I’d heard The Kids were using Instagram as Facebook these days, but looking through my matches and their “moments” I’m starting to suspect they’re using Tinder as Instagram.

Getting old is so confusing.

Her: you put butter in your coffee? That's so *weird*.
Me: you take yours black?
Her: cream.
Me:
Her: what?

I don’t think most of the participants were thinking of it that way and in any case that essay was kind of maximizing for cheekiness and provocation.

Mostly I think it came down to the Americans sending signals, especially with their victories in Italy and France, that they weren’t going to go for total officer-level purges, they weren’t going to make a thing of executing, starving, or enslaving surrendered troops, and they wouldn’t rape or pillage too hard. (And that, like after WWI, they’d hold the other, more revenge-minded Allies’ debt and thus the whip hand, and they’d learned from the Treaty of Versailles.)

Meanwhile the Russians were signaling opposite, and I suspect the wiser Germans were signaling that they were ready for surrender and demobilization, say in reports to HQ that they expected to be intercepted.

Now, we know from things like the Operation Paperclip files that the U.S. was laying the groundwork for German co-option even before V-E Day, and from things like Wiesenthal and the Israeli Nazi-hunters that prominent Reich figures who saw the writing on the wall were planning their outs at the same time, including putting out feelers to foreign governments. (The Catholic Church in particular, which at this time still had a sizeable geopolitical infrastructure, was a big intermediary for this sort of thing.)

So I wouldn’t rule out some Inglorious Basterds-style direct contacts, or given the way we refounded our mythos on victory, the subsequent and continuing denial of same.

argumate:

kontextmaschine:

I don’t think most of the participants were thinking of it that way and in any case that essay was kind of maximizing for cheekiness and provocation.

Mostly I think it came down to the Americans sending signals, especially with their victories in Italy and France, that they weren’t going to go for total officer-level purges, they weren’t going to make a thing of executing, starving, or enslaving surrendered troops, and they wouldn’t rape or pillage too hard. (And that, like after WWI, they’d hold the other, more revenge-minded Allies’ debt and thus the whip hand, and they’d learned from the Treaty of Versailles.)

Meanwhile the Russians were signaling opposite, and I suspect the wiser Germans were signaling that they were ready for surrender and demobilization, say in reports to HQ that they expected to be intercepted.

Now, we know from things like the Operation Paperclip files that the U.S. was laying the groundwork for German co-option even before V-E Day, and from things like Wiesenthal and the Israeli Nazi-hunters that prominent Reich figures who saw the writing on the wall were planning their outs at the same time, including putting out feelers to foreign governments. (The Catholic Church in particular, which at this time still had a sizeable geopolitical infrastructure, was a big intermediary for this sort of thing.)

So I wouldn’t rule out some Inglorious Basterds-style direct contacts, or given the way we refounded our mythos on victory, the subsequent and continuing denial of same.

Interesting theory, but didn’t the battle of the bulge have the effect of ceding half of Germany to the Soviet Union by delaying the US/British advance?

If German officers who wished to make arrangements with the Allies couldn’t avoid this, then it sounds more like wishful thinking that had no effect.

Well it’s not like there was an official directive, that’s what I’m saying. And it shouldn’t be surprising that the Western Front commanders weighted their hate/fear heavier against the Western Allies than the Eastern Front.

Also you know, not everyone on the German side was a gutless cynic out to save their own hides, some of them were true believers.

Have you ever actually seen Triumph of the Will?

(You should, it’s everything they say, you can watch it in this, the year Luigi 3, and still spend the next hour thinking “well, I’m not sure what these ‘Nazis’ are all about, but I want in.”)

Anyway, you’ll notice that the biggest audience pops by far are when Hitler foretells the collapse of the Reich, the decay of its institutions and symbols, and the bloody death of all involved.

I <3, <3<3<3, fitting things into parallel constructions and generational cycles, maybe discount for that.

All those things had ideologies attached but had a lot to do with the attempt to deal with war trauma - shrapnel and burns in WWI, “battle fatigue” (or was it still “shell shock”?) in WWII, survivable amputations in Vietnam.

Remember the Six-Million-Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman? That was the contemporary mythologization.

So give it a while, let transhumanism and cyborg feminism and all that percolate and polish until they’re intelligible for public consumption, meanwhile let all the VA money from Iraq II (signature wound IED damage that rips out the whole undercarriage) bang into the DARPA money for drones and exoskeletons and telepresence…

As the opening line of my favorite novel put it, “In five years, the penis will be obsolete.”

Oh god *dammit*, tumblr.

kontextmaschine:

I

I love fitting things into parallel constructions and generational cycles, maybe discount for that.

So those all had ideologies attached, but a big mover was attempts to treat mass war trauma - mutilations and burns in WWI, “battle fatigue” (or was it still “shell shock”?) in WWII, newly survivable amputations in Korea and Vietnam.

Remember the Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman? Contemporary mythologizations.

