thiscolourblue:

officer-meekins:

Bird Music

This is how they write Jazz

Had 3 different dreams about Scott “slatestarscratchpad” Alexander the other night, which was curious.

First one was me reading a post, or maybe series of tweets, by him, about coding a point-click adventure game and his design decisions about it. Like, he wrote about the tradeoffs in creating a sense of player autonomy, actions that can affect game state vs. actions that just create some flavor feedback vs. the necessity to limit the player to clearly delineate some finite number of viable paths.

And about how he handled memory allocation and how that affected porting to different platforms, and about how he had originally had two separate points meters hovering above the player avatar as purple and green circles with attached tags, only he had merged them into one circle with overlapping colored arcs and no text.

And it was all in his actual writing voice and whatnot but it eventually got incredibly tedious and I was aware it was a dream at points and kept trying to wake up enough to break out so I could dream about something else instead.


Second one we and a bunch of people were hanging around some party by the docks of a lake house, and then me and his consort ozymandias271 went up to check out the bridge of some three-decker fishing boat, only all of a sudden there started being crazy waves on the lake that dragged the boat out and started the engine, and then knocked us into the water.

And the boat was still heading to the opposite coast where it was going to beach or hit some houses, but the wave had also knocked off two jet-skis mounted on the back so I jumped on one and chased after it, and just before it hit the shore managed to hit a jump, and then leap off onto the bridge and turn the wheel to safety.

And so I dropped anchor and went back to recover the jet-ski, which had sank in maybe 7 feet of water, and this crusty old fisherman guy was giving me shit about how that was incredibly dangerous and it was much more likely that I would have hurt myself and damaged the jet-ski accomplishing nothing, and I just rebuffed him like “nah man, I’m not even going to pretend to care about your point until you admit how totally badass that just was”.


Third one I had front-row seats at like, WrestleMania, but the whole dream was just about setting up the arena, like it was a flat, super-huge high school gym where they had to bring in big white folding tables and chairs. And I got my good seat, only after they set up all these tables they started building these cage cells like, on top of them, with barely any headspace, and putting naked strippers in them.

And I was like “huh, I guess this is pay-per-view, they can do full nudity”, and the cell on top of my seat was this 40-something black woman, 8-inch heels and a little dumpy around the waist, and we had a pretty decent chat about where she grew up, but it was really cramped and ruined the view.

So they moved us to another table out from under the cells, but then they started to set up the ring somewhere else, and I was like “I thought I had front-row seats”, and they explained that front-row patrons were actually specifically selected for telegenicity, but then I made the cut, it was just me and a bunch of old guys from, like, some south(/)east-European social club circa 1982, flat caps and checked blazers and skinny, smelly cigars.

Anyway this dream was about him because the whole time I was moving around I’d been bringing along a book that was actually his blog in trade paperback form, the cover in the tricolor of the Cascadian “Doug Flag”.

Young people wonder how the adult world can be so boring. The secret is that it is not boring to adults because they have learnt to enjoy simple things like covert malice at one another’s expense.

clawsofpropinquity:

