#pop media

[creature-wizard]

Why the fuck conspiracy theorists love to use pop-culture as an explanation for things so much?

"OMG, world is a simulation, just like Matrix!"

"OMG, Back to the Future described Project Monarch!"

"OMG, Mandela Effect is just like Dark City!"

and uncountable others

There's multiple overlapping reasons, most of which stem from assuming that the entertainment industry is controlled by The Conspiracy.

The most straightforward one is the belief that the Conspiracy uses entertainment to brainwash people into accepting heretical beliefs and degrade their morals.

Conspiracy theorists also claim that the Conspiracy puts "predictive programming" into media in order to brainwash their audience into accepting whatever evil scheme they plan to spring next, regardless of how the story frames its subject matter. (Seriously, a narrative can be like "do not build the Torment Nexus!", and these people will claim that the Illuminati is brainwashing people into accepting the existence of the Torment Nexus. Conspiracy theorists are among the worst bad faith readers on the face of the planet.)

Another belief that's developed (and I couldn't tell you its exact origins, but it's highly popular among the types who claim Project Monarch is a real thing) is that the Conspiracy cannot act without announcing their evil plans to the world in some way. Supposedly, this is just one of the requirements of getting your power from Satan. So allegedly, the New World Order people are creating movies that announce their plans to the public by working them into fictional narratives. (And again, it's a form of extreme bad faith reading.)

One other reason is that a lot of media is influenced by conspiracy theories. For example, nearly anything with aliens or Atlantis has been influenced by conspiracy theories to some degree. The Matrix was very much influenced by conspiracy theories. That doesn't mean that this media is all inherently bad, but it does mean that anyone looking at the world through a conspiratorial lens is going to recognize their own beliefs and language, and read it as a kind of validation.

Conspiracy theories also serve as a way to maintain belief in things that scientific evidence doesn't support or even precludes. Like where a more well-adjusted person might accept that dainty little unicorns aren't real animals but write them into a fantasy story because they like the idea of them, a conspiracy theorist type might essentially believe that dainty little unicorns are real animals, and the big elite meanies are hiding it from us.

There's probably more dimensions to this than I've covered here, but yeah, in my experience, this is what a lot of it comes down to.

[flopculturefan]

Azealia Banks sign to Warner Music UK's Parlaphone Records

In a newly shared Instagram post by the controversial rapper, Azealia Banks announces she is now signed to Warner bros Record label. Could this mean new music?

"I did it. I wasn't going to let you down."

As an azealia stan myself IM HYPED. MOTHER IS BACK AAAAAAAAAAAAA she served. Pussy and Cunt.

Bro she better be working on an album because bitch im ITCHING for new music from her

[chaoticneutraltor]

[myfootyrthroat]

School: Teaches you something for a week with historical background, context, effects, and outcomes.

One TikToker: Tells you it's fake while doing a bad contour.

Some of y'all: SCHOOL LIED?!

[artsekey]

Thinking about the time I lost a game of Overwatch and I was so mad about it that I genuinely considered getting into shit with the other team in chat and then realized that it was a colossal waste of my living breathing Human Time and uninstalled Overwatch instead because it was only making me angry.

And then thought about the OTHER time when I was on TikTok and realized I was Not Enjoying Myself and was, in fact, seeing so many sad videos and fake influencer ads that I felt Truly Despondent and then just…Deleted it.

Imo I want my social media /general media experience to be a pleasant break from real world and I get to decide what I get to cull to make that a reality for myself. I highly reccomended it! Life has improved considerably!

[yak-leather-whips]

Guys, its not some fucking “bad luck devil” or whatever. It’s clearly this fucking time gargler or whatever the fuck that’s behind all this nonsense. Aguefort literally lays it out for us that the quangle makes things happen out of order. Things like, say…Zelda and Gorgug being broken up even though we know from the Seven that they’re still together in Junior year, or Aelwyn suddenly moving out and going from a snarky 19 year old whose never had a job or gone to college to a middle school teacher with 5 cats in the course of 3 months, or the sophomore album being 10 months late even though Fig only finished her debut a little over 16 months ago AND they were in the middle of the tour, or Hallariel and Gilear getting engaged after like a year when 3 months ago Gilear wasn’t even allowed to sleep in her bed, and Sklonda defending one of the organizers of this folk festival when the festival hasn’t even happened yet, or Figs birthday suddenly moving from Christmas to July.

