so i’m a little unhappy today and it’s over something petty which doesn’t matter much in itself, but it’s just symbolic - I get together to do something bigger than myself and I do all the enthusiasm and all the stuff you do and then the next step involves bringing in someone else to do their part, a part we’ve talked about and they’ve specifically agreed to do
and they don’t, and it’s like “hehe ¯\_(ツ)_/¯“
and I’m like “no seriously, fun and games but you made a commitment you need to deliver on or be marked as a moral failure“
and they don’t and go “hehe ¯\_(ツ)_/¯“ and continue walking around as if their existence is valid anyway
and this shit just keeps happening, and more than anything, if you’ve wondered how come people turn conservative in their 30s, that’s it. for me at least.
it happens, and you try to be understanding, and it happens, and you try to be understanding, and it happens, and you think “you know, if someone would knock some heads together and discipline these fucks, this shit wouldn’t happen”
On the 28th of April, 2011, Ed Balls got a Twitter account. He decided (as most people under the spotlight do) to attempted to look up his own name. However, all he did was tweet “Ed Balls”. This, for some reason, got retweeted by THOUSANDS of people. On a global scale. And because he didn’t know you could delete a tweet it stayed. Every year since then,the 28th of April is Ed Balls day.
This is the infamous tweet
and here are some gems to celebrate that have followed the years, including last year where they framed the tweet and got him to sign it for charity
There are also LOADS MORE in this article from the Telegraph
trends in writing that existed in the mid 1700s and have come back into style
- randomly capitalizing words without regard to Importance - saying ‘tho’ instead of ‘though’ - excessive metaphors, analogies, and personification for/of/whatever inanimate objects and incorporeal concepts
I must reluctantly admit that Vox Day’s influence on the world has not been ENTIRELY negative
“When Tuck Bingle receives and email explaining that he’s been nominated for science fiction literature’s most prestigious award, he’s left utterly confused. On one hand, Tuck is a successful writer of gay, science fiction erotic, but on the other, this email is addressed to someone by the name of Chuck Tingle.
Tuck replies, but his message is not delivered because the recipient exists in another layer of The Tingleverse, a revelation that will take Tuck on a journey into the deepest realms of his butt’s heart.
Soon, Tuck is breaking fourth-walls and anal limits, pounded hard by a handsome sentient Hugo Award nomination named Kelpo and learning the true meaning of homoerotic love!”
I don’t know who writes these, but they’re amazing and I wish them the best of luck in their weird homoerotic endeavors.
Tingle’s schtick is that he writes high modernist gay porn. The weird thing about his getting a Puppy nomination is that this is simultaneously exactly the sort of the thing the Puppies were (originally) complaining about with “politically correct degenerate art house nonsense” and a refutation of the supposed dichotomy between that and “rollicking good fun.” Vox’s other choices, and the fact that he didn’t go for (say) “Pounded in the Butt by my own Book, ‘Pounded in the Butt by my own Butt’” shows that he’s just including it as another throwaway joke at the expense of the process rather than putting much thought in at this level.
(And of course Tingle IS a writer of throwaway jokes, just like say dril or Mallory Ortberg are. They’re still influential and justifiably so.)
(Tagging @prokopetz because he’s the person I most trust to have something interesting to say about the intersection of nerd cultural politics, SFF history, and high modernist gay porn.)
The Space Raptor Butt Invasion nomination is making fun of “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love”, which won the ‘13 Nebula for short story and was nominated for the ‘14 Hugo. A lot of the Puppies are of the opinion that it wasn’t even a story, let alone an SF one, let alone a good one, and that it was so accorded for Correct ideological box-checking. It’s the distilled symbol of what they stand against.
The joke is “Oh, you like dinosaurs-and-gayness themed crap? Well, this one’s at least got fucking space in it.”
i was out innahills for a while and, yeah, there are constitution party signs around election season, but there’s also an art scene, and fucken wiccan covens and deviantart-in-2005 coffee houses with people with tail buttplugs and skull collections and shit
the idea that brooklyn and portland are the only places in america where people don’t spend every waking hour eating the same piece of plain white bread over and over and over is…………..lol have these people ever been anywhere (no)
Around this point in the cultural cycle we should be seeing a back-to-the-land movement where urban idealist types strike out for rural farms. Doesn’t involve too many people but can have a noticeable influence on the culture.
