You know it’s weird after My Big Fat Greek Wedding no one bothered to adapt Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding
Wait, they DID? With Mila Kunis? And it was terrible? Oh man. OK the premise is blown but I just want to remind people of Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding.
Which maybe I’m overestimating the universality of, I heard ads for it constantly… in a media market that covered Jersey tho…
In other Meg Griffin news, I played the Lost in Space pinball table for the first time today. Terrible ‘90s Data East, but I was like haha Matt LeBlanc wait damn, who’s that girl with the hair. Lacey Chabert!
Christ, I forgot how much I wanted to bend that girl over some furniture when I was 14.
this monologue is even funnier delivered by grandpa at dinner to awkward smiles
So if my halfassed syncretic polytheist religion ever took off I think it should have stretch goals, or achievements, or something to keep it aiming higher.
I’m thinking the pinnacle goal should be to have active library temples on Capitoline Hill in Rome, the Acropolis of Athens, and the Temple Mount of Jerusalem
doesn’t have to be new-built, consecrations of existing structures count but they have to be under exclusive control, can’t be split with another authority
which means if a church at pinnacle schisms each faction will have to hold, conquer, or replace the temples to maintain the pinnacle
also pinnacle goals are legitimate causes to declare war, levy taxes, or raise armies
Kokopelli’s got a weird place in American culture. Pretty much unique among pre-Colombian divinities, the mainstream makes a point of keeping his name and symbolism alive… as kind of a lazy, vague symbol of “The Desert Southwest”.
Like, if you rule out bare crosses and only count crucifixes with the actual body of Christ, I might have seen more public depictions of Kokopelli than any other god in America, and I could not tell you a single Kokopelli story.
What’s Kokopelli known for? Well, I’ve got a vague sense he’s a trickster, and I guess he plays the flute. “Oh, like the flutist tricksters Pan or the Pied Piper?” Fuuuuuuck if I know, dude.
Of COURSE masculinity is toxic, so is chemotherapy. That’s how it works! It differentially kills off your vulnerabilities slightly faster than the rest of you, so repeated courses of treatment will eliminate them while leaving you merely grievously injured and ready to thrive!
Anonymous asked: Why did Denmark win a war alone against Prussia, Schlesweg-Holstein, and many other Germans with only a few norwegian/swedish volunteers to assist them in the first Schlesweg war?
This *really* isn’t something I know enough for confident proclamations, but I can toss out some factors:
- Prussia was doing a lot of the heavy lifting of suppressing the revolutions of 1848, and could see what would eventually be the Austro-Prussian war looming on the horizon
- The German Confederation wasn’t very good at marshaling forces under unitary command, not least because there was competition for leadership between Prussia and Austria
- Denmark in contrast coopted its liberal revolution pretty smoothly and entered the fight unified and undistracted
- the Prussian leadership didn’t particularly want the war - German nationalists gave it to them as a fait accompli. With the ultimate goal of building a Prussian-led Germany, they needed to do something to retain public confidence as a vehicle for German national aspirations, but upsetting the balance of power risked drawing major powers into an alliance against them. It’s not obvious that they wanted to win, or that they’d be better off if they had.
i decided to compile all the political proposals i’ve made with in various debates on this site into one big proposal for a hypothetical political model:
Governance: global direct democracy, with a nested council system wherein everyone can vote in the global council, anyone can vote in the territory council of their own territory, anyone can vote in the regional council for their own region, and anyone can vote in the local council of their own town. to represent this visually:
so each dot represents an individual, each square represents a council, and the red lines extending from each individual indicate the councils they would be able to vote in. (there would obviously be more people and councils than this, but that would be too many to visually represent, so this will have to do)
this allows for total direct democracy, as well as quickness and flexibility with regard to dealing with local issues, while still allowing for global-level coordination when necessary. these councils would take the form of internet forums wherein people could submit proposals to be debated and voted on.
Economy/Manufacturing: Fully Automated Luxury Communism, with heavy use of 3-D printing. in the place of most stores, we would have massive 3-D printers, which would produce items on the spot from either pre-loaded designs, or deigns downloaded off the internet. in the same way that competition for internet attention and views and notes and likes and such drives people to create stuff on minecraft or whatever, thanks to 3-D printing, this impetus can be harnessed to create actual usable goods. by giving people ~notes~ or ~views~ or whatever you want to call them for making frequently downloaded products, there’s still the element of reward/competition, without linking this element to the level of access people have to basic vital necessities.
