#you think millenials have it bad try being late gen x

[three--rings]

Buffalo, New York, has houses around the 100k mark. They are not fantastic but they are livable. The weather is not bad, you get real winters but they move out on time then you get nice classic springs and falls. Mild summers in the 80s or so, rare 90 days. The state overall is blue, though this area's a bit more red. The state level laws keep things nice. I moved here for the nationally known autism support services (which are in new york city, but its available by train). You could zillow some places, and I'll tell you if the posts reflect reality. Tell you how good the area is. Though because it is a red area, the posts you'll have from some people call areas bad cause non white people live there.

Thank you for the input, I was actually being genuine in asking.

I lived in NY for a couple years actually, though close to the city, not upstate.

The thing keeping us from considering a lot of places is the weather, which Buffalo firmly falls into. Because both my husband and I are disabled in ways that make dealing with snow, shoveling snow, basically out of the question.

Honestly I'm not wild about actual winters, seasonal depression is a main reason I left NY and came back to Texas, but cold per se isn't a problem so much as grey, lifelessness for months on end and having to dig your car out to go anywhere.

Two of our closest couple friends have moved out of Texas, one to Illinois and one to Iowa and I'd love to be closer to them but...weather...

This is all theoretical because we don't have the financial situation to move right now. We own our home and land but it's not worth a lot. But, well, we've started talking about it in a long term way.

But it's honestly fucked how few places there are that are both affordable and not run by evil religious extremists. Like we basically keep running through red states like..."well, it's not AS BAD as Texas, right?" Or, "it's moving towards being a swing state, right?"

And I hate it so much because I honestly love my state (like, the actual LAND, yanno) and it's home and the GOP only wins by a handful of points and most people are disenfranchised so I know actually they are a minority. And we are way more racially diverse than almost anywhere else, that's something people who leave Texas always comment on. But unfortunately the fucking fascists are determined to take everyone down to hell with them.

And yeah this is just stressing me out a lot right now and taking a toll to the point I'm having trouble even looking at the internet.

IDK IDK please do tell me about the places with the not terrible winters where you can buy a small house or condo for a reasonable price where the GOP isn't coming for your rights.

[riverdale-retread]

Riverdale S5 E 19 (RIP?) - 5 Things I loved/ 3 Things to Consider.

5 Things I Loved

1. I just love Nana Rose telling that insane story about the witch burning and prodding the already unhinged Cheryl into a full blown meltdown. I kind of enjoy the fact that the show leaves it ambiguous as to whether Nana Blossom says and does all the things (the lying about mothmen, the meltdown about philandering men fathering feral Blossoms, whatever)  because she is senile or because she’s just plain stirring shit up for kicks. How do we know Nana Rose didn’t just write that diary as a form of fanfiction about her own ancestors? We do not!

I love everything about this character design - after looking like a hippy during the 60s or whenever it was that Pop Tate had the alien visit hallucination, Nana Rose dresses completely like an Edwardian lady.  I imagine that Nana Rose during menopause decided that modernity was not useful to her and dug out her grandmother’s old clothes from one of the many secret backroom cubbyholes on the Blossom estate and just started dressing like a stranded time traveler and nobody could stop her.  

2. “Nay Cousin!  What is decreed is decreed!  Tata~  Come along, Britannia.”  This is an astonishingly unhinged line and it was delivered with peak camp hysteria vibes and I was so very delighted.  That Cheryl says this and the way she said it is a significant part of why I watch Riverdale.  

I also wondered if the chaotic and self-serving way Cheryl fails to cope with any sort of nuance with the complicated legacies of the past is how the late Millenial/Gen Z political activism and attempts to grapple with history looks like  to the Gen X people who make this show.  Or is this a commentary of a different sort, that is trying to demonstrate that pat answers are impossible?  She either thinks people are victims or perpetrators, and that an injustice endured wipes out the obligation to make recompense for bad acts perpetrated and it’s just not that simple.  Oh and I loved that Britta’s name is BRITANNIA.

