waytoomuchportland:

SE 7th / Salmon

ok Michael Sam wasn’t exceptional enough to make a lineup

which means there’s no ~declared~ dudes who like dudes in the NFL

oh no gay dudes might see you naked in the locker room

man I bet girl athletes never have to hahahahahaha wusses

but come on, play along, make some eyes, coordinate some subtext in press conferences DO YOU KNOW how much chick fans would gobble up your jerseys learn from Hollywood

but would you even make any money off of sales from your particular jerseys hmm NFLPA hmmm

~|~ structural inceeeeentiiives ~|~

swampgallows:

wooliest:

?????

this is the most Acme image i’ve seen in my life

I’ve never been stuck under pressure with someone who spoke incompatible languages and had to form a pidgin. that’s one of the classic experiences to have.

Went back to the Black Pride framing shop the other day to get this old double-hemisphere map print done up.

The place, like my house, is in essentially the black neighborhood of the state, so it makes sense there’s a market for appealing to pride in your black heritage. God knows Portland’s got plenty of opportunities to flatter your white heritage - Scandanavian, Scottish, Irish, German (click that one, ‘dwracu). Hell, the retro-rustic chickens/mason jars/filament bulbs aesthetic we breathe like oxygen these days is basically the midwest-American variant. (And that’s not even to mention the black/white heritage fusion places.) Even the Portland city flag (which you see more often than the American) is a Scandanavian cross, only kinked a bit and with an outdoorsy color scheme, which is pretty much Correct.

Looking around the shop there was all sorts of Egyptian-themed jewelery and busts of Nubian princesses and Zulu motifs and whatnot, which like the Swahili lingustics of Kwanzaa are a little eyebrowable as icons for proud black Americans given that Afro-America mostly traces its lineage to slaves from Western Africa. But how different is that from proud white Australians around here posting pictures of Viking warriors and Roman ruins and Viennese architecture? As long as they don’t crawl too far up their own fantasias or try to fabricate irredentist causus belli out of it, both have my blessing.

(Of course, this Pan-Africanism does have roots in a multinational and intermittently violent campaign towards regime change which… hrm.)

Aaaaaaanyway, this all reminded me that I’ve had a few essays stewing for a while on black history in America that I had in my head to post for Black History Month, only for two years now I’ve missed it. Probably because I don’t have any schoolteachers reminding me by running lessons about peanut butter. So screw it, I’m declaring Black History Month (Orthodox), lasting from now until whenever I finish up. I’ll be tagging the stuff (plus some archives) as afamhist, riffing off the “amhist” tag I shamelessly stole from monetizeyourcat, PBUH. (Who will hopefully recover from her show trial and purge by the sad anime transmarxists before too long and eventually deliver that “Oregon as Peak Free Soil/Free Laborism” piece I’ve been looking forward to for damn near two years now.)

Anyway. First up: The Crack Era, or why gangsta rap is closer to haiku than funk.

clickholeofficial:

Stunning Map Shows Just How Much Of Iraq And Syria VICE Now Controls

riverwaltz:

jakke:

jakke:

Walking up to November’s midterm elections, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) pitched Discovery on the idea of recording them as they spent six days and nights on an island.  They swore to find common ground through compromise - I know, we’ve heard that gag before from Congress.

But in Rival Survival, which is set to premiere October 29 at 10 PM ET/PT, the two political enemies spent six days together on Eru, one of the Marshall Islands, which Discovery describes as an utterly unforgiving deserted destination where the reefs are fraught with venomous stonefish, lionfish and scorpion fish. It’s also home of the largest shark sanctuary in the world - more than 2,000,000 square miles of Black Tip Sharks, Oceanic White Tip Sharks, Grey Reef Sharks, Bull Sharks and Tiger Sharks, among others.

So we can promise you a happy ending — even if it’s only two fewer senators.

Using only their wits - and three modest items of their choosing - the senatorial adversaries foraged around seeking ways to survive. You know, like a week of fundraising.

Hey so a fairly right-wing Republican and a fairly left-wing Democrat (neither of whom is up for re-election) have shot a Survivor-type show together which they themselves pitched to the network. This is not a parody article - this is literally a reality show about two US Senators taking a week off from running the country to wander around some deserted atoll together. This would sound hackneyed and contrived it if was happening in some kind of science fiction mildly-dystopic political satire, but actually it’s a very real thing that’s happening in very real life.

