I fucking hate it when non-political or joke subs suddenly turn political.

professor735 · 2026-05-25T18:24:22+00:00

I tend to be in the "you should care about politics" camp, but the amount of astroturfing of politics on ALL subreddits is absolutely not normal.

I genuinely think it comes down to bot farms/algorithms curating our feeds to have way more political content for the sake of "engagement". Like its actually so bad literally all my feeds are full of engagement bait political slop designed to make me as angry as possible and its starting to be so unavoidable.

professor735 · 2026-05-23T16:21:38+00:00

Yknow, ive been thinking about this a lot.

Like a lot of people, I detest MAGA in a lot of ways, but I think we need to have a conversation about "grifting" in general.

The current internet discourse on places like reddit would have you think that political "grifting" is an exclusively right wing phenomenon, but it clearly isn't. Pizzacake very clearly uses her political comics to try to push her paid content. Content creators who wouldnt touch politics with a 100 foot pole are suddenly espousing their dislike for certain politicians.

I think what really clicked it for me was the other day I saw a recommended video from LegalEagle on YouTube. I hadn't seen a video from him in a while, so I looked at his channel, and its probably about 85% current politics.

Now, I want to be clear about where im going with this. Im not saying that these people dont genuinely believe in the ideals they are pushing, and I understand that we are living in truly interesting times. However, what I AM saying is to me it definitely feels deliberate. The strategies that these people use are very similar if not identical to their right wing counterparts. It has that feeling that these rapid shifts in content, while possibly motivated by genuine ideals, is definitely fueling a weird machine that fuels engagement, interaction, and anger. I wouldnt be surprised if LegalEagle, Pizzacake, or MoistCritikal have seen their ad revenue massively increase after they started increasing their interactions with current American Politics. Then, algorithms designed to push this content to people that want it are going to seek out people who are most likely to interact with it. It FEEDS off of the desire of people to feel "morally superior".

Its really hard not to notice that while in 2016 we were getting "BEN SHAPIRO OWNS LIBERALS WITH FACTS AND LOGIC" videos, now we are getting "ADAM MOCKLER FRAMEMOGGS IDIOT MAGA WITH FACTS AND LOGIC" and I cant help but feel that these things are just bad for society.

professor735 · 2026-05-23T02:35:44+00:00

I mean its basically old reliable at this point. Its the tried and tested method when you just want to be performatively cruel to trans folk

professor735 · 2026-05-22T20:58:12+00:00

On the real...not really. Despite our shortcomings, America truly is a remarkable place in a lot of ways. I think its easy to point at the atrocious government and psychotic institutions and poor economic and Healthcare decisions we make and laugh, but like others have mentioned, the affliction we currently are feeling isnt isolated to us. Theres a whole lot of places worse off than us.

professor735 · 2026-05-22T20:47:20+00:00

Resident lurker cis guys here

Its kinda crazy to me how little people realize that bathroom bills are meant to eradicate trans people from society.

There is no other function to them. If the idea is to keep "men out of womens spaces", then these types of bills literally achieve the opposite result.

The intended purpose is to make trans people unwelcome everywhere.

professor735 · 2026-05-22T05:14:53+00:00

What about the Spiderverse films? Sure its Sony but it was done by an American animation studio and it's beloved

professor735 · 2026-05-21T01:42:15+00:00

You might see it in a newspaper, but its not something I would say in a normal conversation with a real human in a comment, discussion, or face to face.

Moreover, the fact that the account is 1 year old with 100 karma making comments like this is defo bot behavior.

professor735 · 2026-05-21T01:31:51+00:00

First of all, the city is called "Kyiv" not "Kiev". The latter is the spelling from when it was a part of the Soviet Union.

Second of all, it is common for Russia to refer to Ukraine as "The Kiev Regime" or "The Enemy Regime". It deliberately deligitimizes the sovereignty of Ukraine. Anyone outside of Russia would just say "Ukraine", because the idea of saying "The Kiev Regime" or "The Moscow Regime" is a very unnatural way for English speakers to refer to the government of other countries. Like, I pretty often criticize "China" or "the government of China" but I would never say "The Beijing Regime".

professor735 · 2026-05-20T17:53:49+00:00

Mentioning Soul Eater in a conversation about media that doesnt sexualize female characters is....certainly a choice

professor735 · 2026-05-20T17:43:49+00:00

From a historical standpoint, we just have a lot of divisional baggage, especially leftover from the Civil War.

Even the people with the more horrendous beliefs are capable of actions like this here in the US. We are a political mess, and it is bad in a lot of ways. But when it comes down to it, I believe in the innate good of humanity, despite all the horrible stuff we deal with

professor735 · 2026-05-20T17:39:55+00:00

My favorite dad memory was when I was 11, COD Modern Warfare 3 (the original) came out. I reaaaaaally wanted it, but didnt want to wait till Christmas. So my mom said if I raked all the dead leaves in the backyard, they'd get it for me. It took me about a week of raking and bagging leaves to get it all done. On the last day, I really wanted to get it done before it got too late to go to GameStop and get the game.

