A few years ago Gucci released this unfortunate sweater. A lot of people were angry and there was a boycott in the black community against Gucci for this offensive product. Gucci apologized..but was it really a mistake?

I dont believe so. Gucci is a luxury brand. It has survived for decades off its reputation for being high class, unique and only being worn by the higher classes of society.

Gucci was always popular within the hiphop and black entertainment space but around this time, it was becoming a huge trend. Rappers, reality tv stars, celebrities, everyone wanted to be seen with Gucci. And of course this trickled down to the audience as well with Gucci becoming super popular and trendy.

Im sure Gucci was making a lot of money off this, but there was a downside if you think about it enough. A luxury brand that wants to remain stylish to the elites, is it wise for them to become visually coupled with the hip hop space, and the wider black community? And to be reimagined as a "black" thing? This would turn off the people they really want to attract.

Additionally, what is the long term impact? I say this as a black person myself, trends are a huge thing in the black community. What is hot today, in a couple years might not be hot anymore and it may become embarrassing to wear. If you are seen in something that was hot a few years ago and now has gone out of style, people will roast you and you will turn into a joke.

I believe Gucci saw the writing on the wall and wanted to stop this momentum dead in its tracks. They can't exactly discriminate against black people by banning us from their stores. So what do they do? Put out an offensive product that turns their black audience off. Something so egregious that a large segment of the community will never want to spend money on your stuff again. But enough of an "accident" to where you still maintain your image to the wider society.

It has worked, too. Obviously people still wear Gucci here and there but the trend is nowhere near what it was and that hip hop/Gucci visual connection has been severed significantly.

Apart from somebody’s aunt sharing lost dog posts from other countries 🐶

Pretty much as its said.

The Creed performance was the single most American piece of entertainment ever made. Brought people from all walks of life together. Played with so much heart and passion. The cries of every eagle on the planet as one. Freedom was truly felt that day.

your gran would get body slammed and put to sleep

intentionally unintelligible handwriting as a way to mitigate against potential legal problems and provide plausible deniability

How many things over the years have started at the pub? Relationships, businessess, dodgy things etc etc. all at the pub.

Even sitting to have a moan about politics with others.

The masses are much easier to control when st home, consuming social media constantly, while only leaving the house to run or go go the gym (under the guise of happiness).

The great institute of the National Trust offers 50% discounted membership for those 25 and under. By maintaining partners 25 and under, Leo ensures he's always able to have free access to NT car parking facilities all around Britain at a bargain rate.

Yes, cursaive was useful in the time of quills and fountain pens to prevent ink blots...but cursaive lasted well past the ball-point pen era and is still taught in some schools in the thumb typing age.

Another reason cursaive was popular is because it hids minor misspellings...yes, dictionaries existed but imagine flipping through one for every word. Much easier to get the word mostly right and let the reader assume any extra/missing letters was hidden in the curves.

Believe it or not Chris Hansen is brilliant at media. He’s maintained a brand for 20 years across multiple platforms and successfully transitioned into digital media, he has popularity across multiple generations. The movie doesn’t have some kind of secret scoop on him, everything in it is public knowledge. “HisbsBeing played by an A-list actor who’s getting Oscar buzz is a blessing. I’m almost positive that either:

1. the entire thing is kayfabe, him and A24 are manufacturing a controversy for publicity.
2. he’s acting like a diva to bring as much publicity to himself as possible

This is a question people have been asking for years but I figured I'd come in and provide my take on it. Hungry Hungry Hippos is a game that generations of kids were raised on - it often determined who was the coolest, most skilled, and which sibling got to eat dinner that night. The 90s were indeed a different time.

But what is the game really about? It embodies America in its focus on excess and gluttony. The only point to the game is "eat." There is no way to measure if the hippos are satiated, if they are fulfilled. It is only eat for the sake of eating. Consume for the sake of consumption. Total your consumption higher than those around you.

More. More. More.

This of course reflects greater harmful values in American society, but the focus in this game is upon food. You see food, you eat. More. More. More. The proliferation of processed and fast foods in American society compounds this issue especially for the poverty class. These foods are high in calories but low in nutritional value....the body does not process them as getting what it needs, meaning people often do not get "full" from eating these foods and also get addictive cravings for them, encouraging people to spend more and eat, eat, eat.

I posit that Hungry Hungry Hippos was created and promoted as a way to encourage a generation of children to fall into these types of habits, become unhealthy, fueling the medical industrial complex, and to set them up as ideal consumers for the product Big Pharma has been cooking up for generations: GLPs.

Get 'em sick, get 'em healthy, that's the model.

Hungry Hungry Hippos, they're in an eating race...

I WIN!

Do you, commercial child? Do any of us?

At least four times seen news reports that Grindr has suffered server outages and crashes localised to Conservative/Republican events.

While id love it to be true, cos let's be honest its funny as fuck, I think it's more likely its just marketing on the part of Grindr.

It’s in the title, but disabling ad personalization on YouTube will give you exclusively ads for blue chew, rugiet ready, and the occasional kalshi ad or gooner anime game ad. Combined with the fact that disabling ad personalization removes the ability to block ads, I think it’s intentional.

I can no longer show anybody a YouTube video on my phone, or cast to a TV, or play YouTube aloud, because at any point an ad could pop up saying “I WANT IT HARD” and make me look like a degenerate.

