Well the really Kontextmaschine thing to say would be that she’s as good or better than I am at listening in on the tune America’s humming to itself and singing it back in response, she canonically browses tumblr and has long been rumored to lurk 4chan (which is not absolutely ridiculous - she’s our generation too and Lorde, who’s in her extended clique, workshopped Royals on /mu/) and God knows what else she gets up to on those days when she’s not in the mood to be a media object so she doesn’t leave her house.

That she too noticed that the worm turned somewhere in the last few months, and that she maneuvered this intentionally in full knowledge where it would go, that she knows that “a black girl tried to spin what was essentially personal jealousy as a race thing, in the process rudely rebuffing my attempts to seek unity on the grounds of Correct go-(white-)girl feminism, and then mean online media and Black Twitter picked on me over it” is actually going to be a good place to be when the backlash will be kicking in during her next album/tour cycle, that it’ll align herself with where her audience of white-girls-not-like-Coachella-white-girls-I-mean-but-not-NOT-like-Coachella-white-girls will be at by then.

(That all this is on purpose delicate and tangential enough to be disclaimable if it’s obsoleted by the next cultural turn, like how she went from doing a feather-touch War on Christmas song in 2007 to in 2014 having a throwoff line about vicariously enjoying the existence of gayness as a sign of cosmopolitanism in her growing-up-and-moving-to-the-big-city song.)

That if media try to force this meme and take on Taylor fucking Swift not only does that revalidate the picked-on pose she’s so good at but gets increasingly ridiculous as she settles in at the apex of pop culture, but it might even be the overreach that breaks the fever, like McCarthy taking on the U.S. Army, and having her name stamped on a major cultural turn (for which a nontrivial constituency will be grateful) is a good step on the way to becoming Queen of America.

Seriously, how fucking Kontextmaschine a response is that?

I don’t actually believe it though.

(Though in the course of even mooting the theory I’ve started to convince myself.)

severnayazemlya:

krwks:

severnayazemlya:

krwks:

Holy shit lol

juggalos are easily the most interesting christian sect of the postwar era

They’re definitely interesting but I think the “evangelical christian” label you see is a big mischaracterization - they seem more just vaguely pro-spirituality in the same way that a lot of artists (and people in general) are. 

nah bradeodatus, do you mean to tell me that a sect with the explicit goal of doing the will of God by appealing primarily to outcasts in a large and declining empire and dropping vivid morality tales about how you go to heaven or hell after you die based on your morality in this world doesn’t have anything to do with a thing that claimed to do the will of God by appealing primarily to outcasts in a large and declining empire and dropped vivid morality tales about how you go to heaven or hell after you die based on your morality in this world?

sure, christianity eventually ended up converting emperors and capturing imperial power, but you’ve read homestuck

clawsofpropinquity:

theunitofcaring:

Thought prompted by having watched way too much television at work this week: 

what we need are variable length television episodes. The entire problem with Law and Order is that, if they’ve found the bad guy and we’re only at minute 20, he’s not the bad guy. Even if it’s four minutes from the ending there’s probably still a twist coming, so someone is going to pull out a gun and/or jump out a window. You know everything you need to know about how an episode is going to play out just by looking at the clock. 

Movies have this problem too. No, the protagonist isn’t going to die, we’re only 45 minutes in. No, their grand plan to crush the villain isn’t going to work, we’ve still got another hour that they’re going to have to fill somehow. Okay, this grand plan is going to work, because we’re down to eight minutes.

Reading a detective story or law story is pretty much the exact same problem - setup, obvious misdirection, apparent resolution that we know is a lie because we’re only halfway though the page count.  I knew Harry Potter wasn’t dead because I could feel seventy more pages in my hand. 

And that’s print, so we can’t fix it, but now that lots of people read on ebooks I’m astonished there’s not an app that lets authors set false endings and false lengths to their stories. And has no one recut Law and Order to be a thousand times less predictable just by virtue of not always lasting exactly 43 minutes plus commercial breaks?  I would pay a lot of money for a Netflix-of-lies full of television episodes and movies of varying length and thus, for once, genuinely unpredictable. 

