The cowled jacket (Assassins Creed)

The Red Dot Sight (CoD)

The particular angle of attack of the ’80s comeback (Grand Theft Auto: Vice City)

2 white-ass people on the bus with a suitcase and a half and a case of ramen. Patterned headscarves and bangle mantles and open-chest embroidery.

Are they the people who dress like pirates? carnies? renn folk? travelers? gypsies?

How far off are the people who dress like pirates from how actual travelers started? gypsies?

subtilitas:

Toyo Ito - Tama Art University library, Tokyo 2007. Via, 2, photos © Iwan Baan, Tomio Ohashi, Scott Norsworthy.

nebraskanebraskanebraska

longlives:

Taylor Swift by Thomas Whiteside.

literallyunbelievable:

Spot on

The thing with Polygon and Kotaku renouncing review embargos, and going in on Ubisoft over AC:Unity, and retroactively downgrading Destiny… that’s brilliant, and I bet most people don’t even make the connection to hashtag Gamergate.

They finally did what they should’ve, took a step back from the fray to calm down and plot how to turn the whole thing to their advantage. And if they pull it off they could actually come out stronger from the whole thing. They’ve already earned the indie devs’ loyalty from acting as their champion, and their media compatriots for championing their prerogatives against the unwashed masses (I expected Salon to jump onside because obviously, but seeing the fucking London Review of Books do it first and harder was an eyeopener). Now by actually jiujitsuing “ethics in game journalism” to reposition themselves as champions of their alienated audience, and using it as a club to extract concessions from the AAA studios - well, if they pull it off that’s pretty much running the table right there.

They’ll cool down on the SJW “muh intersectionality in vidya” beat, you mark my words. Maybe poke the hornets’ nest for attention every now and then, but the free ride is over and now they know that costs them more than it pays off. They’ll just quietly commission less and less of that stuff. They’ll never make a public show of contrition, that was never in the cards, that’s not how Gawker and its bastard children roll, that’s never been how they roll.

Nick Denton’s brilliant stroke, going all the way back to Gawker’s origins as Gawker Stalker, was to not even make pretense to the American tradition of Sulzbergerian evenhanded postwar monopoly journalism, but to go the British competitive no holds barred venomous one, all taking shots at each other, stirring up witch hunts to boost circulation. It’s been like that for a long time, where multiple outlets are in competition for the same national readership - that’s where 1984’s “prolefeed” and “Two Minutes Hate” come from. That’s why Milo Yiannopoulos, from the British system himself, was the one landing all the hardest blows on the other side of this fight.

I mean, it’s interesting. It’s interesting, and I like living in interesting times, but there’s a reason that phrase comes from a backhanded blessing - as a way to run a culture it’s fucking dangerous, it leads to pillarisation. The Dutch model - Protestant/Catholic/secular social democrat - is safe enough with the European confessional wars well behind us, but the 19th and early 20th century models, where the pillars could be “monarchist” or “communist” or “fascist”, (or even the pre-20th century American party-affiliated yellow press), that was fucking dangerous. Journalists talked their countries into war, into revolution, to boost their numbers and make their names. There’s a reason British libel law is so strict, and that’s to create some leverage to tamp things down when they start stepping on toes that matter.

I mean hell, we’re on course for a full-blown constitutional crisis in a decade or two in no small part because Murdoch imported the British model.

internet retail site: cyberstore
smartphone: cyberphone
instant message: cybergram
wifi connection: cyberwave

ugh, go fuck yourself, insomnia

tswiftdaily:

HQ Grazia France

Gradually trying to expand my cooking range, I tried something new last night, a rice pilaf with roasted almonds and baked jerk-rub chicken.

It was decent, but I should have grilled or pan-fried the chicken or something, there wasn’t enough contrast with the mush-texture of the rice.

I felt happy enough but it wasn’t until I went to sleep that I noticed the secret downside of the dish. Several times I farted so hard I woke myself up. Must’ve been the onion.

It did interrupt my sleep at the right times enough that I got to remember some interesting dreams. The thesis of one was “an important step on the way to sexbots is teaching AIs how to tickle feet”.

It’s this weird combination of scary and hilarious that there are parts of your mind that aren’t under your control and this is what they spend their time on.

architectureland:

Sainte-Chapelle  -  a royal medieval Gothic chapel in Île-de-France, France. 

I keep going back and forth on AC: Unity.

It’s World of Assassin’sCreedcraft, with the SP mode as a spinal solo questline that gives you decent greens and blues then purples. But past that loot-grindable instances and parallel and semifungible progression systems and everything.

