Huh.

jesuit-space-pirate:

…which marxists.org had to take down due to copyright reasons.

Apart from giving you some idea of their characters, I love these for two reasons:

1) Everyone’s like, “Hero: Spartacus”, “Idea of misery: dependence”, “Motto: Per aspera ad astra”, “Favourite colour: red” …and then there’s Engels.

2) Martin Farquhar Tupper’s German Wikipedia entry is five sentences long, and the longest of these five sentence is, “Bekannt ist Tupper nicht zuletzt deswegen, weil Karl Marx in das Poesiealbum seiner Tochter neben Veilchenpuder seinen Namen in die Kategorie „Abneigung“ eingetragen hatte.”

Karl Marx

You favourite virtue: simplicity
- in man: strength
- in woman: weakness [Can you not?]
Chief characteristic: singleness of purpose
The vice you excuse: gullibility
- detest: servility
Aversion: Martin Tupper, Violet powder
Favourite occupation: bookworming
Poet: Dante, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Göthe
Prose writer: Diderot, Lessing, Hegel, Balzac
Hero: Spartacus, Keppler
Heroine: Gretchen
Flower: Daphne
Colour: Red
Colour of eyes & hair: black
Names: Jenny, Laura
Dish: fish
Maxim: Nihil humanum a me alienum puto
Motto: De omnibus dubitandum

Jenny Marx

Your favourite virtue: sincerity
- in man: perseverance
- in woman: affection
Chief characteristic: sensitiveness
Idea of happiness: health
- misery: dependence
The vice you excuse most: indecision
- detest most: ingratitude
Your aversion: debts
Favourite occupation: needlework
Poet: Göthe
Prose writer: Martin Luther
Hero: Coriolanus
Heroine: Florence Nightingale
Flower: rose
Colour: blue
Maxim: Never mind
Motto: Nil desperandum

Friedrich Engels

Your favourite virtue: jollity
Quality in man: to mind his own business
- in woman: not to mislay things
Idea of happiness: Château Margaux 1848
- misery: to go to a dentist
The vice you excuse: excess of any sort
- detest: Cant
Your aversion: affected stuck up women
The character you most dislike: Spurgeon
Favourite occupation: chaffing & being chaffed
Hero: none
Heroine: too many to name one
Poet: Reineke de Vost, Shakespeare, Ariost etc.
Prose writer: Goethe, Lessing, Dr. Samelson
Flower: Blue Bell
Colour: any one not Aniline
Dish: cold: Salad, hot: Irish Stew
Maxim: not to have any
Motto: take it easy

Helena Demuth

Your favourite virtue: Decision
- in man: courage
- in woman: Good temper
Chief characteristic: Love to the young Marxens
Idea of happiness: To eat a dinner I hav’nt created
- misery: To be dependent on others
Vice I excuse: Prodigality
- detest: Egotism
Your aversion: a miser
The character I most dislike: Lasalle
Favourite occupation: Building castles in the air
Hero: My biggest saucepan
Heroine: My coffepot
Poet: The one I know least of
Prose writer: Eugène Sue
Flower: Rose
Colour: Blue
Dish: Pork
Maxim: Leben und leben lassen!

Jenny Caroline Marx

My favourite virtue: Humanity
Quality in man: moral courage
- in woman: devotion
Idea of happiness: to love
Vice I detest: envy
- excuse: credulity
Aversion: prejudice
Characters in history I most dislike: Buonaparte and his nephew
Favourite poet: Shakespeare
Hero: Gracchus
Flower: lily
Colour: red
Maxim: To thine own self be true
Motto: Per aspera ad astra

“Don’t be an asshole” seems like a reasonable strategy for reducing assholism in the world, but when you realize “asshole” just means “someone imposing themselves on the world more firmly than me” you realize it has the effect of making everyone into assholes.

My 2003-era writeup of Something Awful, which started as an undergrad paper in… anthropology? Sociology?

Never cared much. Had a friend in late ‘90s high school who posted as “Chaucer”, with a Cardcaptor Sakura sig, so I got some secondhand forum drama at lunch. Enjoyed the frontpage bits tho.

(That nostalgic accounts of the frontpage/forum era grant such prominence to the vidyanostalgia Seanbaby and X-Entertainment and none to the more gore/porn Stile Project… selective memory.)

Now, I don’t think our modern radical leftisms/rightisms actually originate with LF or /pol/, but it might be those memetic crucibles in which they were rendered generally intelligible enough to be viable.

All of which is pretext to say: if, when I wrote that node, you had told me a decade plus on that it would be an actual factor in American politics that the Something Awful/4chan rivalry had progressed to the point where they revived communism and fascism and were racing to overthrow the government, my responses would be

1. What? Get the fuck out.
and
2. Obviously

and I can’t guarantee they would run that order.

(Related: the view from the other side.)

I mean Stile Project was kind of halfway between the Something Awful/X-E format and another then-current now-obsolete website format, the “Thumbnail Gallery Post” or “TGP” site, that was an important porn vector in the 28.8/56k era.

Fireball, Sinfire, Hot Damn… basically Baby’s First Schnapps, innit?

dagny-hashtaggart:

kontextmaschine:

Fireball, Sinfire, Hot Damn… basically Baby’s First Schnapps, innit?

Kind of. I find the texture and viscosity of cinnamon whiskey is substantially different from that of cinnamon schnapps.

