giwake

giwake

@giwake

game developer, I think?

  • they/them

i make games and music, sometimes.

profile picture by @thewaether!!!

moving to https://bsky.app/profile/giwake.bsky.social

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giwake
@giwake
the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi
@the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi
thewaether
@thewaether

every so often I remember the time Elon Musk announced he was building a robot by having a guy in an obvious costume come on stage and dance. it goes on for so long. it's 10x more awkward than you expect. it's followed by endless awkward silence. you can sense the audience is panicking because they don't know if they're going to have the be the one to point out the emperor has no clothes and say that it's a man in a suit

Anschel
@Anschel

oh god I had heard about this but I never knew the dance was so DORKY

the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi
@the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

by the way happy belated 6th anniversary to the justin timberlake 'filthy' music video

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in reply to @thewaether's post:

Faceattack
@Faceattack

I genuinely believe that Musk being a Big Deal is gonna be something that more or less gets memory-holed/people in the future are gonna be like “did this all actually happen? Like for real?”

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pnictogen-wing
@pnictogen-wing

oh yeah. American society has too much practice at this sort of thing—consider how, after eight years of George W. Bush, the GOP simply kicked him out of sight for a while so they could get on with pretending that Barack Obama invented "government".

arguably you can already see it happening: there's some sort of narrative being prepared in which Elon Musk Went Too Far™ because he was whacked out on drugs or something, and clearly his failure says absolutely nothing about the general class of sober-minded hard-working corporate executives of America, etc.

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ryusui
@ryusui

the worst part is that in recent years they've dusted off the man they used to call Dubya and tried to pretend like he was a Real President, a Proper President, a Cultured, Intelligent Man who Paints in his Spare Time

i can only imagine that within 10-15 years after Elon's final self-destruction his reputation will be given a similar rose-colored wash, because the alternative would be to acknowledge that our system puts idiots in power through sheer force of wealth-backed nepotism

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pnictogen-wing
@pnictogen-wing

ugh yeah I remember the rehabilitation of George W. Bush. it seems part of the ratchet effect created by the gradual reactionary degradation of the Republicans: they produce an even worse crop of politicians, causing Democrats to gush about how much better the previous Republicans were—so "civil"! so gentlemanly!

I partly blame Richard Nixon, who simply refused to accept being disgraced, and worked tirelessly to market himself and reshape his public image, until somehow he arrived at an "elder statesman" status that would have seemed impossible in the 1970s. I think everyone in American public life learned a lesson from that: it's possible to bounce back from any failure, in terms of public relations.

I fear that Elon Musk will be very difficult to wash away. he inserted himself far too effectively into pop culture, and people aren't easily going to forget the sheer magnitude of his ambitions. I wouldn't be surprised if "Elon Musk basically invented electric cars you know" is still a talking point decades from now.

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ryusui
@ryusui

or "Elon Musk had a plan to get us to Mars, but yada yada tragic dream" - or worse, "he would've gotten us to Mars if he hadn't been cancelled by 'the wokes'"

i'm not sure which scenario is worse: a collective effort to whitewash the sins of rich failsons, or enshrining said sins and using them as a culture war beachhead

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