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youtube recommended me an hour long video where someone rants about the decline of build a bear as a brand and I decided to watch maybe 15 minutes or so not for any insight, but instead as a form of people watching. what kind of life would an adult my age lead to feel that kind of consumer betrayal? not because build a bear is cringe but because build a bear is expensive. ridiculously expensive. the only time in my life where i walked into a build a bear and did not immediately walk out was when my old-old ex took me there for my 18th birthday and got me a twilight sparkle plush because we were looking at the cost of these custom bears and their clothes and going "holy fuck whaaaaat". a build a bear ride or die is built very different from me.

you probably deduced from the thumbnail (as well as from the nature of these consumer grievance type videos) that the thing this person has an issue with is the overall modern day "aesthetic". the store has downsized considerably in the last decade and resembles a regular toy store moreso than its older workshop-like setup. at one point she near-tearily mulls over how many malls only have a "dinky little kiosk" instead of an actual location. she hates the fluorescent lights and minimalist style shelves. she doesn't get why things that were once painted surfaces are now interactable screens. she gushes over the things she loved about the old store as if she's seeing it all for the first time in between talking extensively about her personal relationship to certain accessories and plush types. she hates that so many of the plushies are just licensed characters now. she misses the experience of being in the store as a child. she misses the bears from her childhood that she regretfully gave away. she doesn't like that these things that meant so much to her are going away and that she doesn't know how to get them back. at one point, she mentions that she tried to go back to the store a few years ago and (pausing repeatedly as if hovering above some kind of inscrutable alien truth) that buying a bear and paying $30+ for clothes "just wasn't...fun?" but immediately combats the instinct to investigate these feelings by arguing that this is the store's fault for not being fun. that build a bear is failing because it is not more accommodating to adults.

with any other youtuber who was confounded by the fact that novelty things from their childhood did not survive the forces of the market 15+ years later (and had to shuffle around its brand aesthetics to see what would maybe make investors happy while also minimizing cost) I would probably have just stopped watching at the 15 minute mark, but I found myself fascinated by this humorism powered hydraulic performance. she simmers in nostalgia happily, reliving her memories with every image of old build a bear she superimposes over the screen, before snapping into a state of sadness and confusion once the image has been taken away. it takes about 25 minutes in for her to start verbalizing her frustration towards all modern day toy aesthetics. "why did they do this? what makes them do this? why does everything look like this now? I don't understand" she's less asking a question and more unable to reconcile that a part of her life which once possessed tangibility no longer exists, and the transactional nature of her relationship with build a bear is what specifically makes her unable to make peace with this. she cannot accept that she cannot buy back this time that was lost because her time as a child in build a bear was something that she purchased in the first place. the experience is tied so much to build a bear as an enterprise and transaction that to simply separate what she liked about it and pursue something that resembles that is inconceivable, and instead that the only choice is to. retvrn to build a bear.

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Whilst entirely useless as a Wikipedia article, this version of the one on If on a winter's night a traveler remains one of the funniest things I've read

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happy 4th of july

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I literally wouldnt and not enough people notice this

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I do find it a little fascinating how many of these people go insane. Not metaphorically, but literally just become shadows of their former selves. Every grifter who’s from 5-8 years ago I’ve seen is now in some phase of either borderline delirium that people watch to see them burn or just straight up vanish.

Why do you think that is?

Grifting in the internet age is an act of performance with a profit motive. The goal of that performance, the way you make money, is the art of Baiting.

Making good bait is difficult. Grifting was a different game in the early days of the internet. You had to be provocative enough to bait people into paying attention (positive or negative!), but not so provocative that you folded over into self parody. But I think the algorithmization of social media has changed how this game has played somewhat.

Every seen this guy?

He goes by DateRightStuff on tiktok. He is a master of producing bait. Every video is some shit like "when homeless people ask for money, I like to give them fake Hollywood money. That way when they go to try and use the money, they get arrested."

Clearly made-up nonsense. He doesnt actually do that in real life. But it is a story that gestures towards a conservative base, while leaving himself wiiiiiiide open to dunks from the left. Because you gotta remember, he makes money from every comment, every stitch, every reaction.

Every half-baked snarky dunk is another triggered lib for his audience to laugh at. Dunks keep him relevant in the algorithm! This is important, because the way DateRightStuff makes money is by hawking his "conservative dating app." His entire tiktok account is essentially one giant marketing campaign for this app. It is bait-based advertising, and every day literally thousands of people fall for it.

But DateRightStuff is especially good at this. Mainting this level of performance is exhausting, no matter how profitable it may be. It requires an in-depth understanding of the social space and no small amount of creativity. It is a careful balancing act, constantly making small adjustments to an internet persona to keep the money flowing in.

Many grifters fail because they are strange. They have strange ideas about the world, and have trouble maintaining the level of objectivity that makes guys like DateRightStuff so effective.

I dont think grifters really "go insane" per se. (I'm sure some do.) I think they lose control of the balancing act. They press too hard in the wrong direction, get into the wrong beef, or fail to capitalize on some new social trend, and lose the attention they need. There can be a period of attempting to claw back that attention with increasingly ridiculous stunts. From the outside, this looks like they are going nuts.

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I took my little brother (autistic, mostly non verbal) out and he was using his voice keyboard to tell me something, and this little boy (maybe 4 or 5?) heard him and asked me "Is he a robot??" I tried to explain to him that no, he isn't a robot, he just communicates differently, but my darling brother was in the background max volume "I am robot I am robot I am robot I am robot"

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You're obsessed with the rotting bloated corpse. It's like your Jungkook. Embarassing!

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obscurity is definitely in my top 10 things to languish in

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I'm beginning to think that making visibly corrupt weapons contractors a load baring pillar of our economy might not have been a great idea.

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they're letting just anybody order a happy meal nowadays

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I took my little brother (autistic, mostly non verbal) out and he was using his voice keyboard to tell me something, and this little boy (maybe 4 or 5?) heard him and asked me "Is he a robot??" I tried to explain to him that no, he isn't a robot, he just communicates differently, but my darling brother was in the background max volume "I am robot I am robot I am robot I am robot"

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A strawberry used to peel men with a single foppish motion of the wrist

*lich voice* FALL