worst fad of the 21st century so far. it's steampunk, right?

I feel like any dude doing a particular look in San Francisco is another burner casualty

generalized neo-Victorianism seems arguably worse than steampunk.

is there really a diff

the kale fad is good because kale is good for you

you gotta problem, go eat a cheeseburger

i think the perceived burlesque-roller derby connection might just be women with tattoos

the weird obsession with Betty White
"zombies"
Rocky Horror Picture Show shadow casts (this 'fad' is several decades old yes but it's 2016, find another cult classic ffs)
GIF memes with a pic of a celebrity and some text that they may or may not have said in comic sans
the saying "I just threw up in my mouth"
whining about Firefly getting cancelled (ok, I like Firefly, but it's become a meme at this point: "8 seasons of According to Jim, 1 of Firefly?"
Condescending Wonka meme
Deconstructed cuisine
Hookah lounges
Fireball whiskey shots being on special at every fuckin' bar
Man-buns
Hating Nickelback
Selfie sticks
Escape rooms
"Laser tag" with military-esque weaponry (srsly what was wrong with classic laser tag)

Hot Stampers

everyone else seems to think selfie sticks are inherently loathsome but i don't really care about them

back in my day you had to hold the Polaroid *just right*

Macklemore

back in the day you just had to say "excuse me will you take our picture" and hope the person wasn't a thief

this might actually give steampunk a run for its money.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/7XNHCDOed6g/maxresdefault.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSVoeHKZDLE

xxpost it ain't a selfie if someone else takes your picture!

"Hot Stampers"

also: vinyl revival in general. keep waiting for it to die. 7 years is a long time to have people coming in my store to say: i hear they're coming back! and then leave without buying anything.

No bronyism, no credibility.

Furries

Twitter

"Tell us what you think"

really unhappy about this steam powered giraffe thing

thanks to this thread for reminding me about kale and sausage soup which owns

TS: fake Victorianism vs. fake medievalism

there's also a guy around the corner with an I Love Vagina bumper sticker on the back of his truck. i don't know if he eats kale though.

I'll bet he tells people about how much he loves to eat kale, talks about how he'll happily eat kale all night long, it's not something he does as a favor, he just really enjoys eating kale, but then when there's actually a plate of kale right in front of him he sort of half-heartedly nuzzles at it for twenty seconds and then is like "ok great what's next"

kale is spectacular you just have to know how to cook it right

it is not very forgiving if you don't cook it right but neither are most vegetables

things about kale i didn't know before i ate it habitually for a long time - raw kale can be hard to digest, massaging kale with lemon juice and salt makes it less bitter and (supposedly) easier to digest.

just kale things

steampunk can only be embraced by fairly wealthy people with more time and money than good sense,...

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Thursday, August 25, 2016 8:26 PM (yesterday)

the people I know who are into it are not wealthy at all.

was gonna say, a lot of these items are easy to come by in thrift shops, eBay, etc.

Isn't steampunk like at least thirty years old?

No one's mentioned vajazzling.

I guess because the thread doesn't say 'best fad'.

yeah idk what about it codes as wealthy unless you think people are actually buying/making steam-powered computers or something xxp

there is definite steampunk - burning man crossover. With only a few exceptions, everyone I know who is a steampunk person either is or was a burning man person at some point.

the only person irl i know who has expressed any interest in steampunk is a young man who is sweet, non-gothy, very working class, and enjoys making things in the family shed

such a nice kid in fact that i've never took the piss out of him for liking steampunk

I had a steampunk outfit in a play I did once and I don't think the pieces combined cost us more than $100.

enjoys making things in the family shed

most of the steampunk ppl I know were like this as kids too.

worst fad: pro-rape blogs

i totally get the aesthetic delights of brass and clockwork and exposed engineering, i'm just a bit eyebrow-raisy about peeps who seem to crave to inhabit a more colonial era

generalized neo-Victorianism seems arguably worse than steampunk.

― the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Thursday, August 25, 2016 11:03 PM (fourteen hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is there really a diff

― mh 😏, Thursday, August 25, 2016 11:03 PM (fourteen hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean yeah I think Steampunk has the defense of being a kind of fantasy/parallel universe thing, whereas straight up Victorian nostalgia is (1) nostalgia, which is inherently bad and (2) nostalgia for a more colonial era as NV says

to play devil's advocate for Victorianism though, you can make the same claim about nostalgia for almost any era. Humanity is pretty much always doing lots of horrible shit at any given time. 80s night -- "What, you're nostalgic for Reaganism? American imperialist foreign policy?

