Minor Annoyances (Vol 2)

[SuperBacon]

"IYKYK" 

[Keith Houchen]

1 hour ago, SuperBacon said:

"IYKYK" 

What’s wrong with Popeye laughing?

[cobra_gordo]

When song lyrics reference that it's a song i.e any variation on "And that's why I wrote this song". I know it's a song, I'm listening to it, but being reminded of it feels like a fourth wall break and ruins the magic.

[gmoney]

9 minutes ago, cobra_gordo said:

When song lyrics reference that it's a song i.e any variation on "And that's why I wrote this song". I know it's a song, I'm listening to it, but being reminded of it feels like a fourth wall break and ruins the magic.

It can be a lazy old trope, but I like it when it's done well. Something Changed by Pulp is a good example. 

[cobra_gordo]

"Song For Whoever" gets a pass too because it's the whole theme of the song and it's done so brilliantly. When it's done badly though, and normally because the word "song" rhymes with a line they've already used, it makes my skin crawl. It's up there with when anybody starts a rap with "My name is _________ and I'm here to say".

[Keith Houchen]

5 minutes ago, cobra_gordo said:

"Song For Whoever" gets a pass too because it's the whole theme of the song and it's done so brilliantly. When it's done badly though, and normally because the word "song" rhymes with a line they've already used, it makes my skin crawl. It's up there with when anybody starts a rap with "My name is _________ and I'm here to say".

I spent far too much of my time wondering if when Richard Ashcroft sang “Play a song for the lovers” he meant a romantic song or the very song he was singing. 

[air_raid]

38 minutes ago, cobra_gordo said:

When song lyrics reference that it's a song i.e any variation on "And that's why I wrote this song". I know it's a song, I'm listening to it, but being reminded of it feels like a fourth wall break and ruins the magic.

I loathe songs where the artists feel compelled to say their names as part of the lyrics. "DJ KHALLID!" "JASON DERUUUUUULO!" etc. Just fuck off, tell me whatever story you want to tell me in your song, don't slap your own/each others backs like "look at this what we have created, isnt it great!!!"

I do give a minor pass to the "ready Freddie" in Crazy Little Thing Called Love because its so subtle I miss it almost every time. And because I have unashamed bias towards Queen.

[Fatty Facesitter]

I’m seeing an increasing amount of YouTube teaser adverts directing me to watch…adverts. Case in point, there’s a sample of this year’s John Lewis advert directing people to ‘watch our Christmas advert’.

Exhibit A) As this is already an advert, why not show me the whole fucking advert in the first place? Why use advertising to advertise…a fucking advert?

Exhibit B) I don’t even need you to advertise the advert, because it’s on every sodding television channel and other YouTube video I watch anyway. So it’s an utterly pointless exercise, a waste of time, money and oxygen. 

Exhibit C) They’re not even advertising a product. They’re advertising the shop. No notion of any Christmas deals, no gift ideas for loved ones, not even skateboards which would have actually been a fun tie-in. Just their fucking NAME. At least with the Coca Cola advert you physically see Saint Nicholas drinking said product therefore giving you a clear indication that if you purchase said item, you too might find the taste as satisfactory as Father Christmas does. 

This has really rocked me. I’m not ok. 

[air_raid]

On 12/8/2022 at 8:53 AM, Fatty Facesitter said:

I’m seeing an increasing amount of YouTube teaser adverts directing me to watch…adverts.

It's META. Meta is cool. Blame the kids. Started with that Odeon "here's the part everyone loves, the trailers" shite and it gets worse all the time. There's that one for a coffee product where Natalie "Dinner Date" Casey goes "Oooh, plot twist!" and I recently even saw an advert which included the word "narrative." Everything's got to be self-aware these days and let the viewers know they're in on it, but just like with the wrestling, its always shit.

Edited December 22, 2022 by air_raid

[Gus Mears]

8 minutes ago, air_raid said:

 Started with that Odeon "here's the part everyone loves, the trailers" shite and it gets worse all the time. 

I hate the cinema anyway, but that was another small nail in the coffin. About the only plus was that they got in a shite Stephen Merchant impersonator to say it, which meant the actual Stephen Merchant got no money out of it.

Edited December 8, 2022 by Gus Mears

[BomberPat]

TikTok, and especially the intersection of TikTok and true crime wankers.

I was just bored and clicked on to a "reel" on Facebook, and one of the next ones that loaded automatically was someone talking in a really smug, irritating way about a serial killer. Except, it's TikTok, and they have a load of language restrictions, so he had to call him a "serial unaliver" who mostly targeted "s workers". And maybe, when you're having to say bollocks like that out loud, you should stop to think that perhaps this isn't the best medium to tell this story, perhaps some pretentious teenager isn't the right person to be telling it anyway, and perhaps you sound like a bell-end. 

