lostinspaceandmeaning:

captainsnoop:

kadara-skies:

midclown120boos:

radailurophiles:

midclown120boos:

midclown120boos:

midclown120boos:

okay i just had a bad epiphany but corporate interest’s influence on the internet is going to become so much stronger now that generations that are internet naturalized have grown up and starting working as “social media consultants”. advertising is going to become so much more subtle, manipulate your behavior to a greater extent, and completely pervade every aspect of our lives the more we rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to social validation. 

what im saying is its scary that corporate twitter accounts are getting good at twitter. to have the same avenue a human would to express themself. its like, an extreme anthromorphism of a brand, and that brand representing a corporate interest, and successfully passing itself off as a sentient entity on twitter, thats really weird to me.

like this is so fucked up. it doesnt immediately read as an advertisement, conceptually it executes the levels of irony and deconstruction that usually make for successful memes in this genre or whatever. its almost subverting itself, but ultimately it still succeeds as an advertisement. it makes me sick. for every misfire of corporations trying to relate (pepsi protest commercial), theres another company getting better at it

okay but like my thing about this is… who is actually eating at these places because shit like this? yeah it’s funny but i never go to wendy’s because a meme, if i go to wendy’s it’s because i want a gross burger and a frosty, same with taco bell and mcdonald’s and wherever the fuck.

i really think that you’re blowing this out of proportion and having very little faith in people’s ability to decide what they want for themselves. it’s just not that deep.

It’s not about the effectiveness of the ads in question, but their complete omnipresence in every aspect and moment of life, and how bizarre and sophisticated the mechanations of advertising have become. If people don’t call attention to these things, they become normal.

The effectiveness of marketing isnt one-to-one, like, “ad says burger is good, I think burger is good, I eat burger.” That was 50 years ago. Y'all, since then these multi-million dollar corporations have been hiring psychologists and sociologists and anthropologists to study how best to get under consumer skin and theyve figured out it’s not about making you WANT a burger,

It’s about creating a Brand Identity - an anthropomorphized personality that your brain fits into an established schema (system of thought) so it’s easier to just drop into the background of your everyday life. It’s not about making you want a burger, it’s about making it so, when you DO want a burger, the first place you think of is Wendy’s, because their ads have made you think about them five time already that day. And most importantly, it’s about making sure you dont realize how often they make you think about them, so you don’t resent how pervasive they’ve become. They do that by tricking your brain into thinking of them as just another human-like personality. Your Funny Meme Friend Wendy’s. Wine Aunt World Market. Woke Jock Nike. Even your Endearingly Unhip Uncle Geico.

(hey also if you want dozens of terrifying examples of what I mean, just type ‘brand identity schema’ into Google like I just did and take a gander at all those scholarly articles discussing how best to acquire consumers, like we’re a fucking commodity)

one time i said i didn’t like the wendys twitter and got called classist for hating retail employees 

this shit works. it makes people like Brands. gets under their skin and in to their minds. when i said i didnt like the wendys twitter i personally offended people that viewed wendys as a friend, that viewed the wendys social media manager as a friendly individual that they respected.

the wendys social media manager is not your friend. they don’t even really exist. there’s no one person that writes the tweets for wendys. there’s a team of 20 something year olds that casually observe the latest meme trends and crank out mspaint memes because they know they’ll get retweeted if the memes are relevant.

they trick you in to thinking that Wendys is a hip friendly young person, and they manipulate you in to thinking that disliking marketing is somehow a “problematic” “un-woke” thing to do. 

and it works. 

install ublock origin. on mobile, block every promoted tweet you see. don’t let them convince you that this shit is normal.

shalllaby:

Can We Guess Your Age By The Words You Use?

official-deutschland:

official-german-gaming:

Konzept: Deutsche akademische Texte, nur dass die Autoren, auf die verwiesen wird, konsequent mit ihren Vornamen oder Spitznamen genannt werden. So wird zum Beispiel aus einem Autor, der mit Vornamen “Günter” heißt, “der Günni”.

(vgl. Matze und Bros, 2016)

she-minions:

kierongillen:

carriagelamp:

dearnonacepeople:

So let me get this straight, in Monopoly if you give one player more money to start out it’s “unfair” but if you do it in real life it’s “capitalism”? 

You know what, I’m going to tell you guys a story.

In my Sociology class a few semesters ago, our prof had us break off into groups and, much to our naive joy, began distributing Monopoly boards! We had no idea what was going on but yay! Games! Of course, once our group, and a number of others, got the board we began to work at setting up and distributing the money…

until suddenly our prof told us to put the money down and pick up the dice.

“Roll the dice and sort yourselves from highest to lowest,” our teacher commanded.  "Now, the highest number is the upper class. The next one is upper middle class.  The next two or three are middle class. The last person is in poverty.“

Well, as the person who rolled a two this was startling and not wholly welcome news.

From that point the game changed entirely. We had to hand out the money so that the “upper class” had this fucking mountain, and then less for upper middle, even less for middle, and I didn’t get any triple digit bills. We would all collect different amounts from passing go as well.

The biggest change though? Going to jail. Upper class didn’t. Period. Upper middle class could go but they only had to stay for one turn or they could immediately pay their way out. Middle class had some pretty easy guidelines for when they could pay to get out. As lower class, it was really easy for me to wind up in jail and REALLY hard to get out. But since I was working with so little money when everyone else had so much I was in jail all the time because there was no “game over”.  If I couldn’t pay I had to go to jail for a certain period of time. I had to take out loans with interest I could never pay back just to get out only to wind up back in it again, rolling dice turn after turn hoping to be able to get out.

It was simultaneously the most enlightening and most awful game I had ever played. I was bored and frustrated and a little terrified about it all. And it wasn’t only me. I would never win, I sort of accepted this, but it was amazing how the middle classes reacted as well.  They were stressed. Because they were always that close to either being able to one-up the upper class or from crashing into poverty with me. They had to fight constantly just to stay in the middle.

(I should also mention that the upper class player in one group felt so bad for the lower income players that they ended up overhauling their entire game and creating a “socialist” society instead. I’m not sure how our teacher felt about that one.)

Worth stressing this is entirely in the spirit of the original designer’s aims for Monopoly. 

Monopoly’s  original form of The Landlord Game which was explicitly designed to teach people about the unfairness of rent systems. To quote from the wikipedia entry, just as it’s the easiest source to hand…

Magie designed the game to be a “practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences”.^[2] She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed byHenry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.

When the usual suspects start making “don’t bring politics into games” noises, I roll my eyes pretty hard. They have no idea of the history of the form.

And then the Parker Brothers pushed her out and stole the game thereby demonstrating exactly what capitalism is

sharmakeswife:

i urge you to seek comfort in the fact that everything in the universe is subtly interconnected. it didn’t work out the way you wanted it to but you’ll end up where you need to be. keep your head up.

thedarkperidot:

Signs you grew up lonely

- Chasing people who don’t want you

-Making up lots of stories and worlds

-Overtalking whenever there’s someone to talk to

-Excessive reading

-Daydreaming

-Clinging emotionally to others

-Being the ‘disposable’ friend in the group

-Excessive baths

-Talking to oneself

-Obsessive friendships

-Excessive helpfulness