The high schoolers wearing retro Pokemon t-shirts today are basically the same as the high schoolers who were wearing Pink Floyd shirts in the ‘90s, aren’t they?
Nissan pulls ads from Gawker http://theralphretort.com/nissan-cuts-ties-gawker/
And Gawker making an article in response to it http://gawker.com/how-we-got-rolled-by-the-dishonest-fascists-of-gamergat-1649496579 (archive.today link https://archive.today/UXA4r)
It is like they want to deliberately sink their business into the ground by showing themselves as being about the worst place to advertise in, seeing how they treat advertisers.
P.S: bonus points for saying that Renée J. James, president of Intel, is a “craven idiot”.
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Gawker, confirmed for mad. Like. Mad mad.
AND THEY CAN’T DO A THING TO STOP IT.
Looks like they’re opting for the “run ourselves into the ground” option. And here I thought they’d be smarter than that. Lol. I was wrong.
Max Read-era Gawker is a glass cannon.
The Choire/Balk/Doree Gawker could handle this shit, but then it would never have gotten itself in this position in the first place. That’s not speculation, just go over to The Awl, which is basically the Choire/Balk/Doree Gawker aged in place, and check out their Gamergate stuff. It’s still anti-, and given to celebrate their triumphs before they hatch, but that “we’ll get them in the end” stuff is the line of someone rationalizing a strategic retreat and regrouping.
Hell, even Pareene could’ve handled this. He’d be an insufferable little shit about it (I have no idea how he missed bothof the Daily Caller’s “most punchable faces in media” lists), but he at least knew that the Gawker brand voice was contempt, not hatred. I mean, look at this. Correct.
Eh. I could tell Gawker was headed nowhere good in 200…7? 9? Back when commenting was open by audition only and there was an article about some kid falling out a window and one of the commenters invoked Anal Cunt’s classic Conor Clapton ballad, “Your Kid Committed Suicide Because You Suck”, and then someone huffed that we should show more sensitivity, because a child has died and all that, and then the huffer was not included in that Friday’s round of commenter executions.
It’s funny looking at the comments, people reading ‘gaters as a new cultural development that’s ruining your arcadian internet. Nah man, that’s the traditional culture of the old internet you built yours on top of. Used to wander the plains freely, and as recently as a decade ago you intermingled, but by now you’ve pushed it back into reservations on the ‘chans, and you’re still pushing. Cet animal est très méchant; Quand on l'attaque, il se défend.
I guess my investment in all this is that I was born and raised into citizenship in the older internet, and I’ve got a bit of patriotism about it.
Rockstar Games, the Scottish-founded makers of the Grand Theft Auto series, always liked tweaking America but as time goes on they’re really turning into our generation’s Martin Scorsese, specializing in crime stories set against the backdrop of interesting and half-forgotten moments in American history.
The sixth-generation console games were still, rather than invoking American culture directly, riffing off previous riffs on it - GTA3 on Mafia movies; Vice City on Miami Vice, Scarface and neo(n) noir; San Andreas on hood films and gangsta rap imagery. Bully, even if officially set in New England, was more about British “public school” culture than anything.
But with GTA4 you started seeing them branching out and taking on things that hadn’t really been treated before, in this case “the new, Slavic wave of immigration to New York City” and “ethnic conflict in the Balkans after the collapse of the Cold War system”. I think they ran into the same problem as DS9, that that latter one’s not actually A Thing in American culture, and it would’ve been more true and interesting of them to hang a lampshade on the fact that no one actually cared what Niko saw or did in the old country. This might be the Scottishness coming into play - growing up close to Norn Iron during The Troubles, “ethnic conflict orthogonal to imperial geopolitics” was probably more resonant to the developers.
L.A. Noire was the late ‘40s, specifically as a bridge between WWII and the ‘50s - dramatizing how and why a nation traumatized by Depression and war might actively *want* to escape to a scripted conformist consumerism, and how this scripting was developed and implemented by a culture industry and military/corporate elite that had actually been fairly insulated from the trauma.
Red Dead Redemption (the best of this generation imho) was about the closing of the frontier, the end of cowboy culture and agrarian yeomanry in general, the growth of federal authority, the historically porous Texas-Mexican border, and the way the Mexican Revolution bled across it.
GTAV was, eh. You can tell they were first overambitious and later rushed, trying to push it out the door before the next generation of consoles showed up and obsoleted their efforts. There’s too many redundant characters - each of the three mains have supporting casts that reuse roles and traits before being completely abandoned by the plot. And as the demand for clever writing expanded beyond missions and radio bits to also include websites, facebook posts, tweets, overheard street chatter, TV shows, and phone conversations between each character pairing after each mission, you just got too many cases of the same themes being reused, executed far too on-the-nose. Michael’s “ex-criminal turned family man dragged back into the game by the authorities” plot hit too many of John Marston’s beats, and I can’t help thinking that the Mirror Park, “UCLA”, and northwestern coast environments were supposed to be settings for missions.