“Corporate Witchcraft Witchcraft, seemingly at the antipodes of magic, is closer to religion. It possesses no intrinsic magic; rather, magic is used against it. It works by spiritual means, as religion does; no wonder its persecutors imagine witches’ sacrifices, witches’ gods, sabbats of witches, witchcraft as a demonic religion. Witchcraft is more concerned with morality than most magic; it inverts morality to reinforce the value system. Witchcraft, moreover is a projection of voodoo death, which is execution by religion; witchcraft becomes a theodicy explaining death because it is originally about death: psychic death. The witch kill is the totemic symbolization of the voodoo death; and the witch accusation is man’s first magic to fight religious assassination. In this sense, all witch accusations are a form of sorcery, in which another human being is hit because he speaks for the oppressive consensus. That is why there is a strain or suspicion of sorcery in all magic: because all magic has something to do with protecting the self by counter-attacking the moral order. Usually it attacks another person as the symbol of that order. The witch accusation is the perfect paradigm of magic because it takes the form of manipulating public opinion for private ends, by accusing the moral accuser of inverted moral values. The accusation was originally defensive; but in more complicated societies, when the self goes on the offensive, witch accusations can be attempts by individuals to seize power by manipulating consensual values so as to downgrade rivals. In modern bureaucracies, the “sorceror” is the deadly rival who proceeds by foul means of rumour, innuendo, destruction of one’s work and other secret measures to ruin ego as a competitor. While the “witch” is the person who speaks in the management voice, clothes himself with the moral values of the group to attack weak or marginal individuals as unworthy, or to brand dissenters as immoral. In modern organisations, however, there are no “diviners”, no accepted oracles, no tribunals of public opinion, no magical grievance procedures to handle cases in which some individuals make others get sick and even die. Modern bureaucrats allegedly protect themselves by “role distance” and role diversity; but in American society, occupational role is so much more greatly weighted, and is so determining of other roles, that the totalism of primitive kin groups is approached again. Work groups in bureaucracies tend to number the familiar 30 to 50 individuals found in band societies; in corporate bureaucracies these tend increasingly to be “parochial” groups who stay together for long periods, perhaps whole dreary lifetimes. Unconsciously, these groups are internalised as moral orders, even by scoffers who protest more scepticism and distance than they actually achieve. In many cases the odd man out, the person who loses the partly competitive, largely co-optative and often dishonest status game, literally sickens and may die. Primitive ideas of the moral nature of illness are never far from the minds of the participants, moreover. And when one person who has been isolated, marginalized, has finally sickened to the point where he drops off, quits or dies, some remarkable things happen. First, despite the secular milieu, the event is interpreted with almost primitive realism and moralising theodicy. “He was slipping.” He deserved to die. It is a moral judgment that teeters on the edge of causal explanation and sociological insight. And secondly, an even more remarkable thing happens. Once he is gone, somebody else gets “sick”, as if the system generated its own tensions and required scapegoats to withstand its own terrible internal moral pressures.”

— - Daniel O’Keefe, “Stolen Lightning”

clawsofpropinquity:

There are three forms of conspiratorial paranoia at large in the world today. They are all dependent on the myth that the public at large are hostile to the current political and economic settlement. 

Check which one matches yours: 

1. Left-wing paranoia - normative values and social cohesion are being undermined by “Neoliberal ideology”. 

2. Right-wing paranoia - normative values and social cohesion are being undermined by “Cultural Marxism”. 

3. Far-Right paranoia - the Neoliberals and Cultural Marxists are all in it together.

Is there a collective term for small polities just outside the border of a larger polity that make their name off of, I guess, legal arbitrage? Providing things that are outlawed in the larger polity?

I mean what Monaco and its casinos are to France, or Macau and Singapore to China and southeast Asia, or Amsterdam and its drugging and whoring are to northern Europe. (Or maybe Bahrain to Saudi Arabia, but I’m not that clear on the specifics.)

I’m thinking mostly in terms of vice, but I suppose there’s major overlap with offshore banking, and there’s often a bit of smuggling based in the area.

America used to have Tijuana on the West Coast, and Cuba on the east. In the early 20th century Havana was a major American mafia town; the Cuban revolution and the need to create a replacement is a big part of how Las Vegas developed. Lonely desert Nevada was plenty willing to make a buck off legal arbitrage with looser gambling, prostitution, and marriage laws - offering no-fault divorce when other states didn’t, but also offering quick and easy marriage when other states required minimum ages, or parental permission, or waiting times and announcement, all intended to prop up family/patriarchal control of courtship in the face of the stability-undermining effect of frontier mobility. (Nevada here represents the solvent effect of frontier mobility. ‘Merica!) All the goofy Elvis instant-marriage chapels now are a relic of this, back when “elopement” was more of a real, actual thing. Just like Gretna Green.

