I think there are popular people who are popular because they're good at being a friend. I certainly also got shit on by "popular" kids in grade school. I have also met unpopular people who turned out to be unpopular for good reason, but I can't say that being betrayed or talked about by unpopular kids was a recurring problem for me. (I think there is a species of kid who gets rejected by "normies" and styles themselves in opposition to them, but is actually still super image-conscious and guilty of the same competitive king-of-the-hill behavior that hurt them in the first place. I'm not sure I've ever been friends with any. honestly this is probably what underlies my tendency to assume the worst about "alt fashion" enjoyers.) I think being cynical and bitter, generally, is hardly out of line for people who haven't had an easy time finding people to get along with. That can happen even to people who aren't "kind of a dick."

the particular "weirdos" I was thinking of when I wrote the bit you quoted were the founders of the Church of the SubGenius ("stiflingly conservative rural environment" = 1970s Dallas/Fort Worth), or Gary Wilson (New York, but not the densely populated part)... and the kind of "weird" I was thinking of was, like, "would have wanted to talk about Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart." not even super esoteric and mystifying, necessarily, but if you're somewhere where there aren't a lot of people to talk to about the thing, and there's no "online," finding anyone you can even kind of talk to about the thing is a big deal. also, if you're surrounded (as the SubGenius guys were) by extreme Bible thumpers, and people with lots of money and no humility, and it's kinda horrifying, you gotta laugh to keep from crying...

i'll come back to this maybe but posting is the last thing i need to be doing right now

Quote from: k9 on April 24, 2024, 08:37:55 AMI haven't had a great experience with art/music circles irl either. A lot of people talk about how finding their local art communities made them feel "seen" and "accepted" but I feel probably the exact opposite. No one has been like outwardly mean to me, but there's also not a huge appreciation for my kind of work in my local area. It often makes me wonder if the problem is where I am, or if the problem is my work in of itself.

I'm always looking at / reading about stuff that was birthed in 20th century pre-internet art scenes, but also recently in particular

sometimes when a meeting of minds is really cohesive, the minds involved attribute it to something shared in their background, like people working on Pee-wee's Playhouse growing up on 1950s TV, or a couple of knuckleheads who are the only "weirdos" growing up in a stiflingly conservative rural environment. many such cases

I think nowadays, everyone's formative experiences on the internet are potentially wildly different; even someone who's your local, socioeconomic, cultural neighbor may have been hanging out in a different internet dive from you, and you won't have been traumatized/aroused by the same things. so I feel like unless you're on a particularly popular trip, local scenes are kind of a hodgepodge, and it often feels more like respecting the different thing your local friends are doing, rather than really being tuned into the same frequency. sigh

but that isn't a totally new thing. I was reading this 70s underground comic book, made at a time when people would move from NYC to San Francisco for the stronger comics scene, and in among all of these comics from stoners and acid-droppers and R. Crumb acolytes etc is some dude drawing the most Prince Valiant-meets-Frazetta long-winded boring lore shit I don't care about, and I'm like "what's he doing here?" But then, who else would've published it?

then there's also like, for example, cartoonists Seth and Joe Matt and Chester Brown who are united by geography and practicing comics, but they're sort of doing different things and might not have gotten so involved with each other if they hadn't all been pre-Internet neighbors?

yeah I don't really know how to get into symbiotic relationships with people who Really Feel what you're doing, I think it's just harder to find kindred spirits the less popular your thing is. But the chances drop to 0 if you don't stay involved with the thing in kind of a public way ig

congratulations on ur blinkenlights slurpeeclock

i have been trying to do some self-paced 𝒮tudies but after going at a decent clip for a while, i've somehow blown the past nine (9) days. other stuff going on, chores to do, and sometimes just fucking wasting the time i guess aaa

you know what they say

"you gotta eat goat to get goat"

Linux adventure:

so months ago I did my fresh install of Debian Bookworm. I thought wi-fi was working fine until I went somewhere with a different wifi network. connman wasn't working. connman GUI would launch but I couldn't see or connect to any networks, so I had to Google how to use wpa_cli or something to connect via command line. which I got working, but y'know, clunky for something that should have worked out of the box, right?

