moved to curbsidefuckup

@7f72d375a2c5669f2534c799

archived 09/05/2021

15.5K posts

considering using this shitshow again. @curbsidefuckup

#consider me gone #not because of this

i'm (temporarily) back, bitches

formerly @this--is-my-blog

the-mediocre-life-deactivated20

@mostlycatsmostly

This is the best email I’ve gotten all year

Holy fuck I’m dying

Conservatives and progressives

Belize City on Google Maps vs. Apple Maps.

im31andwhatisthis

peer2peer2peer-deactivated20210

okay i just had a bad epiphany but corporate interest’s influence on the internet is going to become so much stronger now that generations that are internet naturalized have grown up and starting working as “social media consultants”. advertising is going to become so much more subtle, manipulate your behavior to a greater extent, and completely pervade every aspect of our lives the more we rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to social validation.

peer2peer2peer-deactivated20210

what im saying is its scary that corporate twitter accounts are getting good at twitter. to have the same avenue a human would to express themself. its like, an extreme anthromorphism of a brand, and that brand representing a corporate interest, and successfully passing itself off as a sentient entity on twitter, thats really weird to me.

peer2peer2peer-deactivated20210

like this is so fucked up. it doesnt immediately read as an advertisement, conceptually it executes the levels of irony and deconstruction that usually make for successful memes in this genre or whatever. its almost subverting itself, but ultimately it still succeeds as an advertisement. it makes me sick. for every misfire of corporations trying to relate (pepsi protest commercial), theres another company getting better at it

radailurophiles

okay but like my thing about this is… who is actually eating at these places because shit like this? yeah it’s funny but i never go to wendy’s because a meme, if i go to wendy’s it’s because i want a gross burger and a frosty, same with taco bell and mcdonald’s and wherever the fuck.

i really think that you’re blowing this out of proportion and having very little faith in people’s ability to decide what they want for themselves. it’s just not that deep.

peer2peer2peer-deactivated20210

It’s not about the effectiveness of the ads in question, but their complete omnipresence in every aspect and moment of life, and how bizarre and sophisticated the mechanations of advertising have become. If people don’t call attention to these things, they become normal.

The effectiveness of marketing isnt one-to-one, like, “ad says burger is good, I think burger is good, I eat burger.” That was 50 years ago. Y'all, since then these multi-million dollar corporations have been hiring psychologists and sociologists and anthropologists to study how best to get under consumer skin and theyve figured out it’s not about making you WANT a burger,

It’s about creating a Brand Identity - an anthropomorphized personality that your brain fits into an established schema (system of thought) so it’s easier to just drop into the background of your everyday life. It’s not about making you want a burger, it’s about making it so, when you DO want a burger, the first place you think of is Wendy’s, because their ads have made you think about them five time already that day. And most importantly, it’s about making sure you dont realize how often they make you think about them, so you don’t resent how pervasive they’ve become. They do that by tricking your brain into thinking of them as just another human-like personality. Your Funny Meme Friend Wendy’s. Wine Aunt World Market. Woke Jock Nike. Even your Endearingly Unhip Uncle Geico.

(hey also if you want dozens of terrifying examples of what I mean, just type ‘brand identity schema’ into Google like I just did and take a gander at all those scholarly articles discussing how best to acquire consumers, like we’re a fucking commodity)

captainsnoop-deactivated2020041

one time i said i didn’t like the wendys twitter and got called classist for hating retail employees

this shit works. it makes people like Brands. gets under their skin and in to their minds. when i said i didnt like the wendys twitter i personally offended people that viewed wendys as a friend, that viewed the wendys social media manager as a friendly individual that they respected.

the wendys social media manager is not your friend. they don’t even really exist. there’s no one person that writes the tweets for wendys. there’s a team of 20 something year olds that casually observe the latest meme trends and crank out mspaint memes because they know they’ll get retweeted if the memes are relevant.

they trick you in to thinking that Wendys is a hip friendly young person, and they manipulate you in to thinking that disliking marketing is somehow a “problematic” “un-woke” thing to do.

and it works.

install ublock origin. on mobile, block every promoted tweet you see. don’t let them convince you that this shit is normal.

lostinspaceandmeaning

peer2peer2peer-deactivated20210

I just wanna say, not only was I extremely correct in my paranoid regarding these posts, but it’s actually gotten way fucking worse already

