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The fear of a "normal" and stable life is hilarious in hindsight. I was listening to And Introducing's episode on the New York rock scene in the 2000s and there are so many glaring examples even in that of how having a stable life has become more alien in such a short time (and how 9/ll basically kept parts of new york from being gentrified even earlier -- thanks Osama for keeping rent down a little longer, I guess).
https://soundcloud.com/and-intro-pod/48-meet-me-in-the-bathroom-ft-graham-wright
It's not a terribly deep movie but it's at least a little more nuanced than that. It's actually pretty anti-capitalist, anti-consumerism.
Besides, isn't the idea that you can get paid just enough to stop caring about other people and just buy furniture and waste your life working to make somebody else more money a little bothersome?
holy crap, you could buy stuff straight from ikea? like, not used?
The golden days when like, half of the people could afford a brand-new Kramfors.
I was thinking about this movie recently! Durden managed to create a huge working class movement/revolution by uniting alienated men. Then he blew up a bunch of what, banking offices? Pretty fucking rad tbh
Yeah. It's telling, that the Talking Simpsons podcast had two of the Chapos (Will and Felix, I think) guest on their "Homer's Enemy" episode. They pointed out how Grimes represents the entitled nature of younger people, but at the same time, seeing Homer sleep through life feels like a valid grievance.
I was not allowed to watch simpsons as a kid but I rigged a coathanger to the back of the TV and figured it out anyway. My older brother saw one of his friends do it. That's how we learned EVERYTHING back then.
same, parents had to lock out every channel with parental controls and they hid the cable
found the tweet:
also here's this recent article on the same topic:
It's a traditional sitcom using a cartoon base. It leans on both sitcom and animation tropes with a wink to the audience. For example, sometimes the house will be a shithouse in a bad neighborhood, sometimes a mansion in a good neighborhood. Everything in the Simpsons depends on the plot. Sometimes they can't even afford good toilet paper IIRC.
I feel like the Simpsons also conveyed the desperation the working class is feeing today, though, in the good seasons that is. It’s just intensified as time has time has gone on. They are constantly skrimping and saving. When homer’s company stock increases, Marge is excited that they will finally have a savings account (though Homer goofs and cashes it out when it’s $20 and buy’s an expensive beer). When their dog needs an emergency surgery, they have to cut things out of their life and modify their standard of living for a little while because of their lack of money. In the first episode, when they have to pay for an impromptu tattoo removal for Bart that consumes their Xmas present money, and Homer doesn’t get a holiday bonus, they are unable to purchase any Christmas gifts and Homer is forced to shop at the 66 cent and below store.
I guess what the tweet is getting at is still true, that the Simpsons embodied a typical suburban existence that is becoming less and less possible. But even in that embodiment, the Simpsons were barely hanging on to middle class status in the show, and little bumps along the way threatened to throw them off of it at any moment.
Edit: or maybe they weren’t saying that things weren’t hard for the Simpsons, but rather that their standard of living is now impossible for someone of Homer and Marge’s background
I think this attitude is still around, too. I have a modest home and a kid on the way, and it seems like everyone expects me to be climbing some corporate ladder right now.
It's like this brain diseased, "chase a dream that you didn't conceive for yourself" mindset.
Couple of generations and people will be chastised for wanting a job that pays money and not serving as a bloodbag for some decrepit billionaire ghoul in exchange for Amazon vouchers
It is weird how people forget about that "end of history" period.
Makes the matrix hit different, thats for sure.
I think, the thing that gets me the most is how much the sneering dismissiveness about everything was just an affect.
I had just recently learned how the columbine guys were ultra conservative white power types. Blew my mind for how much they got portrayed as goth anarchist types.
They were the prototype of the modern school shooter chud. We were just never told about it at the time. Part of me thinks the cops and the media that investigated at the time just thought their ultranationalism sounded normal and didnt think to report on it. They would have loved gamergate and all that.
Yeah, the US running out of coke and being hungover for a generation, deciding that there was never gonna be the energy to do anything again is the perfect solipsism
anarchists don't really blow shit up. when we do, we tend to shoot one person. even when we're violent warlords we try to minimize splash damage pretty rigorously. and we're generally at least a little competent and not wanking off our guns.
so it's a good bet that whenever someone is called an anarchist terrorist; they're fucking not.
At least you're better than me, I wanted to be a fighter pilot as a kid after playing the Ace Combat games. My thought process was basically fast jet = cool. Then when I got older and realised that will involve killing people if war ever broke out and noped out of that very quickly.
The games stories are usually very anti war, but as you said it doesn't stop the military fetishizing people. My PC is definitely not strong enough for DCS lol. Also my country has basically no use for the brand new fighter jets they have, so they are using them and their special camera modules to hunt down poachers. Just think of how inefficient it is to spy on poachers in a Mach 2 fighter plane.
best option? no. most awesome option? pretty close.
DCS is a real joy in VR, though it's becoming increasingly clear I need a better headset than my og vive.
I wanted to be an Astronaut. Turns out it's mostly janitorial work in the worst OH&S environment imaginable.
I wanted to be an astronaut so bad when I was a kid.