i just took my laptop to a coffee shop and had another go at *really* fixing the problem. some CLI solutions involved nmcli, but I don't have that, dude, I'm supposed to be using connman but it's saying "no carrier"

found this guy who was like "I deleted isc-dhcp-client-ddns, works gr8", and I didn't have that package but thought deleting dhclient, the thing that lets my computer use DHCP, was maybe a bad idea anyway. but maybe I could... disable dhclient?

anyway that second guy was right. my home network settings for the wifi device had been written into /etc/network/interfaces, probably during the wifi-connected Debian installation process, and dhcpd was taking over that interface and not letting connman manage it. commented it out. rebooted. connman works and I didn't delete anything important in the process. victory

oh no I didn't post this here for you guys, I'm just putting it here so it comes up when some other idiot googles the problem

I don't have bad things to say about any of my present coworkers

I can think of people I used to work with that one could say bad things about

Sometimes a difficult or annoying coworker lands at your job, and for one reason or another they don't last. (And until then you're waiting for them to do something that will finally get them fired.) Other times you start a job somewhere and the annoying person has been there forever and might not be leaving anytime soon, so you just have to learn how to work with them without setting them off.

I would muse that maybe the harder a job is to get, the less likely that shitty people will make it onto the payroll, but then I remembered sexual harassment type software dudes, so maybe not

young sheldon is MY COMFORT CHARACTER

if this were ten years ago i'd have already posted an autoplay swf that redirected you to the smf logout page

i coulda been a contendah

Quote from: PhantomCatClock on March 03, 2024, 10:44:28 AMIt's a waifu collector gachapon

sexy anime bitches have been a critical load-bearing feature of computer mahjong games since the 1980s. no bitches = why did you even make this game when there are so many other mahjong games with bitches

in spite of this i don't think i ever fully grasped the rules and strategy of real mahjong well enough to undress anybody

Quote from: Slurpee on March 06, 2024, 03:12:51 AMbut it turns out they're like $20 at the low end

well yeah if you buy new. why don't you see if there are any local drug dealers who'd sell you a gently used phone they're no longer interested in

Quote from: Slurpee on February 27, 2024, 08:56:29 PMsex inside of marriage is wrong because when you marry someone they become your family and that means it's incest

a lot of couples that think they need a marriage counselor just needed to hear this

huh well that's unfortunate i guess i'll watch episode 2 in spanish with english subtitles thanks SonGoku007

Quote from: PhantomCatClock on February 18, 2024, 09:39:50 AMraise your red solo cup in co—






i remember this song being a lot better

ok i just checked and the world's oldest living dog, tobykeith the chihuahua, now 23, appears to have outlived his namesake

anyway I like this new guy's style, now there's a precedent for "cutting loose" iykwim

Quote from: PhantomCatClock on February 15, 2024, 08:08:12 PMi-knew-it.png

I don't know how to make today's kids understand how low we were willing to stoop for interactive entertainment you didn't have to pay for

we could have come up with 2048 or Wordle at any point but noooo

i was trying to recall the origin image (and exact phrasing of) that "OVER 20 LBS of PUSSY & ASS!" meme and had to use google

i welcome the terrible targeted ads that are about to be served to me and probably also my roommate

Quote from: Slurpee on February 07, 2024, 12:08:44 AM

I haven't seen this anime but I am taking this to mean "David McCallum in an Astro Boy wig"

I dunno seems pretty cool

Quote from: RobClock on February 04, 2024, 01:16:26 PMNS Power has managed to keep electricity going with sparse outages and quick restoration, which is frankly unbelievable

hi we're going to superimpose this on a photo of you and add it to our homepage hero slider. thanks for choosing to be an electricity customer

hello ytmnd fans

this is your reminder that Paul Engemann's "Scarface (Push It To The Limit)" is currently available on streaming after being one of those annoyingly unobtainable major label songs for a long time

go! clock crew! go out and walk along the razor's edge!

Quote from: FLOUNDERMAN_CLOCK on November 05, 2019, 12:15:36 AMI hope you've paid your membership dues to the National Association for the Advancement of Shit-Ass Bears