The funniest thing is this isn’t even my favorite story like this from Ancient Rome.

Okay, so in the 100s B.C. there was a Sicilian slave named Eunus, who was a magician. Not like a wizard, but a stage magician, though like all proper magicians he didn’t acknowledge the distinction. A guy who performed tricks in front of an audience while keeping up a charming patter.

And his master had Eunus perform for rich audiences at parties. He wouldn’t be paid, because slave, but he solicited tips from the audience. This was pretty normal - city slaves often accepted tips or hired themselves out during their free time to build up a nest egg with which to buy their freedom.

(American slavery is best known in the context of plantation agriculture, but urban slaves working in manufacturing or the service sector were often given the same opportunities, to the point where laws were passed against the practice, for fear that it would undermine the racial castehood that had not been part of the Roman system.)

Anyway, part of Eunus’ act was that he claimed the power of prophecy, and specifically that there would be a great overturning of society, he would become king, and the slaves would kill or enslave their masters.

Presumably this was wrapped in a cheekiness that rendered it more amusing than threatening, for the act ended with a solicitation for tips, with the promise that the audiencemembers who tipped him would be spared from the purge.

From 135 to 132 B.C., there was a major slave uprising in Sicily, now known as the First Servile War. Eunus led the slaves. Those who had tipped him were spared.

Okay so “beep-boopism” and data journalism and effective altruism and moneyballism are the same thing right? The resonances are strong enough for that to be a productive category, at least.

And honestly I think it might be largely an epiphenomenon of consumer computers finally being powerful enough to brute-force large data sets enough to deliver interesting results, and the resulting prestige leading those techniques to spill over into different fields where everything looks like a nail, the same way everything has always been about to deliver immortality.

So the insulting way to put it, your worldview is part of the same fad as Dwarf Fortress.

Also an insulting way to put it, your worldview is like that time in the ‘90s when CGI got just good enough and “morphing” and low-poly animation was everywhere. You know, the kind of stuff vaporwave’s calling back to.

And academics in fields from business to philosophy to gender were like “Yes, Virtual Reality MUDs are definitely the next big thing, both in themselves and as a metaphor for everything else.”

I maybe should A/B test those.

Halfassed speculation:

qualitative romanticism as thesis

quantitative beep-boopism as antithesis

neotenous autism chic as synthesis

(Compare Victorian synaesthesia chic, Spiritualism-as-science)

Painfully dead-on.

In our defense, when New York does a sketch comedy show, the underlying message is “look how superior we are to everyone else”. “I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not”, etc.

When LA does reality shows (which are just sketch drama with improv elements), the underlying message is “look at me look at me look at me look at me look at me affirm me”

And when Portland does a sketch comedy show? The underlying message is “Are we being ridiculous? I’m a little concerned we’re being ridiculous.”

(I was going to start “when Canada does a sketch comedy show…”, but most sketch comedy shows are actually Canadian in disguise.)

Bonus Cascadian sketch comedy: Bill Nye saves the Space Needle by speedwalking

homohustle:

Last night I had a dream that I built a robot and I was being interviewed about it and the interviewer was like “Can you fuck it?” and I smugly answered “What kind of fool would make a robot that you can’t fuck?”

polyaletheia:

severnayazemlya:

polyaletheia:

prophecyformula:

nostalgebraist:

blashimov:

nostalgebraist:

The college handbook forbids students to embrace or promote “doctrinal errors” from the 4th through the 21st centuries, “such as Arianism, Socinianism, Pelagianism, Skepticism, Feminism.” If drawn to such ideas, they must “inform the administration immediately and honestly in a letter offering to withdraw from the College.”

Wtf college is this Clearly a hokey religious one But which

It’s New Saint Andrews College (quote is from this article), which is part of a weird, frightening little religious subculture I just spent a night of insomnia reading all about

Man this is so close to being #my fucking ingroup

But… Protestantism

Weirdly close to mine too, or my desired in-group at least, except the whole Christian thing. I mean, intelligence, Anglophilic traditionalism, drinking, self-presentation… and this is something that a lot of people might find trivial, but that fact that the folks in the picture make an effort to dress properly is hugely important to me. It automatically makes the women look like marriage material, for example. Seriously I will convert to almost any political/cultural views for a group that present themselves like that. Just not to Christianity.

I also notice that, like the European New Right, they’re taking the “Gramscian” approach of focussing on culture for long-term change rather than politics for short-term. It seems to be a thing these days.

there is a fair argument to be made that mormonism isn’t really christian (^:

OMG no. When I was last in Salt Lake City I visited their temple compound. Mormonism is the most tasteless fake made-up invented religion imaginable. You’re not allowed inside the big boxy temple building itself, but they have this cut-away model of it in their visitors’ centre. One of the rooms in it is “the beautiful room” decorated in a vaguely baroque style where, at the end of your full initiation or whatever, you get to experience a preview of what heaven is supposed to be like. When I saw that I was almost overwhelmed with compassion for Mormons and for the culture they come from, that they are so deracinated from the great cultural traditions that give context and meaning, so separated from the beauty and wonder of this here present world. But perhaps that’s the point of living in a desert. 

What I’m really looking for is the cultural rootedness of the Japanese, together with the sophisticated taste and attention to quality and craft of the Japanese combined with the animism of Shinto and the pro-society orientation of the Japanese. Also hot springs. I really have no idea where to go to find that, though.

Related.

Related?