3.  I don’t know why I love this, but I see the season finale pairings as a sort of gauntlet thrown by the makers and it fills me with anticipation of a good kind.  A brilliant mutual who also watches this show with close attention pointed out to me that the values of Riverdale are actually very conservative, and the season finale pairings seemed to reflect this.  The conservatism is expressed in the like-matched-with-like aspect of all the pairings:  

- Jughead who is weird is with Tabitha who is weird and they are both arsonists.   Jughead as a child was schooled in an eye-for-an-eye form of primitive justice, and Tabitha seems to have the same orientation (If you snark about my business going up in flames, I set you on fire!).  Such pretty faces, such dark souls. 

- Betty who is violent and self righteous is with Archie who is violent and self righteous.    But also, I absolutely adored the way Betty bursts into laughter and giggles and touches Archie in that kitchen.  Betty can be so incandescently charming and beautiful, and I was so happy to see her happy. She hasn’t laughed like that much this season.  

- Toni and Fangs are both aspiring gang-leaders who cannot project menace whatsoever because they are completely hampered by being very doe-eyed, and they share a baby so they are now together. I mean, it’s possible to coparent without being in a relationship, but the Serpents are actually deeply conventional, and it makes me laugh whenever I see them together.

- City slicker Veronica is with small town slicker Reggie, and they are both all about the money and also indifferent honest, with near identical experiences in defeating their highly problematic fathers. 

Sidebar: The out gays are alone which is really weird: Kevin is living with his dad and going to pursue his Broadway dreams, and Cheryl is living with her grandma and adopted(?) redhead child and pursuing witchcraft and revenge and atonement.

This is a big about-face from say, what Bughead was, which was the weirdo who really wants something conventional and solid getting together with a normatively conventional looking person with a lot of hidden weirdness, and trying to create something different from both (and, I would say, failing).  Veronica sought out Archie’s company because she wanted to join Wholesome All Americana, but Archie is an oblivious gay who wants to just live with lots of virile bearded men so he’s not actually that wholesome or Americana.  

In any case, I loved this neat lining up of the dominoes. I want to see how they fall.

4.  I loved that Hiram Lodge’s inner soundtrack is Goldberg Variations.  I was so shocked by this - Hiram Lodge listens to Bach??  And then Archie just somehow punches down his hotel door like the Koolaid Man.  Is this how Hiram sees his relationship with Archie? It’s possible.  He’s just sitting peacefully in his nice room in his nice life calmly imbibing good rum and thinking along with Bach’s thoughts, and then Archie Andrews bursts in uninvited.  This made me laugh.

5. I love the way Reggie says that “he almost passed” the test.  I was raised to view tests of all types as either I got 100% or I FAILED so this was immensely liberating for me to hear, and I’m gonna just apply this to everything I do now.  ‘I almost did the dishes”  or “I almost told a funny joke.”  I mean I love Reggie in general but I especially love him with Veronica. They’re both so pretty (such EYES on the two of them) and so full of ideas. I don’t come from entrepreneurial stock, so I love actual and fictional people who just come up with the next thing to try, nonstop. 

3 Things to Consider.

a) “The Serpents are a Joke.”  Guess why. GUESS WHY. 

Say it with me:  

Sweet Pea Is GONE!!!!!!  (#cult of sweet pea #is forever)

But I mean seriously - Fangs and Toni are even less scary than Jughead during his failrun as Serpent King because at minimum he had a feral unhinged energy that could believably escalate.  I really don’t know where they’re gonna go with this and really can’t find any reason for it.   Are Toni and Fangs just trying to cope with their cognitive dissonance in how conventional they actually are?  Outwardly they look like a nice straight couple with a baby and stable jobs.  Maybe they need to just lean into that identity?

b)  They Need An Adult:  The show brought back Pop Tate, and the Core Four nominated two completely insane middle aged people to sit on the council.  The lost young people of Riverdale still feel very lost, and they feel the need for adults even though they are a year older.  Alice Cooper is not stable, has never been stable, and Uncle Fucking Frank is a war criminal who skipped town after fucking over his brother, the Sainted Fred Andrews. But Betty and Archie, out of all of them, are the most trapped by their childhood personae, and really do need adults.  It’s a very dark message, isn’t it, that unless you’re fully abandoned by the shitty people that raised you (Jughead) or you do the immensely difficult work of rejecting them wholesale (Veronica, Reggie, possibly also Tabitha?), you are going to revert to reaching out to the very people who locked you into the worst parts of your life. (Rescue Betty Cooper from Alice pLeAsE.)