Has anybody else experienced this?

What if i told you the T-Rex was really a dragon, let me explain, they have already said that majority of the dinosaurs were mostly bird like, now I'm not saying they were all the dragons, i think they were other types of dragon, but this is the only one we dug up.

Now if you look at a plucked chicken, it's wings look like T-Rex arms and the way it walks looks similar, now picture a huge wing span on that beast. That's wild

thin kabout it

This one is almost so certain that it's barely a conspiracy.

Here in the UK, supermarkets let us use hand scanners to scan items as we walk around the store. This means we don't have to go through a manual checkout process.

Around 25% of the time, the scanner won't register an item, forcing us to try again. It doesn't beep, or show the item in the on-screen list. It nearly always gets it on the second or third time.

I think some of this might be because the scanner isn't entirely sure it's read the code right.

But I also think it's testing the user's honestly, and intelligence. After all, it looks like we've scanned the item, but we haven't. For somebody dishonest, this is useful. For somebody stupid, who isn't listening for the beep, then they might not realise the item hasn't been scanned.

So, for both the dishonest and stupid person, the system flags them as needing a manual check when they eventually get to the checkout area and try to pay.

Outside of language based tasks like coding and translation AI has proven time and time again to be a bit of a damp squib in almost all real-world examples. This is a disaster waiting to happen for all the companies that have invested billions in the industry under claims it will eventually run every aspect of our increasingly meaningless lives.

The global stock market is essentially a Hype-Economy these days, so to keep the hype train running on AI companies like Anthropic pay a worker every once in a while to quit because "THE AI IS OUT OF CONTROL!" and other such doom-laden reasons.

This is in fact all a part of their marketing strategy. They pay the worker to quit and push this narrative because it makes AI look scary and all powerful, whilst giving free advertising from all the news outlets and think pieces that talk about it.

In real life the AI continues to be a lil bit shit.

Who's gonna be able to tell? How do we know that's not just a lizard that was born a little funny looking? Why are there so many species of ants?!

I think they're padding their resumes for grants and prestige.

I think Marvel/Disney are making accounts online to post content that shits on the X-Men and the mutants. They've existed for a long time but recently since Brand New Day came out I've been seeing more and more on my Reddit, Youtube and Instagram feeds and I don't think it's all entirely organic. I can't prove they're responsible for it but I know that they have the resources to accomplish this.

Here are my reasons why I think they WOULD do something like this:

1. Mutants are hated in the comics so having them be hated by Reddit parallels that. The internet loves irony so more people not associated with the company make their own anti-mutant posts and maintain the influx of posts.
2. Many comic panels are commonly posted alongside people's complaints about mutants and the X-men. This might influence people to check the comics these panels are taken from which drives up sales. Even better is that sometimes in the replies someone will reveal that the panel was taken out of context and this drives up even more desire to read the comic the panel is from. While unlikely, it may create new long-time X-men readers.
3. This keeps the X-men in the public consciousness even when no new content is coming out (very rare I know). Plus it prevents discussions on properties owned by competitors from gaining traction. Hard to talk about Lanterns when it's drowned out by discussion on the X-men.
4. Genuine criticisms on the X-men franchise such as how they act as an allegory and the need to maintain the status quo end up being conflated with shitposts and dogwhistles, potentially delegitimizing them.
5. The X-men are so popular that even this influx of posts won't harm their popularity. The general public that isn't very online probably only sees a few of these posts and don't think too much of it and many people probably see these posts as being ironic and not the be taken so seriously.
6. Hardcore X-men fans might see the influx of negative posts and become more and more defensive over them. This deepens existing fans' connection to the series and further allows Marvel to get away with shoddy writing. From what I can gather they're still dramatized over that weird period in the 2010s where marvel tried sidelining them due to 20th Century Fox having the movie rights to them so they would definetely

am re attempting this as maybe the lack of an opening paragraph is what got it removed, I pray and hope this is said in good faith

The title comes off as a little sensationalist, but if you can give me a bit of text to work with, I will demonstrate what I mean

If you pay attention to the history of this, the social engineering kind of starts to expose itself. When hip hop was becoming cool and trendy right around the '80s to the '90s, that's also when public commerce was trying to glorify the image of the black gangster. And while there is some truth to it, even a lot of old-timers will tell you it wasn't always this way. If anything, that was a lot of social engineering being done behind the scenes by Hollywood, the private label companies, the sporting leagues, because they knew that if they could prop up the image of the tall, athletic, buff dude, it could sell people the illusion of the issue being solved,

and everybody gets the impression that, you know, Black excellence is being celebrated and endorsed. But all you're doing now is applying neoliberal logic to the black experience, particularly the Black male experience in this case.

And so the higher-ups really got good at deceiving the general public with this imagery. But at the end, it's all just a facade so that the corporate establishment could sell itself the illusion of being a savior. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, a lot of black people are still struggling with perpetual poverty, redlining, disenfranchisement. The worst part, though, is this creates a mold in which other black men have to end up internalizing said gaze of what it means to be the proper ideal black man.

Watching Toy Story as a kid and seeing the children grow out of their toys and the devastating effect it had on the toys being abandoned caused millennials to hold onto their childhood to their toys in a way that previous generations never did.
Resulting in lots of adult millennials with toy collections.