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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 1h

This looks like the bedside table of a pretentious upper-middle-class American teenager, yet it belongs to the richest man in the world.

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 1h

This picture of Elon's bedside table is to me the most emblematic of this cultural era: a few empty cans of diet coke, a replica of Washington's gun you can order online for one or two hundred bucks, a cheap-looking vajra and a shitty plastic replica of a gun from the more recent Deus Ex games.

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 1h

And you're right that the artsy folks don't generally dabble in that kind of stuff. The issue is that the rise of consumerism and mass media has made popular culture more powerful than it ever was, making "copies of copies" culturally dominant.

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 1h

It all comes down to the inherently derivative nature of popular culture compared to the transformative nature "higher culture" generally takes—the difference between the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the shitty saintly icons that were sold on the town's market for a few coppers.

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 1h

I think the real insight here is that your statement isn't accurate. Reading a lot of modern fantasy doesn't give me the impression the author read Tolkien (it would look very different if it did!), but that they read someone else's take on someone's take on Tolkien.

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 5h

Oh of course, don't worry, this absolutely was not directed at you, and I apologize if it gave that impression.

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 15h

One of the great ironies of political theory is that the best way to do radical politics is to not scare the hoes, yet many radicals fetishize scaring the hoes because, well, otherwise they wouldn't be radicals!

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 15h

As always, it comes down to online leftists being utterly convinced that their radical ideas are actually immensely popular, and the more radical thr better. Meanwhile, in the real world, Mamdani *is* popular but has noticeably high unfavorables for a Dem nominee. It's a tight rope he has to walk!

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 23h

On the other hand, it's always fun to pull the old Erwin Rommel trick in those types of games.

Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 23h

France might have to change republics again too.

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Reposted by Baptiste Lerak

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 1d

of course this has no real basis in modern history, which has demonstrated over and over again that bigotry is a luxury. bigotry is a waste of human potential that you can only get away with when you're *not* in a life or death struggle with an enemy "hellbent" on destroying you

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 1d

Everything is Fortnite now, which is a profoundly tedious development.

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 1d

Making Jar Jar the villain of the Mando and Baby Yoda movie would unironically make it 100% more interesting.

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 1d

"Aside from [thing that single-handedly annihilates my argument], I'm basically right." is my favorite type of idiot rhetoric.

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 1d

Ah, but have you considered that you can just, you know, kind of handwave the Manhattan Project away to make your argument stronger?
bsky.app/profile/sodr...

Secretary of Defense Rock @sodrock.bsky.social · 1d

Lol, lmao, lol, lmao

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 1d

And it's not just the Americans. French tanks for example were more numerous AND of better quality than German Panzers.

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 1d

More than that I think it comes down to a general impoverishment of the cultural diet of creators. It used to be artists liked to experience a lot of very different and very weird things. Now *everybody* consumes the Trending Thing, and then consumes its fan-content until the next Trending Thing.

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 3d

I notice my bubble is much smaller than it was on Twitter, but it makes sense. Ah, the fun we had doing poll denialism back in the old place. Those were the days and life hasn't been the same since then (quite literally).

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 3d

Remember a few years ago when Charlie Kirk was assassinated and that was it, that was the start of the Gotterdamerung, and then two weeks later they had already forgotten about him and had switched to demanding the UN be dismantled because an elevator stopped before Trump?

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 3d

Maybe those movies would be more profitable if they didn't cost the GDP of a small island nation to make.

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 3d

"Studio wants the budget cut to $200M" is an objectively insane sentence though.

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 4d

Even then, I do think Homestuck is a pure product of early 2010s Internet culture that is past its time anyway.

Indeed, we already got modern Homestuck, it's called Undertale/Deltarune, and an animated series on either of those would make numbers like you wouldn't believe, regardless of quality.

Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 4d

And I think the viewcount of the Pilot speaks for itself. Not even 2 million views a week after release; that's pathetic by the standards of Vivzie's pilots. In comparison, the *French dub* of Helluva Boss alone is currently at 4m+.

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 4d

Meh, I don't think it'll go anywhere. I watched it, and it was atrocious, because it's patently clear they don't have a fraction of the talent needed to translate something as intrinsically tied to its medium as Homestuck without destroying the substance of it.

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Baptiste Lerak @baptistelerak.bsky.social · 4d

One of the two dudes who wrote all the Hazbin Hotel S1 songs is literally the Living Tombstone guy. We're talking about a band that got their big break doing an Eurobeat remix of a My Little Pony fan-song! A derivative of a derivative.

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