Why have posts on ILX gotten so boring in the past 10 years?

This might not be true, but I'm pretty sure it is..

I'd bring up the growing influence of the Reptilians, but of course WE CAN'T TALK ABOUT THAT

GOD

not enough Sicilians

Not enough parody threads

Because we're all old and not drunk enuf?

Why has your face gotten so boring?

lack of consistent trolling, i think.

who is our troll right now anyways?

maybe we need to take out an ad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDSbPt39EQA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbt_m6oX2n4

ZS uncovers the shocking truth:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP49-qftyuk

need more food threads

the vast majority of ILX posts have been boring since always

Some of the best posts are bland

Right on

It happened around the time that the Patron Board Brain changed from Mark S's loopy, surreal, philosophical abstracts to Nabisco's endless OTM reasonableness.

except for a few very well-trodden topics ilx seems pretty sleepy these days

i am pretty sleepy, certainly

mordy start a thread where you give a 140 character summary of your opinion of each ilxor

:D

that'd bring the house down!

might try and do that in a "positives only" way but i'm so sleepy

does "really conscientious about polling the best records of previous decades" count as a positive?

"excellent at communicating a limited range of opinions"?

What ILX needs is a struggle session thread

What ILX needs is a struggle session thread

I started a self-criticism thread, but it was locked.

the modocracy tolerates no criticism but its own

How many regular posters are there now? It used to feel like there were dozens but now it feels like a pubroomsworth.

i think there's still a bunch but a growing % are indistinguishable from each other

"astute at identifying potential threats to the quality of the message board"

"highly skilled at ensuring all posters are aware that there is a Metal poll happening"

oh vague :D

For more than a week, a veil of secrecy enveloped the proceedings. Dozens of prominent Americans -- members of Congress, governors, labor leaders, academics and clergy -- were summoned to the mountaintop retreat to confer with the beleaguered president. Sitting on the floor taking notes, Carter listened to criticism, much of it scathing, of him and his White House. Reagan biographer Steven Hayward has aptly described it as "the most remarkable exercise in presidential navel-gazing in American history." At the end of the "domestic summit," the president planned to deliver a nationally-televised address, telling Americans what he had learned and how he planned to lead them out of the current crisis.

ilx malaise

i think there's still a bunch but a growing % are indistinguishable from each other

― Mordy , Friday, November 15, 2013 10:34 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

The solution is to give every poster a number of http://ilxor.com/s.png in their display name that correlates to the quality of their posts

"holds forthright views on food and how to eat it"

"not easily fooled by sheeple"

i believe finney said it best when he said the only point of engagement one can control is their own

be the change you want to see mordy

"knowledgeable as to what date new indie albums will be released on"

"depressed"

"has body issues"

thought you were talking about treesh for a few seconds there, TLG

"not afraid to share intimate details of their inner life and how much they dislike work"

lol nv

"keenly interested in message-board-based political reform"

"gets really annoyed at everyday, insignificant occurrences"

"netflix subscriber"

"comfortable with their own bigotry"

this article was really great. i don't think its supposed to be about everything ever, just a specific cultural moment where 'respectable' thought is guarded by what other places we call tone-policing or concern-trolling. nor is it arguing about negativity vs. positivity in general -- its about sort of a deepgoing hypocrisy packaged up in sunny diplomatic language. is not saying distrust people with an agenda, its saying distrust the pervasive denial of the hidden agenda!

also it wasn't about satire in the least, which is a whole different thing.

this article is the best i've read about satire all year, btw: http://www.mrdestructo.com/2013/04/point-counterpoint-is-satire-even-thing.html

(& really don't see how we can be discussion 20c satire and not bring up nathaniel west, ishmael reed, george schuyler, budd schulberg, and a few more besides)

smarm piece was great yeah

Not sure that post really references the piece, Sterling.

local garda are you basically saying he didn't argue the opposite of his thesis enough? the articles not called "on smarm oh and snark has its limitations, too." if it were it would be like twice as long and honestly who even got to the end of this thing. snark only really came up as a manifestation of smarm being calling out as snark anything remotely disruptive of the status quo.

snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm! snark! smarm!

local garda are you basically saying he didn't argue the opposite of his thesis enough? the articles not called "on smarm oh and snark has its limitations, too." if it were it would be like twice as long and honestly who even got to the end of this thing. snark only really came up as a manifestation of smarm being calling out as snark anything remotely disruptive of the status quo.