I remember hearing some interview with Flake (on NPR or something?) where apparently this is an actual hobby of his. He just gets dropped on islands with nothing and survives for a week and gets picked up later. I just. 

kurawpika:

Yeah sorry I’ve been busy.

Went to the local bar, sometimes a metal bar, sometimes the metaller of the local punk bars, to me a pinball bar, and tonight it was Poikkeus’s “welcome to America” party bar.

About 3/11ths of my college classes were “learning to use Japanese” and I have ever only used it five times since, four of which were to talk to or listen to people at bars when at least one party is totally wasted.

The first was in LA on the roof of The Standard (the downtown one) when a girl I knew as a package with the DJs I knew back then was coked up and talking to two Japanese hairstylists in town for a fashion conference, I wandered into the cluster and it was “hey [kontextmaschine], do you know Japanese” as a throwaway and I braced myself and said “…yes”. She was inviting them back to party and they were politely playing along and my contribution involved forgetting how to count room numbers in the crazy Japanese counting suffix system.

The second was taking the JLPT in LA, this was back before the N-level revisions and I thiiink it was the 3 level. The course I’d been through was the scaled-down version of an immersion course that was oriented to the DLPT instead. I absolutely bombed the vocabulary and listening comprehension sections, I could feel it happening, literally the worst test I’ve ever taken. And then we got to the grammar bit and it was an absolute breeze, there was no question I ever had to think twice about (after 6//6///¾//¾ credits I knew all the structure in the Japanese language, the idea being if I was ever airdropped in Japan I’d just pick the words up). After the test was scored and normed I passed by the skin of my teeth. Got a formal certificate, and then a few months later an e-mail saying that the information of anyone who took the test might have been stolen by hackers.

My proctor was a girl from the college anime club, the one that was the one to fansub Utena, back in the genlock days. We traded looks enough to confirm and then pointedly ignored each other.

The third was at M Bar, in Los Angeles. This is not the “M Bar” on Vine that Google tells me about, M Bar was a Japanese expat piano bar semi-attached to the Knights Inn on Temple Street just northwest of downtown. M Bar was also an after-hours bar, it would keep going after the (LA? California?) closing time of 2am. Of the after-hours bars around Echo Park, it was my favorite. Alvarado House (which was the backyard of an actual house, on Alvarado just south of Sunset) would have music and girls with fox tails who would respond to your “oh, isn’t that just yiffy” with an embrace and “how long have you been in the fandom!?” and freak you out because at that point in your life you’re great at passing judgement but terrible at relating to people in the moment; M Bar would have competently mixed drinks and a dude playing piano in front of a weird vine-themed stained glass wall display.

I’d gone there a few times before I ended up staying at the Knights Inn because my place was being fumigated, and went out and came back drunk and had lost the card to open the parking lot gate so put it on the street and walked into the bar to ask if anyone could call the hotel (this was before cell phones had the internet to look numbers up). And I asked once and the (expat) bartenders and regulars couldn’t understand, and twice, and thrice, and then it was like okay, tonari no hoteru no denwabango, wakarimasu ka? And minna wa “heee” te, and tried to talk to me across a language barrier and bilateral drunkenness but I did get the number.

The fourth time was in Portland at C Bar, I just picked up on the “[letter] Bar” continuity and it’s kinda funny. The (Japanese) owner and (gaijin) husband of the iffy sushi place next door were in the pinball room playing, getting drunk, and talking shit on people, and I followed along.

{oh! somewhere between 1 and 2, maybe even before 1, I translated h-doujins, because of course I did. This was maybe in the early days of e-hentai, before even ex-hentai, maybe even before when your only source was mangakan.net/main.html; alternatingly 3 or 5 doujins each day and sometimes they’d be loli or guro or plain ugly and you were just fucked. This was back when “sexual menace” still meant tentacles and not NTR; there was less begging boys to nakadashi and more begging them not to, there’s maybe an insight there? Anyway I did some of the Sakura Taisen “Mai Hime” ones.}

Tonight I used it to interpose between the charismatic Poikkeus lead (as a social unit, I dunno as a band) and a doorman I’m friendly with to communicate the fact “one of your friends is passed out on the patio, they need to leave”.

jakke:

jakke:

When you first sign up for the service, you’ll be assigned an “Alfred.” The app shows you this person’s picture and some general information, as well as the verification for the person’s background checks. You’ll then choose a specific day for this person to deliver your goods each week, and you’ll compile a grocery list to get them started.

