FRONTLINE: the pbs documentary series not the flea medicine

another ilxor once sent me (out of the blue! for no charge!) a vintage leather coach bag which only says "coach" on the strap IIRC and it's scarcely visible. one of the nicest things anyone has done for me!

I bought a new (used) Honda Element this year and the first thing I did was remove all the chrome nameplates and ornaments front and back.

You should just build your own car.

You should just build knit your own car.

Our 94 Honda Civic is so old the chrome logo H on the front of the hood fell off when the fasteners rusted through.

I do brew my own gas. And the whole interior is hemp.

good plan snatching up an Element now, what with them being discontinued

Lots of trackers on the Frontline page

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bhsy9gBCYAAuFXF.png

what does that mean

i have no idea what that means either

I'm no expert, but I'm fairly sure that means services built into the code that provide information about the visitor. For example, crazy egg provides analytics (like google analytics).

In other words you're supposed to view the image and be dumbstruck by the hypocrisy of frontline for putting out a show that criticized companies that collect and share information about unsuspecting internet people for profit, when in fact they are ALSO collecting and sharing information from the viewers of the program!11!!!

ah, i get it now. but that sounds like the paranoid feedback loop sort of thinking that gets people disproportionately riled up .

<i>If I were given a choice of not displaying corporate logos on my clothing or anything else I own, I would definitely take it. The practice of putting logos prominently on merchandise is so universal now that I do not have that choice. It has become compulsory. However, I have been known to remove or efface logos.</i>

You're like Cayce Pollard from Pattern Recognition!

*today i am wearing a sweater i got at a thrift store in 1990, the beginning of my sophomore year of high school. i have had this old sweater forever! why would i want to buy a new one? get off my lawn!

― we slowly invented brains (La Lechera), Wednesday, February 26, 2014 7:47 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^This! Yay! <3

Advertising gives an identity to people who otherwise would have to go without. be creative.

watched "generation like" with my class this morning
they didn't know what to make of tyler oakley but they all agreed that hunger games girl was wasting her time and middle school braces girl was making some bad decisions

xp I've compared LL to Cayce Pollard before, although I don't think I could remember her name at the time.

Pollard's name, not La Lechera's.

did i have to google that name? yes i did.

hunger games girl is definitely wasting her time but i can at least get where she's coming from. whereas tyler oakley is just terrifying to me. i hate youtube celebrities.

I have the exact opposite reaction to those two. Hunger Games Girl makes me feel like an old person confused and scared by kids today because I can't even see the appeal of grinding out unpaid labor to promote a book/movie franchise that is doing just fine without her. Tyler, though, he's making something of himself (albeit in a confusing and scary and kind of gross way).

That said I probably would have done the same as Hunger Games Girl for Def Leppard c. 1983 so thank god this shit didn't exist when I was making all of my incomprehensible tween decisions.

I definitely felt bad for hunger games girl. it seems like she'll almost certainly look back on her obsession (and appearance in the doc) with embarrassment in a few years, but she'll be fine. tyler oakley, ugh

yakking about nothing on youtube seems like the most obvious and intense form of attention neediness i can think of (aside from physically throwing oneself at people), and i am 100% sure i was taught that doing things because you need attention is uniformly a bad idea in the short run and the long run.

also i wanted to note that the guy who runs theaudience looks a lot like mookieproof

the most embarrassing spray of fandom i ever engaged in was when i wrote a letter to spin about their profile of bob stinson. i was old enough to know better but i couldn't control myself! that article really made me sad.

That said I probably would have done the same as Hunger Games Girl for Def Leppard c. 1983 so thank god this shit didn't exist when I was making all of my incomprehensible tween decisions.

exactly, i can totally see myself being like that when i was 15 but the internet wasn't developed enough, luckily

like idk, I'm into plenty of shit that ultimately boils down to people being narcissistic consumerist attention-seeking jackasses, but there's something about the idea of someone turning a camera on themselves and going "Hi everyone!" and acting like they're the viewer's best bud that is just immensely, unconscionably wrong to me. Hunger Games girl is just a nerdy teen fanatic, and I can identify with that, and I get the sense that she'll be ok even after the world moves on & her totem gets ripped away from her.

xposts

I spent my teenage years gushing about the Smashing Pumpkins and Peter Murphy on ILX, and it's plenty embarrassing in retrospect, but my soul is still intact, I think

I mean, if I had to spend time with either of them, it would be Hunger Games Girl all the way. She seems totally charming and sincere. I just have trouble identifying with her motivations whereas Tyler Oakley's are transparent as hell and make perfect sense in our capitalist society - he's riding the brand identity train to moneytown.

HI GUYS! It's just ME, LA LECHERA, yr VIRTUAL BFF here to tell you all about COOL STUFF I LIKE

can you even imagine!?

i don't even like to start threads about stuff i like, but this thread is an exception bc it's educational

also ken middleham thread because the poor guy didn't even have a wikipedia entry in english
that was a public service

TO's got charisma and I think he's probably pretty smart or at least very savvy in the right way at the right time. Basically I admire his ability to play the game, even as I find the game itself pretty scuzzy. Contrarily, it seems like HGG is getting played hard in that a giant media megacorp is exploiting her enthusiasm as a nerdy teen fanatic and using her as slave labor to promote a movie that is already wildly popular. So watching the documentary, her segments made me cringe while with TO, I was like, yeah, this dude is in control of this situation.

