Johor, since 1871
In one of those great sentences you can only find on Wikipedia, the blue field of this flag is described as representing either “the universe or the state government”. You know, either or.
I just had a weird and kinda cool dream sequence and I just wrote it out being like “man, I don’t know what that was supposed to mean”, and then I reread my description and it was just intensely, thuddingly obvious what it meant so I was like “whoops” and deleted it.
The obvious ISIS parallel is Revolutionary France but we don’t see that brought up as often as we should.
Been trying to buy a solid motorcycle and/or pickup truck (Toyota circa 22R/22RE, 4x4 manual, long bed, bench seat, not bobbed or dropped or lifted) off Craigslist for a while now, which has involved a bunch of trips to the redneckier outskirts of Portland.
I just had a weird and kinda cool dream sequence and I just wrote it out being like “man, I don’t know what that was supposed to mean”, and then I reread my description and it was just intensely, thuddingly obvious what it meant so I was like “whoops” and deleted it.
you should have left it so some of our notions of self-esteem could stay afloat knowing that you are capable of error, that there are indeed things that you do not know
Shit, you do know how to flatter me.
Alright, I was in a zombie postapocalypse, but far enough off from the initial outbreak that the zombies had rotted to unthreatening - they were these white, swollen-faced maggot-things, if they were mobile at all it was slowly, teeth rotted out, you could take them out with one punch if you had to.
But it was still a lonesome windswept world, roaming the land scavenging houses, and then this one house I got to, doing my thing, and there was a cute 20something girl in there in sweats and a black tank top, and she was the first human I’d seen in like, ever.
And so it was like a human reunion, we talked and talked and got along great, eventually it was like okay so what’s your survival story and she was like “Oh, no, I died, just after the infection hit my ex and some guys came and chopped me up with some axes.” And I was like “…huh, you don’t look that chopped up” and she was like “yeah idk”.
Which was weird even in dream logic but we kept it up and made some drinks and the sun set and we were talking on her bed and I asked her for a hug and I was going to ask her if I could sleep there hugging not even sexual just for the comfort but she was like “no, it’s Friday night, I’m getting sick, I can’t deal until Tuesday, get out of here, not until Tuesday” and her face was turning green with goth-shadowed eyesockets and so I left.
And I was like “Wait, so she’s undead too? But… cursed undead, not infected undead. I wonder how they get along? … …I could deal with that.”
And then I woke up and I was like dammit I liked that dream, I’m going to try to fall back asleep and get back to it and for once it worked. I didn’t meet her again but I met some other folks and we were going to resettle a college campus and I made plans to go find her and invite her along.
The meaning, of course, was “>tfw no gf”
The first few times I read your post I saw it as “you are capable of terror”, how Freudian is that?
Industrial Society and Its Future (“The Unabomber Manifesto”)
(can someone who was reading on paper tell me if the 9/11 Commission Report made it?)
Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Signs, 1975: “INSTITUTIONS ENJOY CRITICISM AS LONG AS IT DOESN’T THREATEN THEIR BASIC STRUCTURE”
The editor of the annotated edition.
So, true story.
When I was starting 1st or 2nd grade, I got a cat. It had shown up as a ~6 month kitten at the patio door of a family friend, had a kink in its tail that the vet guessed was from being run over by a car tire, maybe one it had curled up to sleep under.
This cat was skittish as hell, if it had been socialized at all it was poorly, when I got to this family friend’s house we had to keep picking up pieces of furniture that it would try to hide under. I named it Freely, because “she ran around so freely”, and I was the kind of weirdo kid who would name a pet after an adverb.
She started out afraid of humans and it didn’t help that little kid me was like “pet! let’s play!” in a way that cats don’t really play, so her whole life she was distant and pissy. I went off to college, and then to LA and she stayed with my parents.
One year I was flying home for Christmas and my flight got cancelled because the plane was stuck under a blizzard in Denver or something, I got rebooked for two days on. Apparently I missed my last chance to see her because the next day my dad called to say she’d died, which wasn’t too sad because she’d always been distant and pissy.
So he asked what he should do with the body, options included putting it in the dumpster at his office, cremating it in the incinerator at his office, or burying it out in some woods by the country club, I asked him to do #3 because it seemed the most dignified.
Ha.
So, flew home, did Christmas, flew back, a few months later my mom calls me laughing her ass off. Apparently a cop knocked on her door around noon all seriously asking where my father was, she told him he was at the office and what was this about, cop just insisted he needed to talk to him, so she took a number and my dad called back when he came home.
Cop came back over and it turns out to be this: my dad went to bury Freely but the ground was frozen hard, the softest ground he could find was down by a creek so he dug as deep as he reasonably could (he was in his mid-60s at this point), buried her, and piled rocks on top to keep scavengers away.
But then the snow melted and flooded the creek up to its banks, the rocks and loose soil floated away, and this plastic bag with my dead cat inside floated several miles downstream until this dinky-ass creek passed over someone’s driveway at which point it beached, and this housewife coming out to get the paper encountered this rotten, waterlogged cat corpse stranded in the middle of her drive, freaked out, and called the cops. And as my dad hadn’t had the foresight to take off the collar and tag around her neck, it came back to him.
So there was this cop standing in the living room basically asking my dad if he had murdered my cat, possibly as part of a ritual to cast a spell on this random woman, while my father was just doubled over laughing in his recliner, the cop being all “this is a serious matter, sir”.
He was convinced and went away, and that’s how the best story about my first cat takes place months after her death.
Polytheism is the decentralization and democratization of divinity. It destroys the power of belief and also the power of belief in power, and instead, it believes in many beliefs and many powers. It is but a representation of the individual succumbing to the many as opposed to the one, changes and differences as opposed to persistence and unity, chaos as opposed to order.