I disagree with his thesis, that's kind of the point of discussion, sorry if the article isn't "meant" to contain points I agree with... v strange rebuttal.

Think my disagreement with it is clear in the above post, or the problems I have with it.

I agree with you that it's way too long tho.

i thought u were saying it's not balanced enough by not being equally critical of snark--kind of a smarmy position~ tbh!-- but maybe i just eidn't read to the point or don't recall where he says snark is rare commodity and that negativity is his namifesto

Not sure that post really references the piece, Sterling.

― Legitimate space tale (LocalGarda), Saturday, December 7, 2013 1:08 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you mean my post doesn't describe what the piece you think you read was? so that seems to be my disagreement -- we both see a totally different central argument/purpose of the piece, which isn't necc. so much pro-snark as anti-anti-snark (since anti-snark=smarm)

btw sorry everybody for my posts the other day, don't think any of u are the worst ilx posters, was just being sociopathic 4 kicks. actually kind of an interesting debate. feel like for an article trying to define something using like a million examples most of the criticisms itt (aimless, sarahell "just random things strung together") were pretty void of content and look like more of an expression of tone preference ("i don't like gawker"). like "Smarm seems to be a whole series of specific quotes that he doesn't like, but his larger point never really coheres and his notion of 'smarm' as a rhetorical device never gets adequately defined" i'm pretty sure it gets very specifically defined more than once! seemed like the whole thing was a kind of elliptical narrowing in on the concept, which is why it felt so repetitive and overly long. it was just hammering the same point over & over with more examples. but i think that's a perfectly good way to define something.

^

ILX needs a certified therapist, not this quackery!

I actually think, w the latest revive, that this has become the most interesting ILX thread in,a fortnight

still think Mordy shd articulate exactly why he posted it to this thread, if only so that a rain might come

I think it defines smarm really well, but I think (a) it creates a two-sided coin of snark v smarm without acknowledging the fact that one depends on the other for its existence and (b) assumes smarm is safely employed by known "enemies" in a conflict that has some truth in it, arguable for politics, false for art, even with its attempts to cite movies "we all agree" are shit or whatever. Fuck that kind of objectivism and its slippery slope.

Oh jeez LJ what's w the Travis Bickle act?

xp

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/12/dave-eggers-tom-scocca-and-being-nice.html

huh i guess i was mocking this http://www.vpsingles.com/pics/shrug.gif
Why have audiences at concerts gotten so boring in the past 10 years?

Gladwell goes too far the other way. Is it really so hard to believe that both snark and smarm are regularly employed to reinforce a given status quo? "Be nice" and "be angry and authentic" are just two sides of the same coin. Innocent Smoothie and Brewdog.

otm, and you could reduce the latter to "be tough" (or "cool", "real" etc.)

Exactly, like shock horror, abstract reduction of worldviews to a one-word "nice" or "nasty" catch-all is not nuanced enough in the real world.

this seems rly caseinpoint:

And as for laying down rules for other people, Eggers has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books and worked on three screenplays. He has started three magazines. When he was unhappy with the publishing world, he went out and started his own publishing company. When he thought that disadvantaged children needed better educational opportunities, he founded two nonprofits. When he tells students that they ought to aspire to a primary relationship to art—to put more energy into making art than into denigrating the art of others—he is speaking from the heart. You have to be running pretty low on ammunition to look at someone like that and call him full of shit.

how dare you call this writer full of shit for things he wrote: look at all the companies he's started! plus he is speaking from the heart. tsk tsk @ the level of yr discourse

that lrb thing it linx to about british comedy is good tho

the one whose thoughtfully chosen primary source lol gladwell steals for his kicker

Our attention is both finite and worth something; we should not spend it on the VMAs, Anthony Weiner, recreational misandry, or the boilerplate opinions of others. And yet these things enrage us. We can’t live this way. We were so mad, staring at our phone, reading opinions, we just walked into a planter. Our friend calls us and says, “I need help, I think my phone is making me depressed. I want to keep looking at it when I’m looking at it, but as soon as I look up, my body lets out this involuntary sigh, like a stick yanked from the mud, like, What have I done?” We are grateful to be on the phone, so that we can’t look at our phone.

