kontextmaschine

itsbenedict:

yknow in a few weeks “are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president” is going to have weirdly sincere connotations

nice

what?

ok.

still, what?

ah. k.

kinda got that aeon flux elongation

watching ‘80s movies in a bar and all those chopper pilots we trained for 'Nam really left a mark on our credits sequences

Next installment in “There’s actually a LOT of unpulled or abandoned plot threads in America”:

every year the NRA runs a marksmanship competition where the President of the United States recognizes the 100 best gunslingers in the country with a patch that’s not only approved for wear on military uniforms, but the only thing that can sub in the “triple canopy” of elite-force shoulder markings

and that’s it

I am watching a sidebar ad for Medidata and it’s using the artificial heart as a symbol of futuristic hope and I’m like come on now

Haven’t watched in at least a decade. I used to get some mileage out of my (sincere) claim that Craig Kilborne was a better host than Jon Stewart, Noah just confuses things.

Posthumous essay from Benedict “Imagined Communities” Anderson, celebrated scholar of nationalism. Basically an intellectual autobiography, ends up with an endorsement of comparison as pedagogy - across cultures, across times, wielding the foreign to see the hidden particularities of the familiar.

I mean, endorsed, and when he puts it like that it really sounds like an old-school take on the promise of liberal arts. And when he puts it in proximity to his biography, makes you wonder if that doesn’t depend on men with the kind of Indiana Jones man-of-the-world life he had.

So for the second time in about a week there’s snow on the ground in Portland

Apparently before I showed up that was a hella rare thing, to the point that bars would post pretty undistinguished by Pennsylvania standards pictures of their storefronts “the day it snowed”

Since I’ve been here we’ve had two winters with one snow day and now this one with two so far

For all the 4wd Subarus and light pickups no one can drive for shit, Portland doesn’t have any plowing or salting capacity, and you realize how flat it isn’t. They put chains on the buses and people stay home

It’s not clear whether this is fluke (coast and inland mountains, the Columbia Gorge, and the Pacific Ocean all do weird things to airflow, when these come together things get crazy) or the new normal, since I’ve been here the summers have been droughty enough for the grass to turn yellow and apparently that’s new too

My concern is how this affects the viability of a motorcycle as year-round exclusive transport

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to walk a fucking mile through the snow to feed a friend’s cats

I’m sure this was a successful attempt at hagiography but it really does make it sound like so much of The Artist’s mystique was at base the ability to perform “superstar” and “Minnesota Nice” simultaneously

Like the stuff about women, all these people being like “he’d be on the hunt for college girls with talent, and invite them to his pleasure palace where he’d be flirty with them, and if that worked they’d watch movies and have dinner with his parents, otherwise he’d just support their dreams”, like if the intent was for me to go away with charmed fondness towards Prince it worked

>having been a child in Portland through 2004-2011, IME, snow is normal there.

Huh. Yeah, I put some qualifiers on that bc my only pre-presence context for Portland is the Ramona books and I could remember tetherball and the bit with them fucking up the turn and getting stuck going across the bridge on the way to a free student haircut and a bit where they’re worried about her dad stuck on runaway barges?

but I was like “oh jeez, did they have any snow scenes” and couldn’t remember

what do Portlanders do when it snows?

newyorker:

Taylor Swift, who turns 27 today, turned teen angst into a business empire. Read Lizzie Widdicombe’s 2011 Profile of the pop star from her country-music days. Photograph by Katy Grannan. 

probably for the best she sat out the election. can you imagine?

I was about to scoff that Wikipedia dates the concept of civic virtue to 1983

But then I looked, no, they’ve got good coverage of a broader sense

It’s just that when I googled, Google thought that the most important thing to me was a take from 1983

I found the original greek-ass one by searching in private browsing

Further repeated searches in open tracked browsing gave the greek-ass wikipedia as top but gave a slightly different top 10 every time, in ways that kind of suggested they were trying to anticipate the angle I was taking, like one seemed oriented around a philanthropic civil stability basis, and others seemed to frame it as an antidote to police abuse

The dystopian cyberpunk future is so… competent…

Oh I just remembered how in the late 90s/early 2000s I called nü metal “some college rock”, I should take credit for that

Walked and fed the cats

Met some friends at the pinball bar Went back to their place, they have the bookshelves of board games

They have VR, the Steam version

They were talking about it, like “maybe instead of turning our bedroom over to a holodeck we should turn our dining room over”

I was getting ready to laugh

They put me in the squid headgear

I played the spaceship dodging demo and the hex tactical archery demo and the Disneyesque minecart horror sample

It’s an honest fucking holodeck, everything short of Marina Sirtis sucking your dick

Yeah now I have to qualify that “no equipment” too, Mr. I Finally Got To Powell at 3 The Next AM