You know, in an alternate timeline it could have been Hot Springs, Arkansas instead. For a while it was. Look at that page. “In 1944, the Army began redeploying returning overseas soldiers; officials inspected hotels in 20 cities before selecting Hot Springs as a redistribution center for returning soldiers… The soldiers had time to enjoy the baths at a reduced rate and other recreational activities.” Hmm.

Look at this official National Parks Service history: “Bathhouses [treating venereal diseases] employed special attendants, mercury rubbers, to administer the mercury ointment. The patient gave the prescribed mercury to the rubber who administered the ointment with either bare hands, a bath mitt, or a brush; later the rubbers wore gloves.” “[Attendants] took monthly physical examinations to make sure that patrons were not exposed to contagious diseases.” Hmmm.

Getting back to Havana, in other aspects, Miami picked up the slack. And Tijuana, I guess you can still go for prescription drugs, and San Diego teenagers down to drink, but Las Vegas stole a lot of its thunder too.

Of course now that we’ve got air transport some of that stuff’s moved even further offshore to, say, Thailand. But then, I’d be surprised if that region ever didn’t have that stuff. It’s right at the nexus of the Chinese and Indian Ocean coastal and the Asian archipelago trade routes, which means sailors; you’ve got mouths of the the Mekong and Chao Phraya systems, which means you’ve got the guys moving trade goods along inland routes (You know what we call guys moving trade goods along inland routes today? Truckers.); plus it’s been on the borderlands of various land empires, which means expats, functionaries and soldiers posted away from home.

(You know where in American history inland and coastal shipping met at the borderland of multiple empires? New Orleans.)

Look at all the temples, you’ll see how far the tourist trade goes back. Religious complexes are and always have been tourist sites. A lot of smaller ones, boasting the foot of St. Whoever or the largest statue of Buddha of this particular material in this particular pose, are like Wall Drug or the world’s largest ball of whatever - tourist traps located just off an otherwise featureless segment of major trade and transit routes, surviving by drawing in travelers eager for distraction. While the bigger ones become destinations of pilgrimage in their own right - the statistics I can find seem pretty speculative, but I hear around 10% of Muslims make Hajj in their lifetimes, while 70% of Americans visit one of the Disney parks.

(You know what’s a famous story about the coexistence of prostitutes and religious tourist destinations? The Hunchback of Notre Dame.)

Been reading Gone Girl, which is really good writing, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Beautiful You, which is… Chuck Palahniuk writing, but damn is it an interesting combo on the tragicomedy of modern men and women trying to figure out what they should expect of and offer to each other. When I’m done they’d be a good pairing for a review essay.

thebloggerskaramazov:

put your virtues on your dash and your vices in your likes

My best guess is Mumia Abu-Jamal *did* kill that cop but an investigation/prosecution playing by the rules *couldn’t* have won a case, Rizzo in Philly was a traillblazer of the backlash decades ahead of Giuliani, a message they weren’t even going to pretend to abide the Warren Court rectification

But “let’s be careful out there” always should’ve been “today is a good day to die”, Musashi, glory, &tc.

(Musashi wrote in a peace when samurai struggled to justify themselves through dramatics in the face of nothing)

nathanjurgenson:

THE POLICE WILL NOT ENTER
THERE IS NO LAW

kontextmaschine:

THE POLICE WILL NOT ENTER
THERE IS NO LAW

It’s a blue sky day

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

THE POLICE WILL NOT ENTER
THERE IS NO LAW

It’s a blue sky day

And it’s here to stay

thenewinquiry:

Spoiler: at the beginning of the last episode of Serial, Sarah Koenig tells us that she’s going to have an ending. But she doesn’t. She also tells us that she’s going to give us her opinion, but she doesn’t really do that either. She says what she would do if she was on a jury — she would vote to acquit — but that’s not an opinion, that’s a refusal of certainty. In the end, she doesn’t uncover and show us the truth of what really happened, and she knows it, and says so. Which is to say, she is still basically where she was at the beginning of the series: Adnan could be innocent but maybe he isn’t. This is where we started. By the end, we have a lot more facts and information, as the story gets piled on top of itself, week after week, but all of it adds up to… a story about Sarah Koenig doing a journalism, which ends.