Destiny was World of Halocraft and AC:U did it better, half of GTAV was WoGTA and AC:U integrated the sides better, on the other hand Diablo III was More Diablo II and that didn’t happen so. So.

Also the French Revolution, they did even more than you could expect.

the AC3 lineage, 3-Black Flag-Rogue, I liked that. More wilderness, more stealth timing. ubisoft says okay let’s see that work out in Batman: Arkham and Shadow of Mordor’s lineage, let’s split another branch off from early Ezio and make it WoAC and I’ll give them a chance.

It’s interesting how the AC games have been going revisionist for the last few, giving Templars sympathetic self-understandings and highlighting naive Assassin blowback.

(if they’re committed to the release-a-year schedule they could do worse than split into alternating Templar/Assassin lineages along the gameplay [medicine and 2 button climbing/greased rails and combo chains] split)

architectureofdoom:

philopenshaw:

atomic
former nuclear weapons testing facility - orford ness

View this on the map

“Why the fuck is there a theater on ’Crime Alley’, anyway?”

countersignal:

kontextmaschine once implied that the ‘cultural marxism’ stuff was pushed by capitalism against actual marxism. was that a thing?

Yeah, well, The Establishment, and the CIA, being fairly exempt from electoral pressure, had the latitude to be competent. After WWII there was a lot of actual, real support for communism in Europe, on either side of the Iron Curtain. Partially for the same reason as the fascist renaissance in ex-Warsaw bloc countries - they reaped the goodwill of being the ones to really stand up against The Hated Occupiers - partially because there really were a lot of poor ex-peasants coming from a century-long tradition of struggling to cast off the remnants of feudalism.

And the Marshall Plan and all that, we tried to guide who we could to Yay Capitalism, and rig electoral systems to keep the commies out - huge cash dumps to friendly parties, election rules weighted to get NATO-friendly results, skullduggery where necessary - above all we kept the interior ministries (who pay the police and count the votes) friendly - coups where necessary.

But there were some people we were never going to get with that, so we at least tried to guide them to less-bad fallback positions. If you want ownership of productive forces in common, in accordance with the general will of the people, how about a welfarist social democracy with nationalized industry! Like England, which spent most of the Cold War under a Labor party proclaiming Clause IV. And if they were absolutely dedicated to communism, they were guided towards a form that was at least not a cadet branch of the Lenin dynasty ruling in Moscow.

And that happened domestically, too. The Soviets did promote communism in America for their own purposes yes, but it’s not like communism hadn’t had a following in America before that, particularly among the downtrodden and the thoughtful types. Communism didn’t firmly equal Marxism equals Russia until the Russian Revolution, but Edward Bellamy didn’t even live to see the 20th century. And so they were ripe for co-opting too.

If blacks organize and press identitarian claims as blacks, or pan-Africanists, well at least they weren’t organizing and pressing their claims as communists, which was a real, live possibility. If the students are pressing their claims as hedonists… (there was major campus unrest in the 1950s over “in loco parentis” parietal rules, because what’s the point of having women around but to fuck them?)

And of course, to the extent the Soviets were actively trying to undermine and fracture our society with art and ideas, we were doing the same thing. Am I saying we were morally equivalent? Yes, of course. Everything is morally equivalent to everything at a value of null. More importantly, strategically equivalent.

Encounter magazine, dissident authors, abstract expressionism. We didn’t stir up tensions along racial lines so much as religious - Muslims in the ‘Stans, yes, also Catholics in Poland (JPII wouldn’t be the first time a papal election turned out awfully convenient for a dominant power, and we were into some darkside shit in Italy that touched the Vatican at the margins…) and Jews in Russia.

You know, in national mythology, “the Nazis were bad because” didn’t really end in “the Holocaust” until the 1970s? “The Jews” were awfully communist-associated, after all. But then the white ethnics were integrated into white, and the various Israeli wars shook things up to the point they ended up on our side (and transformed their public image from kibbutzim to Rambos), and we managed to cast “Jewish repression” as the bad thing they did, and so it goes, so it goes.

scavengedluxury:

Skyway. Coventry, November 2014.

Another fucking dream last night, someone asked me to tell her a story and I had to consciously piece one together in a way where the plot and motivations made sense (i.e. not dream logic), and would appeal to what I’d figured of her tastes. And I still remember it, but not the rest of the dream.

So I guess that was two halves of my mind having a storytelling competition at each other?