c) Hiram walking into the wilderness after being rejected by his daughter, and his departure bringing in the witch wind or whatever that was, was interesting. Was Hiram that powerful all this time?  Or was his type of villainy - to do with gentrification, real estate, capitalistic greed,  drugs decimating communities, the draw of organized crime in economically depressed areas, municipal politics - something the show doesn’t want to cope with anymore?  

[hellyeahheroes]

Uncanny X-Men #11 is Outright Vile

Women in refrigerators. POCs killed for white people narratives. Anti-vaccinator and pro-suicide messages. Return of FascistCap. This book has it all. So obviously, all kinds of trigger warnings below.

I will not be posting any pages from the Uncanny X-Men #11. Not a single one. At least aside from that first page which reads like a bad joke anyway. Yes, this stuff is an actual page of this book. And I urge others to do the same and not post anything from it. When previously I would find this book to just be awful at this point it has reached levels of being openly mean-spirited and spiteful. While Matthew Rosenberg talks on his twitter how he wanted to discuss serious topics in this issue, dealing with personal experience of self-harm and suicidal thoughts, neither he nor anyone else at Marvel took care to actually warn potential readers the book flat out shows a suicide scene for shock value and I have already heard reports it has triggered people. So I urge everyone to not post these pages less we trigger more people.

Yes, the book has a character commit suicide. The story has a subplot of Cyclops searching for Blindfold, whom Rosenberg claims to be one of his favorite X-Men. And after reading this issue I have flat out said on twitter and I will say it here - could have fooled me. Scott finds her too late, as she already has slit her wrists in the bathtub. So this is what her story amounts too. She dies so that Scott Summers can feel sad. Or sadder, he wasn’t exactly sunshine and rainbows since page one. A character created after 90′s and not popular enough to get resurrected in the next 20 years dies so that people who come back to life more often than Jesus can pretend death in comics still has a meaning. A woman dies so that a man can feel sad. The page above is right. Every X-men story really IS the same.

This is not delivered with any respect whatsoever either. On the previous page, we had Madrox telling Scott where he can find Ruth and to leave her alone and then we get a splash of her death with coloring and art so bad you had to actually study it carefully to realize she is, in fact, not naked. As far as lack of respect goes it is out there with that godawful Heroes in Crisis cover showing dead Poison Ivy, wrists slit, ass up. 

What’s more is that at the end we have a backup story, so-called Last Blindfold Story. Which pretty much explains that she did it because she’s been tormented by visions of her own death and cannot see any possible future in which she does not get killed. And this is very obviously a clear metaphor for invasive thoughts, all the dark scenarios people tend to run in their heads about how everything is going to turn horrible, there is nothing good awaiting us in life, no hope or future, just continuous series of crushing failures, disappointments, humiliations and all-around misery so it is better if we just killed ourselves. I know that feeling, even though I am not diagnosed with anything. I will say even I had these feelings to deal with after coming today from a, particularly disastrous day at work that made me dread my future and indeed made me think of killing myself. And then I’ve read this book and do you want to know how this whole story came out to me? It told me that this voice telling me to end myself is right, that every scenario I envision not only will happen but is inevitable and it is better to just kill myself. Thankfully, being spoiled the contents beforehand made it I reacted to the pages more with anger than getting put into an even shittier mood, I certainly did not need it. 

I do beleive Matthew Rosenberg, just like Tom King on Heroes in Crisis, means well, I really do. I do believe each of them is trying to tell a personal story. But we really need to sit down and talk about how the mainstream comics portray and handle topics like anxiety depression, other kinds of mental illness and disorders, self-harm or suicide because for every book that deals with it with respect like recent Unstoppable Wasp or Mister Miracle, and you notice these are always niche titles, we have a high-profile book that completely botches it for shock value and preserving the status quo. Rosenberg might be working through some personal issues but he does so in a way that doesn’t seem to realize the damage he is doing all around.

