kontextmaschine

I. it was grubby and everyone was trying to win but then someone did

II. FOR NOW

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Can you imagine being the first guy listening to In The Air Tonight and not knowing those drums were coming?

saw a bunch of people reblogging this without commentary and felt vaguely insulted

my own damn fault

By which I meant that it had like 36 notes and I thought I was getting juked for taking Phil Collins seriously. I still see it reblogged #WOW or #what a good post and frown but looks like it’s just a relatable feeling.

My favorite reblog tags were something like #the best drum fill #the best drum Phil

r.i.p. my mentions though, it’ll be nice when I can use notes to see where my other ideas are getting to again

Sympathy for david drugdoer for that snarky chain money blessing post that got like a million earnest reblogs though. Wonder where that boy is. Hope he’s drinking his milk.

In a bar, listening to a guy talk about how he finally got an office job after years since college being a kitchen monkey, telling horror stories and his friend’s like “guess you’re glad to be away from that”.

And he’s like “wellll… you know, I’d work with felons, and people drunk on the job, and we’d just constantly tear into each other, the most offensive shit, but then when the shift was over they’d be like ‘wanna get a beer?’ and we’d talk about what was going wrong in our lives”

And at the office everyone says the right words and talks positive but when he goes up to them and code-shifts into happy talk asking for something he needs they’ll just be ‘mmm, nope’ cuz nothing in it for them and it’s all calculation and every attempt to engage his actual self is transparently manipulative, ~*~activities~*~ (you can hear the punctuation) to make him a loyal worker or people trying to feel him out for office politics or reciting their recreational resumes at him to find an overlap for networking

But he’s gotta pay the loans for that film degree somehow

UPDATE: while I composed this he’s moved on to telling his friends, with far more enthusiasm than they, about all these fascinating troubled genius cooks he’s known and how you know when his dad or uncles had a car problem or an electrical problem they’d FIGURE IT OUT, you know, maybe ask someone better or go to the library for a guide but they’d figure it out, you know

Saw an ad for “The Good Place” and it’s nice Kristen Bell’s getting work

No unironically, Veronica Mars was like a seminar in range and then they were like nah

In Sarah Marshall “well ok what if we put her in a bikini” and she looked GREAT but nah

This is all some Tomb Raider-ass navigation puzzle to him and it’s great to watch

They wanna fuck with semiotics next American restorationist movement should claim the Betsy Ross flag, challenge them to anathematize that

kontextmaschine:

They wanna fuck with semiotics next American restorationist movement should claim the Betsy Ross flag, challenge them to anathematize that

Best squat it before the sestercentennial tho

polyaletheia:

kontextmaschine:

They wanna fuck with semiotics next American restorationist movement should claim the Betsy Ross flag, challenge them to anathematize that

We See Things Differently (Bruce Sterling, 1992)

HOLY SHIT

readthisreadthisreadthis

b-a-c-u:

If you want to support us please see our latest project here: https://goo.gl/XYRD5R 16-storey residential building “Chamomile”. Belarus, Minsk, built in 1982 Architect: Vladimir Pushkin. Engineer: A. Poterschuk, R. Vigdorchik, T. Yakushkova © BACU

pretty sure this is what the Westin Bonaventure evolved from

quoms:

unhaunting:

quoms:

unhaunting:

quoms:

the argument that the arab world is falling apart because of its poorly drawn borders falls apart if you look at borders literally anywhere else on the planet. africa? completely arbitrary. south and southeast asia? drawn at the whims of the colonisers. fucking the united states of america? have you seen what we’ve got going on?