So give it a while for transhumanism and cyborg feminism and all that to bang together and polish into something comprehensible for public consumption, then let all the VA prosthetic money from Iraq II (signature wound an IED tearing out the whole undercarriage) bang into the DARPA money for drones, telepresence, and exoskeletons…

As the opening line of my favorite novel goes, “In five years the penis will be obsolete.”

drethelin:

dekomoron:

shutupaubrey:

it should be illegal to put an s after the word “feel”

it feels like you didnt think this through

I know that feel

Have you ever noticed that Chicken Little and The Little Red Hen are complete opposite fables?

Did the faire summers after my 9th (which was middle school for us) and 10th grades.

THAT was the place my first gf brought me along to. Honestly if she'd’ve posed it as a polyamory thing I’d’ve been more okay with it. Probably would’ve realized I was *supposed* to fuck that one girl.

Seriously though, have you ever MET faire folk?

I see the breathless, wide-eyed shock from contemporary young fandom convention workers, Did You Know [so-and-so] Has A Reputation For ~FLIRTING WITH~ His Teenage Fans

and it’s like

::blink::

::blink::

::blink::

HAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAGAHA

hahahaHAHAhaha

Hahahaha

hooooooooly shit, dude

secondbalcony:

I wrote this years ago but I still like it lots: ‘The purpose of a 90’s sitcom is to tell us everyone is capable of every behavior. There’ll be the episode where the cool guy embarrasses himself compulsively, the episode where the nice girl acts like a jerk, the episode in which the reasonable one acts crazy, and so on. I had a crush on a barista once. I sat by the counter with part II of The Man Without Qualities saying to her that I should really be studying French instead because I’ll have to be able to write PhD-level papers on Robbe-Grillet soon, once I choose whether I’m saying yes to Yale or Harvard. If I hadn’t watched about a hundred episodes of ‘Friends’ during my tweens I would have had to kill myself that night.’

As I’ve said, Cascadian culture most highly values books, beer, trees, and tits.

nightpool42:

ilzolende:

meaninglessmonicker:

daughter-of-adam:

bicyclicada:

edwardspoonhands:

lizziekeiper:

abookblog:

mycupofbooks:

booksandpublishing:

“In the gallery beyond: more dead.” - The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt (hardback)

It’s literally “love is for the weak” 😃

“It was, like most of the rooms in the Institute, an unused bedroom, meant for visiting Shadowhunters.” - Clockwork Prince 

LIKE LITERALLY ACTUALLY WTF

“All righty. I’ll leave you to it, then.” - To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han. 

This young man’s credentials were satisfactory, my father and my aunt (who has always looked after the children’s welfare) were satisfied, and I acquiesced. - Crooked House - Agatha Christie

It follows that uv is an arc of G(x’) but not of G(x), for otherwise d_x(r,v) <= d_x(r,w) + 1, so w = v_i, v=v_{i+1} for some i.

Combinatorial Optimization, by Cook, Cunningham, Pulleyblank, and Schrijver

Ceres allowed herself to be pacified with this arrangement, and restored the earth to her favour.

Since, for other reasons, Mohism also did not survive as a living school of thought after 221 B.C., the logicians had little permanent influence on Chinese thought Conrad Schirokauer, a brief history of Chinese and Japanese civilizations

Your childhood aspects should also foreshadow your behavior going forward. -Fate Worlds Volume 1: Worlds on Fire

Do: Be specific. “These cell phones are distracting to our discussion.”

- The New Complete Facilitator. Howick Associates

Got 3 equidistant.

I guffawed uncomfortably at my gaffe.

- Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

Seeing that Adam is still lonely, God makes woman out of one of Adam’s ribs.

- Kenneth C. Davis, Don’t Know Much About The Bible

But if you will not listen to us and be circumcised, then we will take our daughter and be gone.

- Genesis 34:17, The New Oxford Annotated Bible

shit.

scavengedluxury:

BOAC Building by Gillespie, Kidd and Coia, now a branch of a Britpop singer’s clothing line. Glasgow, May 2015.

I’d say it’s most like golf, even the whole “hit a ball around the same course several times, total your score” bit is like weekend tournaments. (The big psychic difference is no matter how bad a hole of golf you eventually succeed and sink it, no matter how good a ball you eventually fail and drain it.)

Like golf, competitive players *are* better (and have specific strengths), and have more skills - aim, timing, yes, but also how to slow and trap a ball (which might include *not* using the flippers and letting a ball bounce safely to the other), how to a get physical with the machine for maximum effect without tilting, how to cradle and trap and tap pass and bounce pass and post pass and shatz the inlanes. (At the extreme, with deathsaves and bouncebacks you can save a ball that’s by normal standards completely lost already, but that’s considered unsporting and even potentially injurious to the game and the player and not done in competition.)

But beyond that knowledge is important. This can be things like just knowing that a shot that looks angled to be hit with one flipper can not only be “backhanded” with the other, but that that’s even safer, because the ball picks up different spin based on which wall of the orbit it’s riding.