Not sure this is solvable for movies* or books, but I think variable length tv is on it’s way in. British tv has always had, compared to the US more variation in episodes per series (often because of actor availability) and more variation show length between series, including season of the same show. They’re more willing to vary episode lengths within a show too, and it’s quite good for suspense like that trick where the extra long series finale resolves a bunch of plot threats unexpectedly quickly, leaving the viewer unbalanced, that works much better with an 85-minute episode or whatever than with a US style two part finale. 

Anyway I’m fairly sure the reason British tv is so much more variable is that a) the schedules are more flexible b) miniseries are way more popular so people are okay with a Luther series of three 80 minute episodes or whatever it was. Netflix is even more extreme in terms of point a, and webisodes and minisodes are ramping up b, so the potential is there for good things on this front!.

*Well, it’s already somewhat solved for movies as a whole because standard running times have expanded so much: when I first started watching Hitchcock and Hammer Horror movies I would always get blind sided by the ending - it’s only been 90 minutes!

(and can’t you just turn off page count on your e-reader?)

Don’t think variable length will help much because no matter what the length is you’ll still be able to go “hey, there’s still 15 minutes/25%/wevs left”. You could do it if viewers watched blind to the length which I suppose could technically work on Netflix where you’re not tied to the “4 regularly spaced cliffhangers that keep people bound for 3 minutes worth of ads” model, but I don’t know how many people are going to be like “Ah, a new episode’s out! I know what I’m doing for the next 2 hours and/or 30 minutes and will be satisfied either way, and don’t mind that without a scrollbar to tell me I can only skip around through VHS-style FF/REW controls.”

You can kind of get away with stuff like that in movies - consider the fake happy ending to The Ring - because not that many people will be thinking “ah yes, this is 106 minutes long and my internal timer that I started after the previews and kept up the whole time I was sitting enthralled in a dark room says we’re only at 87”.

I think if anything the way to deal with this is to wield the audience’s genre/medium-savviness against it. Joss Whedon’s always been good at that but what was really a master class in the technique was the first two seasons of Veronica Mars. You’d be like “well, obviously that guy can’t be the perp behind the case-of-the-week because he’s clearly in the middle of a multi-episode character arc that would fuck up/a member of the main cast” and then an act or two later you’d be like “welp”.

iamjapanese:

Ilya Ibryaev（Илья Ибряев Russian, b.1955）

watercolor painting   here, here, here and here

Anyway, what brought me to that was thinking about something. I’m very much a text guy so I kind of categorize 4chan and stuff like that as a primarily text medium with occasional illustrations, but there’s a reason they’re called imageboards.

And one really interesting thing about imageboard culture is how big it is on the concept of personification. I’ve talked about polandball and the other countryballs, which come from Krautchan, and Pepe (”sad frog”) and Feelsguy, but also things like the suit/greenface Anon, Fawkes mask Anonymous, /v/irgins, Le Happy Merchant, Captain Sweden, Iron Pill, and Big Red. Always been fond of the Japanese-style moe anthropomorphization, too - ebola-chan and all that.

Like, it’s telling that the very first thing GamerGate did, on coming to self-awareness and realizing they were a thing, was to create Vivian James and start investing charisma in her.

kontextmaschine:

i must not fear
fear is the mind-killer
the little death that brings total obliteration
i will face my fear
allow it to pass over me
and through me
and where it has gone
only i remain

severnayazemlya:

thathopeyetlives:

cyborgbutterflies:

chroniclesofrettek:

honey-andrevolution:

sexpot-titzgerald:

sprinklesobourbon:

thegestianpoet:

seansoo:

but why do we have to get married and have children

why can’t we just get a group of friends and live happily ever after in an apartment and share the profits

i’d be much happier that way

this is the most millennial thing ive ever read 

Nothing wrong with this, you can have roof parties and grill food.
Better yet just save up together and buy a small house split the bills and mortgage.

- the nuclear family as an economic unit has really only existed for a few hundred years, across part but not all of the world

- the nuclear family unit is the easiest to exploit under capitalism, because parents have to work externally to provide for their children. They work to pay for child care for their children while they work. They work to earn money to feed their kids and to give them nice things to make up for all the time they spend away, at work.