"slave labor" is inappropriate terminology there. "Unpaid labor" I should have said.

i don't know what it says about me, but i like HGG because she makes me cringe in sympathy, and i hate TO because he makes me cringe because of his transparent lusting for fame and power

haha tbf my being an underpaid yet enthusiastic lackey for a giant media megacorp probably has something to do with my feelings here

Karl Malone otm

http://i.imgur.com/DRwAdx0.jpg

"i hate TO because he makes me cringe because of his transparent lusting for fame and power"

where did you get that hi-res picture of me?!

Spent my pre-internet teenage years on BBSes, and I was into Doom WADs and level packs. Making a new level in Doom may have been free promotion, but at least there is some level of personal creativity there.

Free labor promoting corporate IPs these days does seem like a scary new thing to me, but then again maybe it's just Old Media cherry picking extra shit to go along with their regular advertising shit and it's nothing really all that new. People have had fansites since the beginning of the internet, the only difference is now if someone photoshops The Hunger Games into a still from Seinfeld, instead of being seen by the 10 other people that have sites in the same webring, it's splashed all over AV Club, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

my particular life circumstances have led me to fear attention more than crave it tbh, so basically i was horrified by everything. mostly i'm sad because it works. what they're doing WORKS. ugh humanity.

The scary thing will be once Comcast has beat the internet into submission and people aren't just doing IP juxtaposition for free but PAYING FOR THE PRIVILEGE. No doubt Old Media have this business model in their sites.

HI GUYS! It's just ME, LA LECHERA, yr VIRTUAL BFF here to tell you all about COOL STUFF I LIKE

can you even imagine!?

― we slowly invented brains (La Lechera), Thursday, March 6, 2014 2:34 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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jeez, that secrets of the vatican ep was just unbearably sad. for some reason i was not expecting 2/3 of the episode to be horrendous child abuse stuff, of course this seems obvious now in hindsight

yeah it was absolutely horrifying.

back to teens: this was an interesting side note to the doc, from an interview with alissa quart

It’s I think a side effect of living in such a data-rich and socially networked universe, where narcissism is not a condition; it’s a strategy, … strategy toward betterment, toward improvement, creating community, which sounds ironic, like how can narcissism help us create community? But it’s sort of like the person with the most aggressive data stream wins, who posts the most, who likes the most, who’s most present and ubiquitous.

I think cool used to be identified with scarcity, the jazz singer who turns his back to the audience. Now cool has become omnipresent. So there’s been a real shift in what cool is. That’s one thing that we’re talking about underneath our conversation about teenagers.

Let’s talk more about that, because that’s a fascinating shift. …

… I think cool originates with the jazz culture in the ’40s. There was probably cool before that, but that’s when people started talking about cool — Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and a bunch of other early, cool jazz folk.

Then it sort of got absorbed as the height of adolescent style, so an example of that would be James Dean. James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause is cool.

But one of the things with all these people that we’re describing from an earlier period of cool is that they resisted; they withheld. They were emotive without being emotional. They gave off like a cold light, right? And they were not giving that much.

Now I think coolness is about giving everything. It’s like you have to be constantly selling yourself, showing yourself and marketing yourself and using technology and using multiple platforms, because you might even seem sort of half mad. Instead of turning your back to the audience or wearing sunglasses at night, you’re taking off those sunglasses and you’re smiling into the camera, and it’s like there’s a real shift. …

The currency now is one of constant approval and a constant hum of self-assertion rather than standing back and hoping people come to you. It’s a real change.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/media/generation-like/alissa-quart-from-gen-x-to-z-teens-and-the-new-cool/

this doesn't seem like a new development-- Type A people connecting broadly have usually been more popular. Debbie Gibson was more popular at my middle school than any "cool" late 80s artist. The word "cool" is probably being stretched beyond meaning here.

THAT is so interesting, that excerpt. I was either attending or watching a discussion recently in which someone noted that a crucial element of cool is that it rejects what is widely available, that it requires being a have-not of whatever the going currency is...that "cool" comes from resistance. In that framing, you almost need a different word for the approval seeking kind of popularity, it's like the anti-cool?

I'm glad you posted that, I'd almost forgotten that chance comment and now it's becoming a new net to catch other thoughts.

agree, we need a new word for what these super in-your-face people are, a word like "trending"
because i guess cool isn't in anymore, but cool should remain cool

i think part of the problem is that we are trying to apply old concept words to new concepts, like spaceship or whatever -- there's a word for it but i can't remember, retroformation or something? i dunno.
not that this whole thing is particularly important, of course. it's worth noting that this stupid frontline about likes has generated more conversation than any other one
on one hand, this disappoints me
but whatever, people will talk about what they want to talk about unless someone gets super in their face about it, and clearly i am not the man for that job
so here we are :-/

yeah i think president keyes is right that this isn't really a new development, just new technologies enabling old phenomena. "cool" has had multiple meanings for a long time—it can def used to refer to both the "popular" kids and to the "outsider" subcultural kids. i think the difference between those two uses is more philosophical than generational. there's always been teenagers who desire fame and attention even in the limited high school sense, kids who want to show off and be gossiped about.

Cool can be used to describe the popular "popular" kids and the popular "outsider" kids.