(via artistyrant)
It is more the victory of the principles of aristocracy and plutocracy than of democracy, imo. Decentralization being the opposite of democracy.
(via lovegodsmashtyrants)
I had a dream that someone I know had been complaining about Comcast so much that some solomonic judge decreed that he’d be put in charge of the local franchise, to either improve it or appreciate the pressures of the system. And then he hired me as his enforcer and I’d ride along in his ‘30s open-top car with a pinstripe suit and guitar case tommy gun.
At one point he made fun of me for not getting the connection between the names of the Spectrum, this old Philly sports arena, and PRISM, a local premium cable station that aired games from there. Which was a connection I’d never made until right then, weirdly enough.
Then I had another dream that I was telling him about this dream, only I got woken up by a phone call in the middle of it and was really disoriented.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Expired L.A. by Vicky Moon
“I wanted to shoot at night because I feel that L.A. changes drastically from night to day. There’s this quietness that L.A. has when it’s dark that is really nice,” photographer Vicky Moon says. “It’s like you can finally have a conversation with the city without having to shout.”
Oh man I’ve stayed at that second one, it’s the Olive Motel, a real dive on Sunset in Silverlake, When I was in town some street girl got killed there, and then later a bike theft and counterfeiting (!) operation got busted there.
white dude in this horror movie : *translates old arabic text* *somehow it rhymes perfectly in english*
Now I really wanna see a horrible faltering translation from one of these movies, like “Whomsoever enters this room, they shall… well, this word is like… literally it means ‘unbecome,’ but it was used as a euphemism for death, pooping, and—wait, when was this carved? was it 15th century? Cuz it was a euphemism for sex too in the 15th century. This is either a cursed crypt, a bathroom, or a royal bedroom. Who wants to roll the dice?”
“You guys, I’ve gotta be honest, okay? This thing’s written in some kind of weird localized dialect, and I’ve only ever studied the standard form of the language. I mean, this part right here…I can’t even tell if it’s some kind of error, or an obscure slang phrase…whatever it is, I have no idea what the fuck it means.”
‘this is written in ancient sumerian. it’s about… uh… well that word is… uh. okay this is either a poem about farming, or straight-up a nasty sex guide. it might be both. i want a shower.’
So back when blogs were blogs and had comments (with decent signal:noise ratio, even), I’d be in the comments at Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein’s sites (hey wonklife, I was Senescent).
Fun times, fun times. No better way to hone your theory of mind than spending all day watching people describing what they thought other people would think about what they thought about those other people’s public personas.
That’s where I first came across Steve Sailer, who would show up day after day, ignore whatever shit he got, and have something cheerfully novel to say about the topic of the post as a leadin to linking two essays on tangential subjects. Good strategy.
Anyway that was the setting for one of the most interesting things I ever noticed. There was this commenter on Yglesias’ blog named Petey, who was actually really clever, subtle, worthwhile.
And then in the middle of the 2008 presidential primary, John Edwards said something about a plan to make something - healthcare? I forget - available to everyone by letting people sign up from computers at public libraries.
And it was like a throwaway moment, not fleshed out at all, but this guy Petey went all in on it, praising it to the heavens in comments. And people would be like “but Petey, how’s that supposed to work?”
And he’d just insult the questioner and restate the premise, like “What are you, a moron? You go to the library. You sign up. That’s it.” And people would be like “no, you misunderstand me, (informed question about backends and regulation and &tc)” and he’d just insult them, and restate the premise.
And this was completely at odds with his whole persona for years up to this point, and he just kept it up. He’d praise Edwards to the heavens and just repeat slogan-level statements as if they were glorious wisdom, and when questioned just insult the questioner and repeat them harder.
And then Edwards dropped out and he switched to Hillary as if nothing had happened and kept doing it. (Even though he had previously been seriously shit-talking her, for example.)
And one of the things he did was whenever he referred to Yglesias he’d call him “trust fund scumbag Matt Yglesias”, by way of accounting for why Matt failed to get on board and push the same line, the line that he should obviously be pushing and had no reasonable excuse not to.
And one of the things I respect Yglesias for most, he had a comments section that would regularly reach the mid-100s, which was a lot back then, and he almost never made any signs of acknowledging that the comments even existed. Once in a blue moon of blue moons, he’d post a comment of his own.
And this is the only time I ever remember him actually making a post(!) that acknowledged a comment. Not because something had caught on - all the other commenters thought Petey was being ridiculous. Not because anyone had actually said something worthwhile, quite the opposite! People said worthwhile things all the time. Rather, specifically because someone had thrown the steering wheel out the window and implacably committed to repeating the same idiocy (“forcing a meme”, if you will) over and over forever.
And that is the power of message discipline.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s doing an impression of Jack Nicholson on a Japanese tv program
When I was in LA Jack Nicholson gave me shit about the contents of my cart in a supermarket checkout line, not even kidding. In the Albertsons on Alvarado there was this dumpy old guy behind me wearing mirrored shades and out of nowhere he said “I can tell you don’t have a girlfriend, ‘cause you don’t have any fish in there”. And it just went from there. He asked what I was doing in LA and when I explained the spec script I was writing he said “fuck, that sounds terrible”.
Eventually he put his groceries on the conveyor belt and it was like, Capri Sun and boxes of microwave burritos. I was like “dude, what the hell”, and he said that yeah, one of my friends lost his job and I’m buying food for his family to eat, ‘cause god knows I’m not about to let him stay at my place again.
It was all really charming and towards the end I was starting to suspect, but I was like “no, Jack Nicholson isn’t that old and decrepit” and a short drive and google later, well.
reblog for the newbies
Cheetah: possibly the only pinball backglass to fuck up the breasts in a *small* direction.