After that, the app works on its own in the background. You don’t really have to open the app again after you’ve signed up unless you need to make adjustments to your weekly grocery list.

Afterward, your “Alfred” will head over weekly to drop off your clean laundry, put it in the closet, drop off your household supplies, and replace supplies as needed – like putting new paper towels on a towel holder, for example. He or she will also put your groceries away and make sure the house is spotless. The idea is not only to cut into the 30 average hours per week that people spend on household chores and related tasks, but also to make using the variety of apps and services in the shared economy even easier.

So apparently the best new tech startup of the year is an app that connects you to your own personal servant. Said servant drops off your groceries and laundry and does various other chores once per week. Amazingly it only costs $25 per week so for that to be profitable after overhead you’re almost definitely looking at a sub-minimum-wage servant.

The obvious narrative here is the one about how Silicon Valley startups no longer pursue big new technology ideas. Instead they’re mostly just figure out how to offer new luxury services to highly-paid tech workers wanting to signal their status via conspicuous consumption. However there’s more going on here.

The labour market has now diverged to the point where there are plenty of people making hundreds of dollars an hour and even more people who are desperate for any form of gainful employment whatsoever. The market of performing basic tasks for very low pay for rich people is going to be a huge growth industry. Services like Uber (which treats its drivers terribly) have already done very well, and full-on domestic servitude seems like the next logical step in this direction.

that’s cute, that’s cute. Every year that goes by, the Batman canon gets that much closer to supplanting the biblical one as our cultural touchstone.

In olden days (black) Pullman porters were by convention addressed as “George” and Irish servant girls as “Bridget”.

Riffing off that. Someone was just now mooting the idea of in-house escorts as a Google perk. Well as I’ve said, a few years ago when Google started hiring non-STEM grads from top-flight colleges, disproportionately female, for customer- and public-facing phone jobs (I know a few! I’ve had sex in parallel with them back at Risley!) they were getting a trainable PR/political executive cohort aaand they were getting a status-appropriate wife pool for the programmers.

But if we’re talking about sex workers, not sex hobbyists, what Googler wants to do their fucking on-campus, really? (Don’t answer that.) So you’d pawn it off on third party facilitators, just like Google doesn’t hail you a taxi itself, you use Uber.

Like all those Korean girls offering GFE sessions from the apartment blocks at the edge of the valley here on 1- or 2-year rotations (as they say, the thing about prostitutes isn’t that they fuck you, it’s that they leave after) that you would find off myRedbook.

Which wasn’t quite Web 1.0 but certainly predates “apps”, because that’s what the “oldest” in “the oldest profession” refers to. Whenever you’re at, they were there first.

That Dog - Never Say Never (1997)

sosuperawesome:

Paper art by Morgana Wallace on Tumblr

the Scotsman is not happy about the referendum.

update: he came to offer me a cordless mouse, because he punched his laptop screen in anger and broke it

countersignal:

alternaterealitygame:

lovessevy:

the-phandom:

it gets worse

I have bipolar and I laughed.

Me too.

This is stupid not only because of the schoolmarm/whitecloak mentality — we, the righteous, must protect the fragile little ones who are incapable of interacting with the world without our righteous protection, and we must do so by curbstomping everyone else, those filthy, disgusting shitlords who aren’t as righteous as us — but also because it’s completely historically illiterate. Lithiated beverages were widely sold for this exact purpose until they were banned a few years after the end of WW2.

But, that’s right, history doesn’t real and cultural memory is shitlord shit that ought to be torn down and destroyed, the better to let the whitecloaks reprogram everyone they don’t feel like killing.

Invoke tradition of mineral springs as cure-all (Lithia Springs, GA; Lithia Springs in Ashland, OR)

Invoke tradition of “water cure” sanitariums as cure-all

Invoke vitamins (“vital minerals”) and 19th century nutrition science

Invoke American mythology of elemental salts as mind control/public hygiene (fluoridated water; sulfur as anti-aphrodisiac in army food, lithium as public water additive?)

Invoke “rehab centers” as successor idiom to water-cure sanitariums and mineral springs as cure-all

jedavu:

Amazing designs from Romain Trystram