harry Potter movies didn’t happen in the last ten years.
I refuse to ever call Harry Potter a classic.
But it is a classic
Holy hell, the last movie was released in 2011.
I remember how much anticipation and agony people were complaining about waiting for it, that it couldn’t come soon enough.
I recently picked up a new game: RoboCop: rogue city… It hits all of the nostalgia about the original movie so far. Marching through an office building blowing off people’s hands and ripping machine guns off turrets and mowing down rooms full of enemies in all the gory, bloody detail… It gives me all the warm and fuzzy feelings.
The sound track is on point too.
Hard to believe it’s source material is from 1987. The game almost looks as good as the movie did. It’s not as polished as big name titles. People will talk and their mouth won’t move, some of the idle animations for NPCs is very repetitive and robotic… But the visuals… MMM. If you liked the original, and want to partake in some thug killing mayhem as Murphey himself, I’d recommend it.
That game is a blast to play. Some bugs like you said but well worth the 20 bucks or whatever I spent on it.
It’s actually only $9.99 right now with the Steam spring sale, normally $49.99…fuck. I might have to play it.
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I wish it was like that, reality is there’s like 3 platforms that make you IRL famous. Youtube, Twitch and TIk Tok.
I mean OnlyFans too
I used to be really into new music. Now I have 10 bands I listen to and just hope they keep releasing new albums.
I used to be really into standup. Now people mention it and all I can think to say is “Kyle Kinane is still doing comedy, right?”
I used to be really into movies. The newest I’ve seen recently is the Bob’s Burgers movie.
But hey, at least I’m ignoring a lot of my hobbies these days!
I had no idea there was a Bob’s Burgers movie. Im apparently out of touch. Lol.
and we wondered why everything was a GameBoy or a Nintendo for our parents
No no! THIS is different ! 😀 it’s because it’s funny to mess with kids.
My routine when I walk into the room where my daughter is playing a game:
- Identify the game she is playing.
- Ask her how <activity in game she isn’t currently playing> is going. Like if she’s caught all the Pokémon when she’s playing Minecraft.
I’m not even trying to be subtle about it, but am still not sure she realizes I’m doing it deliberately. Either way, she corrects me with exasperation each time.
I used to work at a hikers’ hostel on the Appalachian Trail. A group of hikers needed a ride into town but were short on cash. One of them suggested they offer the hostel owner some weed in exchange for a ride. Another one said, “He doesn’t smoke weed. He’s old, like in his 40s.” He actually was in his 50s and bought his weed from me lol
“We are the first to do this.” -every young cohort going back through time
“The young ones are lacking conservative quality that we had” - Every old cohort going back through time
Ah the duality of humans :p
I don’t regret any of this one bit, you look them up and it’s always someone shilling products extremely hard while doing extremely low effort content like reaction videos or streaming Minecraft.
This.
The TV stations around me are desperate to attract the young viewers, so they always have influencers as guests on their shows and what not, and I simply do not get it.Today’s guest: Billy Bobberson.
What’s he famous for? Oh he posts some selfies on Instagram daily and every other post is a sponsored brand promo.
Why the fuck do people even follow influencers like this???Because most people are stupid. It is easier for stupid people to follow fake celebrities aka influencers, than to read a book or think for themselves.
I’m in this camp too and have made a recent comment (dev angle) but I genuinely believe most people are stupid lately
I’d go further with it (about celebrity culture and influencers) but I think we’ve heard it all
my genuine shock is just how much people seem to care so much that it affects their daily lives
The fact that ‘influencer’ is a legitimate job title is proof that humanity is doomed.
I would be ashamed to ever admit that I follow somebody whose explicit job is to influence me. Like, do people refer to themselves as “influencees”?
I work for an influencer now, I went to a reputable film school and have a masters degree. I used to do documentaries on BLM for god’s sake.
So are you a one (wo)man band filming/editing their content? I’m not necessarily opposed to doing this with a (good) youtuber if the content is high-brow/interesting/educational etc but the idea of doing it for a tik tok star sounds positively dreadful. In fact I refused such a proposal before because the “stars” were really not my vibe and also they gave some red flags, but at least they were still “musicians” not JUST ad-peddlers.
