Straight Fyre for Two Hours, But With Mechs

#1

'Sup fam, the Waypointers are on their way to Fyre to check out the hottest new music festival on Pablo Escobar's private island! Seems like it's going to be lit! The top models and musical acts in the world (Blink-182 is supposed to be there!) in a tropical paradise? With no infrastructure for a festival? Or accommodations for thousands of important guests like us? Count us all the way in!

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/panpx7/straight-fyre-for-two-hours-but-with-mechs
#2

Every time Austin starts talking about Gundam I just want him to keep going. Hopefully there will be more of this in the Evangelion Be Kind and Re Watch it when it comes out. Maybe he should write a book or several long form essays about Gundam. I would be there for that 100%.

My wife asked me what Gundam was about when I was re-watching Unicorn recently. I had a good long think, and after a long pause I said “Big picture it’s always about a special teen who pilots a special robot suit.” That seemed to satisfy her.

Re: Length of pods. The length is awesome. Especially for the Friday episode. It gives me the opportunity to listen over the course of the weekend as I am doing chores, walking my dog, etc.

Keep up the great work.

#3

So RE: nailed it, have the people in the second season really seen the first season? It looked like the first season had promo clips from bad stuff made in the second season (the snake cake I think). I got the impression they were filmed as 1 season and aired as 2.

#4

That was my impression as well – I feel like I saw the unicorn cake from s2 in the first-season intro when I first watched it months ago.

#5

So I watched the Netflix Fyre documentary the day it came it came out, and MAN. I remember the schadenfreude of watching it all go down on Twitter - ha ha, rich kids go to festival on beautiful island, except it’s not and it’s terrible - but the documentary makes the whole thing really sad in a way you never expect.

Yoga Bro knows so early and so definitively it’s fucked, and they rattle on. The minor contractors brought in go “yo guys this is a terrible idea” and they just thank them for their time and bring in someone else. Literally every element is being mismanaged, from the guy doing bookings at an inflated cost with just a random set of acts because he is literally the last person who should be doing the booking, the easily sorted accommodation issue that just goes to shit because hey nobody thought that they’d need to actually deliver on what they promised, and the catering which is literally “hey lady make sure they don’t die” and the poor fucking dude who believes in these guys so much he is literally willing to go down for them to have water.

And then they start talking to festival goers, and you lose all pity. Whiny McAscotwearer who pretty much says “Blink 182 pulling out was a giant red flag but I ignored it because I don’t know what a Blink 182 is” before filing a personal lawsuit through a very famous attorney to make sure he’s not the one who suffers. Asshole Jock Influencer who says “man it was bad - so we decided to make it worse by stealing what we could and destroying or pissing on what we couldn’t grab”. All the social media floosies whining because it’s not a private jet rather than thinking “if they can’t deliver on this what else isn’t real?” because fuck it it’ll be good for presence and exposure no matter what.

By the end it was clear to me that the people who got scammed didn’t care, because 1. money = power and that means I’ll get back what’s mine, 2. this was all to say they were there anyway, and they sure can still say that, 3. this was a giant Rich Kids of Instagram meet-up where everyone wanted to be seen at the most exclusive music festival, listen to zero bands, but instead hopefully hang out with famous models and rich people to brag about later - in other words, Fyre was always about LinkedIn for rich people and bragging rights anyway.

And the people who actually suffered would totally have gone unnoticed, if not for all this. All the labourers and caterers who got scammed, hard, and were never going to be compensated. The loss of savings, possible financial ruin and utter havoc caused to a small relatively poor community by some rich kid scammers looking to fleece some other rich kids by selling them an obvious lie and pretending they could ever deliver on what is essentially Ja Rule getting to fuck about in the Caribbean on someone else’s money while ordering models to do whatever he wants in a way that makes his utter lack of punishment for it all - and worse, still getting to do what was their plan all along with a different business partner - all the worse. I mean, he literally went to an island, dicked about with a load of supremely expensive stuff - yachts, drones, sea planes, anything he wanted - while liberally draped in famous models. To sell a festival that was never a festival, to fund an app that was just another way to profit from rich people wanting to get their own way by showing money = power.

And at the end of it all, there he is, Dudebro McOverconfident, running a new scam while on bail for his last scam going up. Using the email and cell number list from that very scam. To try fleece the same people all over again. With no sense of shame. While being filmed doing it, and not caring. Because money is power, and he’ll wield both to never suffer.

Being in the UK, I still haven’t seen the other documentary. I don’t think I want to. This was enough, I think.

#6

I really enjoyed this episode a lot! I did notice something odd thought with this episode and the last couple of podcasts that have come out. Occasionally the audio will speed up for a second. This happened at around 1:34:42 of this podcast. I thought I would let you know just in case you weren’t aware of this happening.

