• Sandinband
    ·
    4 years ago

    "Fantasy novels, Japanese comics" how the fuck is that relevant to anything?

    "Suspect had a low calorie cookbook and a bar of soap"

    • Optimismbias [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 years ago

      It is a signifier of The Other.

      Nerds. Those untrustworthy people who we bulled and briefly felt guilty about it, but now feel they well deserved it. Nobody but nerds reads fantasy novels and Japanese comics. Where's his subscription to The New Yorker like a normal person? Or the works of Michael Wolff and Stormy Daniels? If his apartment had those, along with perhaps some audio books like The Night Watchman, we might be able to determine the slappening was a legitimate rebuke to power. But nope, he's a geeky, he's a gamer, and we can safely dismiss him (whew!) because he is The Other and anything he does is invalid by the fact that he isn't one of Us.

        • NaturalsNotInIt [any]
          ·
          edit-2
          4 years ago

          I feel very Citations Needed thinking about how the clinical, passive language portrays him as a monster. A normal person would just be like "he's a history buff who enjoys anime and video games" and it completely gets the point across without sounding like you're diagnosing someone.

      • SiskoDid2ThingsWrong [none/use name]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Nerds. Those untrustworthy people who we bulled and briefly felt guilty about it, but now feel they well deserved it.

        Idk, hasn’t the culture zeitgeist kinda moved past this almost to the point nerds are fetishized and celebrated? At least it felt that way circa 2015, nerd culture around them felt almost coddled. Perhaps shit like GG and the rise of the alt-right caused people to go back to “nerds are creepy”.

        • Optimismbias [none/use name]
          ·
          4 years ago

          It's the cycle of a cool subculture being created, and getting ruined by the sociopaths who package it and the public who consumes it. Here's a really good essay of what happened to nerd culture: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

          The sociopaths also work out how to monetize mops—which the fanatics were never good at. With better publicity materials, the addition of a light show, and new, more crowd-friendly product, admission fees go up tenfold, and mops are willing to pay. Somehow, not much of the money goes to creators. However, more of them do get enough to go full-time, which means there’s more product to sell.

          After a couple years, the cool is all used up: partly because the New Thing is no longer new, and partly because it was diluted into New Lite, which is inherently uncool. As the mops dwindle, the sociopaths loot whatever value is left, and move on to the next exploit. They leave behind only wreckage: devastated geeks who still have no idea what happened to their wonderful New Thing and the wonderful friendships they formed around it. (Often the geeks all end up hating each other, due first to the stress of supporting mops, and later due to sociopath divide-and-conquer manipulation tactics.)

      • SerLava [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Yeah the cops reporting this know exactly what they are doing