The year is 2026 and I am wearing mirrorshades. “Runner,” says Mr. Johnson, keeping our forms of address cooly professional, “are you ready to take the job?”
“Sure as I’m a street sam,” I say, taking a deep drag from my e-cig. The task: go into augmented reality, find some Ikea torrents that won’t infect Mr. Johnson’s toaster with sentient porn ads, and ghost. Impossible? Chummer, for the BTC I’m earning,
Harison Carter Watkins
is a Texas-based graphic designer who adorns horned animals skulls with
colorful beads. He uses paraffin was, pine resin and a mix of beeswax
to fix his beads and shape aztec and geometric patterns, referring to
his native southwest. Source: fubiz
The year is 2026 and I am wearing mirrorshades. “Runner,” says Mr. Johnson, keeping our forms of address cooly professional, “are you ready to take the job?”
“Sure as I’m a street sam,” I say, taking a deep drag from my e-cig. The task: go into augmented reality, find some Ikea torrents that won’t infect Mr. Johnson’s toaster with sentient porn ads, and ghost. Impossible? Chummer, for the BTC I’m earning,
What. Also, how can you retroactively take things out of the public domain, what gives?
People should be able to get store Chinese-factory-brand fancy 1950’s chairs.
This is Bad and Wrong and … okay, probably less important than I intuitively feel that it is, but ugh.
Can you imagine being the first guy listening to In The Air Tonight and not knowing those drums were coming?
The first guy listening to it knew the drums were coming. From wikipedia:
“Ahmet came down to the final mix in the cutting room in New York (…) The drums don’t come in until the end but Ahmet didn’t know that at this point, because on the demo the drums hadn’t come in at all; it was only drum machine all the way. And he was saying, ‘Where’s the down beat, where’s the backbeat?’ I said, ‘The drums come in in a minute.’”
Incidentally, about this post and responses, my favorite performance art is stuff I don’t really get.
i’m all for making america great again. boo-yah, let’s do that exact thing.
my question is, when exactly is the chronological reference point for “again”? because i’m looking through our yearbook pictures, and none of them are very flattering.
When I got to this house I realized I had a regular mail carrier who looked like a really Swedish version of Harry Anderson, and when I was out working the lawn when he came by we’d chat briefly and he’d crack jokes that were like 1/3 of the way to corny and 1/3 of the way to dirty but never really made it to either one
It was this weird kind of sitcom domestic normality and I really liked it and for the past few weeks I’ve noticed new different carriers doing his route each day and I hope he’s just on vacation or something.
Some people forget that the late 90s were a crazy time for game development. Games were suddenly getting exponentially more complex before the hardware had evolved to fit it. That’s why things like the fast inverse square root and Mario parallel universes exist (Mario moves in floating point space for smoothness, but collisions are calculated in integer space for speed). Nowadays it’s hard to imagine computers failing to understand floating point math, but until that era many PCs didn’t have an FPU to begin with, much less one fast enough to provide enough inverse square roots for 3D lighting before the heat death of the universe. “Bad” programming and mind boggling decisions (from a modern perspective, anyway) aren’t just hacks. They made games what they are.
I’m quite fond of fast inverse square root as it’s simultaneously both an excellent argument for C and an excellent argument against C
When I got to college in the early 2000s I was all excited to take CS courses because I (like probably a lot of people that the intro level was deliberately there to weed out) was like
Programming: The Discipline That Makes Games Like Final Fantasy 6!
except the class was all
Computer Science: A Quest For The Most Elegant Recursive Math!
in fairness the introductory programming course did introduce me to the fact that that was kinda true, I came to realize a programming standpoint the interesting part of FF6 was
* producing a smooth composite image out of multiple animated layers and sprites, which can change position independent of each other due to scripting or player input
and
* compressing the thing to fit into cartridge memory
and that’s not really something that much interested me. The people who followed that trail all the way through ended up writing absurdly complex algorithms they couldn’t fully grasp the function of but on requirements assumed must be for NSA phone tapping; though I hear if you got far enough you could sell out and write absurdly complex algorithms you couldn’t fully grasp the function of but were used for investment bank derivatives trading.