No, I’m part of an entire team. There’s multiple project managers, stylists and other people. We get client briefings and everything, it feels strangely corporate.
there were always similar jobs going all the way back to the rennaisance
They aren’t some symbol of the end times or anything, they’re just a symptom of the sort of attention based economy we’ve built up here in America. They exist precisely because you can get paid to shill products while playing Minecraft.
If we reign in the marketing and advertising industries then influencers will fall alongside them.
Or, if we regulate “proper” ads and fail to do the same to influencers, whether on purpose or not, then they will become a primary source of advertising. Depending how this is handled could be a good or bad thing.
Hi, today’s post is sponsored by draft kings! If you sign up today and put $10 in your account they’ll give you $100!
Man fuck any influencer who pushes gambling.
It’s also one of the few ways to make money available to them that has a chance of making them enough money to live the way their grandparents did. Certainly the easiest to get into.
To me, reaction videos are truly astonishing. Like, the number of videos reacting to some thing typically outnumber the thing itself by the hundreds. People prefer watching somebody else watching something so they know how they should feel about it. It’s the modern version of the laugh track.
I’ll turn shit off if someone keeps pausing the actual clip to provide absolutely nothing worthwhile while wasting my time. So annoying.
People born in 2007 shouldn’t be old enough to be online yet…
When I wrote this I was thinking, “12 is a little young to be online but I guess they could be”. No, turns out someone born in 2007 would be 18 right now. Yikes
I was online at 11 or so, but back then we pretty much just had AOL teen chat and rudimentary web sites.
I was online when I was 11 also, back in 94. No google. No yahoo. No youtube. Just non-stop unregulated pornography as far as thee eye could see. Then yahoo showed up and had yahoo chat WITH NO BOTS. They even had a Webcam feature on dialup. I was 14 by then and I remember going into a Webcam room with a woman in Australia in her 40s and she made me watch her use a huge black dildo. The original rickroll was goatse, or this website that infinitely loaded popup windows until it crashed your pc.
Truly a golden age.
Ooo yah my young ass found AOHELL TOOLZ and would scroll the chat or send logoff bombs to peeps.
Golden age indeed.
At the time I had no pc in my house, I could only use it at my grandparents house. They got AOL, and like a week after getting it he checked his email and it was a porn spam with a big image of 2 lesbians using a double sided dildo and he called that day and canceled AOL and he switched to a smaller local isp(back when those existed). I still cackle at that, with how ubiquitous emails like that are.
Hahaha that’s excellent. When I hit like 13, I was fed up with AOL’s walled garden (funny, because now I love my iPhone, but at least I get the whole internet) so I installed something like freeinternet.com or whatever and the Opera browser came out, so I used that. My mind was blown when suddenly I didn’t have parental restrictions. The free internet was a crunchy place back then!
Then, as a later teen, I discovered suuuper early TOR. THAT was a wild place. I stumbled upon things I did NOT want to see.
I vividly remember as a young teen watching a completely free Webcam feed from Amsterdam of unpaid amateur people who liked to be watched have sex(on dialup) with a little watching counter in the corner. It was literally front page, didn’t even have to goto a page and click a hotlink. Or how Whitehouse.com was a porn site and kids would regularly go there by accident in the school computer lab doing projects.
I never used TOR until like 2004 and by then I was in my 20s. In 2007 I came this close to buying $40 in bitcoin to use on silk road when they were less than a penny. I could be a millionaire right now if my ex hadn’t talked me out of it.
My friend with young cousins was telling me that kids are using “sigma” instead of “cool” now?
“That’s so sigma, bruh.”
The fuck?
'The fuck" is now “what the sigma” at least that’s what I gathered from lurking on shitposting communities
Edit: and I’m deeply afraid of using it around people who don’t know what that means. And also around people who do know what it means.
50% of what Gen X thinks is zoomer slang is actually jokes at zoomer slang’s expense
reminds me of that oprah show when a lady reads out then contemporary teenage sexual slang and it’s so obvious the kids were fucking with her
wdym I went to SO many rainbow parties as a 9 year old
Start speaking in Greek to them. Asspro means white.
