DID YOU KNOW the country name “Iran” is the same word as “Aryan”, chosen specifically for that reason in the aftermath of WWI when whiteness was hot, Ataturk all “instead of Islam, modernity!” and the Japanese still printing cartoons where their upright Prussian-uniformed palefaces triumphed over the yellow slant-eyed Russians?
DID YOU KNOW if you call an Iranian expat “Iranian” today they won’t correct you but WILL find an excuse to pointedly call themselves “Persian” in the next 40 seconds?
if EA rebranded as Effective Anti-Malaria organisation the arguments about it would become a lot more pertinent and a lot less interesting.
punks worry themselves sick about summoning a computer djinn, meanwhile they brag about summoning an army of the dispossessed without even planning who it’s against
Even so, there were a few silver linings for Mrs. Clinton. While Mr. Sanders bested her among all age groups younger than 45, the two candidates polled evenly among voters aged 45 to 64. And Mrs. Clinton won the support of voters 65 and older. And, though Mrs. Clinton lost nearly every income group, she did carry voters in families earning over $200,000 per year.
>year of our lord 1347 >visiting farmers market >luscious maiden doth spy me >“withhold thyself, brother” >she come hither to sit beside me >feel her hand atop my leg >my flesh doth rise to point heavenward >she reaches for mine own garments >mistakenly opens satchel >pasta cascading outward >mine countenance whereupon
[Trump’s] constant harping on his polls is not simple narcissism, but a sped-up version of a quarterly earnings report: he is reassuring his supporters that they are with the smart money, in on the ground floor of a big thing.
Woke up to an interesting thought today - Jesus’ miracles in the New Testament mirror Old Testament miracles, but with an important distinction: where the OT ones were acts of creation ex nihilo, the NT ones were acts of transmutation.
Like, to feed a crowd God made manna; Jesus made fish and loaves… out of fewer fish and loaves. God made water spring from a rock, Jesus made casks of wine out of casks of water. I suppose God used dust and a rib to make the living Adam and Eve, but that’s still more raw creation than the NT parallel of making the living Lazarus out of the corpse of Lazarus.
And that does make a sort of sense, that God bound to a specific physical form would have powers bound accordingly. And it’s not like existing Christianity totally misses the transmutation thing - thematically, there’s the God made the world//Christ made it the world redeemed thing, but more than that, the Eucharist! Transubstantiation! (No, not “tea substantiation”, iPhone, wtf.) The central priestly ritual as not a blessing cast on the worshippers but an act of transmutation!
Now I wonder how that schema could account for the empowered artifacts - the Shroud, the Grail, the Spear.
Keepalive is Aram Bartholl’s fake hollow boulder in the woods of Neuenkirchen, Germany. It conceals a thermoelectric generator that powers a router configured to serve documents related to wilderness survival. The router switches on if the rock is sufficiently warmed, say by a blazing campfire adjacent to it.
It’s based on Piratebox, a standalone Internet router project for file-sharing.
It’s not the only art/artificial boulder project, though: Ed Ruscha claims to have made an artificial boulder called “Rocky II” and hidden it somewhere in the Mojave, where it is visually indistinguishable from the surrounding rocks, making it all but impossible to find.
that magic rock in the Mojave is going to confuse the fuck out of our descendants one day.
probably not. it’s just a rock. most rocks go unregarded
most rocks aren’t wifi access points!
you need to regard a rock to find out if it is a wifi access point.
w hat the fuck. did the world’s most sadistic text adventure game writer make this rock
You are lost in a woodland clearing. There is a large boulder and a pile of firewood nearby. > check cell phone You open your cell phone to google wilderness survival tips, but you don’t have any service. > make campfire with firewood You could light a fire here, but you’d still be lost. > regard rock It’s a large rock. The underside of the rock appears slightly charred. > light campfire under rock Pretty soon you have a blazing campfire going underneath the boulder. > regard rock The strange boulder, now warmed, has begun to emit a faint mechanical hum. > check cell phone You open your cell phone. There is one wifi network available, named “KeepAlive.” > connect to rock wifi The wifi router opens a webpage full of documents on wilderness survival. > ????? Invalid command. > why Invalid command. > who hides secrets in a magic heat-activated rock Invalid command.
While [high-culture critics] spoke proudly of their own subversiveness and turned out account after account of the liberating potential of each act of consuming, the culture industry itself grabbed with both hands at the golden promise of rebellion-through-consumption. The more closely American speech was brought under centralized corporate control, the more strenuously did our advertising, TV sitcoms, and even our management literature insist on the virtue and widespread availability of revolution. In economic terms, the nineties were years of unprecedented consolidation; in terms of official culture, they were years of unprecedented radical-talk.
Theodor Adorno Thomas Frank et al., Commodify Your Dissent (1997)
“In television commercials, through which the new American businessman presents his visions and self-understanding to the public, perpetual revolution and the gospel of rule-breaking are the orthodoxy of the day . You only need watch for a few minutes before you see one of these slogans and understand the grip of antinomianism over the corporate mind … In most, the commercial message is driven home with the vanguard iconography of the rebel: screaming guitars, whirling cameras, and startled old-timers who, we predict, will become an increasingly indispensable prop as consumers require ever-greater assurances that, Yes! You are a rebel! Just look at how offended they are!”
By 2025 there will be a Zero Wing/All Your Base movie, fuelled by the same nostalgia that brought us Transformers and Battleship. There will be over the following half-decade a series of films based on memes, until the trend is finally killed by 2031’s Doge: Much Rise, Very Origin.
But many of these movies will be shockingly good, thanks to the great and sincere love the directors have for the material.
