You people talking about Reddit motivated me to explore just a little (what is "sm" by the way?), which landed me on Not the Onion
https://old.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/
There I learned that scammers are impersonating psychics. People looking to spend money to get advice from a genuine psychic or astrologer are being scammed by people pretending to be those psychics. So they end up sending money to people without psychic abilities or astrological training who end up giving them advice instead. One can only imagine the negative repercussions.
The whole article reads sort of like that. And maybe you do not need to be a psychic to predict that it is in the.... LA Times
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-30/astrologers-psychics-are-being-impersonated-on-instagram
>sm
social media
I'm pretty sure most of us would call psychics are a subset of scammers. As a young man I use to do palm reading, not because I believed in it, but because it was a great way to get up close and personal with young women. Anyway, the lines all had rules and it was pretty easy to apply, just a basic algorithm of nonsense. About half of my future dates in the college days started out that way. Weird thing though, many people took it very seriously. A mother of a friend of mine mentioned to someone decades later that I was a palm reader. I told her that they are just folds in the skin but she refused to not believe. Magical thinking is really stubborn.
I have a few friends way way into astrology and other occult things. I'm not into it, but whatever.
What I loved about that article is the overall tone. It sounds so much like satire. I remember an interview with the guy who made the movie Idiocracy. He said there's no room for satire anymore because "serious" people are saying all the things he would normally have written as satire.
So quotes like...
QuotePremo, who teaches yoga in Sacramento, was surprised to hear from Daashuur directly — she'd only been following her for about a week — but she wrote back that she was planning to reach out to the medium soon. She had a big project coming up and could use some divine guidance.
QuoteMarcella Kroll an artist, tarot deck creator and reader, agreed. "I've worked super hard to legitimize my work," she said. "I do everything to be on the up and up. I pay all my taxes, I have my certificates. This doesn't help."
.
QuoteSanyu Nagenda, who works under the name Sanyu Estelle as a soothsayer, tarot reader and word witch, said one of her clients sent $500 to someone impersonating her on Instagram. In return the client received a 15-minute video of a burning candle. Nagenda was appalled. "I don't even have a $500 reading option on my site," she said. "And if I did, it would certainly be more than 15 minutes."... "I'm particularly offended because I am a soothsayer — my business is the truth," she said.
"My business is the truth." I'm going to use that line from now on.
One of the reasons I quit watching TV:
Miss Cleo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Cleo
>> word witch
I'd like to know more about what that entails. 8)
>> word witch
I wondered if that might catch your eye. I wondered about that too. I have a longstanding quip though: I don't believe in magic words.
A friend of a friend once worked on the Psychic Hotline. She did not consider herself a psychic, but she was desperate for money and they were hiring. She said it was arduous. She couldn't take it.
Typical calls would go like this:
Caller: "My boyfriend gets drunk and beats me. I'm trying to decide whether to leave him. Can we do a Tarot reading."
Jane: "Let me just see what the cards say. Oh, 12 of Cups. Leave him."
Lots of people just looking for really simple life advice. Lots of people wanting to know whether their husband was going to die of cancer. That sort of thing. It quickly wore her out emotionally.
Quote from: rcjordan on December 01, 2021, 10:31:31 PM
>sm
social media
Shows how out of the loop I am. In the marketing conversations I have, it's usually SoMe or sometimes, confusingly, "some".