if anything the ‘bad borders cause conflict’ argument is just an argument for the legitimacy of ethnic cleansing. nowhere in the world, prior to the introduction of the nation-state, have people of different languages and cultures coexisted such that it would be possible to draw a clean line between them and post some guards on it. europe’s borders are exactly as arbitrary as the borders of the colonial world, in some cases more so; the primary difference is that europeans enthusiastically permitted themselves to carry out mass deportations (western poland) or state repression of minorities (alsace-lorraine) without a great deal of moral compunctions or conqueror’s guilt. the creation of america’s arbitrary borders was concomitant with a long-term project of genocide, erasing from history the people whose very existence could render those borders moot. and even today europeans find themselves putting up barbed-wire fences and running sea patrols to maintain the fictive purity of the nation-state

borders are violence, they necessitate large-scale communal violence, but it has nothing to do with the notion of them being ‘arbitrary’ or ‘poorly drawn’. attributing this problem to the third world and not the first is a self-serving myopia

now hold up just a second there preacher, how come you just drop “(western poland)” there as if it was self-explanatory? surely you must be referring to the mass resettlement of germans from what became western poland after ww2? or the resettlement of ukrainians from the kresy into that same terrirory? would you say either of these were motivated by conqueror’s guilt?

like listen i don’t even disagree with the overall point here, and it puts me in the unenviable position of having to defend post-ww2 resettlement projects (admittedly the cause of a great deal immediate suffering and motivated by stupid ideology about monoethnic states being more desirable and more stable), but really, really, what the fuck

well i think you misread the post because i said there wasn’t any ‘conqueror’s guilt’, that phrase here referring to the sense of feeling bad as a result of doing terrible and inhumane things to people

but also, yeah, defending massive ethnic cleansing projects is a totally fucking unenviable position. maybe you should consider not being there

well, no, i don’t feel too terribly bad about the however many hundred thousand ethnic germans forcibly resettled from liberated poland, and that after the bulk of them had already fled westward before the soviet advance, indiscriminately destroying property and infrastructure as they went. many – but not all of them – were occupiers, settlers, collaborators, NSDAP members.

(notice i am throwing you a bone by saying “not all”; i could fail to mention this and have the upper hand in this argument, because you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.)

any residual “conqueror’s” (fuck you) guilt i might feel for the handful of geniunely innocent ethnic germans who got caught up in the millstone of history is counterbalanced by several considerations: one, the reprisals against them would have been much worse had they been allowed to remain; two, and relatedly, the memory of hitler using false claims about the oppression of ethnic germans as a pretext to invade was still very fresh in everyone’s minds, and three, i think in this case the victims of attempted genocide should have a little bit more to say and “i don’t want to live next door to a german” would have been, uh, a pretty common sentiment.

anyway if you’re going to use the term “ethnic cleansing” to refer to the (forcible, fairly indiscriminate, undemocratic and probably immoral – i am admitting all of those things) resettlement of people responsible for genocide, you have some considering of your own to do. i’m going to stop trying to give you an education in what every child learns in elementary school here, because it’s a waste of time, and clearly you don’t care about the historical details as long as you get to sound woke and righteous. fuck along now.

literally incredible

watching left tumblr bounce against central/east european nationalisms is hilarious

reminds you how Great Patriotic War socialism was experienced as whatever central/east european nationalism and still running on fumes

reminds you how Jew-suppressing Aryan supremacy was experienced as whatever central/east european nationalisms

(reminds you there MUST be collaborationist narratives by which the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was experienced as whatever southeast asian nationalisms and it’s kind of odd you’ve never encountered one)

remember that girl like a year and a half ago that was all about antiquities and… Turkey, was it?

and when like drdogballs and that other one - the train one, I think he follows me actually - went from tankies straight to like 1488 because ukraine?

Hazy knowledge and inexperience added to an intuition that politics was manipulated by mysterious forces. Suspicion was often transmitted down through the generations by adages like “All politicians are thieves,” “The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” and “One hand washes the other.” The penchant for projective thinking was evident in the fluency with which Italian Americans resorted to conspiracy as a means of explaining events. A leader in the Italian-American Civil Rights League offered a grandiose version. “There’s a conspiracy against Italian Americans, because we really are a majority of Americans. There are thirty-three million of us, although the census is afraid to admit it. That is why the CIA shot Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Joe Colombo. It was because Colombo was trying to unite the have-nots against the haves. The CIA did it because Joe Colombo would have upset the two-party system.”

