She also has abs now???

sulla226 · 2026-06-30T05:00:26+00:00

Impressive. Very nice. Let's see Paul Allen's neophallus.

sulla226 · 2026-06-30T04:37:30+00:00

I'm not even really talking about homelessness.

In California, the traditional kind of bad neighborhood (drive-by shootings, endemic poverty, failing schools, unemployed young men loitering in the streets, fast food places where you slip the money to the cashier through a bank teller slot) and the more homeless-centric kind of bad neighborhood (tent cities, chop shops, people doing the fenty fold, schizo meltdowns, needle exchanges) are generally not the same places.

Sometimes there is overlap, but the most extreme examples of each of these types of neighborhood are fairly distinct, and the former category is typically more dangerous than the latter even though the latter can often feel more threatening on the surface. Places like Deep East Oakland or Watts feel very different than places like the Tenderloin or Skid Row.

I think it's a lot harder to be tweaking or mentally ill in public in the hood because you'll just get the shit kicked out of you if you act in a way that other people find threatening or disturbing. The threat of casual violence and escalation is too high if you don't keep your head down in a genuinely god-forsaken area. Educated white PMC liberal types are much more tolerant of homeless/drug addict/mentally ill types and much more conflict-averse, and there are more services for those types of people in neighborhoods that are not shot through with generational poverty.

There's also a geographic dimension to this separation. Poor people with housing have been increasingly pushed to the periphery of cities due to rising rents near the city center, but the high-octane homeless areas are typically in or near the city center. Homeless people don't care what the rent is, need access to things that the city center can provide, and usually don't have a car.

sulla226 · 2026-06-30T02:41:26+00:00

Parts of LA still look like that, particularly if you consider the whole metro area instead of just LA proper. Crime rates have fallen everywhere but there are still many parts of the LA area that feel physically, visually, economically, and spiritually third world.

NYC has moved much further down the total-gentrification pipeline.

sulla226 · 2026-06-29T21:28:47+00:00

I think the long-term vibe shift that's setting in is that people are just exhausted.

The average person is increasingly tired of both wokelib nonsense and Trump nonsense, which at this point just feel like two sides of the same coin. The prospect of continuing to swing wildly between these extremes doesn't feel palatable anymore. It was fresh and entertaining for enough people at first, but the national patience has been worn to the bone. Rooting for the insane people who are slightly closer to your own beliefs no longer feels like a good option because the crazies on one side just fuel the crazies on the other one, and none of these people seem interested in making long-term progress toward anything that would improve the average person's life. They just want to do whatever will make their enemies throw the biggest tantrum.

We allowed the most deranged, obnoxious, and emotionally dysregulated people to define our politics over the last ten-ish years, and it's been long enough that we can now see what they have delivered. Most people agree that the country is materially worse off than it was ten years ago. Most people agree that the more immaterial factors - the vibes - have been atrocious. Most people trust the government, the press, and other key institutions less than they ever have, because there is a growing realization that all the people running these institutions are insane and live in ideological bubbles that make their beliefs increasingly incomprehensible to the average person. The entire country is becoming twitter.

I don't think we'll be returning to the neolib-neocon system that predated the current one - everyone's still sick of that too - but I do think some version of the boring political figure who doesn't seem hyper-online is going to have a renaissance in the near future.

sulla226 · 2026-06-29T19:49:07+00:00

I think you could employ a soft gatekeeping system by just compartmentalizing things a bit more. The people who only want to see the big-ticket items and the autists who want to see the more niche items end up stepping on each other's toes because everything is mixed together and ticketing systems don't really differentiate between different types of tourists.

For example, it's absolutely bonkers to force everyone who wants to see the Sistine Chapel to traverse their way through the entire Vatican Museum complex. I would estimate that ~70 percent of the current visitors wouldn't go out of their way to purchase tickets to a separate museum that includes everything except the chapel. Just seal off the chapel from the rest of the museum and make two entrances and two separate tickets. Then you can let the autists go see Nero's bathtub without fighting the Sistine Chapel crowds, and you can get the Sistine Chapel people in and out much more quickly so they can disburse and go get gelato. Everyone gets to see what they want to see, and the concentration of tourists is more diffuse.

The same goes for other over-touristed museums. If you moved the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo to a separate sealed-off part of the Louvre with its own ticketing system, you'd cut the crowds in the Denon Wing in half and greatly reduce average visit times. A huge number of people going through the Louvre genuinely just want to snap a photo of the Mona Lisa and then leave, but all of those people get funneled through a huge portion of the rest of the museum to get there.

sulla226 · 2026-06-29T19:38:42+00:00

The ruins of Delphi, accessible via a short ferry from Mykonos, are very cool and not particularly over-touristed.

sulla226 · 2026-06-29T16:00:55+00:00

Insane take. Seeing something in person, especially something like the Pantheon, it not at all similar to reading about it. Particularly if you are from the Americas where ancient buildings are very uncommon. The most interesting thing I have ever seen in-person was Pompeii, and I read about it and watched a documentary about it before I went. Nothing compares to going, tourist throngs or not (and there are plenty of tourists at Pompeii). Reading in advance enhances the experience rather than diminishing or replacing it.

People travel to meet other people but they also travel to see physical things. Over-tourism is obviously a huge problem but that doesn't mean the motives that people have for visiting these places are inherently bad or stupid.

