There are lots of “influencers” who are kind of sketchy. Well, all of them. But for someone like myself, with a memory for past photographs, it can be a bit of a problem.
There is one fellow who goes by “Zeus” who looks remarkably like an older guy in mid-midlife crisis, who wears what he (and the Instagram generation) think is the finery of wealth, and poses with women getting into and out of ‘his’ many sportscars. There is lots of footage of him escorting various women and their boob jobs from hotels, to cars, and vice versa, in Monaco, etc. I guess most of the Instagram generation don’t realize that there are mansions for rent, etc.
There is even a clever entrepreneur who shall not be named who has a fake interior of a Gulfstream V that you can rent for a day. This is all within the real of practical special effects. I do _not_ need to materialize an actual instance of Godzilla, for crying out loud. Although, I can.
Because I am a horrible person (and I know nobody reads the comments, anyway) I used to sometimes comment on Zeus’ images that he is my favorite parking lot attendant, and I hope he gets to drive some more cool cars to the parking garage, soon. Mostly, I hope he washes his hair before it falls out from all the weird products he is shoveling into it.
In case you missed my point: it appears that the Tate brothers archive of cars is, actually, rented.
Holy fucking shit, are you kidding me? Young men fell for that? I think they should be less worried about how to get laid, and more worried about how to stop slamming their own head in the door. These guys are trying to fake how they spent a relatively insignificant amount of money, compared to – say – sponsoring a fusion experiment. No, don’t think about it, it’s safe if you don’t think about it. I promise I will not be sponsoring any large implosions. Meanwhile, I thought you guys might enjoy some of my recent snapshots of me inspecting my new boat that I just bought from my OnlyFans membership sales:
It needs some spiffing up and a stripper pole but, it’ll do.
I bet you didn’t realize how profitable blogging at FTB is, did you? I was going to post a picture of the A turret cocaine locker but some imbecile (who is now on report) filled it with 19-inch high explosive shells. This is all the fault of my date for dinner last friday, who said she expected to be “picked up in something expensive” and I thought that I’d better not go with something simple like a sports car. Life was complicated by the fact that my entire schwere panzer team was having transmission overhauls. But, everything was OK, or seemed to be:
There was some argument over parking but fortunately my captain and his crack crew prevailed. [Did you notice my date carefully selected a Worth original that matched the color scheme of the ship? I think someone is reading our codes!] Anyhow, I feel bad for wimpy little gomers like those Tate boys who are driving cars that are merely a prince’s ransom, let alone a significant chunk of a maritime power’s economy. I read the A-list and they’re down around the T’s. Ugh.
Unfortunately, and I did not forsee this, the restaurant was one of those horribly modernist places, and the chef was trying to show off his new season of Land Rover themed cuisine which was a flop followed by a grinding crash.
I was furious with myself for not staying aboard and just having sushi at the admiral’s table, but them’s the breaks.
I noticed (and appreciated) GPT’s making my fictitious dinner date age-appropriate. I did specify that she be wearing a tasteful Worth original, but the other judgement calls were the AI’s.
I also noticed that it served my Steak A La Land Rover “A point”, as I like it, which would catch me sneers in Monaco unless we were dining under the 19-inch guns of my yacht.
Theme Music for this post. Its worth it. “all that gold don’t mean thing”
People will fall for anything if you’re giving them something they want to believe, whether that’s Tate’s alleged lifestyle, chemtrails, UFOs, the Singularity, the Rapture (but I repeat myself)… The interesting question is not “why do people fall for this bullshit?”, it’s “why do people want to fall for this bullshit?” What needs are these beliefs fulfilling for them?
Of course, the other interesting question is “what bullshit am I falling for that I don’t realise is bullshit, because I want to believe it for some reason?” And that one’s far more difficult…
I like the kataginu vest over t-shirt look. :)
Marcus, Thank You. Bought genuine joy to my breakfast. Especially liked the Series 3. An aside: hands all look OK, gun hinges appear functional. Still not spot on with the vanishing points for the decking…
I hope the Tate brothers get extradited to the UK and barred from access to women and the Internet for a very long time.
Looks like GPT has used its increasingly accurate hand/finger rendering and transferred it to rendering battleship turret guns accurately (naturally assuming Marcus owns two battleships). Very cool images though.
As to Dunc’s question above, “why do people want to fall for this bullshit?” I’ll hazard a guess that people have such a strong desire to “belong” to some group or other that they believe will give them some prestige, however minor or obscure, over those not in that group and that the more it costs you to belong, the more cred you have. Using myself as an example by trying to maintain cred in the Marcus fan-boy cult. Having no blade-smithing, mad photoshop or AI image skillz (Spelt with a Zed!) I have failed utterly.
The Bennetts from Jane Austen spent more time ‘seeming wealthy’ than managing their wealth (managing their wealth never happens in the story, nor does it appear that they hired anyone). She didn’t get this from nowhere.
“Influencer” has been around since forever. The name changes, the bullshit remains the same. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The first picture is the very best (but the last one is funnier). You are a very (prompt-cum-ai) artist.
