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Back to the Future promised us hoverboards and instead we got this bullshit.
Main music while creating: Prejudice — Tim Minchin
Cancel Cult
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Back to the Future promised us hoverboards and instead we got this bullshit.
Main music while creating: Prejudice — Tim Minchin
Janice Duke Illustration 
Sidestepping any talk of cancel culture and poetry (I am likely a poor judge of either), I do love that illustration. Particularly how you’ve created a sense of depth in the there with only a few flat colours
Very impressive 😲
Cheers, Tim 😊 I find keeping it simple for this sort of illustration is the best way for me. No point getting bogged down with detail. You can imply a lot with very little, much like poetry… and cancel culture 😋
Yeah Janice, social medai just keeps on showing me that we just cant have nice things. Love the word choices you used here. Makes me think of a Forest of Stars song
A particular bad experience or just an observation? Social media is definitely not the place for nice things in my experience, idiots have made sure of that. It’s not even useful for networking now. I just use mine to lure people here. At least if someone decides to be a dick on my blog, I can simply remove any comments and block them. No need to start a witch hunt to destroy them utterly, they can say what they want on their own blog. And the real world still has lots of nice things and people 😊 What’s the song? I’ll check it out.
Pure observation. Every time something comes up, say a book or a movie or a song, from nowhere there will come a wave of unwanted stuff and people trying to convert others to their way of thinking. People wont not go out of their way to spoil things for others. That is why i try stay as far away from it all so i can make my own decision on things. Song is called Summertide’s Approach, band from the UK i very much love. The voice might not be for you, but the lyrics are what gets me
I hear you. It’s one thing to have an opinion, quite another to aggressively demand everyone else must think that too. And yeah, spoiling things for others. Ugh.
That’s a great song! Sounds a bit like Alcest. Thanks for the recommendation. I especially liked the last verse!
Glad you likedthe song. They have a great catalogue. I’ll give Alcest a try tomorrow
The cancel cult is completely insipid.
I’m glad I have a blog where it’s safe, because social media is so toxic these days.
I’m really impressed with your illustration and poetry. It sums up my feeling no appropriately.
Agreed. Hopefully blogs will stay safe-ish for the foreseeable. Seems to be the place to be if you’re the live and let live type.
Thank you for the kind words. The main thing that keeps me posting this kind of thing is the thought there may be others out there who connect to what I’m expressing.
Cancel culture – don’t get me started! If anything deserves to be cancelled it’s that nonsense! It stamps out debate and thoughtful discussion, it drives people away from a number of otherwise good causes and it’s just so steeped in cruelty and vindictiveness. Anyway, top work on both the picture and the poem; both are very powerful, well done indeed!Â
Thank you 😊 And I couldn’t agree with you more.
Just noticed you were listening to Tim Minchin. Good stuff. Also funny about being promised hoverboards and getting cancel cultures instead. And I think my Twitter account got permanently stunted by someone attempting to cancel me. I remember when Alex Jones got cancelled. I spoke out about it on my blog as representing a kind of un-American all-out censorship, even if the guy was an outraged wingnut who insisted that Michelle Obama was a tranny. Next came a wave of independent voices being demonetized on YouTube (also, my blog was demonetized here). And then, as with covid scenarios, years later it turns out people were banned for saying things that we now accept as either true, or quite possibly true (ex., lab leak). And that means that people are now being destroyed for telling the honest truth. We all become whistle-blowers in a corrupt corporation if we so much as whisper that something smells fishy in the boardroom, and whistle-blowers are eliminated. One of my fears is that I will eventually be erased as a convenient scapegoat merely because I don’t accept that I am automatically the source of everything wrong with the world. Also not looking forward to a global digital ID and social credit rating, if that happens. Remember, Black Mirror wasn’t a dystopian sci-fi series, it was a video tutorials package.
Tim Minchin is great, especially when I find myself taking stuff too seriously.
Twitter won’t let you be seen if you’re not playing their “I support the current thing” game. Algorithms will suppress your content. It’s a conditioning machine, do this “good thing” and be rewarded with attention/likes/dopamine, do this “bad thing” and be punished with being ignored/bullied/outcast. So people keep doing the “good thing”, because we are quite easily manipulated but often far too arrogant to admit that to ourselves. All social media runs on this fact.
When Alex Jones and others like him started getting cancelled I knew it was the beginning of the end for free speech. Doesn’t matter if you don’t agree with someone, beyond certain unacceptable things (inciting actual violence, for example, which we have laws to deal with) people should be allowed to speak and if I don’t like it I am allowed to not listen. I don’t take away their right and capacity to speak, that’s insane, evil and not in my own interest. If anyone can be cancelled, I can be cancelled, therefore no one should be cancelled. Let the marketplace of ideas decide who gets heard. But then the powers that be wouldn’t be able to force bullshit of the kind you mention down our throats.
I don’t think they will succeed though. They have enough understanding of human nature to manipulate us within a certain controlled context. Outside that, they are making stupid mistake after stupid mistake already. They are also too arrogant, and often socially inept at best and psychopathic at worst on top of that, which means their understanding of human behaviour is inherently flawed. They are blind to the factors that will cause their plans to come apart, unfortunately probably violently. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Does the bigger, stronger, truer picture prevail in the long run, or is this the course that leads to the collapse of a civilization?
Good question. I don’t know and I think anyone claiming with any certainty that they do know how this will play out is deluded or being manipulative. All we can do is look at history for circumstances with similar characteristics, factor in contemporary human behaviour along with human nature, and speculate. Past behaviour is a fairly good indicator of future behaviour in people. Civilizations have fallen before and will again, and have been revolutionised for better and for worse. We shall see.
A wild card to factor in is nukes, as we seem far more nihilistic and unhinged now than we were during the cold war, so I don’t think M.A.D. is any guarantee of anything anymore. “Some men just want to watch the world burn” and there are those in power who seem far too cocky in the face of that possibility, likely because the idea that it could ever actually happen seems so unreal. Sadly, their denial fuelled lack of foresight won’t stop it, if it comes to that. We really can’t afford to give idiots power, but somehow we always do. Humanity will win the ultimate Darwin Award if it leads to nuclear annihilation this time.
I doubt that’s going to happen, though things have transpired in recent years that I would have thought were bad writing in a novel because not plausibly believable. We do seem hell-bent on making dystopian sci-fi movies and literature into real life experiments.