Ask me anything (me = forum)

The consolidation of fan groups under the Reddit umbrella bums me out. I’ll get interested in some new thing and want to look up what people are saying about it online, and much of the time the only place I know to look is in the subreddit. Nine times out of ten discussion is limited in the same way it usually is on Reddit, which is to say even if you can find a thread that isn’t members of the in-group batting around the same set of opinions, it’s still not really discussion due to the way Reddit’s format and voting systems and comment norms all dictate what people are saying and what you see.

Often tricky to judge whether it’s “safe” to talk about something like that—sometimes I win the battle against hesitation and sometimes I lose. But cool people (all of you here) have to speak up on these things or else we’re letting the other guy win

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That man is my hero.

Everything he does brings me immense joy.

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I feel like Herzog would never be embarrassed and would try to find some common ground or wisdom in that situation. I can imagine him asking one of them “Does ze life of ze catgirl maid require you to be a carnivore? Perhaps all fantasy requires hierarchy between ze species.”

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i agree. that is the mentality i try to embody with “my fandoms”

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he makes money doing that though

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I agree everything being on reddit bums me out too. I think its a pretty terrible platform overall. I was on a One Piece discord but it was annoying because it was a never ending stream of two people sharing fan theories that were basically fanfic.

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Oh I completely thought you were replying to my ThinkPad comment lmao. Oops!

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I don’t think it helps that most of the things people are ostensibly fans enough to reddit about specifically are for children.

Not to say that I don’t interact with a large amount of stuff for kids, I do, but I think a lot of people live only in the kid stuff and I imagine it has to rot your brain to a degree.

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Genuine question: why do people hate The Beatles so much? I don’t especially care for them myself but it seems many people have extreme reactions to even just the idea of them. Is it a joke? Is it a retaliation against their popularity? Is it an Elvis-type situation where the culture is trying to correctly re-attribute where certain innovations originated? Nobody ever really offers an explanation for any of this, they usually just make fun of the accents or anything else surface-level. I don’t even have a horse in the race, I just realized the other day that this is definitely a phenomenon that has been happening recently and couldn’t figure out why

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I can only speak for myself but I’ve heard them enough, or like the handful of their songs that get the most play, by the time I was in high school to be sick of them for life lol. I don’t often think about them though and wouldn’t even say I hate them.

I’ve seen teenagers walk around with Beatles tshirts and it struck me that they could ever be relevant enough to take up space where Nirvana used to on kids’ chests but I don’t know if my sample size indicates anything. Maybe there’s a backlash to that if it does?

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I myself have not noticed anyone hating on the beatles. I don’t hear much about them though. In my head I kind of assumed they were like default good so discussion about them at this point is a bit old and boring.

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I’m not sure if I’ve heard or seen what you have. If it’s prevalent among my generation, their popularity and the Elvis thing are significant, I think. It’s reacting to (a) parents being into them, and (b) the Rolling Stone-and-adjacent critical dogma that the group and their albums single-handedly sowed the seeds for every innovation in popular music since then, which for a time was annoying to read over and over. Never mind that the truth of this idea depends on flattening the whole field of guitar-and-drum music into a single sound, it of course ignores every genre/artist which had nothing to do with the sound the group did inspire.

Best albums of all time, in any genre, period:

10 Let It Be (idk)
9 Please Please Me
8 Blood on the Tracks
7 The Beatles (The White Album) (they’d write both names every time as though it were necessary)
6 OK Computer for the kids (latter half of the decade it would be Kid A for the kids)
5 Rubber Soul
4 Abbey Road
3 Highway 61 Revisited
2 Revolver
1 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

I can’t make any excuse for reading this over and over except that I didn’t know better—coming to this from being a teenager beginning to learn about popular music culture in the 2010s, when I saw this often enough online.

Today mainstream music criticism (including Rolling Stone) has moved away from this comically reverent attitude a bit, but I think the impression has lingered. Rolling Stone themselves still include three of these in their most recent edition of the top 25 albums of all time. And because they’re an institution with a huge marketing budget who write lists they get the clicks, perpetuating the idea for even more people to read and rebel against. In a media culture where Hot Takes = social capital, hating the Beatles is easy money.

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i don’t really have a strong opinion on the beatles, but your post made me think of a trend i detest which is the new reverence for what might be called AAA pop music you see in pitchfork et al. i believe the word for this is poptimism.

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I find it really odd to have a vocal hatred for any (non-dangerous) media in the world today. If you don’t like the Beatles, it’s incredibly easy to not listen to the Beatles.

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never had a family member get really into hamilton I see

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(unrelated to above, I’m losing an argument with some friends and need more data)

Starting from 0 knowledge of video games but some knowledge of Windows, EDIT: For someone who knows what happens to their Program Files folder and subfolders when they install a program; someone who has never used Steam nor any other digital storefront, nor any game dump–hosting site to download a game to the computer—this person could have “1000 knowledge” of video games as long as it’s not on a computer—is it easier to:

  • learn how to buy and play games on Steam
  • learn how to download an emulator and use https://cdromance.org
0 voters
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presuming you have the cdromance opinion, i understand why you’re losing

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my gut says emulator option but my brain says not enough information.

like does this person has bought any app on their phone before? do they use email at their work? how long has this person has had this familiarity with windows? etc.

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now I’m really losing lol

May not change the results but I shouldn’t have said 0 knowledge of video games, that was just the quickest way to explain the argument. Let’s say re: Windows, someone who knows what happens to their Program Files folder and subfolders when they install a program. Re: video games, someone who has never used Steam nor any other digital storefront (including phone app stores), nor any game dump–hosting site to download a game to the computer. This person could have “1000 knowledge” of video games as long as it’s not on a computer or console’s digital store

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I don’t even really mind big pop releases but why do we have to double back to them actually being good. Same thing as acting like I dunno, Marvel movies should be considered in the same category as well, real movies for lack of a better term. It drives me crazy, like Sabrina Carpenter all you want but you don’t have to have people also call you smart for it.

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