#7

About Chuck Schumer’s press secretary appearing Netflix’s Fyre doc…

My partner works on the hill and after all those twists and turns in the doc, we were flabbergasted to see someone politically connected suddenly show up. So we asked around Schumer’s DC comm shop to see if anyone knew him.

Turns out he’s a mid-level staffer from the state office in NY (fancy titles like “press secretary” are largely meaningless for congressional staffers). My guess is that McFlarland was groping for “the best” PR people to help rebuild his image and dipped into the public sector.

That being said, working for a prominent public figure and taking a meeting with an infamous fraudster is a quick way to start your path to a new career.

Also, they kind of burned him. He can be heard clearly asking the camera no to include him in the doc because of who he works for, and that bottom third that comes up when he’s on screen completely puts him on blast. Get it in writing, my guy!

#8

That guy who was like “we didn’t want anybody in the tents around us so we just went around pissing on everything nearby”…That was one of the moments where I just absolutely could not process what I was hearing. Like, I have no concept of being a human being whose thought process worked like that.

#9

Who is to say he hasn’t? I wrote a number of undergrad essays on Anime relating to literary theory, I bet that to get where Austin is in terms of education he has an paper or two about Gundam.

I would pay money to be able to sit in lectures or seminars just to be able to talk intelligently with folks like (and specifically Austin) about anime, so take that for what it’s worth.

#10

I want to preface this by saying I have a lot of indirect and hands-on experience dealing with pain management care from a patient perspective, including the literal pain management departments and pain management doctors themselves.

The thing about the dental surgeon’s ethos on pain management is that this ethos, of tackling the cause of the pain rather than treating the symptom is woefully, dangerously rare. I have yearned for physicians who strictly adhere to this ethos for years, and, of roughly a dozen, I’ve encountered, perhaps, one. It is so uncommon that treatments that fall under this model are borderline experimental. Of course, as far as health insurers are concerned, they ARE experimental. Besides (some) physical therapy, they are often not covered, and worse, physicians are rarely even aware of them. Pain medication is no problem, though (surprise surprise!)

All this to say that his ethos is the cutting-edge (hopefully the future) of pain management. Unfortunately, he is not a fucking pain management specialist, and only deals with acute conditions, not the chronic ones to which his ethos applies. For his patients, the pain is inevitably going to go away, with or without his intervention; it’s just a matter of being empathetic, and making that ride endurable.

The methodology is not wrong, but his application of it (and the field in which he attempts to apply it) absolutely the fuck are.

#11

Out of curiosity (and you hint at this in the post), is this type of ethos more applicable for folks with chronic conditions for whom this kind of pain management approach is different than the (usually) short-term issue that arises from dental work?

I know woefully little about this so just wanted to tap your view on this.

#12

Yeah so to clarify, pain management departments generally deal with chronic conditions. My back hurts, I have migraines, I have a neural condition, etc. Many times, chronic pain is treated at the symptom level: here’s a opioid for your back pain, for example, or here’s a drug to make your migraines endurable when they inevitably happen. The problem is that, often, chronic pain is the result of a treatable condition elsewhere in the bodily system: you have back pain because you sit like a slug, or because you’re depressed, or your core is weak and you’re not supporting yourself correctly.

In these cases, treating the cause treats the symptom. Treating the cause in this way is massively beneficial to the patient for a variety of reasons: no drug dependencies, no side effects from those drugs, and of course, the symptoms are weakened or stopped altogether. Unfortunately, symptom treatment is extremely common. I can’t base this on any data, but anecdotally, it appears to be the most common treatment method by a landslide.

What this means is you have people (who VERY OFTEN have solvable problems) addicted to opioids or on powerful medications whose side effects are fucking profound, and the doctors literally have no endgame. This addiction, these side effects - this is just your life now, and no one is incentivized to improve it for you, the patient. Ideally, you’d be on no medications, and not have these problems, but your treatment is not geared towards that, and so no improvement is made, or expected to be made.

It is also worth mentioning that there appears to be evidence that opioids can wholly create or exacerbate pain in people addicted to them, thereby ‘necessitating’ dosage increases or continued dependency. Pain management specialists have described this to me as a result of new neural pathways for that pain growing in strength, like a frequently-revisited memory, in combination with the reward center firing off. Again, anecdotally, my experience corroborates this 100%.

Essentially, chronic pain management currently appears to be dominated by acute pain management treatment methodology, which leaves the patient beleaguered by side effects (I can’t stress enough how crippling these can be), sometimes addicted, and in spite of these prescriptions, still in pain.

(and of course, addendum to say that some conditions can only be treated at the symptom level, and that medications are not themselves bad.)