kontextmaschine

akaltynarchitectonica:

hotcommunist:

laddermatch:

the last meme of 2016 will be the phrase “let’s get into gender politics” followed by a completely unrelated gif

let’s get into gender politics

let’s get into gender politics

odditycollector:

StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis
with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks

(tldr: some people taught a computer to draw novel birds and flowers on request. results are surprisingly decent.)

so, um. This is going to get really interesting really fast.

From the Suicide Squad extended cut, apparently

This guy was my sensei, he was really really good at the physical operating, wise understanding, AND charismatic motivating parts of that role, I endorse him

Would kinda like to be cannon-fired through a briar patch because I like the aesthetic of being all bloody-scratched up from forcing through but that would be so fucking tedious

mun-sal-vache:

The Collected Works of Gabriele D'Annunzio, illustrated by Ivan Bilibin.

Has anyone done a good rip on Valve-style “best practices” game design, “move towards the light” and all that?

New box-pushing puzzles imo

argumate:

utnapishtim89:

As the U.S. population expands, the number of undergraduates expands. Given roughly constant productivity in teaching, this means that the number of professors must expand. Which means there is an ever-increasing army of people out there trying to find and report interesting results. 

But there’s no guarantee that the supply of interesting results is infinite. In some fields (currently, materials science and neuroscience), there might be plenty to find, but elsewhere (particle physics, monetary theory) the low-hanging fruit might be picked for now. If there are diminishing returns to overall research labor input at any point in time - and history suggests there are - then this means the standards for publishable results must fall, or America will be unable to provide research professors to teach all of its undergrads.

This might be why we have a replication crisis in psychology (and a quieter replication crisis in medicine, and a replication crisis in empirical economics that no one has even noticed yet). It might be why nutrition science changes its recommendations every few months. It might be a big reason for p-hacking, data mining, and specification search. It might be a reason for the proliferation of untestable theories in high-energy physics, finance, macroeconomics, and elsewhere. And it might be a reason for the flood of banal, jargon-drenched unoriginal work in the humanities.

the humanities folk should be writing fanfiction and the technical people making video games, BAM once again I’ve solved all the problems of humanity

isn’t this where GamerGate and Rabid Puppies came from? a Too Many Chiefs crisis diverted from academia into vidya and genre fiction, setting off a Völkerwanderung-style displacement cascade?

memecucker:

quoms:

memecucker:

Something I think is funny in Hearts of Irom games is how “oil rich” areas of the map are different from what they would be nowadays like Saudi Arabia is unexpectedly modest while Romania and Indonesia are some of the most oil rich regions for that time

the indonesia thing i think is because they conflate oil and rubber - virtually all the natural rubber in the world came from indonesia at the time, but i don’t think there was petroleum extraction

Indonesian oil is how Royal Dutch Shell got its start. I looked it up and pre-war Dutch East Indies amounted to 4% of international oil production which was enough to match Japanese wartime demands in addition to Dutch infrastructure in the area being fairly well established http://histclo.com/essay/war/ww2/stra/w2j-oil.html

Ironically Imperial Japan had no idea it was sitting right on top of the massive Daqing oil field in Manchuria, which contained 16 billion barrels worth of oil when it was discovered in 1959

Can you imagine the North Sea fields running through the wars, tho? Shit woulda been bananas, submarine tankers and everything.

1: Yeah that's what you get for crying wolf
2: But *there really is* a wolf!
1: Yes that's the lesson

I still think Baz Luhrmann taking his Romeo + Juliet dialogue from the original script and having the direction and visual design bear the weight of the conceit was really well done

and that with that and Moulin Rouge he did takes on the grand old American cinematic genre of the musical, and with Australia and Gatsby the Technicolor epic, that were basically honest updates incorporating all the post-stagey advances in moving pictures from Riefenstahl to MTV

and that that merits some respect

feeling alternately jittery and melancholy, so I’m chalking it up more chemical than narrative, but still a hell of a position to consider my life from

well, maybe some of it’s narrative, comedown from the election we’ve been having for the last what, year and a half? I’ve gotta say I do invest a lot of identity and ego in what I do here, knowing a lot of connected stuff, obscure America stuff, all the weird currents and corners of The Discourse, being able to connect the threads.

