Imagine if you’re going to an Insane Clown Posse show expecting them to do their usual horrorcore rap rock and instead they come out to circus music in a tiny clown car and start throwing pies at each other and doing funny flipsy-flops and goofs and all of the juggalos are having an earnestly great time for the whole family and then they ask you on stage and you get tricked and squirted with water but in a funny, good-natured way which you handle well and then you get to take a bow and the whole audience applauds and you are laughing so hard it is the best night of your life
One thing I noticed house-hunting and Fallout 4’s reinforcing, there’s definitely a mid-20th point where grey metal took over from white ceramic as the icon of sleek hygienic domestic style.
One thing HHH gets right is, “yeah dude, certain sorts of suffering are important in life, and of course they’ll still be around after the mythological eschaton.” A lot of people miss that these days.
I spent a lot of time experiencing things that pattern-matched to tropes that were goddamn ridiculous, realizing the actual experience was actually like that, and accepting that actual experience was just goddamn ridiculous. Highlights:
1) I hit my head and got amnesia once. It works exactly like all the cheesy plot devices.
2) When I lived in Echo Park it wasn’t even a rough area really. The first guy I remember welcoming me to the neighborhood did end up shot in his car but that was a weird case, and I did see the tags change as Echo Parque and Big Top Locos and some other punks struggled in the aftermath but feh, boys’ play.
Anyway it was mostly an area that used to be rough so the guys who had grown up there still had some street to them ;and I used to watch ridiculous kung fu movies on channels like 57 and 17 and 29 back before they were UPN and WB and even FOX and I thought it was ridiculous the trope where local toughs would show up at the dojo to challenge the students
And I was going to a dojo there and then, boxing/American Kempo/BJJ and this actually happened on the semi-regular - not like they came in gangs with sticks but they’d swagger in individually to show the fancy boys what’s what - and the students would win against some tough beefy dudes for the same in-the-movies reason that we actually knew what we were doing
(gym rats especially. they’d have strong muscles but only punch with a few of them, while the we punched with everything between the toes and the knuckles. anyway, you realized they weren’t used to punching people who wouldn’t stay there while the punch arrived and worse, would interrupt them by punching back)
I wasn’t there for it but there was this one time this wild-haired scraggly-clothed ranting older dude showed up claiming to be a genius black-belt and wanting to challenge our sensei, and the issue was
A) we were close enough to downtown LA (and the concentration of social services that produced Skid Row) that the more ambitious crazies were a regular feature of the street landscape
BUT
B) we were also not far from American Kempo’s “hometown” of Pasadena, where (stereotypically eccentric) CalTech types and JPL rocket scientists were overrepresented as students
and people could not tell how to properly categorize him
Scientists hope to hugely reduce the cost of wind energy by removing the blades from wind farms, instead taking advantage of a special phenomenon to cause the turbines to violently shake.
Vortex, a startup from Spain, has developed the tall sticks known as Bladeless — white poles jutting out of the ground, that are built so that they can oscillate. They do so as a result of the way that the wind is whipped up around them, using a phenomenon that architects avoid happening to buildings and encouraging it so that the sticks shake.
They do so using vortices, which is where the company gets its name from. The bladeless turbines use special magnets to ensure that the turbines are optimised to shake the most they can, whatever speed the wind is travelling at.
As the sticks vibrate, that movement is converted into electricity by an alternator.
Wiggling Poles of the Wasteland Harvest Electricity For Power Hungry Humans
These also look like they would cause fewer problems for birds and bats.
This is really cool.
They leave off the important note that when the wind rises, each pole makes a sound like a hundred vuvuzelas roaring at once. In the post-apocalyptic world of the future, villagers will speak in hushed tones about the Roaring Plains, and caution adventurous travelers to stay well away.
I appreciate how they essentially invented very useful yet alien-looking screaming pillars. Science continues to make some suspiciously sci-fi shit.
Anonymous asked: So, if Donald Trump is Huey Long would that make Sanders Roosevelt?
I’m seeing more parallels to Reagan lately.
Remember Reagan took shit on the campaign trail for conspicuously not condemning reactionary domestic terrorism, honoring its victims, or feeling the least bit ashamed for pressing the terrorists’ causes.
(Remember further in office he did rechannel economic and generalized despair into nationalist sentiment (as vs. Japan), encouraging a climate that could shade into lethal, ethnic violence with a degree of tacit official indulgence.)
Remember that Reagan played fast and loose with his claims and anecdotes on the campaign trail and got derided as a buffoon and compulsive liar when it turns out he was a genius charismatic who understood that a President’s role is to generate legitimacy for his allies to spend.
Recall Reagan’s “Teflon” nickname, reflecting that no matter what offense the media connected to him, it had no impact whatsoever.
Remember that the media/govt/etc. institutional class that currently slots Reagan as “beloved patriarch and refounder of the national order” started with “joke candidate” before passing through “can’t win”, “won’t win”, “mustn’t win” and “fascist”.
Now one thing definitely WAS true of both the interwar period and the Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal ‘80s: the rightward shifts were so shocking, and their opponents so backfooted, not just because of their magnitude or severity but because the mainstream intellectual consensus had been that society was working up to a major leftward shift and everyone had positioned themselves accordingly.
1) Centuries after apocalypse Bostonians still speak with Bostonian accents (and Bostonian self-importance, that’s a detail they got really good), the robot Takahashi’s Japanese speech is a subject of discussion, arrivals from outside the Commonwealth are big news, but no one makes note of the Longs’ Chinese or the Bobrovs’ Russian accents.
2) And somewhat related, people have re(invented/discovered) windmills, there are waterways everywhere*, traders and trade routes are the backbone of civilization** but under constant bandit threat, the USS Constitution is right fucking there, but no one thinks to go sailing.
*unlike the desert of 1 and 2, where they had an excuse
**this is why I did what’s apparently unthinkable around here and sided with the Legion in New Vegas - what the Wasteland needs most of all right now is a force to pacify the roads and allow a traders’ empire to consolidate; “imitate the Roman Empire” is not a bad approach; NCR city-state federalism doesn’t scale and would fall to infighting; Yes Man’s Free City New Vegas sounded tempting but not if the opportunity cost is rebuilding civilization.
Anonymous asked: I'm kinda surprised that an NRxer would side with the pack of savages armed with scraps of aluminum and football pads over the techno-commercialist dictator with an invincible robot army and a mission to colonize space.
Don’t think of myself as NRxic, though I can see where you’re coming from and I’d accept “fellow traveler”.
For the record I identify as an adventurer in the model of my idol Gabriele d'Annunzio, the definitive text on the subject being Trotsky’s essay On the Philosophy of the Superman.
A less flattering alternative would be Mr. G from Dorothy Thompson’s Who Goes Nazi?.