Speaking of shock value this issue also casually kills of Loa, one of Marvel’s very few Pacific Islander characters. Worse that scene, in the end, serves nothing, it is there to shock you and does not add up anything. You cannot even say that it was done to push Blindfold to her suicide or to show the situation really is that serious. It amounts to nothing in Ruth’s storyline and the latter is being hammered down through the entire issue anyway, this is completely redundant death done only to get people talking. How am I supposed to believe that X-Men writers and editorial really, as they claim to, care for these characters when they write something that treats them as disposable. Similarly, aging of Velocidad done from overuse of his powers is there only to nod Wolverine more into getting back into the game, something that so many other elements, including his conversation with Blindfold, already accomplish, making it redundant. What does that leave us with, however? Two POC characters killed or alerted beyond saving to show how serious the situation is and two teenage girls killed to make things look bad and grim for our manly heroes? For a franchise that prides itself for being a metaphor for minorities, X-Men sure treat women and minorities as nothing but props for stories about white guys.

When we are at treating other characters as props I cannot help but mention that Captain America, Black Widow, and Winter Soldier show up here to protect a mutant-hating rally from any mutants who would want to start a riot. And even though they tell you they want to protect both sides Cap sure didn’t step in when the mob tried to kill Cyclops for speaking his mind but stepped in only when he started fighting back. He had no real answer to Summers accusing him of protecting fascists either. I do wonder what do Mark Waid and Ta-Nehishi Coates think of their efforts to fix Captain America after Secret Empire being flushed down the drain for the sake of an outdated message of mutant isolationism. They did the same with Phil Urich, making him a coward who refuses to do his job out of fear of public opinion. And topped on some old-fashioned ageism by having Chamber, a Gen X character, go and tell Scott, a Baby Boomer, to give up...while Millenials are sacrificed to prop said Baby boomer’s story. And I don’t care Jordan D. White is ranting on twitter with Marvel sliding timescale O5 are now “true” Millennials, nobody cared for this thing in a long, long time and he comes off as bitter old man trying to pretend he is still young.

Speaking of the said rally we need to address the problem of the whole mutant vaccine plotline. And is it me or does the whole thing comes off as anti-vaccinators propaganda, with evil bigots trying to practice eugenics by forcing mandatory vaccines on kids that somehow work on something genetic? Is this really the way you want to use the mutant metaphor? To equate your heroes with a bunch of idiots who don’t want to vaccinate their kids for stupid and often bigoted reasons like assinine belief vaccines cause autism and they’d rather their kid died than be autistic? Is this really a message you want to be sending? Maybe next X-men will start wearing MAGA hats, proclaim Earth flat and draw comparisons to “blue lives” defenders?

It is not that the story is dark. I like dark stories. I love them even I’d say. But there is a difference between being dark and being pointlessly grimdark for the sake of it. One of the reasons why I read superhero comics and why I am a fan of Earn Your Happy Ending narratives is that I find inspirations in seeing superheroes being knocked down and still raising, still pressing forward until they win against all the odds and prove that yes, there is a reason to fight another day. But so far Uncanny X-Men made it abundantly clear this will not be another day in which I or my generation are welcome. I have no doubt X-Men will win in the end. but it will not be X-men with Blindfold and it will not be X-Men with Loa and it will be not X-Men with Velocidad. It will not be X-Men with any of the characters I care about at all. It will be X-Men that made it clear not only am I not welcome here, the book actively things the world will be a better place if I and my entire generation were gone so that it can relive good old days alone.

But hey, it had two guys beating up mooks on a splash page so it CLEARLY means the franchise is on the right trac /sarcasm.

- Admin

[megacircuit9universe]

Times Change

WED JUL 08 2020

Trumps numbers... approval rating, and polling numbers in all the states that could possibly matter this November... are so bad right now that Trump has threatened media outlets, including FOX News, for posting the latest numbers, which he says are all fake.

