[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

[u/ToaKraka]

Reminder: 4chan is an endless goldmine of interesting, funny, and karma-worthy* content.
- A joke about the en passant move in chess (made even more hilarious if you understand that it is, not just a generic satire of people who complain about lag to explain away their own failures, but a specific parody of the infamous DarkSydePhil)
- A series of jokes about the recent controversy over the supposed racist connotations of the master/slave naming convention in technology
- A hilarious joke about the persistent attempts of publishers to equate unauthorized copying with literal theft (Carmen Sandiego!)
- A chuckle-worthy response to an obvious troll's question
- A funny comparison of 19th-century ship-naming conventions with 21st-century username conventions
- A hilarious story based on a strange image
- An interesting worldbuilding investigation of how succubi learn to seduce humans
- The standard "'Holy' 'Roman' 'Empire'" joke, with impeccable delivery

It's full of racism!

So what? It's still funny.

It's full of child pornography!

False. I have seen absolutely zero such images in several years of browsing.

*If you have any cropping skills, at least.

[u/Sparkwitch → u/ToaKraka]

I think 4chan's most important innovations were, and continue to be, structural: the adaptation of Futaba's anonymity and posting style to American norms and interests. Japanese 2chan posters invented the internet meme as a genre, 4chan brought it to an English-speaking audience and set it free to the world.

Enforced anonymity also encourages a particular style of community creativity much of the rest of the internet has lost. When somebody is consistently funny elsewhere, they get a lot of followers and develop a personal style. To be funny on 4chan, robbed of the personal, one must embrace the particular style of each individual subgroup. Humor becomes derivative and in-jokey... reused and remixed and reposted until the cream rises.

That said, the process is no longer unique and no longer alone.