fyre festival is going well

Ja speaks!

I love how ppl watch a doc and think they have all the answers... 🤦🏾‍♂️

— Ja Rule (@Ruleyork) January 20, 2019

I had an amazing vision to create a festival like NO OTHER!!! I would NEVER SCAM or FRAUD anyone what sense does that make???

— Ja Rule (@Ruleyork) January 20, 2019

@Hulu PAID BILLY!!! That money should have went to the ppl in the Bahamas... @netflix PAID fuck Jerry who also did all the promo for the festival... 🤔 the docs clearly have Billy at fault but let’s blame the rapper lmao ok...

— Ja Rule (@Ruleyork) January 20, 2019

I have receipts!!!

— Ja Rule (@Ruleyork) January 20, 2019

please make a documentary, Ja. Please.

Ja Rules of Engagement

i believe both current documentaries highlight the fact that Ja is now running a talent booking app thing (like the original Fyre app concept) called "Iconn"

I guess "I con" would've been too on the nose?

The islanders set up the 1970 festival to fail by forcing to move to a location overlooked by a hill, providing free viewing for all that cared. Emcee Rikki Farr's rants are great in the doc (pissing off the bands by threatening that they won't play unless people pay).

Ja is further insistent

I too was hustled, scammed, bamboozled, hood winked, lead astray!!!

— Ja Rule (@Ruleyork) January 20, 2019

Yeah but was he flimflammed or hornswoggled?

If you add "even!" to the end of this it becomes a perfect Snagglepuss impression https://t.co/bYkQioBY8e

— Al Kennedy (@housetoastonish) January 20, 2019

Billy getting in a videographer to document his new scam was extremely "is you taking notes on a criminal conspiracy"
― Number None, Sunday, 20 January 2019 16:55 (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol this was my (and everyone's I'm sure) exact thought watching this

he says something like "if there's one thing I've learned, it's that it pays to record everything" and I was like... what

water guy kinda sounds like jeff goldblum

uh, Ja is quoting Malcolm X there fwiw

By any repurposed quotes necessary.

WHAT'S MY MOTHERFUCKING NAME

Halfway through the Hulu one and watched the Netflix one yesterday. But yeah, the hulu one has a more buzzfeed edit going. Netflix is much better as a cohesive piece. And the digital voice was LOLOL.

I am enjoying how much everything in the last 2-3 years, despite being terrible, is really playing up how much we mindlessly were giving men money and accolades for empty fucking visions.

Hulu doc is primo if you need to see a clip of a SNES controller and a clip of the WTC towers falling, to illustrate the concept of “Millennials.”

YT comment:

Even the documentary is douchey

the festival goers they interview are such pieces of shit, really makes it easy to lol at the whole thing

Men are really having a(n) (inverse) peak week.

Xpost Unrelated but lol @ yr dn, that shit has been appearing in my FB ad feed for two months

lol I can't avoid the blues

That “satirical blogger” dude Seth(?), whom I mentioned above, sure wears out his welcome across the two docs...

He was such a bottom-feeder. I watched the netflix one first so could't figure out why this middle aged guy was so in the midst.

Netflix doc was just OK. Didn't care about the perpetrators, didn't care about the victims. Cared about the unpaid workers, but that's the oldest story in the world.

Watched the Netflix doco and thought it was okay. Ja Rule's desperate attempt to spin things ("that's not fraud, that is... uh... I would call that false advertising...") was well worth the time invested, however. (And er, the Evian story...)

I can't believe they all forgot the first rule of Event Management: listen to the Dutch guy who learned to fly with Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Main dude came across in the Hulu documentary interview like Seth McFarland crossed with a confused and hormonal 14-year-old talking breathlessly about World Of Warcraft, I'm left wondering why people are taken in so comprehensively by him, he sounds like a dummy.