He’s also been ranting on Twitter about how the upcoming election is going to be rigged, and doing speeches, such as on July 3rd at Mount Rushmore, in which he’s ranting about how liberals and Democrats are enemies of the state, including teachers, and the media, and that they’re all conspiring to end America and bring forth a scary dictatorship where conservatives will be persecuted and punished.

His little pal, Tucker Carlson, over on Fox... is running with that ball and helping to plant the seeds in the dysfunctional brains of his audience, that if Trump loses, it will be because the election has been rigged by a vast liberal conspiracy.

Well... if by, rigged, they mean... influenced by a level of Presidential incompetence so astronomical that nobody in the country can’t see and feel it quite painfully... and if by, conspiracy, they mean... a vast majority of voters have agreed to use their voting powers to vote him out of office... then, sure!

But what this all says... the warlike paranoid rhetoric against not just all races (it used to be just Muslims and South Americans) but all US citizens who would dare to oppose Trump... coupled with the cries of a rigged election to come...

...is that he know’s he’s going to lose.

And they know... he’s going to lose (his junta).

So, the best plan they can think of at the moment is to try and foment violence if he loses... in an attempt to intimidate the rest of us into backing down.  

Don’t you vote him out, or we will unleash our army of brainwashed morons to take to the streets with guns and torches blazing.  We will throw the biggest tantrum the world has ever seen.

But, after everything else we’ve been through so far... we’re not simply desensitized to the threat of more upheaval... in the case of this threat, we’re like, bring it on!

People are already in the streets standing up to walls of fascist cops in riot gear every night. You think anybody’s scared by the idea of a bunch of red hat idiots coming out of the woodwork with their shotguns and assault rifles?  We have shotguns and assault rifles too!

This is America... everybody has a gun!

We don’t use them on the cops, but if Backwoods Bob, or KKKarl wants to show up in attack mode, because they’re pissed off about the outcome of the election... shooting their asses in self defense is justifiable homicide, so let’s go!

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court and the Pentagon have already shown conclusively, in the past month, that they have zero loyalty to Trump.

BLM has brought together a huge coalition of not just white and black people, protesting and fighting side by side, but also Native Americans, Arab Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Asian Americans, Jews, Amish, Wiccans and other Pagans, atheists, scientists, gay, straight, lesbian, trans, even some Christians, and yes, a not trivial number of Republicans.

Gen X was always there for the fight, along with a few Boomers, and a few Silents, but now Millennials are finally on board, as is... everybody’s celebrated new heroes... Gen Z!

Which brings me back to Tik Tok...

Tik Tok has been instrumental in bringing the above mentioned coalition together... though it took SARS CoV2 to be the catalyst that mobilized us against racism, fascism, and Trumpism, here in 2020.

As social media platforms go, Tik Tok has outmatched all of its predecessors... who were all, in their own ways, very impressive... from MySpace, to YouTube, to Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter and Vine.

It has old roots, being a merger between Musical.ly which has been around since 2014, and what began as Douyin back in 2016.  2018 was the year that what we now know as Tik Tok, was born, and quickly rose to the top of the app charts.

It inherited a huge user base of teenagers, but also filled the gap left behind by Vine, which died in 2016, and Tumblr, which was dealt a critical blow in late 2017, when it was sanitized of all explicit material.  

Ignored completely by the mainstream, Tik Tok was also blown off fairly aggressively by established YouTubers as a platform of vacuous content, of no interest to anybody above the age of 15, other than pedophiles.

 But when Covid19 hit the world stage in early 2020, forcing everybody on the planet to shelter at home, and grapple with boredom... Tik Tok went mainstream in a big way. 

It was the only social media app left, where it was acceptable not to wallow in depression and political defeatism (Twitter), not to be out shopping, globe trotting, or partying (Instagram) and not to be making long form videos in a professional studio with 100K subscribers and a Patreon (YouTube). 

This is when most of the millenials, GenXers, Boomers, and even Silents began to get on board... to have a go at finding their own niche in the Tik Tok universe.

And this brings us to the key to Tik Tok’s popularity... its algorithm.  

Well, its algorithm, coupled with an elegantly simple interface, and perfect upper time limit for videos... just over a minute. 