Cultural rootedness, sophisticated popular taste, appreciation of skilled labor, pagan sensibility, prosociality, that’s pretty much of what I’ve been enjoying about Cascadia. All in an Anglophone society that presents some of the most plausible continuity with American mytho-heritage.

We’ve even got hot springs, but they’re mostly tucked away in obscure hollows in the volcanic ranges. That’s one of my long-term retirement daydreams, buy a plot with one and open an onsen ryokan.

Which reminds me I *really* need to tell my story about Sandpoint Idaho.

(I’m aware of the posts I’ve promised and never delivered - Black History Month (Orthodox), the Simpsons play review, my stop in San Francisco, the history of American roads and the Post Office as a center of power. Don’t think I’m not. Sorry. And that’s not even counting all the asks I need to get to.)

The good thing about this kind of Taste, if you really believe in it, is that it is surprisingly democratic. If you read the right things, and talk to the right people, they can tell you exactly what Taste is. Then you just go out and buy some. The bad thing about it is that it is intentionally calculated to elude most people, no matter how hard they work: The right people only talk to each other, the right reading only shows up in college or grad school and sometimes not even then, all of it seems cut to flatter white men’s egos and no-one else’s, and everything you’re supposed to love is always exactly difficult enough or expensive enough or rare enough or well-hidden enough that you’ll never get your greasy paws on it, you fucking peasant, you.

Meanwhile, populist critics have adopted the idea of taste as natural and inherent. Basically, they argue for nature over nurture: They write about their love of (most often) pop music as if it’s a physical thing, a repressed desire that has always existed somewhere, waiting to be set free. This also frames pop culture itself as something forbidden and shameful that needs to be de-stigmatized. People don’t get into pop; they admit to it. I have almost never read anyone who is learning about pop, or trying to understand pop. (Carl Wilson’s Journey to the End of Taste might be the big exception, but even that comes down to a sort of epiphanic moment, a memory of listening to love songs with his ex-girlfriend and realizing that things could be simple and true and good.) What I read them doing is re-connecting. Or re-discovering. Or they reclaim, or own, or embrace. They validate their own “guilty pleasures,” they re-experience the innocent joy of dancing around in their bedrooms as children, they repudiate the shaming of an anti-pop social circle to proclaim their truths.

In the old model, Taste is transcendent, like God, existing outside the material universe. In the new one, it is immanent, a wellspring that is only found within. Taste is always already there. It’s only the listener who changes.

Sady Doyle took the time to open the Twitter cage and let her complaints about “poptimism” out to breathe in essay form, and the result is impressive (hint, hint).

I would love to see Sady and Freddie de Boer together on a poptimism feature some time. They’re the two most vocal, best critics of the tendency I’ve ever come across, but the specific things they find fault with in it - and the way this focus varies between them - map so perfectly to the broader differences in style and worldview that have had them at each others’ throats before that I think the tension could be fascinating.

doctorfvckingwho:

[x]

What I miss about the old tumblr reblog formatting is that at least the weird word ziggurats told you upfront how deep the chain went and whether it was even worth your time to start reading.

Whooo wants to stare into the void tonight?

yup. spoopy, isn’t it?

spacetwinks:

gate guardian stops you with their armored fist out, towering over you by at least 4 feet and tell you that if you want to move through the gate you must solve their riddle and you tell them you can solve any riddle and the gate guardian nods and holds out two swords, one in each hand, and asks you “which is a cooler sword?” and you stare at them for about 5 minutes with this thought burning in your mind wanting to tell them that that’s not a riddle it’s a question of subjective taste but the fact remains that they’re holding two swords and you’re holding none so you’re pretty worried about pointing that little fact out

Asked what slogan they would put on a protest sign, more Democrats chose “All Lives Matter” than “Black Lives Matter”. That’s interesting.

Whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism or eudaemonism, all those modes of thinking which measure the worth of things according to pleasure and pain, that is, according to accompanying circumstances and secondary considerations, are plausible modes of thought and naïvetés, which every one conscious of creative powers and an artist’s conscience will look down upon with scorn, though not without sympathy.

youzicha:

I thought this panel was an interesting translation hall-of-mirrors effect. Dead Dead Demon’s Dededededestruction is a slice-of-life/science fiction comic in which the characters hang out on the internet all the time, so the scanslators translate Japanese chan-speak into English chan-speak. In this case, “too lewd” is a 4chan catchphrase. (In the original, Ontan says “やだー!! 下品下品!!”)

But the reason the word “lewd” became popular in the first place was via scanslations from Japanese. It’s such an awkward word choice that people picked up on it and made fun of it. So in some sense this comic completes the circle: “too lewd” is an excellent translation in 2014 because it was a poor translation in 2006.

(Where did “too lewd” originate? According to Know Your Meme, it all goes back to this translated Touhou comic. The corresponding phrase in the original is 少しエロ過ぎる.)

From the age of six through twenty-six I did what I could to free my mother from caring whether I, she, or anyone lived or died and the failure will always haunt me.

aner0:

Building 30 - Ben-Gurion University.

“to know”

animedads:

I’m keeping the dream alive

glaciersofice

In middle school a piece about Gemstone III for some competition, it was about one of the clerks that gives low-level players delivery quests going on an adventure of his own.

In high school started a BtVS piece called “Aggrytagh” or something, it was a Welsh word for “shapeshifter”, it was an Oz-focused story about another werewolf showing up in Sunnyvale, the only thing I really remember is I tried really hard, maybe protesteth too hard really hard, to make him not a Mary Sue.

Also after college in LA I wrote a Veronica Mars spec script, which is kinda professional fanfic.