Anonymous asked: Do you ever go to Vancouver, Washington much? What's it like?
I’ve been a few times. It’s okay. Got an older town core about the size of a county seat that kind of reminds me of towns in eastern Pennsylvania where I grew up, only not run down. Not particularly booming, though.
Some industry and transportation infrastructure near the port, other than that fairly suburban. Washington doesn’t do Oregon’s thing of restricting development towards urban density with growth boundaries so it’s a lot more spread out Anywhere U.S.A.
Oregon doesn’t have a sales tax so there’s a bit less retail as that preferentially locates across the river, but they have a sizable income tax so Vancouver’s got some appeal for executive commuter types.
There were a few months there where recreational marijuana stores were open in Washington but not yet Oregon, that’s probably the most attention Portland paid Vancouver in a while tbh.
midcentury motels. it’s amazing the little pockets of america where signs like this still survive. very few of the motel restaurants or coffee shops still function, but in little desert towns like Lone Pine and Bishop and the dodgy outskirts of Lancaster, California you can still find successions of sketchy motor inns all in a row with rusty signs that look a lot like these.
Eve Online (“spreadsheets in space”) is the infamously intricate massively multiplayer space trade/conquest game where in-game currency can be exchanged for real cash, making the battles fought there consequential in a way that sets it apart from other games.
But now the game has been brought to the brink of a battle that beggars belief, as the notorious Clusterfuck Coalition (formerly the Goonsquad) has used a tribute system based on ancient Persian tithing to create a galactic empire they call “The Imperium,” whose leaders have waxed fat and arrogant (and have attempted to cash in on in the real world).
It’s got to be too much for the other players. Working with a war-chest supplied by one of the bankers behind I Want ISK, a virtual casino that allows players to gamble with in-game currency (which, remember, can be exchanged for real-world money). The looming battle looks to be the biggest in the game’s history.
This is the most surreal shit I’ve ever read. Members of The Imperium swore fealty to a cosplayer. The owner of I Want ISK is hiring mercenary troops to fight in absurdly gigantic battles. There may be a real dollar value to the damage done in game. It’s more like reading about a parallel universe where space war has broken out than an MMO.
“Milo is actually 44 boys in a trenchcoat” is kind of funny, but the mockery’s missing an important point.
(Assuming the thing’s not a damned April Fool’s joke)
Online publishing’s in an iffy place. A lot of money sloshing around recently but a lot of antsyness, and that’s only going to get worse come the inevitable app crash. If Milo’s gambit succeeds - and that gambit is NOT to get his guy elected or to make his ideas hegemonic, but rather to establish Breitbart as right-Salon or -Gawker by mainstreaming the alt-right and proving that ad-supported conservative content can draw a young audience - people are going to copy him.
People will found Breitbart clones. Institutional conservative media will realize they need some connection with Trump types to maintain their relevance, and the #NeverTrump dinosaurs aren’t going to do it. The investors holding the purse strings to Vox, or whoever owns a majority of Gawker now, are going to point out publishing a left-millenialbait site but not a right-millenialbait one is leaving money on the table, and they won’t stand for that.
And you’re going to need to staff up for that. And where better to find someone to do the Milo thing than people who’ve been doing the Milo thing?
“Milo has 44 interns” means he has 44 proteges loyal not to the Beltway, foundation-funded “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” journalism, but to Milo and the ad-supported punchmouth attention-seeking Breitbart model, and they’re ready to be seeded throughout the media firmament within the year.
Swear to god, if Gamergate turns out to be our Dreyfus Affair and he turns out to be our Zola…
My dad told me a story recently about how he was in Boy Scouts or something and they went on a hike and were each given a rifle and one single bullet to practice shooting with (idk, it was the 70s or whatever). One of his friends, whom I’ll refer to as Steel Balls for reasons that will soon become clear, beckons my dad to a part of the woods and points to a giant hornets nest up in a tree. SB announces that he’s going to shoot it, waits for my dad to take cover (as one should in this situation), and fires off his only round into the nest. Sure enough, a swarm of pissed off hornets descend upon SB, who stands stoically and perfectly still at the base of the tree. Dad maintains that, despite their buzzing right around him, none of the hornets stung his friend, and they soon calmed down and returned to their newly renovated nest. SB turns back to face my dad and imparts this chunk of wisdom: “That’s the secret to dealing with hornets, Jim. They don’t know humans make rifle shots; they don’t know where the noise came from. You gotta stand still and don’t move, and they won’t chase you. If you run, they know you’re guilty.” Apparently dad was so awed he gave up his single bullet so SB could shoot the nest a second time, with the same results.
Long story short: hornets can sense guilt and there are people in the world who have tested this theory.
