zippy the pinhead: vaguely reactionary anti-mass-culture mass-culture comic that occasionally drops its authorial voice to yell about kulaks
edit:
i am reading british meme-communists and it occurs to me that this is probably normal. the ‘cupcake fascism’ guy has a very angry post about some sort of cartoon character, a yellow pill-looking thing with a variable number of eyes, which is apparently in two movies and innumerable advertisements. i have never heard of this before. there is also a very angry post about a marketing gimmick for a brand of candy which i think might have risen to my conscious attention once when i was eight.
particularly illustrative is the one about the cereal bar. as part of the broader agenda of infantile cupcakeism, somebody somewhere in britain opened a thing called a ‘cereal bar’, which is a place that sells servings of cereal for three and a half of the local unit of currency, which one presumes translates to somewhere slightly upwards of three and a half dollars.
there are a lot of paragraphs about the relation of the cereal bar to the vile cupcake agenda. after them, there are more paragraphs, these describing the meme-communist’s visit to the cupcake bar, and the expensive bowl or two of cereal he consumed there.
upon reading this, two words came to mind:
‘jersey shore’.
i have met many people who watched jersey shore. (‘watched’? ‘watch’? does it still exist? i don’t know.) i have never met anyone who was motivated to watch jersey shore by the artistry it exhibits; i would assume it does not exhibit any. the motivation for watching jersey shore that is shared by every single person i have met who does so is that it is bad. they watch it because it is bad. the cupcake fascism guy went to the cereal bar because it is bad.
there are pop-cultural artifacts that use this vector much more overtly, like pickle surprise. pickle surprise is not high-quality. it is intentionally awful. that is why it has upwards of two million views.
here is a selection from the comments on the video:
What kind of sick fuck would come up with something like this?
I once saw a video on here of a poor boy jumping off a bridge into some water and he accidentally face plants on some concrete below, The after math shows him on his death bed struggling to survive while his face is literally split in half. This video bothers me just as much as that poor split face boy : /
Can I ask a serious question? Am I homophobic? because this makes me really uncomfortable.
Please, no.
Is this hell or what
Sweet merciful god.. What is this.
Shared on Google+
Now I’m scarred for life…
all of these people watched the video.
a larger-scale example of the same phenomenon is the celebrity status of tommy wiseau. the room is an awful movie. it is watched precisely because it is awful.
it makes no difference to the cereal bar whether their customers are giving them money because they genuinely like paying three and a half of the currency units of their country to eat a bowl of sugar in an infantile cupcake nostalgia ukulele shrine or because they think it is awful. three and a half currency units from an unironic neoteny-lover and three and a half currency units from the guy who coined the term 'cupcake fascism’ are both three and a half currency units. i r o n i c c o n s u m p t i o n i s c o n s u m p t i o n
i have, for some reason, a bag of candy. i do not particularly like it, and would prefer a bag of carrots. but it requires an active expenditure of effort not to keep eating the fucking candy, even though it is not particularly good and my tongue feels like a plague of locusts shat on it. this does not happen with a bag of carrots. when i have a bag of carrots, i eat some carrots and then i close the bag. zippy the pinhead guy and cupcake fascism guy keep sticking their hands into the bag of candy again and again and again and again and again
“please, brer fox, please don’t throw me into the briar patch!!!!!”
To derail this, the way my mealsquares experience ended was I never got to eating them. I ate everything in the cabinet. I ate butter or jam on the all the discount post-Passover matzoh megapack. Everything except my several packs of nutritionally complete, satisfying foodstuffs. Because the thing about so completely optimizing them as a nutrition vector with no interest towards mouth appeal is that EVEN WHEN I was hungry, EVEN WHEN there was no other food in the house, EVEN WHEN I knew they would satisfy me, I was never actively moved to eat them. I ate out instead.
Since eating just one I’ve definitely noticed an unusual energy - not as in stimulant intensity, but like, a completeness. You know that weird hollow feeling at your temples you get when you’re dehydrated? The exact opposite of that.
And I’m not only not craving any more food but I don’t even feel interested in it, I walk through the kitchen and it’s like
That said, stocking the house with nothing but this would probably be a good way to get on the right “eat when hungry, however NOT eat when NOT hungry” track