This is probably how Serial was going to have to end. Because it isn’t a mystery novel. A mystery novel begins with a disruption and ends with resolution: a corpse becomes a murderer, and justice is done as disorder becomes order. How on earth could Serial end that way? And we knew from the start that the ending wasn’t already written; we knew from the start that she was still researching it, still working towards a conclusion. She could have continued, almost indefinitely; I fact, there’s something interesting in the fact that she didn’t. She decided that this was enough. And so the thing ended.

Spoiler: I wrote the following few paragraphs before I listened to the last episode of Serial, and though I’ve listened to the whole series (I think), I haven’t worked very hard at it. I don’t really remember whether or not the cell phone tower thing is damning or not, and I’m not sure why the Nisha call is evidence of anything, or what.

Spoiler: this blog post goes nowhere in particular.

The American criminal justice system is a marvelously creative fiction. It is like a detective novel, because it reveals the killer at the end, letting everything else fall away. There are facts that turn out to be clues, elements of the truth, the building blocks for constructing a “Case.” Retroactively, they become important because of who turns out to be the killed. Everything else, retroactively, turns out to have been a distraction, a blind, just camouflage. That which convicts, matters. That which does not, does not. This is why you should never talk to police: nothing that can’t convict you will ever turn out to be true. Never talk to the police.

Police lie, constantly. Perhaps not everything the police say is a lie, but at a certain point, it stops mattering: an occasional truth cannot survive buried in lies. As former San Francisco Police commissioner Peter Keane wrote, a few years ago:

“Police officer perjury in court to justify illegal dope searches is commonplace. One of the dirty little not-so-secret secrets of the criminal justice system is undercover narcotics officers intentionally lying under oath. It is a perversion of the American justice system that strikes directly at the rule of law. Yet it is the routine way of doing business in courtrooms everywhere in America.”

As Michelle Alexander more recently observed, the system of mass incarceration rewards dishonesty. In this way, human beings become cops:

 Research shows that ordinary human beings lie a lot — multiple times a day — even when there’s no clear benefit to lying. Generally, humans lie about relatively minor things like “I lost your phone number; that’s why I didn’t call” or “No, really, you don’t look fat.” But humans can also be persuaded to lie about far more important matters, especially if the lie will enhance or protect their reputation or standing in a group. The natural tendency to lie makes quota systems and financial incentives that reward the police for the sheer numbers of people stopped, frisked or arrested especially dangerous. One lie can destroy a life, resulting in the loss of employment, a prison term and relegation to permanent second-class status.

We all lie. But when a person lies who happens to be endowed with a badge, a gun, a phallus, and/or a prison-industrial complex, human beings have a way of turning into one of two things: cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, black and white, masters and slaves, humans and animals. These binaries sometimes line up and sometimes they don’t. But they have in common a single unifying thread, the distinction between those who have the power to tell a lie and make it true, and those whose rights a cop is not bound to respect.

You cannot shame a novel for being fiction: it knows that it is not true, and it doesn’t care. All it wants is your belief. The same is true of the police. They don’t care why you do anything; they only want obedience. They only want respect. They only want order, and to give order. Like a novel, the criminal justice system is realistic without bearing any necessary relationship to reality; it is truthy without needing to be true. If its stories might be true, and if they are obeyed, that’s enough. They have plausible assertability, warranting the belief of those who want to believe. And we suspend our disbelief when we read, because we must; if we don’t, it falls apart, and we want the center to hold. It is the only thing “we” can want: if we don’t suspend our disbelieve, who even are “we”? We would cease to exist.

Cynicism tells us not to expect truth. A properly cynical view of the police would say, look, the police lie constantly, the court system is a clusterfuck at best, and the prison-industrial complex is a predatory, cannibalistic, and corporatist system of neo-slavery. The police might occasionally intervene in positive ways, the courts might occasionally give something resembling justice, and some of the people in jail might genuinely be homicidal psychopaths whose freedom would be a ticking time-bomb. These things might be true, but as exceptions to a more general rule: any resemblance to real justice is more coincidental than not. Especially after Ferguson made it impossible to ignore, such cynicism is surely warranted: the burden of proof is and must be on anyone who wants to insist that the criminal justice system is anything of the kind.