It takes only ten minutes, scrolling through Tik Tok videos, liking the ones you like, for that algorithm to start visibly tailoring your feed to what you want more of.  And over the course of just a day or two... doing this, and following whoever you’d like to see more of, even when they aren’t going viral on the For You page... you can quickly cultivate an addictive feed that you’re happy to scroll through for hours.

Some say it’s just a sinister ploy to keep you on the app, in order to steal your data but... all social media apps do that.  Tik Tok simply does it better.  It’s algorithm is superior to Twitter, Facebook or even YouTube, allowing you to tailor your feed on the fly in real time... if times are changing that fast... which they have been.

So, why the long love letter to Tik Tok now?

Well, this week, it’s suddenly in peril.  It’s been banned in India, could soon be banned in America.. and after losing those two massive markets... could just die.

It began with China passing a law last week that, for national security reasons, it needed to have access to all app data collected by all apps based in China... which includes Tik Tok, which is owned by a Chinese company known as ByteDance, headquartered in Hong Kong... the province which has been in a struggle to maintain what little autonomy it has left from the Chinese mainland for several years now.

India... which was recently embroiled with a border dispute with China that resulted in a military skirmish, immediately banned Tik Tok, for fear of their citizens data falling into the hands of Xi Peng.

But Tik Tok has an American CEO, who, in a move to save the app from getting banned in America, announced that the Hong Kong headquarters would be moving overseas.

That didn’t do much to calm the Trump administration, however... who have only just pieced together that Tik Tok was truly behind the disastrously low attendance of his recent Tulsa rally... and also a key social media channel for BLM and other anti-Trump movements to organize and coordinate (and one they can’t penetrate and manipulate, as they did with Facebook and Twitter four years ago).

So now, both Trump and  his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo have gone on record saying they’d like to ban Tik Tok in the United States.

It’s not clear yet if this ban will actually happen, though it seems likely.

It’s even less clear how a ban in both India and the US will affect the fortunes of Tik Tok.  

VPNs will make it possible for users in both countries to continue using Tik Tok, so... over the short term, it will remain accessible... at least to those hardcore devotees who have come to rely on it.

But, barring a massive sea change in the general popularity of VPNs... which is not out of the question, in these increasingly authoritarian times around the planet... the loss of most of the two biggest markets could cripple Tik Tok.

People say, What about supply and demand?

Well... the most likely fate would be for Tik Tok to be bought out by a non-communist company, say a US company like Google, or Amazon.  

That’s been the trend for over a decade now.  Yahoo bought Tumblr.  Twitter bought Vine.  Facebook bought Instagram, etc.  But more often than not, in these cases, when the hugely popular platform gets bought for billions by the big corporation... the big corporation drops the ball and drives it into the ground.

YouTube being bought by Google is probably the least dismal of these examples, but YouTube is nothing like what it was back in the early twenty teens, when it was a platform for anybody with a web cam in their bed room to talk to the world, and get famous.

But then again, this IS 2020...

Tik Tok has redefined the entire dynamic of social media, at the same time that SARS CoV2 has drastically altered the global economy... meaning that the twenty-teens model of both things, and how they work together... could well be out the window by now.

And this brings us, in tonight’s final analysis, to a fundamental truth that Trump, for all his diabolical plotting to game the 2016 campaign process... has failed to plan for.

Times change.

Twitter was the shit back in 2016, wasn’t it?  What a brilliant move for a dark horse boomer candidate turned President to troll the shit out of it every goddam day for years on end, right?

Well, he’s killed Twitter now.  The whole universe, as it was in 2016, has disintegrated... in no small part thanks to Trump’s abuses, neglect, and incompetence.

But also just the march of history... climate change, global pandemic, technological breakthroughs, economic upheaval, civic unrest, etc.

They like to say those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it.

I say... those who ignore the future, get eaten by it.

Tempus Edax Rerum.

Time consumes all things.

[me-take-three]

  Another thing that has been weighing on me a lot (no pun intended) has been just that – my weight. By this time last year, I’d lost 29.8 pounds since around the beginning of December 2015. Anyone in Weight Watchers might remember that Thanksgiving as the day Oprah took over the site and apps. (It was a complete goat rope, you guys.) Then my friend Dee came to visit in late March, and I took a week off from dieting. And then a month. And then would try to restart only to fall off again.