(For example, by filling the countercultural imaginary with idealized images of rugged manual-laboring men and nurturing child-raising women in a way that counterweights sexual egalitarianism.)
One thing though, we last went through this part of the cycle in the ‘70s, back before the 1980s farm crisis completely destroyed homestead farming, I’m not sure it’s even possible today, that we even still have an idea of being on the land to go back to.
The 1970s were actually a great era for American farming - a 1972 Soviet crop failure set the agriculture market on fire, and then the federal government tried to keep the embers burning. The ‘80s crisis came when the bubble collapsed.
This is where Northern California’s “Emerald Triangle” marijuana-producing region comes from - hippies armed with Earth Day/Skylab-era technology like hydroponics, solar panels, and composting set out to farm the backwoods only to realize the economics demanded a cash crop and the weed they were growing for personal use would do just fine.
I’m a little afraid that the Portlandia backyard chickens/pickling/lumberjack thing (which in Portland itself is already losing ground to generic West Coast appfucker culture) was all we got this time around.
I don’t know why I thought “Skylab” was a capitalized acronym. It kind of seems like it should’ve been, though, innit? Maybe it’s just conceptual bleed from EPCOT, which now that I think of it are pretty close in my mental space.
…aw man, they don’t even capitalize Epcot anymore?
Apparently they called it Epcot ‘94 and Epcot ‘95 for those years, which reflects the World’s Fair/Expo model it turned out as in the same way the acronym reflected the batshit ‘70s futurism of the concept.
these baby names a neural network generated are all so good and all the people in the facebook baby names groups should let computers name their children
Anonymous asked: what was your criteria for the colleges you wanted to go to? Did you get accepted into all the ones you applied to?
Preʃtigious, for really smart kids. Going in as a freshman I expected to do more sciencey stuff than I ended up, so I focused on Research I universities and overlooked liberal arts colleges - I probably would’ve done great at Reed, for example.
On the other hand in LA I remember a girl saying that she - a Colby grad - and I were similar because we both went to colleges for smart kids and I remember thinking “Actually, the commonality there is rich kids, and that you don’t notice that distinction kind of IS that distinction.“
Searching “Jewish”. Several of my earliest partners were so it’s meaningful to me I guess. Results didn’t really remind me of them though, maybe I should’ve searched “mischling”.
I mean, did you think I’d be embarrassed to admit I found it while trying to jerk off? That’s not even the funniest thing I’ve ever found while trying to jerk off.
(That would be the hentai doujinshi someone’s been paying to translate into Australian “bogan” slang.)
FYI, since I posted this Facebook has been serving me JDate ads in heavy rotation, which is honestly pretty impressive.
As an example, Hypponen said he had recently
spoken to a European aircraft maker that said it cleans the cockpits of
its planes every week of malware designed for Android phones. The
malware spread to the planes only because factory employees were
charging their phones with the USB port in the cockpit.
So every now and then an old post of mine takes off out of nowhere. If it starts with a reblog I assume someone’s archive diving, if it starts with a like and then likes/reblogs from other people I assume I’ve been linked somewhere and check ‘dwracu’s twitter, because half the time that’s it.
Few months ago I remember clicking around twitter and found a rare guy who seemed worth reading; as I scrolled back psyched with the discovery eventually I came to a tweet that was basically “Man, I can’t wait to see kontextmaschine’s take on 13 Hours!”
That’s not the first time I’ve had the experience of enjoying a writer only to realize halfway in that I was a subject, but it’s still uncanny. I guess I do write in the hope of being read by people I respect, so yay. I’d had no intention of having a take on 13 Hours and suddenly felt pressured to pencil one in, but decided that’s starting down a bad path. Hope I didn’t disappoint you too much, reader.
Aaaaaaanyway, why I bring this up now is for the past few weeks, this post on dinosaur illustrations has been getting a me lot of likes, and reblogs, and followers, which is completely inexplicable since it’s a reblog-without-commentary of a post with five digits of notes.
So, uh, welcome new followers, can anyone tell me what’s going on?