Jonathan Rieder, Carnasie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism. FYI, this is who Joe Colombo is.
(via antoine-roquentin)

Finished the Witcher DLCs. (Previous on the Witcher III: 1, 2) Really good! Bioware and Bethesda have found a real worthy competitor in CD Projekt Red. They got me thinking about two things though:

AAA open world games now have anticlimaxes. Like, you’ll go through all the way through the main mission chain, fight the big bad, and then after you’ve beat him there’ll be some more missions as a wind-down, but the thing is they’re not apex challenges but kind of cozy scenarios.

The first one I noticed was Red Dead Redemption, where the return to domesticity was an important step to resolving themes and setting up the tone for the ultimate resolution, so fair. But last year the weird James Bond-inspired AC:Syndicate chain where you take missions from Queen Victoria, I don’t even know what that was. You could say it’s more content for people who’ve exhausted everything else but that chain ends too eventually and I’m not sure what the point was of putting that particular lump of content after the main quest rather than integrated with it like other side quests.

(It also says something about the ideological drift of the AC games, where the assassins who started out as killers-of-tyrants-and-bringers-of-freedom still do that sometimes [while being heavy-handedly reminded how much they’re mucking society up for people], but lately they’ve been resisting the French Revolution because democracy is an more insidious means of control than monarchy and helping the Queen defend the British Empire - but! cheekily mentioning that maybe she could politely consider not keeping India under the colonial yoke.)

Of course the entire Blood and Wine DLC felt like this - the environment and culture of fake Western Europe wine country is so much more pleasant than the fake Poland-and-the-Hebrides you’d been dragging ass around - but even within it after you resolve everything there’s a mission to go drink and pick flowers and bullshit with an old friend, and then a mission to laze about in the sun and muse about retirement with your girlfriend.

I wonder if some of this recent tendency towards anticlimax has to do with the concurrent rise of DLC and particularly season pass-based business models - that you can’t just blow up the world in the climax, and you need to dramatize everything settling back to normal ready for the next sitcom episode.

(BECAUSE Read Dead Redemption wrapped up so comprehensively, the only single player DLC had to go as an alternate universe zombie plot)

The second thought I had, watching the close bond of the higher vampires Regis and Detlaff play out in tragedy, was wait a second, is this relationship fucking queer-coded? Because I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen that stuff treated through metaphor. And I’m like “well, you know, Detlaff had a female paramour, it was an important plot point” but then I think.

There’s this huge world, and like I’ve said so much of your experience is driven not by the machinations of kings but in response to intimate personal lives so there are TONS of young lovers, or married couples, or people driven by lust, over and over, and I can’t remember seeing one single same-gender pairing, or even intimation of same.

Poland, huh!

So that’s a point, I’ll scoff at people who take issue with CD Projekt Red for not at all holding ~*~representation~*~ as a particularly pressing end in itself, and roll my eyes (indulgently!) at BioWare for so eagerly and transparently beavering away to stuff affirmational stuff in wherever there’s space.

But I DID just go through a 80+ hour total experience with what I took to be the best yet simulation of a coherent world full of people with actual interiority - the most humane AAA game I’d seen - that was so appealing it’s bolstered my respect and interest for the actual home culture of its creators, and only in incidental hindsight noticed that gayness had no place in this world.

(Actually in further introspection, I suppose you might be able to count the way people in Toussaint use “bumdiddler” as an insult. Poland!)

((Okay I decided to do some googling and am reminded that in the introductory area, you do encounter a man living in loathed exile in the woods because he was caught in a gay relationship with a lord’s heir [who suicided]. Okay, I remembered the tone-setting mission that used a dwarven blacksmith to establish the rural Polish-style ethnic tensions and the threat of pogrom but forgot that, fair enough.

And there was that elf tailor who liked to wear dresses, who I remember making the distinction that he didn’t identify as a woman, he identified as a shapeshifter.

Oh, and I see all these things saying Ciri is non-straight because… in what was written in the books and not at all mentioned in the game… as a younger girl living on the streets she fell in with a gang which included another homeless girl who forced herself on Ciri… and vulnerable and abused with no other place in society and and a professed desire not to be alone again, she ends up being this girl’s bedwarmer for a while. OH. WELL THEN.))