An amazing time capsule in a lot of ways, also basically Falling Down done as a slasher film.

kontextmaschine:

An amazing time capsule in a lot of ways, also basically Falling Down done as a slasher film.

inb4 “but Falling Down WAS a slasher film from the slasher’s POV”

elarafritzenwalden:

Schulhaus Boppartshof (Primary School)
St. Gallen, Switzerland; 1962-66

Hans Zwimpfer
(photography by J. Stieger)

see map

via “(Das) Werk, 56” (1969)

nostalgebraist:

raggedjackscarlet:

Hold on tight, folks. We’re going full post-structuralist.

So. I’ve been thinking about the discussions that @nostalgebraist and @cyborgbutterflies​ have been having about Undertale fairly recently.

And I think I’ve hit upon a Doylist explanation for why Undertale is so morally bizarre:

All the characters in Undertale have no canonical existence, they have all been preemptively rewritten as the characters that fandom would have turned them into.

Undertale as it exists now, is like the fanon version of a game that never existed.

Let’s call this hypothetical game-that-never-was “Undertale Prime”.

In Undertale Prime, Papyrus is pretty much an exact duplicate of Skeletor: an evil mastermind whose plans never come to fruition. Constantly frustrated, taking out his anger on his minions in the most hilariously melodramatic ways.

In Undertale Prime, Undyne is a deadly serious super-soldier. Even a bit of a sadist. She is acquainted with Alphys, but there’s no romance between them.

In Undertale Prime, Mettaton has no Mettaton EX form. He remains a rectangular robot for the entire game, but his personality shows small signs of the sass and flamboyance of Mettaton EX.

In Undertale Prime, Alphys is a tetchy mad scientist, more like Cumberbatch’s Sherlock than anything else. Prickly on the surface, lonely underneath. There’s no mention of anime or internet arguments or anything like that.

In Undertale Prime, Asgore is stern and serious, and completely in charge, but tormented by the necessary evils he has committed to protect his kingdom. Like a more sympathetic version of a king from a Shakespearean tragedy.

And finally, in Undertale Prime, all bosses are killed without remorse or punishment.

We’ve seen these character archetypes before, and we can guess how a typical fandom would reinterpret these archetypes:

the Thwarted Mastermind becomes a Bumbling Narcissist.

the Deadly Soldier becomes a Hot-Blooded Blockhead.

the Mad Scientist becomes an Adorable Nerd.

The Geometric Robot becomes a Svelte Bishonen.(look at Bill Cipher fanart)

The Tormented King becomes Sad Dad.

(and the most sympathetic/admirable women become lesbians)

But most importantly, all these villains would become sympathetic.

They’d become comedy relief, or even woobies.

Undertale takes the most probable fanon reinterpretations of Undertale Prime, and makes them canon. Why are the villains actions treated so cavalierly? Because typical fandom wouldn’t care. Typical fandom forgives villains, typical fandom makes villains cute.

But the discrepancy is this: in Undertale, the characters’ actions all remain the same as they would be in the dark and serious story of Undertale Prime. They play the same role in the plot, they are still Villains. The only things that change are their personalities, and the manner in which they are presented to the audience.

The result is that Undertale Prime makes moral sense, but Undertale does not.

It’s as if the Avengers canonically considered Bucky Barnes a family friend and acted as if the events of The Winter Soldier had never happened, as fandom wishes it were– But Bucky was still a terrorist.

It’s as if the characters in Borderlands 2 saw Handsome Jack as charming comic relief, the way the audience does– but Handsome Jack was still a murderous psychopath.

It’s as if, in Kingdom Hearts 2, Organization XIII were portrayed as the bickering sitcom family that the KH fandom made them into– but they were still trying to kill Sora and friends.

Every playthrough of the Kingdom Hearts franchise involves killing every member of Organization XIII.

But I guarantee you every Kingdom Hearts fan has their favorite Organization member.

None of the characters in Undertale are “held responsible” for attacking Frisk, because a game audience typically does not hold boss characters responsible for attacking the player. Instead, the audience sees them, through a Doylist/Mechanics-oriented lens, as a welcome addition to the game: a challenging battle and an entertaining character.

Undertale takes the player’s expected affectionate attitude towards bosses, and makes it the “objectively morally right” choice, according to the game’s in-world metaphysics.

Undertale is not just a game that preaches pathological altruism, it is, in itself, a pathologically altruistic text– a text that privileges the interpretation it expects to be subjected to over its own internal structure and logic, and preemptively changes itself to make those expected interpretations into objective truth, even when those changes create plotholes and morally repugnant implications.

A game, suffering to make itself everything the world expects it to be, about a child who suffers to make itself everything the world expects it to be.

oh my god

I am never going to be able to un-see this.

thetowndrugdealer:

gotitforcheap:

gotitforcheap:

astrology is just medieval clickbait

old hag travelling merchant: come hither young man, let me tell thy about how the stars and the month you were born in make you kind of a dick

medieval soldier: uh……i’m listening

old hag travelling merchant: Taurus, Leo, Libra, scorpio, Gemini, Capricorn

medieval soldier: Cancer, Aries, Virgo, Sagittarius, Aquarius, Pisces

lsleofskye:

Untitled

tastefullyoffensive:

Video: Happy Holidays from Boston Dynamics

altarandhour:

What if Narnia got written because CS Lewis was actually a prophet but all God ever said to him, for years on end, was “draw my fursona”

chamomile-geode:

the federalist thinkpieces

cthonius:

Do you vagueblog about me, sir?

I do vagueblog, sir.

Do you vagueblog about me, sir?

(aside) Will I receive a callout if I say aye
(aside) Yes
No, sir, I do not vagueblog at you sir; but I vagueblog, sir.