It’s weird when NPR listeners will claim continuity with hippies, and even weirder when they’ll define this axis as in opposition to rednecks, because like, dude, have you ever met hippies? And have you ever met rednecks? (Have you ever met NPR listeners?)
Every fucking bar on Alberta Street, every night this week, full of fucking Australians.
Salt & Straw’s been a tourist draw for a while, but mostly Americans (haven’t overheard the line recently), now even Pine State Biscuits on a Wednesday afternoon it’s 2-3 person groups speaking in Korean, in German, in eastern european stuff I don’t even recognize.
But Australians, who knows, maybe we made the cover of Rugbyfucker Monthly.
But what’s the alternative, “the new Alberta” of Divison? Been going to Scoreboard recently (decent pinball lineup, the only Fireball I remember in town that’s for sure) and it’s a little rough out there still, people walking in circles talking to themselves on the street. But feh, is that more than one or two years worse than Alberta was when I showed up three years ago and The Nest was still open?
Went to a birthday barbecue today at 94th and south of Powell. Damn nice house on a big lot. On the other hand there’s that voice going “we can’t live here, this is juggalo country”.
LA style gang grafitti too (3-4 character tags, and I even recognize some of the ones they’re franchising off of), but a little halfassed I can tell. The dude making an effort of looking all hard in front of the local girls on his bike in his wifebeater also made an effort of looking back and pulling off to the side to let me overtake him.
So DashCon turned out to be The Arkh Project: Live?
That’s charming.
Must suck to be Malaysia Airlines’ insurer this year.
Signed up to public vulnerability on the assumption there’d be comfort in return but it’s like “nope, what did you think patriarchy was for, stupid punk”.
1962 republic of andolucia manual on demonic constructs
The infographic explanation on how demons work in my story is finally done! @_@ It’s more or less an expanded explanation of this. I worked really hard on it! hope its easy to understand!
EDIT: im gonna put some COOL DEMON FACTZ that i couldn’t fit on the graphic under the cut
Gone from hypomanic back to baseline if not depressive; sorry if you were waiting on my powerful wisdoms, I’ll try to whip something together eventually.
The most specific bumper sticker I’ve seen in a while
In LA I took a screenwriting class sequence through the UCLA Extension program. The idea was that over 2 or 3 courses you’d conceive, outline, and complete a spec script. The program has a solid industry reputation, each section’s led by a credited working writer (even successful working tv writers are only on staff one out of every two or more years of their active career).
The teacher for my first class had had a decent working career, from at least Renegade through Stargate I think, maybe sold some pilots but none produced, and brought good experience to the table - asked how working writers would do something his answer was “basically, however your showrunner wants, but for a spec, here are a few different approaches I’ve seen and what each one is best suited to.”
The guy for the second class was a pompous ass who would publicly belittle students who didn’t follow his (never actually explained) style. This arrogance wasn’t really accounted for by (but might account FOR) his one-season-and-out-on-Charmed work history. I noped out and finished the Veronica Mars spec (“Miami Vice, Principles”) on my own.
The fellow students were a mixed bag of cool. There was a stuntwoman aging out of the job who, when we pressed her to, showed off her ability to do zero-momentum bicycle kicks. There was a (black) WB programming exec who explained, upfront, that the WB had been consciously following the Fox strategy of network-building of starting with few nights of programming and building an identity as “the black network” (the “Sister, Sister” & “Living Single” eras, respectively), then as they proved themselves discarding that for a youth identity with teen soaps (“90210”/”Dawson’s Creek”).
He wasn’t cynical about this but matter-of-fact, suits are unapologetic that it’s all about money and at least TV suits take writing seriously. (Where for movies writers are the lowest man on the pole, TV is a writers’ medium, and the head writer [“showrunner”] has ultimate control of a production. If you’ve ever wondered why a great show was cancelled after a few episodes, it’s often because someone hired on the strength of their writing couldn’t herd cats or wouldn’t compromise vision enough to keep a schedule or budget.)
The way he explained it was that there was enough of an unmet demand for black-oriented programming they’d be guaranteed a survival-level audience, but given the chance anyone would prefer teen, but the specific mechanisms for this were interesting.