I’m something of an asspro myself
In the distant future, when we look back on scattered social media caps, we will regret that the date of posting is not shown. Like scattered pages from books unknown, page numbers elided.
Even some articles or blogposts are without publish date. This should be illegal.
The fun thing is that none of this stuff is going to survive long-term at all. Databases are backed up onto forms of media that have a very short lifespan. Only material that is endlessly copied forward (like DNA) will still be around, and nobody is going to pay for that kind of archiving, at least not for the generally trivial bullshit that comprises social media. FWIW this fact make me happy.
I randomly download scattered memes that I will want to repost endlessly in the future. I assume other people do the same.
What forms of media are you taking about that have short life spans?
I think that as storage density goes up and price goes down, what used to be cumbersome and expensive amounts of data become easily manageable. So the only reasons we loose data will be business or political. Which will also decrease as there’s now money in buying failing platforms.
But yeah, I’m also happy none of the social media I created when I was young still exists, and the platforms are buried by the sands of time. Having everything you do on the internet stay around forever feels like a nightmare.
What forms of media are you taking about that have short life spans?
Things like tape drives and optical storage etc. Even if they have lifespans measured in decades (and these things typically don’t) that still means they have short life spans in terms of being recoverable in the future. A hundred years from now these things won’t be restorable.
I found this report from NIST that estimates tape to last 20 years, CD-R and DVD-R 30 years, and M-DISC 100 years 🤷 (I didn’t even know optical was used professionally, and found the term “optical jukebox” to be hilarious :)
https://www.nist.gov/publications/digital-evidence-preservation-considerations-evidence-handlers
But more importantly, an actively maintained storage system will last forever (as long as maintained). And for example AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs just $0.00099 / GB / month*, so you can store terabytes for the price of a cup of coffee.
*Plus extra fees for access and stuff, but the point is managed storage isn’t particularly expensive unless you have very large amounts of data or heavy usage.
an actively maintained storage system will last forever (as long as maintained)
I mean, this is really my point. This stuff isn’t going to be maintained forever and will eventually be lost - even if it takes 100 years or more. This idea of future archaeologists troweling their way through Facebook posts isn’t going to happen.
Even much of what we know about the first civilizations in Mesopotamia is only because their clay tablets - which were never intended to be permanent records of anything - were accidentally fired and buried when their storage facilities caught fire. It’s possible that some modern forms of media might be accidentally preserved and restored somehow thousands of years in the future, but it’s a bit hard to imagine such a scenario. Especially when we’re going to cook ourselves off the planet before then.
Most of the Chinese internet from the mid-90s to ~2010 has already disappeared.
As civilization has progressed, we’ve done more and more writing and record keeping and done so an less and less durable media. From stone to clay to papyrus/parchment to paper to film to digital media.
I feel like there needs to be some kind of write once media that’s extremely durable and reasonably dense for digital data specifically for long term archival purposes. What’s the digital equivalent to carving something on a stone tablet, that a thousand years from now despite age and weathering could be dug up in a field somewhere and still hypothetically be at least mostly readable?
If you want reliable media to last on a timeline relevant to our lives and even several generations, look into M disc blurays. Though, similar to dual layer dvds back in the day, it’s much easier to find a writer than the media itself. But it claims lifespans of centuries to millennia rather than decades usually associated with other disc media. They are actually etched instead of just using some fancy ink. Readable by normal drives, too. It’s just on the writing side that you need one that can specifically handle M discs. It also supports multi-layers, but those are even harder to find and get pretty pricey.
Still not likely a way to pass information ahead to civilizations even tens of thousands of years away, and even before they break down, a new civilization would need to figure out how to read and interpret them (when we had trouble reading hieroglyphs from known civilizations that we could read directly with our eyes).
But at least they should be relatively safe to write, verify, then forget about for a few decades until you find them and want to take a walk down memory lane. Assuming you can still get a bluray reader at that point, or held on to one. Pack them together and future you or your heirs might be grateful.
