The ubiquity in social media progressifkult of narratives and frameworks of “abuse” and “abusers” worries me.

Not because that stuff doesn’t happen, I’ve got experience myself. My first relationship in 9th grade - we were the two weird and alienatedly smart kids even in the smart kids class, she was the first to feel like she understood me as a peer, also kissing and boobies. Ended up with her demanding I come with her to things as the only way to prove I didn’t hate her “like everyone else” only to tell me to stay away from her lest people think we were together and get in the way of her pursuing other guys, with her going dark for days and eventually saying it was because of nasty things I had (as in, hadn’t) said to my friends about her and telling me her suicide would be my fault.

It keeps going. That fucked me up for a long time. Years of maturation later she too delivered an apology out of nowhere but I wasn’t yet ready to accept it.

I’ve got a similar thing with a guy in my extended friend group, everyone likes him because you don’t see the dark side in public or until he feels he has power over you, there’s just a handful of us who won’t have anything to do with him and I’m sure he tells stories about our failures as friends and people to explain why.

So that stuff’s real, I know it, and it still bugs me because at least half the time I see abuse rhetoric applied it seems to be as an escape hatch to a moral imperative to love and accept everyone exactly as they are (or conceive themselves to be), allowing people to reject or simply dislike each other without themselves becoming the villain.

Which at best is a kludge (like how it was decided we shouldn’t “blame the victim” and then the concepts of enabling and codependency were puffed up to do the necessary work of identifying victims’ agency in their victimization), and at worst, which is a nontrivial fraction of the time, a venue for some impressive abuse itself, given it’s only acceptable to dislike or reject someone when it’s mandatory.

Plus honestly, you get the sense that people are being gathered into choirs and taught how - in perfect, multipart harmony - to cry wolf.

serkentsi-deactivated20180207:

From 1483 we have one Albanian sentence in the Renaissance comedy “Epirota” by Tommaso de Mezzo (draburi to clofto goglie = tramburë të kloftë golja “may your mouth tremble (from sickness)!”), and from 1497 the earliest document of Albanian of some length, the glossary by a German traveler Von Harff. Von Harff was an adventurer who wrote a kind of tourist guide in which he collected valuable information about various European languages including Basque, Modern Greek and Albanian. He provided his reader with the native equivalents of such useful phrases as “How much does this cost?”, “What is that”, and “Woman, I want to sleep with you”.

bars kinda rent you each other.

brazilwonders:

São Paulo, SP (by Renato Stockler)

Girolamo Savonarola (Italian: [savonaˈrɔːla]; 21 September 1452 – 23 May 1498) was an Italian Dominican friar and preacher active in Renaissance Florence. He was known for his prophecies of civic glory, the destruction of secular art and culture, and his calls for Christian renewal. He denounced clerical corruption, despotic rule and the exploitation of the poor.

…the Florentines expelled the ruling Medici and, at the friar’s urging, established a “popular” republic. Declaring that Florence would be the New Jerusalem, the world center of Christianity and “richer, more powerful, more glorious than ever”,[1] he instituted an extreme puritanical campaign, enlisting the active help of Florentine youth.

fetuspuke:

hummousexual:

phampants:

Artist removes 1 inch off the peak of England’s highest mountain; Brits want their inch back.

It is still England’s highest mountain, but Scafell Pike is ever so slightly smaller now after an artist stole the top inch of the summit to display in a gallery.

Oscar Santillan, 34, was accused of vandalism after removing the stone pinnacle of the 3,209ft Lake District peak for an exhibition in London.

Ian Stephens, managing director of Cumbria Tourism, said: “This is taking the mickey and we want the top of our mountain back.”

I love art

This is the funniest thing I have ever seen

Everyone and -where I know has been praising Fury Road, correctly.

Though. You talk about directors able to succeed big with big-budget action blockbusters with a distinctive, suit-unfriendly vision, you know who comes immediately to mind? Mel Gibson.

(His creative signature is the twinned themes of freedom and the violation of the human body.)