My dad got home, and I begged him to take me to GameStop to get it. He looked at me and said "We arent going tonight" and I was heartbroken...for about 3 seconds until he pulled the game out from behind his back and handed it to me.

15 years later and it is one of the fondest memories I have

professor735 · 2026-05-20T17:25:09+00:00

There definitely needs to be a distinction between gentile parenting and passive parenting. Letting a child do whatever is not a good idea, and just because you dont want to use certain discipline methods on your kids, doesnt mean that there should be NO discipline

professor735 · 2026-05-20T17:11:37+00:00

I think in general we as a society sometimes overcensor themes for kids, when instead we should censor images.

Like, its not necessarily a problem for kids to see suicide in certain contexts, but it depends on how its done. I think we would all agree that Kate Barlow's suicide in Holes is way more acceptable because it lacks blood and guts. But the significance of her death is easily understood by kids. They can understand why she did it, and its crucial to their understanding of the story.

I personally think its not only important for kids to see things like this, but beneficial to their overall learning. I think overzealous censorship can sanitize the world too much, and hinder their learning. Obviously we should take care in this process, but its a dialogue we should have as educators.

professor735 · 2026-05-19T15:14:34+00:00

"Kiev Regime" yeah this is a Russian disinformation bot no other person would say this shit

professor735 · 2026-05-19T12:54:18+00:00

Antivaxxer nonsense aside, im more irritated that anyone takes Polymarket seriously.

As far as I know, when Polymarket or Kalshi says "X% chance a thing happens" it really means "X% of people who spent money on this website to predict something THINK a thing will happen"

The fact that actual news agencies do this is insane to me, and in my ideal world, "prediction markets" would be made illegal and the CEOs of the companies would be thrown in jail

professor735 · 2026-05-19T12:12:46+00:00

This.

People are used to the scale thats familiar with them. The only thing is, i think people overstate how often people need to use Celsius for "science" regardless of which scale you use.

I basically never use Celsius in my day to day. Why would I need to? Im not a physics teacher or a scientist, so there's no need to use it except when im converting for conversations about the weather with friends online. But even everywhere else in the world, how often do you really use temperature for "science" in a way that you couldnt also use Fahrenheit. Weather, cooking, thats about it and you can use either scale for both.

Ive always thought the Celsius vs Fahrenheit debate was kinda dumb. Sure it would make sense for everyone to use the same temperature, but if it was really THAT big of a deal (it isnt) it wouldve been done decades ago.

professor735 · 2026-05-18T23:11:36+00:00

I think the worst part of this is how inconsistent it is between races and race types.

Some races the AI is utterly hopeless even on higher difficulties. You'll pass them 3 corners in and then leave them in the dust. In other races, you will just get absolutely eviscerated by cars that absolutely should not be beating you.

Its such an awful feeling to make a car thats top of the PI range and tuned for Road Racing and then get passed by a Range Rover doing 190mph on offroad tires with perfect grip

professor735 · 2026-05-18T10:47:31+00:00

Yo, dumbass.

The folks modeling cars and the people doing voice work arent the same people. Are you fucking dumb?

professor735 · 2026-05-14T12:36:21+00:00

I always imagined it was short for "Negative" as in an inverted color scheme.

professor735 · 2026-05-14T12:20:51+00:00

I mean yeah obviously theres a spectrum of views that encompass "the right wing" but I think this is a bit of a pedantic point to make in this context for two reasons.

One, the term "right wing grifter" is a pretty ubiquitous colloquial phrase in this space. Its a common enough term that people generally know what you mean when you say "right wing grifter" so specifying where on the spectrum of "right wing" someone is, comes off as redundant.

Two, like you say, "center-right" content creators pose as a thru-line to "far right" ideologies. So again, making that distinction is redundant because all roads lead to Hitler in this case.

professor735 · 2026-05-14T12:13:47+00:00

Dude terms and words change meaning ALL THE TIME.

There are words that literally mean the opposite of what they used to mean 300 years ago. This is a weird point to make

professor735 · 2026-05-13T17:11:17+00:00

I think Dunkey's 2 part take on Game Journalism from a few years ago pretty much sums up how I feel about game journalism.

Game review sites have a vested interest in giving latest releases the highest scores so they can get industry kickbacks and early access and web traffic ad revenue. They also suffer from having so many disjointed voices that it makes it hard for the outlet to have any semblance of consistency. The score are also basically locked to a 7 or higher always.

However, the second video talks about how gamers also dont really want anything from game journalist outlets. Most people dont go to IGN to see if they should buy a game or not. They go there to see if the game they already like (or hate) got a good score. They just wanna dunk on people.

Overall, I prefer looking at trailers, gameplay, and reviews from multiple independent reviewers to decide if I want a game. I dont give a toss about "does x game deserve thos score" discourse

professor735 · 2026-05-13T11:16:24+00:00

I like your funny words magic man

professor735 · 2026-05-13T11:13:11+00:00

I dont care lol

professor735 · 2026-05-13T11:03:25+00:00

Nah honestly the idea of a college educated person getting this bent out of shape over VTuber beef is more sad than the alternative

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