I’m just going to be blunt about it; America’s depression epidemic is a direct result of the all-encompassing alienation we experience under late stage capitalism, and now private interests are attempting to recuperate the general public’s feelings of hopelessness and despair into marketing material, the spectacle in effect recuperating our despair and making it appear that the powers that be are on our side. That we are being watched over by boardrooms with loving grace, despite the fact that they are part and parcel with the forces of economy that has driven so many people to not see any hope in their lives. By recuperating the public discourse about the root of endemic depression, the status quo is able to trivialize it and sterilize it before before safely incorporating it back into mainstream society. Not only are we unable to strike against our enemy, most of us can’t even see them for what they are, and the rest of us can’t even speak to the truth of what they are capable of.

Pay attention to little bizarre happenings like these, they betray the rest of the iceberg

featuresofinterest

it seems so strange to me that the only people it is socially acceptable to live with (once you reach a certain stage in life) are sexual partners? like why can’t i live with my best friend? why can’t i raise a child with them? why do i need to have sex with someone in order to live with them? why do we put certain relationships on a pedestal? why don’t we value non-sexual relationships enough? why do life partners always have to be sexual partners?

My grandmother and grandfather more or less adopted my grandmother’s best friend back in the 50s. After my grandfather died (before I was born, back in 1968 or so) they continued to keep house together, platonic best friends, and they hung together until they died, a few months apart, in 2007.

It’s quite recently, as far as I can tell, that living arrangements like that have stopped being regarded as normal.

It’s absolutely a new thing to find this stuff weird, and it has a lot to do with media pretending that the nuclear family and marriage are the only reasons to live with other people.

I’ve lived in a 3 adult household my whole life. My parents and their best friend. This was never weird to me, even though everyone my age thought it was because the media never portrayed these kinds of housing arrangements. As far as i was concerned, I just had an extra non-blood parent.

According to my parents, it was very common in the 70′s-80′s to buy houses with your friends, because it was financially smart to do so (so long as you were certain they were close friends who wouldn’t fall out with you and fuck everything up). Houses and house payments are much more manageable when you split the bills 3-4 ways instead of just two.

Millenials aren’t the first to think it’s a great idea to just shack up with friends. That’s housemating without the hastle of living with strangers. It’s still a good idea to shack up with people you’ve known a long time so you know how you’ll get on living together, but still. In the current economy, it’s pretty much now our only option for affording anything.

I think, and I’m not researched on this, but I think conservatives probably tried to suppress images of non-nuclear families because they likely thought it would encourage ideas of polygamy, polyamory, open sexual relationships with or without marriage, as well as other relationship types they thought of as un-christian or unsavoury. I could be wrong, but that shit wouldn’t surprise me.

(And i want to make a note that there’s also a disturbing amount of asexual denial around that makes people go ‘if they’re living together they HAVE to be banging because why wouldn’t they?’ and that shit both creeps me out and annoys me no end. People can be in relationships without sex. People can live together without sex. Sex is not the be-all and end-all and people being taught to think it is really need to stop).

Don’t let the media fool you into believing you can only live with a sexual partner or blood family. Someone somewhere has an agenda for making these seem abnormal, when really it’s just practical.

A lot of people acted like it was super weird when two of my brothers decided to move states with me when I started my postdoc. I got really used to giving a little canned speech about it because it seemed to bewilder people so much. (Their leases happened to be up! We could share rent! They wanted to try somewhere new!)

The notable exception was my grandma, who was just like, “oh, yes, when we were young my sister and I decided to move cross-country together and it was lovely.”

More of this kind of thing for everyone, pls.

The implication that close sibling relationships must also be a warning sign for incest also peeves me off; what kind of society are we living in anyway

ineptshieldmaid

#my mom’s a historian#does a lot of research#one of the main takeaways from the census data of literally every US census since the beginning#is that the nuclear family has never been the actual norm#nobody really ever lived like that#and a lot don’t now#and it’s clearly artificial and not ideal for most people#every household in the census had at least a grandma#usually a cousin#some rando#someone living in the house who wasn’t mom or dad or kid#always someone#usually several someones#some uncles etc.#unmarried aunties#that sort of person#but often unrelated friends#we’ve never really lived alone#that’s not how families work#that’s not how humans work

tags by @bomberqueen17

Having a multi-adult household unit also just makes a shit-ton of sense, tbh. Much easier to split not only the bills, but also the housework and child-rearing responsibilities. Communal living ftw.