A Playboy for President

Much of what seems strange and reactionary about Trump is tied to what was normal to a certain kind of Sinatra and Mad Men-era man — the casual sexism, the odd mix of sleaziness and formality, even the insult-comic style.

But while that male culture was “conservative” in its exploitative attitudes toward women, it was itself in rebellion against bourgeois norms and Middle-American Christianity. And if Hillary is a (partial, given her complicated marriage) avatar of Gloria Steinem-era feminism, her opponent is an heir of the male revolutionary in whose club Steinem once went undercover: Hugh Hefner…. Hefner passed from a phenomenon to a sideshow, while a more feminist vision of liberation became the official ideology of the liberal upper class.

But only gradually and partially. The men’s sexual revolution, in which freedom meant freedom to take your pleasure while women took the pill, is still a potent force, and not only in the halls of Fox News. From Hollywood and college campuses to rock concert backstages and Bill Clinton’s political operation, it has persisted as a pervasive but unspoken philosophy in precincts officially committed to cultural liberalism and sexual equality.

This fundamentally rings true, close to what I was getting at in that Something for Everyone post.

Separating The Sixties into two is an interesting and possibly productive angle though. You have the Playboy Sixties (which started in the Fifties of course, the same time as campus unrest first flared up, this time against “in loco parentis” parietal rules that tried to keep the male students and the co-eds from fucking. My dad mentions being in near-riots at Cornell over this, in a narrative by which “panty raids” where men would en masse storm women’s dorms and steal their underwear were a blow for freedom.) The Swinging Sixties, what Austin Powers (who woken up assumed communism had won and condoms were for sailors) was riffing on. The Sinatra Sixties. The sixties where the popular New Face Of America was a charming young president with a picture-perfect wife and family and a steady stream of models and actresses piped in the back door.

And THEN, distinct from that, you have the minority-liberationist 60s, the feminist 60s. Which was not obviously or inevitably incompatible with the white man’s ‘60s. That the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘50s demanding membership in white society would eventually be eclipsed by a black nationalism asserting pride in distinct blackness was not obvious or inevitable. Betty Friedan’s original goal had been, taking heterosexual pairing as a given as the correct state of mature women, to make it work for both parties. And her warning of the “Lavender Menace” of lesbians coming to prominence in late-60s feminism came from a suspicion that given the chance, these women who were not drawn to men and were increasingly articulating theories of feminism based on complete life without men were unlikely to spend the feminist reputational capital she’d cultivated on Making Marriage Great Again.

And points to him for pointing out that the Playboy stuff and so much of that period’s masculinity wasn’t the last hurrah of a long stable maleness but a new-at-the-time innovation that was understood as counter to existing stability.

Like, do you remember that 1965 Playboy interview where Sean Connery, deputized as James Bond, agent of masculinity, extrapolated from his character to expound on the necessity of violence in maintaining correct male-female relations?

PLAYBOY: How do you feel about roughing up a woman, as Bond sometimes has to do?

CONNERY: I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman–although I don’t recommend doing it in the same way that you’d hit a man. An openhanded slap is justified–if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning. If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I’d do it. I think a man has to be slightly advanced, ahead of the woman. I really do–by virtue of the way a man is built, if nothing else. But I wouldn’t call myself sadistic. I think one of the appeals that Bond has for women, however, is that he is decisive, cruel even. By their nature women aren’t decisive–“Shall I wear this? Shall I wear that?”–and along comes a man who is absolutely sure of everything and he’s a godsend. And, of course, Bond is never in love with a girl and that helps. He always does what he wants, and women like that. It explains why so many women are crazy about men who don’t give a rap for them.

That came more than 20 years after the publication of Generation of Vipers, a popular and influential 1942 nonfiction book on how baleful but widespread trends of women in positions of influence or control over men in the name of morals and propriety - “momism” were turning us into a cosseted, failed, unworthy nation.

usairforce:

Us aeronautic boys always wanted to fuck airplane girls, but we didn’t know it yet. None of us had the courage to draw airplanes with boobs, so the compromise was to draw mouths and eyes on the planes and then jack off inside the cockpits. Thankfully today, DeviantArt gives me my fix of airplane ass every hour, on the hour.