The whole reason I created this account was to be able to block abusive people on here, which I was unable to do without having an account. If you should find that you're blocked, it's because I saw you doing something abusive to someone. It might have been me, it might not.
We seem to have gone straight from skinny jeans to those big clodhopper deals from the 90s. A shame to skip the bell bottoms this time. Women look amazing in flairs. Three tiers of sexy. The JNCO look makes women look like an upside-down cup.
Then you go to the store and find that the dignified fellow who used to be on the box of Lemonheads has been replaced by something that seems to represent an infant in a cocaine frenzy. And somehow you don't want Lemonheads anymore.
Somewhere, in a vault, are the records of how well the changes in packaging and branding on beloved products actually did. My bet is that it ran about a 10% success rate in some departments at least. Busywork. It's all busywork.
Beloved brands confound advertising because they don't really depend on it. Their advertising was already done. A truly beloved brand that Gramma used to have in a bowl isn't the same thing as Werther's TELLING you that's what they were. It's the one that was actually there.
Holding out hope for some kind of stop to the "age verification" bullshit is ignoring how much the average normie hates power users. People will hobble anyone who uses a tool better than they do if they're given the chance.
It's like, if you want to complain that someone's being lazy by using their era of tech, you better be willing to go live in the fucking woods and carve your own tools because that's where that goes.
An analogy: I've been hearing from my Dad for decades about slide rules and how people who did math with calculators couldn't do it in a power outage (never mind the battery thing). Never seemed to sink in when I asked what he would do without a slide rule.
@oldmantelegram The whole first two reels of ALIEN are the best spacing scenes ever created. They don't have the realism of 2001 but it's a different game.