best posts from the forums
- Constantignoble posted in HANDS OFF SYRIA (2954 posts)
- if israel has already bombed all of syria's anti-aircraft emplacements then i guess they now have the unchecked ability to pursue dahiya from the sky in all directions
so i guess now the question is, will the former SAR be allowed enough stability to become a dysfunctional ethnoreligious-confessional Lebanon II, or will they go straight to "soul-grinding Libya II"
the most optimistic commentators i've seen have been supposing that maybe the Muslim Brotherhood elements are at the head of the current HTS & Pals iteration and between that, the immediate "buffer zone" land grab, and the general population's disposition, this *might* not just be a vichy situation. i don't know enough to evaluate that claim, but the times i've been most grievously wrong in the last five years have been the times i've allowed myself to hope, so it's probably wrong - realsubtle posted Do you think forums will make a comeback? (2 posts)
- Well, lets just be real. Social Media is a fucking toxic waste dump. Facebook is failbook. Twitter's in the shitter. Tumblr has um... tumbled down a lot recently. Bluesky is funded by sketchy siliKKKon valley blockchain pushers and functions as a cheap alternative for democrats to send bots after the people after elon musk made twitter an exclusively right-wing media site. Threads? go to bed! haha/
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do you think forums will make a comeback? are you excited about the idea that a ddeeply inauthentic internet experience might be replaced with the warm and personal vibe brought by a forum? do you think that enough people can overcome their finger-habituations that lead them to social media click-click-click reward-point reward-point You Have Gained A Follower! You Have Gained A Follower! websites instead of charming homespun collections of 150-page threads youre way too far behind to read, populated by the same 10 or so people you have weird complicated webs of enmity and alliance with.
i think forums will make a comeback. i think that everything is eternal, so why should forums be any different? however many days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millenia. eras, ages, eons, kalpae. however many passings and partings, comings and goings, meetings and separations. forums will come back to us. they will make a comeback. barancle jim will be standing before us. his long face radiant. the miracle of an undamaged hole. time will be as a boba, the bright, sweet crushed ice of lucid memory impregnated by the tapioca bubbles of endless possibility. forums will come back to us.
and webcomics too. "or will they be gravestones... to be better born anew?" i think that people will really enjoy using a new platform to express personal creativity and also i guess just to share information. i cant claim to have invented the internet--sorry al gore :smug:--but i have long been a proponent of the idea that this new "public boulevard" of information sharing and creativity sharing may become a new social hub for the masses. it may become the place where i first fell in love. it might grant me refuge from the derangement of my alcoholic parent and guardian. i might develop a humiliating physical illness due to my addiction to everquest. i might be 12, 13, 14, deciding that i'll punch above my weight and troll adults. i'll be *edgy*. i might get in a little bit over my head. not all the way. just enough to half-exist in a shadow world during all my waking world interactions. they know me, they know im sweet and funny, they know im talkative and excitable. but they dont know i post on forums.
everything always seems so consequential, until you realize that its all slipped through your finger-sieves. you grow up, you get a handle on things, you realize you arent really all that fucking special because you used to go to some dumb hangout that nobody remembers, everything is a big deal to you when its happening, but when you remove the memory from its context, ahh, how it collapses like a convenient collapsible household good. and if the thing you were so excited about is a piece of rapidly decaying trivium, what does that say about your horizon of possibilities? what does that say about the possibility of getting excited about the next thing, when every excitement youve had in the past has fizzled out, the burnt husk of last night's firework?
well, there is every possibility of getting excited about the next thing, because the next thing is that forums are going to make a huge comeback. what is more exciting than nostalgia? its a better intoxicant than liquor, especially at this time in your life when you need to start thinking about your health. they will come back, they will come back and they will be easier to search than discords and unpopular, despised people will all get banned. the list of smileys will be trimmed and feature a good balance between popular favorites and up-and-coming gimmicks. no one will make any money off of anything, and you will also not remember the pervasive culture of bigotry because the glaze youve applied over this memory elides it.
do you think your lack of ability to feel excited about things is the reason youve grown so pessimistic about politics? do you think that the cold, cynical shell you've created to avoid thinking about the political realities of our world is related to your jilted desire to relive memories of more naive days? are things really any worse now than they were then, or are we basically looking at the same shit repackaged? is there anything left to be excited about? was the whole yemen thing exciting, or not exciting? is multipolarity exciting, or not exciting? is the UHC CEO assassination spectacle exciting, or a banal distraction? is transsexuality still a hot topic or has that become passe? can you still find the joy in posting a thread titled "im gay" with a minimalistic OP? is AI exciting in the sense that its the latest indication that the tech industry has completely run out of frontiers of hyperaccelerated growth and is now just finding ways to bet and burn everything to usher in the next crop of even more extravagant and conspicuously unuseful waste? does our species have to reckon with our own mortality in the face of hard resource limitations and the impossibility of escape to a ruthlessly inhospitable cosmos? do we need to reconceptualize the collective human dream?
maybe these things arent exciting on their own. but what if you had a forum to post about them on? what if you were just a little bit less anhedonic about every god damn thing? yes, it can be so different. you will find yourself capable of not taking every single sweet and merry thing in the universe for granted, and there will be forums.
oh, and getfiscal will come back too. with the OG audrey avatar!! booyah!!
- Sunday posted in Do you think forums will make a comeback? (2 posts)
- a journalist once asked Gandhi what he thought of forums. Gandhi thought for a moment and replied "I think they would be a good idea!"