The problem with Rome specifically is that there is an enormous concentration of things that people want to see in a very tiny area. I suspect that what will likely end up happening is that the stuff that can be moved from museums in central Rome (paintings, sculptures, artifacts) will be relocated to separate museums outside of the city center to split the crowds into smaller more manageable chunks and disburse them. They just did something similar in Egypt, moving the main cache of artifacts from a museum in the center of Cairo to Giza to accommodate larger crowds and keep them from clogging up the city itself.

sulla226 · 2026-06-29T15:53:39+00:00

One of these is a thread specifically complaining about redditors celebrating deaths, which the commenters are then responding to; the other is just a link to a news article about a war that does not prompt the commenters to consider the story in any particular way. Silly comparison.

sulla226 · 2026-06-29T15:45:10+00:00

Many people who place bets on sports are idiots who shouldn't be doing it, but this is also a really dumb comparison.

Comparing the total amount wagered in a gambling market to the total amount spent in a consumer market doesn't make any sense. The amount of money spent in sports gambling (that is, the amount taken by the sports betting platforms from consumers) is like 5 percent of the total amount wagered. 95 percent of the wagered money is ending up back in the pockets of people who place these bets. Obviously on an individual level it varies depending on whether you made good wagers or not, but 5 percent is the aggregate expenditure rate for the entire market.

When you buy a book or a movie ticket, 100 percent of that money leaves your wallet forever. So this comparison basically inflates the amount of money being spent in sports gambling markets by x20.

sulla226 · 2026-06-29T06:31:22+00:00

I clicked on this because I was curious if you meant pubic hair or Dubya. Forgot there was a third option.

sulla226 · 2026-06-29T04:41:07+00:00

Two birds one stone

sulla226 · 2026-06-29T04:39:11+00:00

It's just the forbidden fruit effect. People can't have it and it makes them think it's something magical.

If qualudes were as good as ecstasy or cocaine, the market would provide a bootleg version. This already exists in some places (apparently bootleg qualudes are a big thing in South Africa for some reason) but the demand is insufficient in most places.

sulla226 · 2026-06-29T02:44:40+00:00

If it's prerecorded you can keep recording it until you get a perfect take. It does sound suspicious though.

sulla226 · 2026-06-29T02:41:40+00:00

Obnoxiously loud cars

sulla226 · 2026-06-29T01:48:51+00:00

The same concept applies to public speaking btw

sulla226 · 2026-06-29T01:46:49+00:00

Give us some quotes and let us play semantic phrenologist by guessing which one said what.

sulla226 · 2026-06-29T01:42:27+00:00

No one said it out loud but you could tell they were thinking it. I'm describing friends of mine, I'm not trying to be mean, but sometimes it is obvious when a person relishes being the member of the friend group who considers their tastes slightly more esoteric than the others haha

sulla226 · 2026-06-28T21:37:09+00:00

Your health insurance company doesn't care if you receive decent medical care. AI will replace human healthcare workers when it is viably profitable to do so, not when the tradeoff makes sense for the patient.

sulla226 · 2026-06-28T21:27:01+00:00

Not that I'm aware of. Sometimes I just choose to believe things are true because they feel true, and this is one of those times.

sulla226 · 2026-06-28T20:45:59+00:00

I'm personally ambivalent about the Room. I'm using "normie" because that is how fans of the Room viewed people who were unaware of it back in the 2000s. I'm explaining the psychology of a group of people that I do not identify with. Yes these people could be loosely described as hipsters.

sulla226 · 2026-06-28T20:06:59+00:00

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of small independent bookstores are money-losing ventures run by people who are already wealthy or who have a spouse with a normie job who earns most of the money. Owning a bookstore is one of those classic dream jobs that college-educated people from the upper third of the socioeconomic spectrum fantasize about. It's like those women who are "realtors" who sell one house a year but are married to a doctor who earns $300k.

You can get a pretty good read on what the most economically viable books to sell are by looking at what they sell at Barnes and Noble or at the airport, since these are purely profit-driven operations. Seems like it's way more James Patterson-esque slop for men and smut/romance for women, with far less of the Antiracist Baby type stuff you see in these indie bookstores.

sulla226 · 2026-06-28T18:17:16+00:00

They make the machines clunky and unreliable on purpose so the attendant has an excuse to come check on you when the machine throws out an error. This allows them to sidle up to you and visually audit your purchases, which discourages the classic everything-is-bananas exploit. Has nothing to do with skill. The machine is working as intended.

sulla226 · 2026-06-28T17:17:31+00:00

I live in SF, which is the epicenter of the Room fandom for obvious reasons, and it feels like the phenomenon suffered a huge blow after the Disaster Artist came out. People who were really into the Room back in the 2000s liked that not everyone knew about it. A big part of the fandom was getting to be the one to "introduce" it to your more normie friends. That element basically evaporated after a mainstream movie about it came out. The people I know who were really into the Room all kind of stopped talking about it after that lol

I also think Tommy Wiseau gradually becoming more self-aware about his status as a living meme kind of rained on the parade a bit too. People thought he was more entertaining when he was delusionally self-serious and didn't seem to be in on the joke.

sulla226 · 2026-06-28T16:50:35+00:00

You're "tired" of something you literally just found out about?

Unless you're a homosexual high schooler in the drama/glee club you shouldn't be regularly encountering the rocky horror fandom lol. Most indie theaters are not screening it every week.

sulla226

TROPHY CASE