Oh fuck it's that time of year where white people think that "you've heard of elf on the shelf, but have you heard of <picture>" memes are still funny.

"In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes", said Andy Warhol, or something like that. Anyway, 15 minutes of fame, we all know the deal.

I found this phrase rattling around loose in my brain recently, and rather than give it the standard tip of the hat "OMG social media Andy SO TRUE" and carry on, I thought okay, so let's run some back-of-the-cerebrum numbers on that.

Assuming a standard human lifetime of 80 years, let's say you spend a third of your time sleeping, a third of your time attending your own personal business, and a third of your time doing stuff that involves paying attention to strangers in a way that might contribute to somebody being famous. That gives you around one million fifteen minuteses to distribute among the famous as you see fit. Reciprocally, that would mean the fair amount of attention you should expect to receive for your 15 minutes is one million people watching you.

Anybody who gets more than that, you're getting more than the average amount of attention. People are looking at you doing your thing more than you are looking at other people doing their thing. The whole world can't watch everyone for fifteen minutes - there isn't time.

You can adjust it for different time scales - one hour of fame for 250k people. Thirty seconds of fame for 30 million people. You could exceed a lifetime's worth of attention with a ten second Superbowl ad. Four people in a band playing a thousand hours of gigs for a thousand people. Or ten hours of recorded music by a solo artis, listened to ten times each by 2500 people.

The maths is all completely stupid of course, but it might give some sense of perspective to anybody who feels like the world hasn't given them enough attention. There's only so much to go around.

enframed wrote: Sat Nov 11, 2023 5:53 pm play the billy squier.

from Wikipedia:

"In 1985, Squier hired a helicopter from the Prince of Nepal and offered $10,000 in cash to two helicopter pilots to land him on the summit of Mount Everest. They turned him down, saying that it was too dangerous.[23]"


Also, what if VanHalen had become VanSquier instead of VanHagar ? I think Billy's semi-glam thing would have been much more logical after DLR than whatever Sammy brought to the group.

Is it just me or does this seem like an extremely misprioritized direction of effort? 72 tracks of audio for something to use in a nature documentary?

Welfare state conservatives are the most disgusting people.

This Foo Fighters "Under You" is a decent Mascis rip-off.

“I am so tired….” Zzzzz….

My next band is gonna be called Alt-Rock Legends. So that way when they re-issue our records on 3-sided 180gsm colored vinyl with chipboard sleeve and 130 page book, they can write about "alt-rock legends Alt-Rock Legends legendary alt-rock masterpiece."

There really ought to be a Wikipedia page heading that goes something along the lines of "the dumbass who wrote this article forgot to include pictures."

I love my 82 year old father, but he came to thanksgiving with a cold, proceeded to cough all around my house for 3 days, then left. Now I'm sick.

i guess it is fair. We did give him Covid last year, and the flu the year before that. Still pissed at him, though.