Back then, I thought humans would be places other than Earth and Low Earth Orbit, though :sadness:
and aren't we glad they haven't yet? imagine spreading capitalism to the stars! fuck that! no more space til we fix our shit!
Honestly, I think space will help, if we can get the Musk types to fuck off. Socialism is mandatory in space, or you die.
until we break our capitalist chains, we can't get the musks to fuck off. it's just permission for them to abuse earth harder, because they have their walled garden they can flee to.
I got even closer than you, lol. A couple years out of high school I applied and got taken to some base to test. There were little games and aa paper test, they rate you on how you did (there were math games, flight controller games, one game where you had to do some math on heating a house on the fly, one where you had to determine if you had enough fuel to make it.)
I apparently did very well, but I was just a little too tall to fit in the trainer planes and ultimately for the fast jets. They "offered" (pending medical and fitness approval) me a direct entry into an air traffic controller commission and some military college. I thought that was cool and then I could do that after leaving the military, but I got fucking work related asthma from my job! Got passed over after some medical test, cant remember what its called something like methane choline?
I felt bitter at the time, but looking back now I'm glad I couldnt do it. I didnt end up doing air traffic controller school in just civilian world, but maybe could give it a shot for after the pandemic if air traffic ever goes back to normal, lol.
They've removed the height requirements now for the most part, be glad you're not younger lol
Yeah I remember when the absolute craziest thing anyone I knew had seen was the video of the planes hitting the trade centers and there being extra long lines for gasoline the day or two after. Really was such a simpler time, at least in rural white areas.
I dunno if you were a stoner or not but remember when weed was talked about in hushed tones as though smoking a joint was literal sedition? I mean for good reason.... people used to get their lives destroyed over it pretty regularly. That's one thing that's changed for the better I guess. You used to have to put your nuts on the line to get high. Kids will never understand.
lol, amen. i'm in my 40s and it's remarkable how insanely sketchy some of the shit i did was to buy weed. tom segura has this great bit about it where he explains to his children "daddy used to get in cars with strangers". like just so i could go home, close all the window blinds, and rip a little pipe before eating cereal and watching cartoons to have a few hours before bed where i forgot how shitty my job was.
Man I'm in my 20s and I still remember all the sketchy shit I used to do with my friends to get weed. I swear we were going to be kidnapped or murdered half the time. Luckily it's legal to grow your own weed for personal consumption in my country so those days are over for me.
same. it used to be such a sneaky, wild thing when i was young. now i have it in my backyard over the summer.
Too many white politicians kids getting popped for it definitely had an effect I think lol.
Yeah, we were that youngsters that got the great evolution of games when they started to be something. You got Dune 2 when we were little and get the new shit today. Great spectrum.
I'm pretty sure almost nobody in corporate America actually "uses their degree". It's all on the job experience. Obviously not talking about doctors and shit, but come on, do you really need a business degree to call people and try to sell things to them?
This is why I hate recruiters more than almost anything. They get paid to find "good" candidates so they skip anyone who doesn't check certain boxes. It's ridiculously hard to break into certain sectors because of this.
Eh, it is sorta still that way for degrees. Like only ~30-40% of people with just a bachelors or below end up in the same field their degree is in.
The problem is that there is a lot more jobs that require advanced degrees now. You can't even get an interview for a chemistry gig without a masters in most of the United States now. Back in the 1990's national labs were hiring anyone with a pulse and a bachelors. It is so insane now at national labs that even entry level positions require PhDs.
Its offloading of training to employees. Training is expensive for corporations and conditions have deteriorated enough that no one sticks around at 1 company for a career (because they dont give out raises, etc. you know the reasons why). Churn is expensive for companies and therefore they want to decrease the cost of employee churn - enter formal post-sec education where the employees themselves have to pay $10k or more for just technical education that they wouldve previously been given as part of on the job training, nevermind needing a masters for some of this stuff. Side benefit is that your workers are now indebted and precarious before they even enter their first job, you can treat them even worse and maybe some quit but the reserve army of labor now all have standardized training and education so churn isnt as big a problem.
Thought it was funny how in different media, working some corporate job in a cube farm was portrayed as this depressing inevitably of life, that you’ll hate your job and yourself. For as bad and soul-crushing as *it is, having a roof over your head and food in the fridge is not a bad prospect.
Edit: that -> it. White collar jobs have their own drawbacks of course
It's obviously better to have financial stability than to struggle but a lot of cuber jobs really are pretty soul crushing if you can't force yourself to buy into whatever bullshit corporate is slinging
Remember how miserable Al Bundy was, with his entry-level job that supported a wife, two kids, a house, and two cars?
I like those shows where the house and/or livelihood the main family has would be fairly unrealistic.
For example, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was The King of Queens (where the main characters worked as a delivery driver and corporate secretary respectively) and George Lopez (where the main characters worked at an airplane production and as an event planner).
Of course, the odds of are these people, if they were real, eventually could not pay the loans they took out and lost their homes by the end of the 2000s.
Meanwhile I'm having nausea and desperately wishing I had a business degree as I wipe mud off my face for the five darn time today
I thought there was a weekly dinosaur thread, what's the deal with making another one?
We all just wanna be big rock stars, live in hilltop houses driving 15 cars.