It can be knowing the ruleset - there’s a LOT of stuff not on the instruction cards or even obvious from the screen, audio or playfield lights, like that all modes in Simpsons Pinball Party use, and reset, the same timer, so you can keep going to finish a difficult TV mode through to victory laps with a safe 2-shot sequence to light and collect the Otto shot multiplier.

It’s knowing a LOT of rulesets, for old and obscure games, so if you’re ever called on a Mystic you know all the good points are in the weird tic-tac-toe bonus.

It’s knowing trends in design even, so if you’re up on something you’re not used to, you know 2010s Sterns have a lot of combos and minor hurry-ups that build value across balls, that 2000s are about stacking every mode with each other, that ‘70s you should probably light a spinner to increase its value a hundredfold or more and keep nailing it, that if you clear all the drop targets on an EM and they don’t reset you should probably look for a bonus collect somewhere.

It’s knowing how tables in general work, how strong the flippers are, how fresh the rubbers are and what brand, how dirty or waxed the table is, what pitch it’s set at. It’s being able to pick that all up from feedback, then subconsciously process it so you can see a ball heading one way and intuitively know where it’ll be 3 bounces later and when and where to slap the table to disrupt that.

It’s being able to start a multiball and do that for 3 balls at once.

It’s knowing the difference between the strategies with the best risk/reward ratios (for head-to-head competition), the highest upside potential (for GCs, some qualifying rounds, risky come-from-behind wins and 4-player games where 1st takes a bonus), and feature advancement (for reaching wizard modes).

(Which leads to high-level strategy being sometimes unintuitive - say playing Whitewater and ignoring the multiball, spending 2 balls scoring few points while advancing Boulder Garden, then getting 5x playfield scoring, picking up a bunch of rafts and getting hundreds of millions in seconds.)

At the very extreme *weather* can be important which sounds ridiculous for a game that’s played indoors in sealed boxes, but flippers, bumpers, and slings are powered by induction coils that heat up with use and get weaker with heat, so ambient temperature and circulation matter in terms of how play changes within and across games, especially in tournaments where a lot of bodies crowd around keeping the same tables in constant use. So it’s knowing if you’re playing first on 3rd ball in a hot, stuffy room it can be worthwhile to flip a lot just to leave your opponent with weak flippers.

It’s knowing your opponents - Robert Gagno’s an autistic savant who does great on tables where blind orbits feed an upper flipper cause he can send balls around as fast as he wants and know exactly when to flip, Keith Elwin’s a route operator who’s spent hours a day for decades making every shot on all sorts of tables and is so great at cradling (well, at everything, but particularly) he can play even a 5-ball MB as a succession of 4 single balls with jackpots lit, Cayle George is a game designer who plays like a speedrunner, knows every rule and exploit (I’ve seen him get 14m on Ripley’s before the game realized his first ball even started). And knowing that, be able to estimate how they’ll do on any given table, and how risky a strategy you should take against them.

It’s even having a guess about opponents you don’t know. THIS one comes from a city that’s never even *seen* a Johnny Mnemonic, THAT one comes from a basement & garage league with a bunch of early solid states and a guy that collects Data East.

So.

As it stands pinball rulesets are mostly designed to offer a decent balance between newbie approachability and competitors’ balance/challenge (& collectors’ depth and replayability). They’ll have one big obvious feature that’s easy to trigger (or even automatic as a final ball “mercy” if you haven’t yet), and sets off a flashy mode, usually a multiball, with animation and sound cues and playfield toys, but a lot of times isn’t worth all that many points if you play it like you’re “supposed to”. (Competitors might ignore the jackpots and use the ball save and multiple balls to shoot risky shots advancing something else, or hold off and only trigger it with other modes started first, say.)

On top of that you’ll have enough modes scattered around the playfield that just flailing you’ll trigger *something*, ideally for keeping interest something different each time.

But the deeper ruleset, and the stuff that gets most polished in updates (pinball’s now like ‘90s PC games, where the final polished version comes as a update patch months after release, with lost causes ::cough cough Avengers cough:: left to wither on the vine) is for competitive players.

Pinball’s kind of in a renaissance right now, and with traditional arcades in decline or focusing on redemption games while hipster barcades open, educated disposable-income types return to the dense cities and bars compete for their patronage, leagues and tournaments are leading the way. So keeping that scene happy is a priority, which is why you have things like Stern calling top players in to advise on revamping the Star Trek ruleset (which at top levels used to favor starting a game, holding the ball still 40 seconds, making one shot and repeating SIX TIMES before you’d get Kobayashi Maru and start playing for real).

I wonder exactly which day it was that the amount of time Comedy Central had spent broadcasting The Daily Show finally caught up to the amount of time they had spent broadcasting PCU

Alright that was all of the last batch of asks, any more? I kinda like getting assignments.

As someone who lived through ‘90s “alternative”, do you realize how weird it is that when Rage Against The Machine disbanded fucking Green Day decided to step into that niche?