“It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Defend the Great Seal, Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot Skywalkers!

Joy!

I think the joke is how a pest exterminator is being called on an extinct species. Play on the mutual concept of extinction.

All the Unity game engine self-destruction choices got to them ;)

It’s already like that here, friend.

Lemmy didn't take off until well into May 2023, despite being online and open source for over 4 years. The quantity of posts, communities, comments was very small for 4 years online.

Then everyone flocked out of hate and anger of an API money matter with Reddit.Then crowds got hate-filled and angry when Threads was launched by Meta/Instagram/Facebook on July 5. And crowds became hate-filled and angry over Elon Musk rename of Twitter to X on July 23.

Outside big growth in memes and shitposts, there haven't been big numbers of people flocking here out of organic goodness on organized topics. It has largely been a HiveMind of hate as a motivation to come here since May.

Some good seeds have been planted since May, but the atmosphere of hate motivates change is pretty much Mob Mentality / reactionary.

When cross-posted >= 2, should go to a dedicated page like Reddit has had for a very long time... and allow easy viewing of who posted, date, number of comments, date of last comment, votes, etc.

A joke that would mostly work on pre-digital camera generations.... those odd night sightings that would now be social media material.

That's why I linked the hot dog eating contest, which is a drag race

And the equal portions, starting gun, and ready to dive in pose implies that they are having a speed contest, a classic kind of American thing like 1972 onward hot dog eating contest, a race of 10 minutes (they have adjusted the minutes allowed, but time is the key to the race).

my first impression is it's a play on unity, that they are already going, but he is saying start whenever he wants to? Still, I can't really tell if they are in motion already... and he is at the front. So I'm confused.

EDIT: 5 months ago on Reddit, someone gave a better answer when I went looking on Google Search: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheFarSide/comments/124clhy/can_anyone_explain_this_gary_larson_cartoon/

It invokes for me the 1993 lecture from Rick Roderick about society... In any case, it starts with the body of the condemned, and the next chapter is about the spectacle of the scaffold and all of the ritual that goes along with these kind of ceremonies. When they are going to do this, you can imagine the streets of Paris, they are all abuzz, there is the spectacle, the scaffold. There are vendors, there are people that write little pamphlets about the executed. I mean, we have an American analogy to that, that’s like, you know, the little Billy the Kid pamphlets that were printed up in the early west about our great criminals and so on. Foucault asks this very interesting question. What was it that fuelled the interest in the criminal? Why was the criminal the star of this production, this scaffold, the spectacle of the scaffold? He’s the star! Well, the crowds became unruly because in many cases the courage of the criminal would become the legend of the spectacle. The courage, the tenacity and the bravery of the criminal would become the story. Well, reformers decided that this was not a healthy mode of punishment. Foucault cynically decides that perhaps it was not considered healthy because the wrong people were the stars of the show, not because it was too barbaric, and I think that that’s not only a cynical guess but he gives some evidence that that’s the case.