I get Instagram and Only Fans confused.
Etsy is easier because they sell chain mail.
2: You see the purported screen shot? The expressions of the other participants is gold.
[Link purportedly showing Jeffrey Toobin's junk and other people reacting to it deleted.]
I'm taking that down. Not picking on you, but it's unannounced nudity, and I think there's enough people here who'd rather not be surprised by clicking through.
4 and 5: I totally understand LB's position, but now I totally want to see it.
Admittedly, I'm not even quite sure you could see junk -- that would have involved more squinting than I was going to do.
Eh, maybe I overreacted. G, if you want to repost the link, as long as everyone's clear they shouldn't click unless they want to see middle-aged naked guy, go ahead.
7: It's more the facial expressions that I want to see.
It's relatively easy to google (or wait DOJ says we can't use that term any more) and find the reaction shots with the dick blurred out. Most of them are laughing or embarrassed looks but Chris in the top middle looks totally puzzled at what he is seeing.
Ah, I just assumed everyone already knew the scandal and knew what to expect.
For those who don't want to google.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EkxYv5HUUAUvqYi?format=jpg&name=medium
I thought he was sitting there wanking but it looks like he's just walking around naked? Or I guess there's more to be gleaned from the action shots.
I don't think that's legit. Looks like it's photoshopped from this skit? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNTJWVoDxYg
And it doesn't include any of the folks said to have been on the call. And, furthermore! I doubt any of the New Yorker writers took a screenshot and posted it.
Standards, people!
The highest standards are being upheld.
15 is very cute, but the best take IMO was roughly "actually seems like a pretty good simulation of the 2020 election", except for the part where "the courts" get disciplined.
I'm pleasantly surprised that we've gotten through several months of this without my wife or I showing up unclothed on the other's videocons, and I have occasionally changed for a workout while in a meeting with the camera off and pointed at the wall, but I really think that it's best to limit wanking during meetings to the figurative sort only.
17: I almost got somebody to pay me to take one of his courses.
Anyway, I don't know what an influencer does, except I read about one in a buzzfeed article.
Is this that strange an idea? It's pretty similar to TV and radio ads, except that the beast the ad is being hitched to is this new less-structured parasocial online thing. The FTC is even requiring disclosure of sponsored content now.
Is this that strange an idea? It's pretty similar to TV and radio ads, except that the beast the ad is being hitched to is this new less-structured parasocial online thing.
When you put it that way, does it hearken back to the early days of TV in which companies would sponsor a show instead of running discrete ads (but, again, in a less-structured way).
The funniest thing I've seen on social media this week is this learned courtroom discussion -- I had finally stopped laughing when I got to the "Fucking hearings, how do they work?" comment and that set it off again.
That's going to be me in ten years.
Assuming we have not reached the point where I am a Juggalo because they are the only effective counter to the fascists.
Wikipedia, the bad side:
Incredibly convoluted and fucked up discussion of why Theresa Greenfield's article has been blocked. Issues is whether she was "generally notable" before she ran for office (general criteria but this is clearly fuicked up application of that beneral rule in this instance). It is not up at this point I believe.
And a glimpse into Wiki culture. The main dude blocking has the following entitlement: This editor is a Grandmaster Editor First-Class and is entitled to display this Mithril Editor Star with the Neutronium Superstar hologram.
It's probably easier to just elect more women to Congress.
Apparently there's a cooking-YouTuber one of whose recent videos, for beef stroganoff, features sponsored content from... the U.S. Navy.
13: That's why I said purported! It was just something texted to me while at work, I sure as hell wasn't going to research that on a govt. computer.
The Egyptian Navy tried that, but there was a miscommunication.
When I run across an "influencer" webpage or social media feed in the wild, I tend to have the same creeping sense of sympathetic shame and excruciating sadness that I feel when I watch most sitcoms or game shows. They all seem so desperately eager to present their perfectly manicured lives, and so painfully insecure in their attempts to do so, that I can barely watch. It's like watching stay-at-home moms of an earlier generation frantically trying to convince their equally-broke peers to buy Tupperware or Discovery Toys or Mary Kay.
Once in a while I read a recipe blog where the person seems happy enough, or at least reasonably matter-of-fact, and I have some faith that they have an ordinary life and this truly is just a hobby they find fun, that might bring them a little extra cash. But most of the time I just feel the same grim certainty I feel when I see a "missing woman" news story and her photos are all perfectly made-up, perfectly staged shots of a Happy Family, and it's abundantly obvious that her marriage was in tatters and she was so invested in having it be Perfect that she wasn't willing to ask for help or try to escape.
Maybe these kinds of folks aren't representative of all "influencers," but as a field it certainly seems toxic to me.
Posted by: gonerill
Old-timer night on the blogs. Tonight I was wondering what happened to Billmon and that incredibly annoying right-winger in Minnesota who posted about Target. I'm not saying the three of you are a natural kind or anything.