Hollywood has a legend that the McCarthyite blacklist was broken by prohibited filmmakers “secretly” working behind frontmen and then revealing their involvement after the films in question racked up praise and awards.

I’m not saying, I’m just… saying.

memejacker2kxx:

im thinking of the “society fears selfies because if we love ourselves what can they sell us” picture and how the artist that made it apparently sold prints of it so

kontextmaschine:

Everyone and -where I know has been praising Fury Road, correctly.

Though. You talk about directors able to succeed big with big-budget action blockbusters with a distinctive, suit-unfriendly vision, you know who comes immediately to mind? Mel Gibson.

(His creative signature is the twinned themes of freedom and the violation of the human body.)

Hollywood has a legend that the McCarthyite blacklist was broken by prohibited filmmakers “secretly” working behind frontmen and then revealing their involvement after the films in question racked up praise and awards.

I’m not saying, I’m just… saying.

Now what would you expect from a Mel Gibson movie?

- huge D.W. Griffith-style set pieces, with a ton of exotic-looking extras

- a scene of self-surgery

- some biblical thematics, like say a man and woman cast out of a garden, their return barred by an angel with a flaming… sword, followed by an end to the old order where evil, violent superhumans mate with fair women to produce warriors, all washed away in a flood of water

(What if it wasn’t an origin story because it was an Origin story?)

- or, say, salvation through the blood of the crucified

I really really think I might be on to something here.

(Really, wouldn’t “universal donor” have been a better label than “INRI”?)

(1948 voice) I listen to everything but race music and hillbilly records.

“Some extra tinkering for something special coming soon”. Christ, that’s ominous.

As compared to normal delicacies, like fungal rot and fish eggs.

flatluigi:

prostheticknowledge:

Galactic Dimension

Maker installation project by royrobotiks is a huge pinball machine made with familiar everyday objects:

Galactic Dimension is a supersized pinball machine which I’ve built for Phæno – an amazing science center in the German city of Wolfsburg. The pinball was built on a steep ramp in the exhibition hall and has a gigantic playfield, which measures 3×6 meters in total.
Styled with UFO’s and other cosmic references, the pinball fits perfectly into the futuristic building designed by the star architect Zaha Hadid.

As a science center should stimulate creativity and inventiveness, I repurposed everyday items like hair dryers and office fans for the playfield elements, giving the visitors the idea that they could also build such a contraption at home.
The result is a fully playable machine, operated via a control desk where the score is displayed on a jumbo calculator. Needless to say – hunting the high score is galactic fun! Watch the video above to see the machine in action!

More about how the project was put together can be found here

spacetwinks

The ‘70s Transgender Moment was the apex of the Surgeons-as-Gods thing that came out of WWI (and then it was all downhill from there)

This one seems to derive from the Psychotherapists-as-Priests thing that came out of WWII.

Now the 2040s Cold War cybernetics one, that’s going to be interesting.

No asks in a while, maybe send me some?

Can’t guarantee I’ll answer them but hey.

No. Immortality has been “just a few improvements on the current state of the art” away for approximately ever.

I was doing a renn faire (and going to the hotel jacuzzi afterparties) back in the late ‘90s, and reading '70s SF before that, it’s nothing novel to me. The problem with polyamory is polyamorists. I remember setting up my OKCupid profile and saying I’d consider it and it took another hundred questions before my matches were remotely acceptable again. Maybe if it ever caught on among the sane and attractive.

Uh. God DAMN is that out of my wheelhouse. I know “socioeconomic history of northern English textile workers with cutting insights, revealing details, and thorough archive work” was the great E.P. Thompson’s specialty, but scanning through the index of Making of the English Working Class I can’t find much that seems to go past the 1820s.

I’d be shocked if one of his compatriots or acolytes didn’t treat the subject though, but beyond that beats me. Maybe don’t be so quick to dismiss the socialist histories, the CPHG crowd did some good work and “19th century English workers were tending towards workers’ solidarity and socialism" is not a ridiculous conclusion to draw.