In retrospect those are two hilariously 2005-ass things right there, I wonder what it’s like now.
But then the hardware did evolve, and you had big-league PC gaming chasing video cards down a rabbit hole, but I think what’s equally interesting is how today is the reverse of OP’s setting - just an overabundance of processing power. And how, ironically, that’s allowed the return of small-team/lone genius production that typified ‘90s gaming but has fallen aside in today’s huge multi-studio AAA titles.
Like, Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress, two of the most famous self-published games, and two of the only to make names - Notch and Toady - on the level of the Carmack/Romero/Newell/Molyneux/Wright/Garriott age. They have absurdly behind-the-curve graphics but are still pretty taxing because they ran on naive un- or weakly-abstracted engines that work by checking and calculating an absurd amount of variables for the contents of every cubic foot in the world on every tick while ticking often enough to maintain some playability.
And I mean, despite that they are quite playable. Underlying CPU architecture improves to the point that lone self-taught Toady can spend his time expanding the flavor and scope of the engine - making the calculations more numerous and byzantine - while hardware keeps pace. (The biggest performance optimization I can recall being the ability to neuter cats.)
Something I like to remind people of to highlight the fluidity of history is that well into the 20th century major Anglophone associations with Islam were “decadent sexual deviance, cosmopolitan tolerance, particularly queer-positive”.
Something similar is that if you go back to early 20th century America, stereotypes of Black manhood get a little off. You still see “bestial brute” but you also get dopey, cringing, lackadasical, henpecked, can’t get or keep a woman. (The unifying theme is lack of self-mastery) Like, a cuck. Remember, like, The Blues? And how they’re about how your woman left you, or doesn’t stay true to you, or won’t accept your love? One of the central contentions of the infamous Moynihan Report was that the reason the mid-60s black American community was unhealthy even after the 1950s civil rights movement was that repression had prevented black men from establishing *dominion* - hadn’t been able to earn a breadwinning wage, could by honest toil have less earning power than a sex worker, couldn’t offer black women enough to discipline them by threat of its withdrawal - in short, had prevented them from establishing a healthy, stable patriarchy and reaping its benefits. And one of its central recommendations was to promote this patriarchy.
A lot of 60s-70s black activism invokes “masculinity” in a way that seems incongruous to moderns because it was experienced as not only a valued but long-denied reward but a valuable resource to be deployed in service of the cause.
(Which means that the pre-X Malcolm Little strutting around Harlem in a zoot suit and a guy in a suit and a sandwich board reading “I Am A Man” and Richard Roundtree posing with a leather jacket and a gun while the soundtrack called him a sex machine to all the chicks [Shaft!] were going in on the same political project. The same one as Eldridge Cleaver reclaiming “rapist”. And, I mean, it worked. When’s the last time you associated “black man” and “harmless cuck”? [When’s the last time you did “white man”?])
In a world where Trump was competent rather than a holy fool of a d100 that got nominated because sometimes it came up “America was legitimate even before the ‘60s”, he’d take advantage of this and redo Reagan’s trick of defining himself against the “welfare queen”, updating it to be an overweight 36-something with a government/NPO social service iron triangle job she got by taking community college all through the terminal postgrad level and a sense that men are dismissably wrong for not living up to her.
(The flip side of that is the “woke bro”, the new worthy object of ridicule who tries to define his total identity, including social and sexual capital, around racism-awareness… was already comprehensively roasted 25 years ago in A Different World and School Daze, treatments of pretentious Black yuppie larva)
Of course even within whiteness this stuff’s never been as stable as either the eternal-order conservatives or the ultimate-revolution whigs would have you think. If you’ve ever harkened to the authentic masculinity of the 1950s, or Teddy Roosevelt’s kettlebell strongmen-and-Muscular Christianity, or the ruggedness of Victorian explorers, know that a lot of that stuff was considered self-conscious and borderline pretentious artifice at the time, part not of an organic maleness but deliberate initiatives to promote and assert masculine force in the face of a threateningly feminizing, white-collar, peaceful, touchy-feely world.
One thing about spending 5 years in such a food service industry culture, I can distinguish “behind you” by tone alone in environments it’s too loud to make out the phonemes