http://nplusonemag.com/rage-machine

Honestly, because of the Internet, because of people’s stupidity, because of people’s either fake political correctness, or the right-wing fake concern about people using language that they would use in their bedroom (but in a derogatory destructive way), it’s not even worth saying certain things anymore because you just don’t want it taken out of context, and you don’t wanna defend it because the minute you have to start defending it, that means you’re explaining your work, and the work that I do can’t be explained, and I don’t wanna explain it. I’ve never used a word about anybody that didn’t have many, many layers and meanings and double-entendres, and that wasn’t laced with irony. So a few things that I might have said ten, fifteen, twenty years ago pre-social media, I wouldn’t even bother saying today. I’m like, I’m not gonna be your guinea pig. Fuck it. I just won’t.

http://www.theawl.com/2014/02/our-lives-with-the-stupid-masses-of-people-out-there-that-are-on-that-fuckin-social-media

bonus comment from freddie deboer on that awl article

I've always argued a lot, which suits me fine. The difference lately has been that I'm always defending myself about stuff I haven't said and don't believe, rather than defending myself about stuff I have said and do believe. I put so many hedges into my writing about what I am explicitly not saying that it takes up the majority of the text. But if you don't do that, someone will squint hard enough and say, AHA! You're really saying X terrible thing! Even though, you know, I haven't said anything like X terrible thing. It's exhausting.

^why I'm not clicking on that thread today

the conclusion on that n+1 piece: Truth is not an imperative, but something that must be discovered. Unlike liquid opinion, truth does not always circulate. It is that which you experience, deeply, and cannot forget. The right to not care is the right to sit still, to not talk, to be subject to unclarity and allow knowledge to come unbidden to you. To be in a constant state of rage, by contrast, is only the other side of piety and pseudoscience, the kind of belief that forms a quick chorus and cannot be disproved. Scroll down your Facebook feed and see if you don’t find one ditto after another. So many people with “good” or “bad politics,” delivered with conviction to rage or applause; so little doubt, error, falsifiability—surely the criteria by which anything true, or democratic, could ever be found.

otm, but ILX is better than most in this regard

The only one whose posting style I much like anymore is Tuomas.

niklas luhmann has a bit somewhere about how communication (in all forms but especially language) works as a kind of lure or trap. once you've perceived it then understanding often follows automatically. once you've understood, it's already too late. even non-response works in this context as a kind of communicative response. you're playing by rules that are already set in advance. in this sense, communicating "first" is an inherent advantage.

sometimes it feels like the internet culture of "think pieces" (which are usually just op-ed type things run through a grad school curriculum, it seems) work in that way. once an opinion is stated it's hard to avoid having your own opinion (or "belief"). this is how those pieces are so good at "connecting" to other communications on the internet. sometimes it actually feels anxious to NOT have an opinion with the constant flood of information coming at you (ie, what Peirce was on about way back when in "The Fixation of Belief").

http://img329.imageshack.us/img329/3065/catbitewj1.gif

not the posts so much but ilx in general seems really sleepy for a few weeks now? maybe it's just the summer doldrums?

You mean you can't decide which one of Taylor Swift and Carlos Santana to vote for?

i feel like there's less music chat lately, or threads where a whole load of people get excited about a new album or something. probably are these, just not albums i care that much about...

but yeah, on the whole it's been a bit quiet.

Music sucks these days.

today has been something

a bitter lettuce to swallow

that thread has genuinely been a highlight

Did we ever sort this one out folks

leap day doldrums

leap day should be a day when you can start literally anything with impunity, but we've gone the other way

i guess 'blettuce' is as good as it gets

Have yis an actually good thread to point me at or what

when 3 ppl get it together we'll have a precovers album that i'm on

other than this idk, anyone seen any woman-to-man proposals today in public

what thread

Songs of Experience? Street King Immortal?

leap day should be a day when you can start literally anything with impunity, but we've gone the other way

― odysseus (imago), Monday, February 29, 2016 1:44 PM (24 minutes ago)

http://i.imgur.com/yT4pqxK.jpg

fun to pretend that's an our love to admire era interpol poster and sing that post like banks would

First actual genuine out loud LOL I've had from ILX in years.

I like how a thread called "Why have posts on ILX gotten so boring in the past 10 years?" turned into a clusterfuck over a gawker article.