This ad keeps popping up in my FB feed and I've never wanted a train to derail so badly.

http://i.imgur.com/WFnqCqD.png

there's a certain kind of industrial optimism about the victorians that i still find kind of seductive: huge canals, the statue of liberty, digging up dinosaurs, national parks, all that. impossible to tease out from the bullshit ofc. and i'm not about to wear a 'waistcoat' in any case.

yeah i'm not gonna call anybody a monster if some aesthetic/imaginary version of the past tickles their fancy, but it is interesting the same kind of fantasies that become popular - i think there are political implications under the surface but not in convoluted, unexamined ways. i see some connection with "rap lyrics in stodgy English" and the whole exaggerated old-fashioned manners/m'lady/chappism cults. because manners are a weapon of class privilege and the roleplay adopters don't seem to be exactly detourning this aspect of their fantasy

most of the victorian "nostalgia" is about as accurate as renaissance fairs ime

sorry, scratch that "not" - the political undercurrents are complicated and usually unexamined

For Americans the VIctorian Era was actually a less-colonial era

yeah i get that but steampunk is largely Victorian London fixated imo unless you count that Will Smith movie

altho come to think of it just because the US's colonies in the 19th century were largely internal let's not pretend they weren't there

For Americans the VIctorian Era was actually a less-colonial era

― Josefa, Friday, August 26, 2016 1:24 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

reeeally depends how you approach the westward expansion of the US

also the Philippines (though that might be just after Victorian era proper)

which is why jill stein adopted that song as her campaign anthem.

bless you, goole

i just want to reassure the bass player in his public image limited t-shirt that life gets better

Shortly after the release of "Cooky Puss", iirc.

Escape rooms can be worthwhile. More so if you, yes, were a fan of Myst

Raypunk is a distinctive (sub)genre within the retrofuturistic esthetics (or retro-fantasy). Covers space surrealism, parallel worlds, alien art, technological psychedelia, non-standard science, alternative or distorted reality and so on. Predecessor to atompunk with similar themes but mostly without explicit nuclear power or exactly described technology and with more archaic/schematic/artistic style, dark, obscure, cheesy, weird, mysterious, dreamy, hazy or etheric atmosphere (origins cca 1880-1950), parallel to steampunk, dieselpunk and teslapunk. For basic info go to www.raypunk.org While atompunk ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/AtompunkCZ/ ) is a genre dealing with the post-WWII hard technological concepts and admiring the modern science, soft, surreal, dreamy and speculative quasitechnological fiction or half-science half-mystery concepts of all times belong to raypunk:

this local bar is doing something called a "silent disco" where everyone on the dance floor wears headphones that the dj transmits to, no actual sound in the room space. horrifying.

^^They're doing that tonight at ACL Fest.

it would be of great value to me, personally, if someone here could report on whether or not these are as bad as they seem

I went to a spirit halloween with my kid and was shocked at the amount of steampunk stuff they had, I kind of forgot that was a thing.

I have no idea who would be buying it, like the Sexy Covid Nurse constume buyers would hate that stuff and the hardcore steampunk typs would be building their own brass google / top hat contraptions.

A friend and I witnessed a bunch of teenagers and 20-somethings at the water’s edge dancing silently with headphones to a DJ set-up on China Beach when we were out walking a couple of years ago. When we came back later they had all taken their headphones off and were gathered around a guru.

It was probably some cultist Christian ministry thing, but walking among young people dancing silently on the beach was an unexpectedly sweet experience

it makes complete sense if it's outdoors or in a public place. but this is the basement of a bar - the perfect place for a sweet sound system. i think they must be trying to get in on the gimmick? people in my city are so ... ugh

Silent Discos have been about since the 90s, surely?

They've been putting those on for awhile in downtown Houston at fading indoor concert venue.

The fact that the bass is more a physical sensation than an aural one makes me think this could never be great

Yeah, silent discos have been around for a while. I always hated the idea but one year at Supernormal they had to finish the music early so compromised with one of these - it was reasonably fun, and quite amusing when you weren't participating watching people bop around to nothing.
However, if you don't *have* to do a silent disco, I have no idea why you would actively seek to do one.

A friend used to run them - one feature which was interesting was that there were separate channels so people were dancing to 3 different sets of music indicated by colour rings on the headphones. If you wanted to dance with someone you could switch to their stream so you were both hearing the same thing.

that sounds really nice