Law Enforcement: If a violent crime was reported, nearby drones would activate, and would be able to be controlled by any citizen, to then neutralize the situation using non-lethal weaponry (there would be game-like simulations which would train people in the use of these drones). the video feed from these drones would be publicly viewable by everyone, and if someone was misusing the drone they were controlling, other people who saw that would be able to shut the drone down and the person who misused the drone would be barred from controlling law enforcement drones in the future. this allows for violence to be prevented without the creation of a separate policing class which is above the law.
Drug Law: All currently illegal drugs available for free in a controlled context, similar to the free heroin programs in the Netherlands. This ends the pointless and harmful war on drugs, while preventing the existence of a drug industry which exploits users for profit (and is thus incentivized to push users to dangerous excess).
Religion: An official position of agnosticism and the encouragement of cross-faith unity in the shared understanding of religion/mysticism within the framework of viewing symbolism/myth/ritual as tools for the overall shared goal of increasing human well-being, as well as the creation of new universally accessible ritual/myth/symbolism around this concept which isn’t tied to any previously existing belief system (ala Lunacharsky’s theories on Godbuilding, or the statue of liberty as a post-religious civic/mythic quasi-deity, or the cult of reason from the french revolution)
reblogging because holy shit.
I like that we’re all designing utopias and religions now, that’s a positive sign
I was going to say “fractals!” with as a digression “(that’s the modern equivalent of ‘wheels within wheels’)”
but then I realized the digression was more interesting
this is not directly related but I sure wish someone some day puts together an etymological-semiotic analysis of the whole synthwave visual identity thing
like here alone, we have at least the following tropes colliding:
title in this one specific type of script at an angle
triangle standing on its corner as a “heraldic ordinary”
for that matter, the practice of including a “heraldic ordinary” in cover art at all
palm tree silhouettes
interlacing as a visual effect
large shiny metal letters, with a mountain range + sky reflecting off them
“virtual” grid in perspective
purple neon lights
(there are at least some half a dozen others)
and we’d have at least two fronts of attack: 1) who or what created and codified these elements in the first place, back in the 80s; 2) at what point were they fed into the current retro-80s memeplex, and from where?
the 80s parody movie Kung Fury helped fuel synthwave, which was already kicking around as a development out of the french electronic scene with like danger, kavinsky, arguably that one birdy nam nam track
Kung Fury came out in 2015, right? it’s probably been good for popularity, but synthwave has been going on as a solid movement a good while longer than that — I’ve been keeping tabs since 2012, and the earliest people I recall doing the thing in basically its current form with some degree of recognition were probably Rosso Corsa Records, starting 2010-ish
and I also keep wondering why do people think it evolved from just french house — the visuals seem to have gotten a good dose of inspiration from there yeah, but e.g. Com Truise basically started off as experimental chillwave, the italo disco revival from Sally Shapiro has been another obvious influence, and of course a fair number of the actual producers have come along from the synth hobbyist scene’s cottage industry that has been going on there all along (it wouldn’t be too hard to dig up some individual “proto-synthwave” songs from 2005 or 2000, with some imagination maybe even 1995)…
Drive came out in 2011 and Hotline Miami in 2012, if you want to date the neoneonnoir aesthetic by commercial product
I got to contribute to this article! Really nice little piece about furry art and indie artists. :)
I feel like I haven’t mentioned it lately, but yeah, furries are usually some of the best customers to work with. I have MUCH fewer problems with these guys than standard clients, and it’s an easy niche to break into. Can’t recommend it enough!
I knew a girl in college (200..2ish?, when furries were kind of an internet boogieman, the Comedy Lolocaust was in ‘04 I think?) who paid if not her tuition at least her living expenses off furry art, taking commissions during the school year and hitting the con circuit in the summer
she wasn’t really in the fandom, way she explained it as an adolescent filling up sketchpads, she got a scanner around the same time she discovered there were Usenet groups to talk about the Redwall books
