She Walked Into My Office Uninvited, And I Gotta Say It Was A Relief To Have A Client That Wasn’t A

#158 The Case of the Missing Hit | Reply All

A man in California is haunted by the memory of a pop song from his youth. He can remember the lyrics and the melody. But the song itself has vanished, completely scrubbed from the internet. PJ takes on the Super Tech Support case.

crazy story which I have done no justice to by reading the transcript instead of listening to it, thus missing the entire point of hearing the song they’re talking about.

What football will look like in the future

Something is terribly wrong. Something is terribly wrong. Something is terribly wrong. Something is terribly wrong.

Look at this thing. LOOK AT IT

kinkmeme: humans

you're on my list of people to ban from my life

I love tumblr. I love that tumblr is the best social media site of 2021.

Every other site has spent the last decade perfecting the art of targeted ads. I am a wallet of flesh and blood which must be stripped bare and profiled and picked apart for the maximally efficient way to squeeze profit from my presence. Every other site will fold and morph itself to a shape of my liking - like a fairy tale trickster stealing memories and taking their mold - to lull me into compliance and loosen my coin purse.

Facebook sees me searching fitness equipment and injects my timeline with athletic wear ads. Reddit profiles the subreddits I follow and eagerly promotes a new coding bootcamp or cloud service at every turn. Google overhears me lamenting over my moving to-do list on voice call and fills in my “how much to tip movers” query before I’ve gotten the third word typed out.

Tumblr never even tried.

They could have. The information is there. The basic infrastructure, presumably, exists. Tumblr can recommend me tags based on tags I follow, blogs based on blogs I follow, even posts that for one reason or another may strike my fancy. Tumblr could be - SHOULD be - funneling this framework into advertising, as the only means that free-to-use social media platforms can turn a profit in our capitalistic hellscape.

They just don’t.

Today I saw an ad for treating Hyperhidrosis - a condition, I think, in which a person sweats too much - and I saw it twice, four posts apart, and it is so incredibly benignly impersonally ineptly untargeted toward me compared to all other pinpoint-aimed advertising that I’m endeared to it. Tumblr knows NOTHING about me. 8 years, 51,000 likes, and tumblr has not learned a THING about me.

Advertisements for a mattress? Shitty mobile game ads that don’t make even the slightest pretense at being anything other than a candy crush rip-off? Choose-your-own adventure games either about Royal Espionage or Choosing The Wrong Dress For Your Date with ZERO in-between.

And then this. This here. The culmination, the crown-jewel of tumblr’s nihilistic non-compliance with the state of social media advertising. Any pretense of capitalistic exchange is abandoned at the gas station by the side of the road. This is not a company. This is not a product. This is not anything that fulfills the contract of consumer and seller. 

THIS. THIS IS WHAT TUMBLR HAS TO OFFER INSTEAD.

“Pour vinegar on your bread, fuck you.”

“Put it in the garbage, fuck you.”

“Your wife says you’re a fucking dumbass, fuck you.”

That’s it. That’s the advertisement. You vinegar-breadless cuck. You virgin extraordinaire bereft of bread and garbage can. I am fucking your wife right now in our vinegar-soaked motel bed. She puffs a cigarette which I pulled from the trashcan and we both laugh heartily at her recounts of your immasculine ineptitude. I don’t want your money. I don’t want anything from you. Fuck you. 

Amazing. Amazing. What a state of things to ring in 2021. What a great platform we all collectively choose to be on.

This is one for the OGs

We should be more pro-active or we’ll see more of such sad fates of honest people.

The perfect storm of intelligence and agility

Call yourself anticapitalist/socialist/liberal/woke/whatever but if you’re not nice to regular people on a moment to moment basis your politics are basically worthless.

Prolly has been asked before, but do you dream of electric sheep?

I do! I'm imagining the inner face of an invisible sheep, which has a rippling pattern on its underbelly that appears and vanishes as it moves about its circuit.