Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

[82_28]

Sorta interesting article here:

Why millennials and Gen Z love "Friends"

Save for Rachel and brother-sister duo Ross and Monica (who all grew up together) and Chandler (originally a friend of Ross) these are folks who probably would not have befriended one another organically in 2019, or even 2009.

They don’t work at the same places or share the same general affinities, save for the one they hold for each other. And while it’s true that Joey met Chandler by way of a roommate-seeking ad (as did Phoebe with Monica, apparently?) these situations generally do not result in a six-person roommate coffee house klatch.

“Friends” is a window into an anachronistic existence where people have the time and inclination to hang out and chat at a coffee shop. What’s more, even the extras are doing some version of that. Does Central Perk have wifi? What’s wifi, anyway?

Another snip:

Basically, then, to a person growing up in a post-9/11 world where withdrawing from interpersonal contract with loved ones and strangers alike is all too easy, “Friends” promotes a version of independent life in the best light possible. From The Rembrandt’s comforting theme song assuring us that our friends will always be there for us, to the bouncy end credits, it gently guides the young and confused past the many checkpoints of striking out solo for the first time. It's Waze, only for #adulting.

https://www.salon.com/2019/09/20/why-mi ... e-friends/

[coffin_dodger]

82_28 said

Sorta interesting article

In what way? From the perspective that it strikes a chord with you as being true and valid, or that it's parroting a press release written by the company that produced 'Friends' and was sent to all mainstream media outlets for them to publish verbatim - trying to drum up demand for a new batch of re-run fees? The BBC 'news' site had this on their front page last week.

[Elvis]

Salon wrote:

“Friends” stories have been flooding our news feeds for weeks now as publications mark the 25th anniversary of the series debut with character examinations, biographical glimpses into the writers’ rooms and nostalgic commentary about the show’s enduring appeal.

I've never seen "Friends" myself, but I understand there's some nostalgia for it. "Culture section" writers gotta write something. Me, I like "Green Acres." Time stopped for me in 1974. I'm living in the future. Cool!

[JackRiddler]

Alienation and loneliness and the industries that offer temporary remedies have been among capitalism's best-known features for centuries. Fake timelessness, conviviality and community have been features of entertainments and group rituals (including mass religious and national observances) since, ha, forever. TV sitcoms have always centered on improbably stable ensembles of relatives and friends repeating the same routines every day in a magical and safe space protected from whatever reality is depicted. In the late years of audiences hostage to network television, Friends stripped the Seinfeld formula of whatever was funny or ethnic and pitched it to a smaller audience for a few seasons. Today it serves only to remind us that there are worse things than The Big Bang Theory, which took over the same niche with more success. If it has any importance, then as a propaganda vehicle for advancing the deculturation of New York City.

[lucky]

82_28 said

Sorta interesting article

In what way? From the perspective that it strikes a chord with you as being true and valid, or that it's parroting a press release written by the company that produced 'Friends' and was sent to all mainstream media outlets for them to publish verbatim - trying to drum up demand for a new batch of re-run fees? The BBC 'news' site had this on their front page last week.

Not even shown on the BBC, channel 4 I think

[kelley]

Jack:

"Alienation and loneliness and the industries that offer temporary remedies have been among capitalism's best-known features for centuries. Fake timelessness, conviviality and community have been features of entertainments and group rituals (including mass religious and national observances) since, ha, forever. TV sitcoms have always centered on improbably stable ensembles of relatives and friends repeating the same routines every day in a magical and safe space protected from whatever reality is depicted. In the late years of audiences hostage to network television, Friends stripped the Seinfeld formula of whatever was funny or ethnic and pitched it to a smaller audience for a few seasons. Today it serves only to remind us that there are worse things than The Big Bang Theory, which took over the same niche with more success. If it has any importance, then as a propaganda vehicle for advancing the deculturation of New York City."


These words are rather striking given the recent predicament in NYC (and elsewhere as well).

There's something to be recalled about Mark Fisher's primary thesis, to wit: It's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.

Still the crux, imo, If exacerbated 'for clarity' these past few months.

Possibly stepping out for a sandwich around the corner this holiday, as restrictions stumble towards easing, but shit still ain't no picnic.

Stay well, RI.

[thrulookingglass]

In an acrimonious fit, I made an ignorant decision to reclaim my reckless, hapless life of cheeseburgers, beer, and blood soaked flag waving 'cause no one is gonna take away this Trumpian nation of bigots and capitalist imbeciles God given right to "freedumz". Can I haz infantilism.

[kelley]

good answer

tremendous answer

tremendous

tremendous holiday

beautiful

very tremendous beauty

it's tremendous

beautiful

enjoy the beautiful hamberder

tremendous

etc

[dada]

I would suggest that historical time itself is "time in retard." Like a musical retard, a slowing down of eternity. But as eternity neither slows down nor speeds up, this retard creates a split. So now we have two times, eternity and retarded eternity.

Time in retard is time eternally in retard, it can never "catch up" to eternal time. Speeding up the tempo does not change the state of retard. In relation to eternal time, this time is eternally retarded.

Therefore time at a stop is a total retard, time totally retarded.

From the perspective of eternity, all time in retard is totally retarded, though. Thus, time at a stop presents us with an opportunity. Accepting it leads to a resolution of the split between the two times. Rejecting it is a falling back again, into retarded eternity.

And here we are, back again. Time has stopped, and yet the sun continues to rise and set. Of course, we know it doesn't actually rise and set, the earth turns around the sun. But we can still depend on the appearance of the sun's rising and setting, set our watches by it and etc.