[connorsok]

before I played Disco Elysium, I thought Harry du Bois was a co-worker in the precinct you work at and, reading about him being such a fucked up guy, I was literally planning on avoiding him as much as possible in my playthrough... colour me surprised when I found the badge and found out the main character's name

[ursiday]

sufjan stevens - i want to be well

[prokopetz]

Okay, so you know how search engine results on most popular topics have become useless because the top results are cluttered with page after page of machine-generated gibberish designed to trick people into clicking in so it can harvest their ad views?

And you know how the data sets that are used to train these gibberish-generating AIs are themselves typically machine-generated, via web scrapers using keyword recognition to sort text lifted from wiki articles and blog posts into topical subsets?

Well, today I discovered – quite by accident – that the training-data-gathering robots apparently cannot tell the difference between wiki articles about pop-psych personality typologies (e.g., Myers-Briggs type indicators, etc.) and wiki articles about Homestuck classpects.

The upshot is that when a bot that's been trained on the resulting data sets is instructed to write fake mental health resource articles, sometimes it will start telling you about Homestuck.

[karamelise]

Promotional material for the canceled 2004 anime film "t.A.T.u Paragate", a film centered on the Russian pop duo t.A.T.u. Newtype Magazine, 2003

[itsnotreallymyblog]

This summer 2023 is coming! Are you ready for what this blog has to come??

We just might promote a whole new system for blogs and journalist everywhere!!

[flopculturefan]

Iconic Lady Gaga tweets that make me giggle

She stays slaying

[sluttyquarantinetheory]

My one problem with Star Trek is that no one is ever consuming contemporary media. As in media that's contemporary for their time period. Everyone is always reading old novels and practicing classical music. They study Klingon Opera or read old Cardassian mysteries. No one is ever like really into obscure Klingon Nightcore. Nobody is reading shitty Ferengi pulp novels. There's no kids media of any kind. Where is space Sesame Street or junior novels about gaining superpowers from a warp core accident? What about comic books? Nobody is playing crappy indy holodeck games. It's always some recreation of a historical battle or just lounging in a mud pit at some alien spa. Someone give me angsty Bajoran protest music. I need some rebellious teens producing the worst most cacophonous death metal techno that they recorded in an empty cargo bay. I need contemporary pop culture in Star Trek.

[daily-sifloop]

I feel like giving loop the flower should have lead to a secret secret ending where mid-fight siffrin scoops up loop and runs into the sunset so they can get bonded together clearly this would be the true ending

Day 32: secret SECRET ending

[contemporary-disquiet]

YAYOI KUSAMA, Fear of Death, 2008

[ahfrickenfrick]

AITA for stalking my now family members AGES ago

by u/no-spleen-attached

this is now apparently a HUGE problem in my household?? and I really don’t see the reason why?

when I (17M) was 9 I was left to my own devices a lot so of course I took up photography, and specifically taking pictures of the cities nightlife

and idk why but one night i saw my neighbors out and about and it caught my interest and I started taking photos of them and just idk following them around?

anyways because a bunch of stuff happened with family and the neighbors ended up taking me in, and it’s been like five years since I’ve stopped and I guess I thought they knew?

like I was literally nine following them how did they NOT see me? thought it was the whole reason they took me in tbh

so when I joked about it, they were like ‘what do you mean’ and i explained it and they were horrified, especially when i brought OUT some photos of them like tripping on curbs and stuff like that

apparently that’s ‘really wrong’ and ‘no sane person would do that’ and one that kept popping up ‘why do you still have these’

ANYWAYS so aita? I’m just really confused rn