As of right now… *goes to weigh on the bathroom scale* … my total weight loss from back then is a miserable 0.6 pounds. I gained back 29.2 pounds and am nearly right back where I began.

I can feel it, too. I don’t have the energy I had. I can feel myself being heavier as I walk. Only my biggest clothes are fitting me now, and not very nicely. My back will hurt if I stand for a long time, and the weird thing with my left thigh going to sleep is back. Yeah, crap you probably didn’t care to hear about, right?

“Why don’t you just stick to the Weight Watchers’ program if that worked for you?” I know it sounds ridiculous, but Oprah. I am so sick and tired of seeing Oprah all over the damn place. Oprah, Oprah, Oprah. And when we don’t see her, we see color photos of women who can’t be over 25 splashed everywhere. Eating large portions of stuff we are “technically” allowed to eat. Playing soccer. Hanging out on the beach. That’s fine… but do the Weight Watchers people really think it’s inspiring to parade models who obviously have never had any need whatsoever to go to Weight Watchers (or Jenny Craig or NutriSystems or even buy SlimFast) in front of women who know there’s no way in hell they are going to look like that 18-year-old ever again?

One of the ladies at the center where I go (yeah, when I go) said she saw a photo of the people behind the website content, Weekly content 9the weekly mini-mag), and all. “Let me guess – no one looks as though they’ve ever struggled with a weight loss of more than the 10 pounds gained on their 10-day cruise?” Yep. And they all seemed to be fresh out of college.

As an example, I just pulled these off the website today:

Don’t get me wrong – these are nice photos. Colorful, active. But think about the audience: there have been many times when I’ve been in the lowest part of the age group in a meeting, with women twenty and thirty years older. (And I’m not a Millenial…) I remember one evening when our leader had to use a flip-board yet again, and one of the women finally popped off with: “Oh, look! That one at least looks like she’s old enough to buy a drink!” or something to that effect. Everyone laughed, and most of us started saying we’d been thinking the same things. Because please, Weight Watchers – putting a model who looks all of 15 on the cover of a Weekly, wearing star-shaped Lolita glasses and what looks like they might be ponytails? Not hitting your target audience there.

The photos above look to me like something from a women’s college website: Sophomores skiing, Juniors kayaking, how delicious the food is at the local restaurants. And please – take a look at the people in that “meeting” photo and show me the person who has more than five pounds to lose. It’s simply not realistic. Not for what they are selling.

In looking for a photo of the people who are in the marketing department, I kept running across articles about Weight Watchers losing money, even after Oprah bought 10% of the shares and was seated on the board. Yes, there was a huge surge at first, but then it slid. In these articles, they look to everything from the plethora of free apps available now to stiff competition from other places. To quote CNN Money (February 26, 2016):

The company has tough competition from the likes of Nutrisystem and Jenny Craig.

Maybe nostalgic Gen X-ers are flocking to Jenny Craig? Kirstie Alley is now appearing in ads for Jenny Craig, along with fellow Cheers alums George Wendt (Norm!) and John Ratzenberger. The weight loss company where everyone knows your name?

It’s not the people in the advertisements. Not really. It’s not the fact that there are free apps everywhere to count calories, track weight, etc. That’s not the main reason for people unsubscribing or for meeting attendance to be low.

Dear Weight Watchers: It’s because you didn’t want to listen. I heard and read all over the place about the bad marketing. How it began to feel rather exclusive of men (the reason Hims never returned, despite the offers of free starter kits and free FitBits). How everywhere you looked there were photos of slender, fit twenty-somethings or Oprah. And more Oprah. No one representative of the women who actually attend meetings. And then the really tacky crap you began selling last year – oh, no.

  Can you tell I’ve had this stuff on my chest for awhile?

Now that it’s off, I am going to hop back on the diet – because really, that’s what it is anymore. I am going to update about it here. And damnit, I am going to wear my swimsuits this summer.

    Where I Am Another thing that has been weighing on me a lot (no pun intended) has been just that - my weight.