[kelley]

The Spinning Beach Ball of Death

The spinning wait cursor or spinning disc pointer — where your mouse pointer becomes the rotating color wheel or "spinning beach ball"— generally indicates that your Mac® is engaged in a processor-intensive activity. For example, applying a Gaussian blur to an image in Adobe® Photoshop® is a processor-intensive activity.

In most cases, the "beach ball" disappears within several seconds. However, there are cases when the "beach ball" spins protractedly, a condition colloquially known as "The Spinning Beach Ball of Death" (SBBOD).

[JackRiddler]

thanks all, thanks kelley.

Total tangent, but it must mean something that TV Tropes is one of this universe's most elaborate, extensive and in many ways sophisticated wiki sites.

[...]

Occasionally Hand Waved by saying that the characters aren't really stopping time, they're just speeding up themselves (and their minds) to a point where everything else seems stopped. To emphasize this, sometimes you'll get a shot of something that should move really quickly, like the wings of a hummingbird, moving very slowly. This means that the illusion of time standing still can be achieved with enough raw Super Speed. Sometimes it goes the other way, with time manipulation being the explanation for a character's Super Speed. Of course, if the character is really going that much more quickly than everything else, he would need lots of Required Secondary Powers to move normally.

More rarely Hand Waved or semi-justified if the character's power behaves like a personal Alcubierre Drive, allowing time to progress normally within a set radius around the character while it has stopped or slowed for the rest of the world. This also gives an excuse to have projectiles fired or thrown by a character stop in midflight at the edge of the zone of normal time.

Sometimes the characters who are still moving will be able to change the frozen world around them (leading to a Time-Freeze Trolling Spree if they're feeling naughty); other times, anything frozen is virtually untouchable.

Tends to require (often contrived) reasons for the character not being able to win every fight he ever participates in... which, depending on how Super his Speed really is, could be every single fight in a city, country, or planet. Usually doesn't offer any reason whatsoever for the character being able to move through and breathe time-frozen air, see despite the time-frozen light, etc.

[...]

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ ... tandsStill

[dada]

Total tangent, but it must mean something that TV Tropes is one of this universe's most elaborate, extensive and in many ways sophisticated wiki sites.

Other than that fans can love things, alot?

--

A new speculation: Is depersonalization the reason why socially observable time has stopped. You have your time, I have my time. One can crawl, while the other flies. This personalization can be a personification, an epiphanic revelation of the angel of Time, say. If you're one of the unfortunates without an angel, your time may not be your own. It is still your time, but in service to iblis, ahriman, "the powers that be," or whichever master suits your fancy. It must be your personalized time to begin with, or you couldn't be robbed of it. Logically speaking.

But when we're discussing socially observable time, we're talking about a depersonalized time, our time, a time we share. No one's time in particular.

So we might say time stops when it is socially observable, the reason time stops is because it is socially observable. Or, socially observable time may have simply dissolved. It would look like it had stopped if that were the case.

[JackRiddler]

Total tangent, but it must mean something that TV Tropes is one of this universe's most elaborate, extensive and in many ways sophisticated wiki sites.

Other than that fans can love things, alot?

There's more to it than that. It wouldn't matter if the participants weren't even interested in most of the content they cite as examples. It's more to the point that obsessives can systematize things, and love doing that, or that systematizing observers acquire a sense of power over universes (fictional or "real") by the process of systematization.

[Iamwhomiam]

thanks all, thanks kelley.

Total tangent, but it must mean something that TV Tropes is one of this universe's most elaborate, extensive and in many ways sophisticated wiki sites.

[...]

Occasionally Hand Waved by saying that the characters aren't really stopping time, they're just speeding up themselves (and their minds) to a point where everything else seems stopped. To emphasize this, sometimes you'll get a shot of something that should move really quickly, like the wings of a hummingbird, moving very slowly. This means that the illusion of time standing still can be achieved with enough raw Super Speed. Sometimes it goes the other way, with time manipulation being the explanation for a character's Super Speed. Of course, if the character is really going that much more quickly than everything else, he would need lots of Required Secondary Powers to move normally.

More rarely Hand Waved or semi-justified if the character's power behaves like a personal Alcubierre Drive, allowing time to progress normally within a set radius around the character while it has stopped or slowed for the rest of the world. This also gives an excuse to have projectiles fired or thrown by a character stop in midflight at the edge of the zone of normal time.

Sometimes the characters who are still moving will be able to change the frozen world around them (leading to a Time-Freeze Trolling Spree if they're feeling naughty); other times, anything frozen is virtually untouchable.

Tends to require (often contrived) reasons for the character not being able to win every fight he ever participates in... which, depending on how Super his Speed really is, could be every single fight in a city, country, or planet. Usually doesn't offer any reason whatsoever for the character being able to move through and breathe time-frozen air, see despite the time-frozen light, etc.

[...]

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ ... tandsStill

I wonder if the guy who authored that piece knows the fuckers who stole Dolly's braces.

[8bitagent]

This and the other older "hauntology" thread on a similar theme have been some of my favorite threads on RI. Even recently a friend called me up and said how odd it is that there's such a stark visual difference in film every decade til you get to the 2000s. The line in Arcade Fire's The Suburbs or Talking Heads Nothing But Flowers about abandoned shopping malls seems more eerily appropriate now more than ever.

Watching all that's going on tonight with Elon Musk's Space X seemingly taking over NASA, China on the verge of taking Hong Kong out of any pretense of democracy, the Covid mass death sweeping latin America...its all been surreal.

But this clip from tonight of the mass youth lead protest in Minneapolis, with how massive and diverse it is, the shift in urgency(even fashion) and how people now get how rotten the entire system is... I get the sense that the 2020's are finally shifting quickly from the past in every possible way(as much as history repeats itself in this unending Overlook Hotel loop of humanity)