Long-running crowdsourced knowledge bases like Wikipedia and the Stack Exchanges have the problem that they eventually get taken over by people who are insane. I don't know if they were already insane, or if they are driven insane by the process, but they are insane. The culture becomes one of people enforcing vaguely defined rules that materialize out of thin air. They become obsessed with policing the boundaries of the site.
It could be that they are driven insane by the insane crap they have to deal with. Particularly for pages about individual people, there's the issue that there are lots of bad actors who make fake pages or add fake information, and if someone isn't actively monitoring the page they will trash it. I can see how this would drive someone insane. On the other hand, spending your free time monitoring pages to see if they've been edited is only an activity that a crazy control-freak would do, so maybe they were already insane.
I always two reactions to events like the Theresa Greenfield issue. One is the urge to point out that it's your fault that Wikipedia is like this. The crazy people edit Wikipedia, and you don't, so of course the crazy people won. Or maybe you edited Wikipedia a thousand times, but you are going up against someone who has edited 100,000 times, who spends hours every day fixing grammar mistakes or added "citation needed" footnotes. Of course they end up with a bigger say. On the other hand, holy shit are the people who police the boundaries awful, and I would like to see them purged from the site. Honestly, I would like to see them killed, but they may be an overreaction.
23: Buffalo juggalo blugalos buffalo boogaloos.
The ridiculous notability criterion, which is so easily and readily abused, is [Jimmy] Wales's fault, isn't it? Or at least the Wikipedia Foundation's. It's not something crazed editors came up with on their own, as far as I'm aware.
I think the notability criterion has always been around. I remember in the early days endless debates on whether individual US high schools are notable. They came up with some criterion when there was a scandal because a journalist edited a fake page -- for himself? for someone else? don't remember -- and no one noticed for a year, until he announced it. I don't think it was notability, though.
After years to trying to sell me utterly unsuitable products like trips on the Hajj and high net worth divorce lawyers and houses in Michigan, Facebook finally managed to advertise something to me that looked so good that I bought it on the spot (and didn't regret it): the Alien TTRPG. Lovely production quality, very elegant mechanics including a great way of incorporating panic.
Did you see they're doing a new Aliens board game too? Mixes Space Hulk style combat with more card based mechanics.
Gale Force Nine. They've got a pretty good track record, though you tend to have to buy an expansion or two for the games to feel totally right.
Hmm. I'll have a look thanks. Only found one review of it and it doesnt sound glowing but will keep an eye on it...
I don't think there are any proper reviews out yet, just a hands-off preview from SUSD and some early pre-production impressions from GenCon last year.
I know a small-ish number of people whose income is partly based on their social media presence. It is a very strange world to be in. A couple of them are guitar tutors/players, so a lot of what they do is creating free instructional material or teasers (in instagram and youtube) that generates income for them via their paid Skype lessons, and the like, but they also make a little money on the side demo-ing products and more "influencer" activities. For them, social media is basically marketing for a business model that's quite comprehensible. On the other hand, one person I know,* is a fitness/wellness type Instagrammer, and her profile is basically cheescake-y bikini shots, freakishly perfect make-up, and assiduous curation of her self-image as someone jetting between Bali, and Dubai, and the like, while being a successful business-women/entrepreneur, and there's something vaguely sleazy and Stepford wife-y about the whole thing. A few of my wife's former colleagues -- who work in fashion retail -- are also dipping their toes in that water.
* the connection is super tangential, although it is an IRL connection rather than on-line.
Rudy Giuliani's penis is going to push Jeffrey Toobin's penis out of the news thanks to Borat.
40: I played a couple of sessions (a friend ran the Chariot of Gods scenario) and enjoyed it. You're right, the fear mechanic is pretty well done; it's a tough line to walk.
Grab a d20. If you don't roll 15+, you have to google until you understand 49.
I do have a topical question, though: how are Instragram ads so targeted and amazing?
When The Kids These Days (now adults, I guess) first got cameras in their phones, I couldn't believe how good their selfies became. Like, how did they know the angle and chin lift and hair and they always look so good (and exactly the same)? And the answer was that it was a learnable skill and they spent a lot of time learning it. I mean, I'm still surprised how good The Kids These Days know how to look in pictures.
The answer must be the same. Microniche ads must be a learnable skill and they have the equipment, motivation and feedback.
Instagram recommendations, and even more so TikTok's, are the product of deep learning applied to everything known about you available to the neural net. Instagram is owned by Facebook, so there's all that information as well as the fb-api login information to third-party websites. They used to have an Ad server as well, Atlas, but shut it down in 2016, I'd be very interested to learn more about the dynamics behind that decision.
The privacy concerns about TikTok are largely due to the apps being very aggressive about grabbing information wherever it's installed to feed their company's neural nets that are trained to predict: https://towardsdatascience.com/the-inescapable-ai-algorithm-tiktok-ad4c6fd981b8
I looked at my insta recommendations just now, found this: https://www.instagram.com/p/CE2H5hngGqw/?igshid=1shpp86md5tvv
||
War crimes: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-21/soldiers-killed-man-who-could-not-fit-on-aircraft-says-us-marine/12782756
|>
Of course, he only reads it for the articles.