That's before even getting into how it spreads idiotic conspiracy theories and urban legends worse than email in the '90s. Just the most toxic and self-absorbed of all social media (which is saying something), and because "content" from there is constantly reposted elsewhere, then not even not having an account or the app in the first place is enough to keep it from my eyes.

[air_raid]

I don’t understand TikTok. I don’t understand most of it.

I tried to understand what gap SnapChat filled in the market that WhatsApp couldn’t do and people explained that things disappear after a while, like that’s a benefit? Then there were filters, but now filters are on many apps. So, TikTok? I don’t understand why it’s succeeded where things like Vine and Tout (cheers WWE) didn’t. What’s the point? It’s YouTube videos but shorter, yeah? So… what was wrong with YouTube? Strikes me as being a million apps for the same five or six functions. Reminds me of being badgered to get a MySpace for two years then within a week of signing up being told by the same mate that MySpace was dead and everyone was getting a Facebook now. Fuck off, Matt, I’m not playing any more.

[DavidB6937]

TikTok is, as far as I can tell in my old man phase, just one of those things where someone posts something and then a bazillion other people copy it. It's all about trending and being cool and all that shit. It seems to have benefitted greatly from the pandemic where it was easy for the youngsters - and Dame Judi Dench apparently - to join in with the dances. All the dances. So many dances. Even the kids school work turned into regular dances.

My main problem with it is that it ends up infiltrating everything else. They post their TikTok videos on Instagram. That then feeds to Facebook. Inevitably it'll end up on Twitter somehow. It's even worse now when you get all the sponsored and suggested shit too. So if you accidentally watch one or the kids do then it'll think you fucking love that shit.

In theory all these things could work indecently. I used to enjoy following photography accounts on Instagram but that's gone more and more towards Reels and video content to try and keep up with TikTok but misses the point completely. Twitter is obviously a mess. And Facebook is just where I keep old school friends and relatives that I have no real interest in communicating with.

I'm glad I'm not young now though. There's no fucking way I'm dancing. I don't know how the kids cope with the social media world. I know I wouldn't have.

[BomberPat]

In fairness, I think blokes in their 30s and 40s not understanding TikTok is entirely correct and proper. It is not for us, and I'd be suspicious of any man over 25 trying to use it in earnest.

The way every social media platform tries to just mimic whatever the latest trend does just shows that, for all that they're worth millions, most of them have no idea what people actually use them for or want from them, and keep trying to change and "innovate" by copying the new gimmick, because they're scared of losing all the advertisers that pay the bills if something else takes off and gets bigger than them. So you get a lot of weird counter-intuitive moves - Instagram going from a photo-sharing app to being almost entirely about video, Twitter going from micro-blogging and short, snappy content to a 4000 character limit, Facebook feeds being increasingly full of bullshit you never liked or followed in the first place. 

What I find interesting, and that I don't think social media moguls have cottoned on to yet, is that Facebook, Myspace before that, and now increasingly Twitter, all pushed to be what Elon Musk calls an "Everything App", where the goal was to basically keep people on one app/website the entire time without needing to ever go elsewhere - you could get your news, play Candy Crush, upload photos of your kids' birthday parties, buy tickets for a gig at the weekend, and chat to your mates, all without ever leaving Facebook - and built around sharing everything with a fairly broad audience, whereas younger generations seem to move further away from that; they're more likely to be on Snapchat, TikTok, and various messaging apps than on Facebook and Twitter, and while those apps have options to share more widely, they're much more curated, and broadly much more of a closed loop, where they're sharing with friends (or at least, people they think are their friends, if I'm going to be cynical about it) rather than putting everything out there into the world at large. I don't know if that's a conscious kickback against the model that they'll have grown up with and effectively reverting to something more like instant messaging, just a sign that these things are cyclical in nature, or if it's all much simpler than that, and that teenagers think Facebook and Twitter are sad and old because their parents are on there, and the last thing you want to do as a teenager is share anything about your life with your parents.

[wordsfromlee]

Tik Tok is big with the kids because it hasn’t yet been taken over by their parents. 
 

It happens with every social media. MySpace, Facebook, Instagram. The kids start using it, it becomes popular, the older generations find out about it and start using it too, that makes it uncool with the kids so they move into the next new one. 
 

The same thing will happen with Tik Tok. Once it becomes popular with the over 30s, it’ll be dead and there’ll be a new one on the rise that does much the same as all the others but with a slight twist.