Ridana@#2:
I like the kataginu vest over t-shirt look. :)
Those are my actual shop clothes, though GPT used a reference photo of me taken at the forge, and decided to add the raccoon image and proper raccoon-platoon slogan: “we were about to start a lifestyle brand, then we remembered we have work to do” related to another project I am involved in.
And, of course, the shots of Yamato are all real.
Dunc@#1:
The interesting question is not “why do people fall for this bullshit?”, it’s “why do people want to fall for this bullshit?” What needs are these beliefs fulfilling for them?
That is, I think, the crux. It is my opinion that what we are seeing is the inevitable result of life-times worth of pro-capitalist propaganda. The Tates were basically offering “get laid quick”/”get rich quick” schemes, which — like most capitalist projects — were based on lies. But there are generations of American and British youth who are growing up with the idea that there is some kind of magic combination number or sword in a stone or whatever that they can reveal which will grant them the wealth and power they have always deserved. [I will note that the wretched Harry Potter books continue the tradition of revealed nobility from The Once and Future King through Narnia etc]
They make the ordinary person, looking at a lifetime of asking “do you want fries with that?” or working in an amuzone warehouse, an escape route into a fantasy life where they are big shots who seduce supermodels or at least pornstars and drive expensive cars.
Perhaps I will help spawn a generation that hankers for dreadnoughts instead of deloreans.
Jörg@#4:
I hope the Tate brothers get extradited to the UK and barred from access to women and the Internet for a very long time.
Me too. They’re pretty disgusting examples of toxic masculinity at its worst. It’s interesting that they appear to have attempted to appeal to Barron Trump in hope that the administration would free them or promote them to head Office of Personnel Management or some such lunacy. Since his alleged MMA championship skills appear to be largely fictional, Andrew is in for a bad time in prison.
seachange@#6:
The Bennetts from Jane Austen spent more time ‘seeming wealthy’ than managing their wealth (managing their wealth never happens in the story, nor does it appear that they hired anyone). She didn’t get this from nowhere.
True. It often seems as if Flashman was a documentary. Because, in a sense, it was. Patrick O’Brien’s Master and Commander series also reveals a bit about how social climbing was done in the military naval caste. In both books, and in Austen’s novels, there is an invisible oligarchy hovering just above them all, while the players in the game leap for the bottom rungs of the ladder, hoping to pull themselves up into a more enviable viewpoint. I think it’s fairly clear that Washington, DC., is similarly afflicted with a parasitic overclass whose idea of “good clean fun” is to parasitize US foreign service. Palantir and Anthropic are merely the latest in a long series of wonder-weapons.
“Influencer” has been around since forever. The name changes, the bullshit remains the same. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Well, certainly under the French monarchy, and I assume others. Frederick and Peter the greats come to mind. It’s a downside of empire-building: you get all the parasites come running.
crivitz@#5:
Looks like GPT has used its increasingly accurate hand/finger rendering and transferred it to rendering battleship turret guns accurately (naturally assuming Marcus owns two battleships). Very cool images though.
(humble) Well, one of them is a rental.
As to Dunc’s question above, “why do people want to fall for this bullshit?” I’ll hazard a guess that people have such a strong desire to “belong” to some group or other that they believe will give them some prestige, however minor or obscure, over those not in that group and that the more it costs you to belong, the more cred you have. Using myself as an example by trying to maintain cred in the Marcus fan-boy cult. Having no blade-smithing, mad photoshop or AI image skillz (Spelt with a Zed!) I have failed utterly.
We always respect snark for its own sake! Snarking away is always a great technique for positioning oneself as superior. After all, the British have been using it since, hmmm… when? My memories are indelibly marked by The Lion in Winter which was kind of a fountain-like jubilee of snark.
wereatheist@#7:
The first picture is the very best (but the last one is funnier). You are a very (prompt-cum-ai) artist.
These sort of images are produced using the AI in conversational mode. That way, it can bring in all sorts of associated memories and apply them to the images, as well. GPT clearly remembers a few things about my general delight in dreadnoughts, and made sure to reflect bits of our shared mythology-space. For example, the raccoon images on my various t-shirts in these pictures, are actually straight out of some t-shirt designs I have had GPT do before in another context. Thus it correctly reasoned that I am the sort of cad who would wear a tshirt and shop hakama to an expensive restaurant while my date had to hock her VanCleef/Arpels necklace to afford that custom-tailored House of Worth copy.
I probably should do a posting or two about the division between AI art and “real” art, whatever that is, as there are a fair number of characters on Instagram who go trolling with postings to the effect of “you can’t call it ‘art'” etc. Well, really? How interesting.
I think Games Workshop beat you to it, and much of the resulting subculture isn’t that much better.
Oh, sorry, wrong sort of dreadnought… ;)
Well, yeah, group identification is a big thing for people of all stripes, and there’s definitely an element of that, but it’s a bit too generic for what I was going for. What I was meaning is more “what specific things about this particular bullshit appeal to these specific people?” As Marcus points out @ #9, the Tates are selling a very particular vision that sits on an intersection of a specific idea of social status as signified by a group of specific markers (the cars, watches, etc), and a bunch of anxieties about masculinity and gender performance, which appeals to a particular sub-group of largely working class young men. Whereas the hardcore Rapture set are motivated by a whole bunch of different concerns and anxieties…