For all that there were some high points. “Did Somebody Say Yoga” used a throwaway minigame and 0-challenge driving to set you up for some impressive sucker-punch plot twists and tone shifts, which is something I’ve only seen AAA games do before in, of all things, the Call of Duty series. The conversation where Michael tells Trevor that he’s a hipster was brilliant. Trevor in general, and his Canadian shame/pride in specific, were both hilarious and well-done. The one place where they really deliver the “insights into American culture” is with Franklin - the fact that south LA has changed since the ‘90s, the community’s becoming both more gentrified from outside and more lower- to middle-middle class from within, young black hooligans are now more skate punk than gangbanger, crackheads and OGs are aging and increasingly pitiful and marginal figures, the face of “ethnic crime” is now Near Easterners pulling white-collar scams, and the real crazy violence is out in the high desert, but that no one from outside seems to have internalized this, still going off second- and third-hand gangsta rap-era impressions. That’s pretty fucking dead on, actually.
Cambridge University is older than the Easter Island statues. Source
This reminds me: something that always shocked me was how New Zealand got reached by the Polynesians/Proto-Maori only in like 1250-1300AD or so.
Yeah, New Zealand’s one of the only places in the world that’s never really seen violent ethnic conflict, the Europeans showed up before the Maori had time to max out carrying capacity and they managed to set up a symbiosis where the Maori fished and gathered along the coast while the Euros farmed and herded in the highlands, both trading with each other.
There’s been some tension - the foreshore and seabed stuff as recently as last decade, where the government controversially established “no, the Maori don’t literally own the entire coast, jfc”, but that rose to vandalism at most.
For all that, I have never run across people so bleeding-heart anguished about the treatment of indigenous peoples as Kiwi liberals (for example), it’s like they’re ashamed of their history and aghast at the Canadians, who are ashamed of their First Nations history and aghast at the Americans, who mostly shrug and say “yeah, what’re you gonna do”.
It’s like a heirarchy structured in reverse order of how bad they’ve actually been about these things. ‘course, as an American I can just roll my eyes and say to both of them that you’ve only been so nice because you’re such latecomers that there was still enough land and resources to go around with room to spare, as your countries expand - you see this NZ with that foreshore stuff and now in Canada where they’re realizing indigenous claims are getting in the way of their new petro-export economy - you’ll do the same thing.
gonna make a grand strategy game where you can be civs like gupta, maurya, delhi, maratha, vijayanagara, mughal, or european union. the leader of the latter will be jean monnet. his power will be agricultural subsidies.
Anonymous asked: you should search David Phillips (entrepreneur) on wikipedia.. if you havent read it all ready you might find it interesting and funny
[P]ressure to erase the darker episodes of its wartime history has intensified recently with the rise of a small, aggressive online movement seeking to intimidate those like Mr. Mizuguchi who believe the country must never forget.
Known collectively as the Net Right, these loosely organized cyberactivists were once dismissed as radicals on the far margins of the Japanese political landscape…
…Scholars say the Net Right has no more than a few thousand active members, many of them from Japan’s growing ranks of contract workers who have been unable to find coveted lifetime jobs. But these extremists have benefited from a broader upwelling of frustration among young Japanese over their nation’s long economic and political stagnation…
…“We are tired of Japan being constantly told to apologize,” said Kazuya Kyomoto, 26, a popular blogger among conservative youth who condemned monuments like the one in Sarufutsu for promoting a “masochistic” view of Japanese history. He said just a few overzealous extremists used intimidation tactics.
Villa Girasole (Villa Sunflower), in the hilly surroundings of Marcellise (Verona, Italy), is an extraordinary revolving house built between 1929 and 1935 by the engineer Angelo Invernizzi, whose dream was to build a house that were able to follow the motion of the sun. (via Revolving house in Italy / Loftenberg)
Are there any of those stories of a Wise Ruler disguising himself as a lowly commoner to get a sense of the people’s experience that end up with the ruler getting the shit kicked out of him?
You know, I pay attention to, and in return get noticed by, people from a lot of different cliques and tendencies on this site. And I guess I flatter myself with a self-image as some aetherial Watcher, above it all. Until I check people’s notes and see they have likes from people I’d categorized as coming from an entirely different part of my network.
Birds of a feather, I guess. If I managed to find them, and pay attention, and my heuristic for paying attention is “is this a clever poster, who says interesting shit I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise?”, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that they’re clever enough to find each other, or similarly inclined to recognize novelty and quality.
Well, whatever. Message being: everyone who’s seeing this, pat yourself on the back. Who’s a good poster? Whooooo’s a good poster? You are! Yes you are.
