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Jake

Idle Thumbs 131: Real Life

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The thing that actually upset me was the casting judgement on the quality of other people's fun, which is something that I associate with someone who is intensely invested in whether or not other people see them as authentic, and are quick to disdain things in the vain hope that this is what makes one authentic. Right now we call these people hipsters; they have had many names.

 

Huh? I'm not sure I follow. But I am pretty sure that almost every person casts some level of judgment on the quality of other people's fun. It's called having an opinion and being human. Is Chris' opinion about lighters at concerts all that different then me thinking it's fucking stupid that people have fun obsessively following celebrity gossip?

 

Plus, I'm pretty sure your definition of hipster is totally wrong. Someone is only a hipster if they wear a fedora and don't own a tv.

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... it's fucking stupid that people have fun obsessively following celebrity gossip.

Shots fired.

Something you may not be considering is that the celebrity-gossip is context that can evoke a strange suspension of disbelief of the known fictional quality in the actual product.

For example, Heartstrings seems to have been made for the people who watched You Are Beautiful and who thought that

Go Mi Nyu should have ended up with Shin Woo.

Heartstrings is pretty much fan-fic. I thought it wasn't very good, but I can see why the audience of You Are Beautiful wanted to see a chemistry between two of the actors extrapolated in a different show. This is a very small example of a much broader network of meta-dramas. Basically, people are drawn to mixtures of gossip and fiction where sensational stuff happens and the reality is debatable.

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Diretide intro was funny, but did you guys know that Valve basically admitted they were wrong?! http://blog.dota2.com/2013/11/not-my-best-work/

 

I haven't been so shocked in a long time. Doesn't make the reactions that lead up to it any less/more shitty/hilarious though.

 

Anyway, feel free to go back to arguing about whether people are allowed to think things are cool now.

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Is Chris' opinion about lighters at concerts all that different then me thinking it's fucking stupid that people have fun obsessively following celebrity gossip?

I guess I win the asshole competition, because I think this whole argument is fucking stupid.

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I guess I win the asshole competition, because I think this whole argument is fucking stupid.

 

You're going to have to share that prize, buddy.

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You're going to have to share that prize, buddy.

 

I guess I win the asshole competition, because I think this whole argument is fucking stupid.

 

Have fun drinking your fair-trade latte's while you discuss the finer points of unicycling. By the way, I would celebrate your birthdays, but I don't follow the moon-calendar.

 

 

Did I do it right?

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I just wanted to come here and interject to stay that people do in fact still smoke cigarettes.  I can't comment about other places, but people in my age bracket (early 20's) who live in the Bay Area smoke, and a high number of them at that.  I don't, but enough people around me do that if I see someone smoking I don't really even notice it.

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I guess I win the asshole competition, because I think this whole argument is fucking stupid.

Uh oh, now I remember something from South Park.

 

"I'm so non-conformist, I'm not conforming with you guys."

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I don't really have a strong opinion about the "waving cell phones at concerts" thing, but I do have an awesome anecdote to share about it.

 

I haven't been to many concerts in my life, but one of the best I've seen was Weird Al at Massey Hall in Toronto in 2007. I've been a gigantic Weird Al fan all my life and he is an amazing live performer, so it was great. Throughout the show, they would play clips from Al's fake interviews, which involve him taking interviews with celebrities and cuts himself into them asking ridiculous questions. One of the ones he showed was one with Michael Stipe. There's a point in it where Al asks Michael to compose a song with him, which ends up just being Al singing "We all have cell phones, so come on, let's get real" over and over. It's a funny clip.

 

Anyway, at the end of the show, when Al comes back on stage for the encore, instead of launching into one of his songs, he just starts belting "We all have cell phones, so come on, let's get real!" in epic power ballad fashion. At that point, everybody started waving their cell phones in the air and it was perfectly appropriate.

 

Then he sang "Albuquerque" and the whole audience sang along to all eleven minutes of it.

 

Man, what an awesome concert.

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The thing that actually upset me was the casting judgement on the quality of other people's fun, which is something that I associate with someone who is intensely invested in whether or not other people see them as authentic, and are quick to disdain things in the vain hope that this is what makes one authentic. Right now we call these people hipsters; they have had many names. 

I thought hipsterdom was about ironic detachment, not a desire to appear authentic. 

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I'm pretty sure it's being aggressively, sensitively sincere about things previously enjoyed only through ironic detachment.

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I thought it was about wearing ties with plaid shirts.

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Hipsters are what happens when scene kids stop being polite... and start getting real

 

(Also they all use Ruby and node.js and have sleeve tattoos.)

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