It’s not just that black wealth/income numbers were iffy - teenagers aren’t that rich either. More, it was that a lot of advertisers wanted a specifically young audience - Taco Bell, Mountain Dew, lifestyle brands, Noxema, superhero movies, entry-level two-door cars - but there weren’t many products with network ad budgets with a specifically black target audience. Tyler Perry movies, basically. So they were selling time on the basis of generic human viewers to generic staple products, only with a smaller (and limited) audience than the big nets, with a reverse economy of scale where the smaller the audience the less power they had to negotiate price per 1000 impressions.
On top of that a black audience is harder to segment, which is where the best money is - Nielsen numbers were good enough for say black male 18-49, but when you get down to say black female 18-34, no kids, income 30k-60k, the sample size is small enough to push up the margin of error, and advertisers (with the aforementioned whip hand) would bid on the least charitable interpretation.
If anything, relative black poverty was the only thing that made black-targeted programming viable at all, because there were advertisers (marginal finance, discount brands & stores, career training, &ct) that specifically wanted a poor audience.
A+ to the makeup/hair stylists on those Wendy’s commercials, Red’s always been a very good poor man’s Alyson Hannigan and I just saw one with an excellent poor man’s Aubrey Plaza.
The Scotsman asked what was up with “African-American” as distinct from incidentally African “American” and I was like, “Ah, you want to understand race in America? First, you must learn everything.”
There are three classic topics in American history and they go
1. Race, huh?
2. Why no socialism?
3. The frontier, huh?
and basically the answer to any of those is the other two
(He was like “but after three generations they should be just American” and I was like “how long have your ancestors been British and you’re still Scottish” and he was like, seriously affronted, but that was the point)
Ancient Apocalypse films use the past to project a reactionary present into the future.
When we think apocalypse, we tend to think of the future. Accordingly, the apocalypse seems to show up on film only in the realm of sci-fi or, occasionally horror. But while every single hair on the rotting scalp of zombie cinema has been analyzed under bloodstained microscopes, a new subgenre has been emerging that wields the potent thought of the end of the world to even more reactionary ends. It uses the trope of apocalypse to project current power into the future by situating catastrophe and its overcoming in the past. These movies give voice to the blind hatred of the disgruntled agents of collapsing empire.
These films span a number of generic registers, from animated kid’s movie to big-budget summer production. You’ve probably seen one: 300, Noah, Gladiator, The Croods, Centurion, etc. These are the Ancient Apocalypse films, and they have opened up whole cinematic territories for a far-right theory of terminal crisis to play in.
So when they say “Thor is now a girl”, do they mean in the “The Flash is now Wally West” sense, the “Spider-Man is now Ben Reilly” sense, the “Spider-Man is now Miles Morales” sense, or the “Superman is now four people including John Henry and a robot” sense?
American nativist anti-UN sensibility should be seen in continuity with the historic American nativist anti-Papist sensibility.
Mind that the Roman Catholic Church as a historical institution included not just the ceremonial corps of a particular religious memeplex but a transnational social welfare and education system that operated in coalition with or to exclusion of host nations, a forum for and arbiter of international diplomacy, and the smiling front of great powers’ colonial apparatuses.
And also a secular, territorial, internally elective empire in its own right, that tended to pursue its own interests by forming the core of multinational military coalitions and using its mythology of universal human brotherhood, as promulgated through that embedded welfare/education apparatus and its affiliates, to constrain sovereigns through internal political pressure.
That cartoon of priests as alligators crawling from the ocean menacingly towards little children was about the fear that the church establishing a role in American education represented a move to capture American youth by, and in the interests of, an overseas and politically unaccountable sovereign.
Because that is exactly what it did represent, because that is exactly what that kind of institution will do if you let it.
The American mythos has drifted far enough from the Germanic Protestant one to make it hard to understand how having an official state church with the monarch as head could be taken as a proud symbol of freedom and independence.
So I guess Homestuck is our Infinite Jest. Our? Their. Their? Our. Not mine, mine was Infinite Jest
Something not immediately obvious about the Dos Equis “World’s Most Interesting Man” ads is that as varied as his highlight reel is, his modal experience is going to bars and drinking mid-range beer with randoms. That’s something to remember about adventurer types.