Especially after Ferguson, Sarah Koenig’s belief in the possibility of criminal justice can be particularly hard to stomach. She wants to find the truth. But what is truth? One of the hardest parts of the show to swallow is the fact that the truth really doesn’t matter any more. It doesn’t matter if Asia suddenly pops up and declares that she has an alibi for Adnan; that boat has sailed. It doesn’t matter if Sarah Koenig puts together a breathtakingly perfect summation of the closing argument that the defense attorney should have given. There is no such thing as substantive justice for Adnan anymore: there is only the procedural reality of prison. He has been convicted, in the present perfect tense. He is guilty, no matter what did or did not happen in the past. His guilt is now a fact. To un-fact it would require proving procedural failures, delegitimizing the system as such. His presumption of innocence is long gone.

For all the ways in which Serial is and isn’t what it should be, or what we want it to be, maybe it demonstrates the fictionality of criminal justice, by believing it to death. Sarah Koenig’s belief is very white, as lots of commentators have observed or complained; she has a kind of naivete about how the system works—a naive expectation that it does work—that rubs a lot of people the wrong way, especially as she observes that it doesn’t. She expects a good faith search for the truth on the part of the criminal justice system, and repeatedly finds nothing of the kind. And then she looks for it again. She suspends her disbelief, all the more when—at the end of the show—she puts things in the hands of the Innocence Project and the Reddit detectives. Let them sort it out. Let them continue. Let them keep going with it. She had a radio franchise to continue, a season two to plan.

Serial decided when it would end, so it could continue.

-ZUNGUZUNGU

The unfortunate result of that dynamic is that a new media order that should be teeming with more vibrant viewpoints than ever is at risk of calcifying into a staid landscape, where original thought is muffled by the wet blanket of political correctness. “There’s a funny, recurring instinct on the Internet now that if you don’t agree with something someone’s written, that it’s not fair or relevant and that it shouldn’t exist,” Jezebel editor Emma Carmichael said recently on the Longform Podcast. “Online feminism has more and more rules lately.” After editing out all of the statements that could be perceived, no matter how crudely, as biased or insensitive, “There are only so many things you can say.“ Even Suey Park, the creator of #CancelColbert who has drummed up Twitter outrage and caught her own backlash many times over, appears to be questioning the social media status quo. “I myself have mistaken pile-ons for justice when oftentimes there was a small miscommunication. I would assume the worse of everyone,” she tweeted this month. “But twitter can give you tunnel vision. It’s fickle, fast-moving, and full of miscommunication and fabrications. It can be self-destructive.”

Amanda Hess, “The Rigid Conventions of Identity Outrage”

I’ve been on the internet long enough now to have seen this cycle happen many times: someone (usually someone young) gains a reputation and attention for searching out and identifying terrible things, and writing cogently about why they are terrible. They do this for several years; it becomes a profession, or at least a dedicated amateur pursuit. Then, at some point, they talk about how this practice of publicly identifying and analyzing terrible things maybe goes too far sometimes. 

The conclusion we should take from any individual instance of “Twitter goes too far sometimes” probably shouldn’t be “internet outrage is about to chill out more.” People have been saying this for years, but the chill-out hasn’t happened. Instead, we should conclude that 1) people who feel comfortable and right generating internet outrage tend to lose this feeling over time, and 2) there will always be new people to replace them.

Or, to put it another way: the internet pays the young to generate outrage.

It’s not always the young, of course. But the young can more convincingly perform the sort of pure anger that online audiences most respond to, plus they have more time to find things and tweet about them and respond to tweets, etc. And the practitioners don’t always end up having doubts about it. But I think generally they do.