- a huge amount of labour is necessary every day to keep a family fed, their house clean, etc. some families are wealthy enough to outsource this by hiring staff, most are not.

- capitalism is a pointless middleman in this. we should just live cooperatively.

- share houses and intentional communities are awesome

- people of different life stages function well together because they have complimentary needs and abilities

- kids are less of a stress and burden in a home with lots of different adults to provide support and love, as well as sharing household tasks.

- destroy capitalism through cooperativism.

^^^

“- capitalism is a pointless middleman in this. we should just live cooperatively.”

Just make sure you have a friend who likes to clean, one who likes to cook, someone who likes to do laundry, someone who likes to take care of children, and make sure you’re all ok spending 50%+ of your time together without getting on each other’s nerves for a couple decades. A simple task for any neurodivergent, socially awkward person.

Sharing a house with many friends/romantic partners great and I can’t wait to do it.

But sharing a house with random strangers? People who might be abusive, mean, bigoted, or just plain impossible to deal with?

That sounds about as bad as family to me. I’m all for cooperation between people but at the same time I am scared because there are many out there who would hurt me and I’d rather have some input in deciding who to live with.

I don’t want to share a house with anyone but my wife and children. Every roommate I have ever had I ended up getting annoyed at.

But it could be very nice to live in a village, esp. a Weltraumburg fractal urban village.

what’s the history of the nuclear family? when/where did it originate?

emmanuel todd says it predates modernity: he thinks family structure influenced the development and speed-of-uptake of modernity, and for anyone whose name isn’t an australian seaworld park, causal relations can only travel in one direction in time.

this says it’s been around in at least part of europe for as far back as anyone can tell.

Historically, it’s completely typical for unmarried adults to live in semicommunal group housing. Not only with (extended) family but if away from home with people who are at least initially strangers - boarding houses, YMCAs, dormitories, fraternities, military barracks, work camps, residential hotels, social clubs and taverns with attached rooms.

The expectation that single adults will necessarily live individually in single-occupancy residences is of about as recent origin as the expectation that married adults will live in nuclear families in detached suburban houses.

tulipnight:

Castle Geysir by Marcel Zaugg

The Scotsman who was living on my couch last year had come from (and returned to) working on a farm in Iceland right next to Geysir, the original geyser from which the name comes. He said that over the ages the mouth has built up high enough with mineral deposits that the pressure no longer rises enough for the water column to clear the lip and naturally erupt that spectacularly anymore. They used to pour detergent into it to make it blow but environmentalists complained about them effectively just dumping industrial chemicals into nature on the reg, so now they only do it on special occasions.

nostalgebraist:

I just learned that “teen” is apparently an archaic term for misery or grief, via the line “my heart is all wracked with teen”

Yes, Bao-Yu, your heart is all wracked with teen

Actually tastes halfway between root beer and cream soda, but this has potential.

Are we still supposed to love Robin Williams?

growing up you notice a lot of adulthood makes more sense three drinks in

purgatorialsociety:

Litany for a Happy Death from Comfort And Consolation For The Sick And Afflicted

oh fuck

this election’s going down with the safety off

soudasouda:

@SoudaBrooklyn / mfoerlev: Albert Frey, Kochner Canvas Weekend House, Long Island, 1934

Posted by SoudaSouda
Follow Souda on instagram, pinterest, facebook, or tumblr.

photos-of-everyday-life:

Villa Cavrois (Robert Mallet-Stevens, 1932).

Croix, France, 2015.

lovegodsmashtyrants:

“A central feature, covering a fifty-year period, in the making of the English working class was precisely a mass resistance to proletarianization. “When they knew that this cause was lost,” notes Thompson, “yet they reached out again, in the thirties and forties [of the nineteenth century], and sought to achieve new and only imagined forms of social control.”

Thompson concludes his exceptional survey of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England as comfortably at home with paradox and contradiction as he is at its beginning. The years of capitalist industrialization in Britain were characterized first by tragedy, “not a revolutionary challenge, but a resistance movement, in which the Romantics and the Radical craftsmen opposed the annunciation of Acquisitive Man. In the failure of the two traditions to come to a point of junction, something was lost. How much we cannot be sure, for we are among the losers.””