It’s also super a capitalism thing.

With only two working-age people in the house, it’s very difficult to make ends meet without one of them (or increasingly, these days, both of them) working away the vast majority of their waking hours to earn enough money to support the household. The other person, if they aren’t also working similar hours, is there to support that working person, full time, with unpaid labour.

The end result of this is that nobody has any time or energy to spend together properly, and they just end up tired and miserable and shackled to their work, throwing money at their problems because it’s all they can do. It’s very easy to convince tired, miserable people to spend their money in the ways you want them to, and it’s also very easy to manipulate and oppress people who don’t have the energy or the means to fight for their rights. Convince a whole nation that this is the way the world is supposed to work, and you’ll be well away.

Death to the cancerous myth of the nuclear family.

dragon-in-a-fez

there is nothing more Fake Fucking Woke than those posts where a teacher gives us all a timely lesson in fascism 101 by essentially conducting a traumatising psychological experiment on their students that only works because schools are already pressure-cookers of authoritarianism like honestly jesus fuck

7f72d375a2c5669f2534c799

hey! WHAT IN GODS NAME IS THIS UPDATE.

7f72d375a2c5669f2534c799

i leave for one fucking week. ONE FUCKING WEEK. and i come back to an atrocity. what. the. fuck.

#this comes from somebody who usually really enjoys large updates

hey! WHAT IN GODS NAME IS THIS UPDATE.

It’s been said many times, but punishing drug addiction with jail/prison isn’t helpful to anyone except the people who make money off sending people to prison.

This single image could not be more inaccurate about about Gen Z slang even if the selection process was getting a series of randomly chosen monkeys to tap on keyboards to generate phrases.

giraffeseatingcake

This is like… early 2000s millenial speak, and only the emo/weeb ones. Gen Zers were like 5 when people were talking like this.

tulipscomeinallsortsofcolors

not to totally derail a funny post but i think this is a prime example of people who cant code switch being pissed off by people who can.

I cant talk much, but what little i can comes in two flavors - at-home talk, and Proper Talk.

the first is basically an appalachian dialect and accent so thick as to be nearly indecipherable to people who speak Vanilla American English, and the second is the way my speech therapist taught me to talk “correctly” and usually what i write in. im obviously much better at the first (i stutter a little less, for example), and i have to actively try to do the second but i can do both.

i believe (correct me if i need to get back in my own lane) that people who speak AAVE have similar experiences.

heres the thing - people fucking hate code switching, especially if you do it in front of them. my father’s family, who are all City Folk, will get blindingly enraged if my sisters and i “talk like trashy hillbillies” in front of them.

it’s not “proper” its “uneducated” is “makes you sound stupid”

sounds a lot like how older people feel about slang, no?

but have you ever met a teenager who isn’t capable of turning off their slang for a presentation? a job interview? hell, just hanging out with grandma?

and the thing is, its not just that they think we’re stupid because they devalue our way of talking. it’s also that they know we’re excluding them. why else would we speak in a way that some people in the room don’t understand, unless the conversation was meant only for those of us who can?

it’s the same reason white people get pissed about spaces for people of color, cishet people furious about pride, able-bodied people who complain about disabled parking spaces.

they’re so used to being the default that the idea of a space, an event, a language that excludes them just. fucking enrages them. they can handle it. it just doesnt compute.

so they devalue it, they call you uneducated and stupid and trashy. they try to imitate the language (as above) to mock it, but all they do is show off just how little of it they understand.

all of this is to say that grasping language well enough that you can flip it like a switch, pick and choose the best words and phrases to make yourself understood in so many wildly different environments?

makes you a thousand times more fluent in a language than someone who just lucked out on being born “the default”

dragon-in-a-fez

one of my coworkers brought some hot cross buns in to share and three people did the whole “ohh nooo, there goes the New Year’s Resolutionnnn” thing, and I just said “yours maybe, mine was to enjoy life more” and grabbed two and I think all of them are reevaluating their lives now

Rooster.

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