It's baffling, yeah. I cannot detect an iota of his alleged 'charisma'

Seems completely out of his depth at all times

agreed that was the most odd thing, he seemed like, I dunno, some guy at a frat that guy in because of his dad and tries to hard to be cool

i watched it over the weekend.
he looked and acted significantly differently when he was being interviewed compared to the photos/anecdotes of him during the buildup to the fiasco
he had clearly lost weight and cleaned up his hair (and got some new boots) and he spoke with the disingenuously contrite phoniness of someone who lives by the philosophy of "act first, apologize later" (which seems very much in character from what i could tell)

what a creep. i felt sorta bad for his girlfriend, she seemed nice but pretty clueless.

he also appeared to be drunk/drinking in pretty much every scene prior to the festival

yeah if i had to guess i would guess he stopped drinking -- his skin/face looked much clearer/less ruddy & bloated + he had lost weight

Apocalypse Now:Hearts of Darkness doc :: Netflix:Hulu

OTM xpost about the Hulu one being way too heavy handed on the stock clips and things like actually filming someone searching for 'luxury villas' on amazon. It's like Ben Stiller character in Reality Bites directed it.

Lol at these last two posts

quite fitting, then!

It's baffling, yeah. I cannot detect an iota of his alleged 'charisma'

Seems completely out of his depth at all times

The 'charisma' of grifters like this seems to amount to an ability to bullshit others into believing they can get hold of unlimited funding - which they then obtain through running Ponzi scemes etc, for a limited while anyway. Money talks and bullshit walks, as the sage Bobbi Fleckman put it, although it's probably the other way around in this case.

The psychologist towards the end of the Hulu doc made the good point that con artists just can't stop. It's compulsive behaviour. No doubt this dude will start all over again one way or another in a few years when he's out, and a lifetime of pyramid scemes and flagrant scams awaits. Until he gets caught out and hauled back into jail, of course.

What else does he know how to do?

water guy kinda sounds like jeff goldblum

The guy is obv a douche, pretty much all the interviewees talking about his magnetic pull are... also obv douches, which may explain why they were taken in idk

Yeah. Feel like ILX0rs don’t really intersect with his target audience. We might be taken in by other angles though, remember Lunagate.

I didn’t realise the Netflix doc was made by the ppl who made the promo btw, I was actually thinking it was pretty skilfully edited to make maximum fun of “fuck Jerry” lol. I haven’t seen the Hulu one but nothing presented here seemed any more self-serving than just about any of the testimony from anyone else. It was funny how some of them were trying to get the audience not just to see them as innocent dreamers but actually to feel aggrieved on their behalf that some internet posters made fun of them - as many people have commented passim the thing that makes this such a heartwarming tale is that everyone involved is the actual worst

Yeah. Feel like ILX0rs don’t really intersect with his target audience. We might be taken in by other angles though, remember Lunagate.

I feel like the douche factor in every aspect of life would be drastically reduced if we just started banning cameras from places.

Some of the “influencers” and attendees were honestly like sketch characters

you don't have to have a silver tongue or some sort of physical charisma to *build* charisma and that's kind of lost across the coverage and documentaries because all of the alluring bits of the puzzle are either alluded to or shown as part of the grift

the whole vibe reminds me of people who see bottle service as cool. which, to an extent, it is -- you're really allocating space in part of a club for your group, and buying everyone drinks at the same time without having to keep ordering. if you're genuinely rich or a celebrity who would get bothered a lot, it's a useful service. if you're a normal schlub, it's an extravagance and people wonder why the fuck you're in there spending a zillion dollars when drinks are a lot cheaper in the normal part of the bar

so if you value the perception of affluence and like being catered to -- your own space, better service, jumping some perceived queue, then the guy who offers that to you could seem cool. and if he's friendly and welcoming, even if he's kind of schlubby himself, then maybe you roll with it

and that's basically Billy McFarland's entire grift! the fake social access card and the attached parties at the office, the whole vibe, it's all just bottle service. and since he had this crowd there, he was able to sell the idea he was genuine to investors. well, not very well

I kept thinking of the dickhead entrepreneur bro who hangs around with aziz ansari’s character in parks & rec