Which means we have a free rider problem. Online activism can have demonstrably positive effects that benefit everyone. But I gain those benefits regardless of what I do. I don’t have to do the hard work of sifting through the oceans of public statements out there to find the things that can really make a difference, if properly publicized. 

If that hard work is fairly distributed (you do the work on Sterling, then I’ll take Cosby while you rest up), it’s efficient. But we know it’s not. We know the work is done disproportionately by the young, or at least those new to the game. And we know that doing this work has negative effects on the people doing it. But we rely on that labor to bring us the positive effects, whether that effect is “real social change” or “seeing someone I dislike looking foolish.”

This work seems to take more of your self than traditional reporting does. For one, the writer’s identity is often part of the vector driving the outrage, and so the writer’s identity then becomes part of the argument, something that can be debated above and beyond the case they’re making. For another, much of the work is done outside any official organ; maybe a writer gets things started with a piece on The Root, but the argument develops through the writer’s personal Twitter account, which is often understood as a proxy for your identity. This professional requirement that your private self be part of the work means that the writer’s identity is there on the table alongside their actions as a member of the media. This seems like something that, prior to social media, journalism did not systematically ask of its workers. And it asks this disproportionately of people on the outrage beat, who have less power to protest that particular condition.

I’m not sure what to do about that; I’m not even sure if it’s bad or not. (Certainly many of the people on the outrage beat would have seen interpretations of their work tied to their identity before social media, too.) But I think when you hear people who have been laboring on the internet for years talk about how maybe it’s not perfect, the conclusion shouldn’t be that the internet isn’t structured the right way. It’s that the labor isn’t structured the right way.

(via barthel)

Hollywood might possibly fear North Korean sleeper cells capable of blowing up theaters that screen anti-Nork films. But Hollywood most definitely fears rogue personnel capable of tearing the lid off of the entertainment industry’s most lurid and repellent secrets.

In fact, Hollywood has amassed so much undisclosed TMZ fodder that it’s willing to do whatever the North says. There is no margin for error, and no taking of chances. Spend enough time in the right/wrong circles here in L.A., and you’ll pick up a tabloid’s worth of sordid stories.

This is true. Not all the secrets you pick up in LA are terrible. My favorite is that Keanu Reeves is actually a very humble man, set for life on Matrix residuals, who quietly gives away most of his money and lets his celebrity dissipate because he doesn’t think he deserves either, only taking on projects if putting his name on a movie will get something worthy made. John Wick was the directorial debut of his former stuntman.

This, those past two reblogs, honestly I think late 2014’s going to go down as the moment the fever breaks and what gatekeepers there are get back to keeping the fire-starters out, ‘cause they’re realizing that fire burns them too.

People are like man, how’d we get to a point in the '70s where we were starting to mainstream fucking kids?

Well, people were committed to this project of tearing off the veil of lies and repression that lay over the culture, and when that veil came off they realized things like oh shit, tons of respectable guys fuck kids. So if we were going to keep that veil off and still make shit work, we were gonna have to make fucking kids respectable.

But people couldn’t handle the truth. Or at least that much of it. We dealt with the fact that tons of respectable guys fuck dudes in the poophole by making that respectable. We’re still on the fence with the fact that tons of respectable dudes think of ourselves as delicate pretty princesses.

Going around tearing off the veil on the fact that tons of respectable dudes rape women, maybe game that out a few steps, do you think we’re ready for that truth? Because we’re gonna have to make shit work.

In SLC waiting for my connecting flight, it’s interesting the subtle difference in culture, in people.

More of the ukulele-twee aesthetic here, actually. Just thoroughly positive in general. On reflection it’s what I should’ve expected, but I’m struck how grating it *isn’t*, that it’s tuned to the exact pitch I’d appreciate. It’s the same year for them too, I guess.

Portland, and Portlanders, make a big deal about how much they like themselves, SLC and its locals make a big deal about how much they like each other. Subtle difference, and kind of what I need right now.

Most telling detail: *a lot* of girls wearing perfume, and really sweet scents, yet *no one* wearing *too much* perfume.