And, like, it paid off! And from a purely selfish perspective, thank fucking god, when your life’s not hitting benchmarks, after a while (say, 2013) you really question pinning your salvific sense of superiority on “~I~ think internet racists are very important”

But there we were, the single most important thing to happen in/to America in my lifetime, everyone of any authority thought it was impossible, and the week after the escalator debut I messaged my friend on Capitol Hill very insistent that Trump would win, and then watched in awe as he hit every turn I thought you’d have to hit, drunken master-style

And it paid off, and I grokked The Thing, and what the hell did it pay off for me

I’m sure all the things I wrote helped get me these more and more followers, hopefully cemented my reputation with people I really esteem

But now, in that field I invest a lot of identity and ego in, in a way that compensates for benchmarks &tc &tc, I feel like a big part of my edge is lost, my wad of several years is kind of blown in a way that hasn’t really improved my position in any way other than internet points, I increasingly suspect the next turns will come from other things entirely, something that gave me structure and purpose and value and future-orientation (or even seasonality) for more than a year is gone, and now where the fuck am I

whew

Halfway between Cassandra and that line from Juno, y'know, “I try really hard, actually.”

argumate:

discoursedrome:

silver-and-ivory:

discoursedrome:

argumate:

I’ve seen this idea going around that there are no female white supremacists.

I mean sure it’d be nice if it were true, but also seems somewhat unlikely?

Female white supremacists are non-prototypical and therefore rhetorically suboptimal. People you don’t know are mostly just fungible shares of iconic “types”, so it’s inconvenient if people are poor models of any of the types you’re interested in. (My impression is that black women definitely have an iconic type for “female white supremacist”, but they are probably not the ones saying that there aren’t female white supremacists.)

An iconic type for female white supremacists? Could you elaborate?

I’m well out of my depth on this, but my impression is that the stereotypical female white supremacist is much more framed in terms of buttoned-down traditionalism, propriety, and respectability politics, more of a Dolores Umbridge type than a skinhead type. I’m not really sure if this is accurate but I have definitely seen a lot of volleys flying in that general direction and I have to assume they were aiming at something.

some early white feminists weren’t particularly intersectional, let’s put it that way.

Iconic? Hm, not far off from “renn faire” in the direction of “Juggalette” maybe?

Oh, take that whig off your history, you silly toff.

(Okay though, as brusque anons go, this guy actually read my old posts and pegged his hits to specific points, that’s worth rewarding.)

First off, it’s fuckin’ great. It’s like listening to lowrider music, you get all of the great stuff from across decades and none of the dross.

Second, I told you, quasi-social democracy is still a pretty functioning face of left politics around here, to the extent this was a referendum on the left and right as you experience them I’m not shocked the Democrats won as But Still, Bernie’s Party* and their opponent White Workers Matter took second as a me-too.

We’ll see how left and Democratic politics go from here. Portland’s a nice place, I largely trust it. Really, it’s got quite the treasury of civic trust to draw on. Make America Portland Again isn’t a terrible idea and if Trump doesn’t deliver maybe the Chapo boys have a hat.

And realignments take a while. NYC if anywhere had a nightmare ‘70s but from the dawn of Morning in America it took 14 years of the New Yorker tutting while the New Republic ate its lunch, churches hosting El Salvador sanctuaries and plague Masses, before Giuliani Time kicked off 20 years of Republican rule.

Appfuckers and yuppies moving in (you know, ‘80s New Republic types), black-denim-and-beanies pushed out, we’ll see. Maybe that sanctuary defunding pushes homeowners to vote their wallets over their hearts, we’ll see. The VC app crash is coming eventually, we’ll see. If a Trump realignment reaches the rest of the state and brings one of the legislative houses back red or to parity that’ll matter. Buncha Fight For 15 inspired stuff this year put hella costs on restaurants and service industry which are huge here, seeing a lot of locals put stuff on Facebook about it I wouldn’t’ve expected.

Plus, I mean, the county went blue 51% for Humphrey, 50% for McGovern, 47% for Carter ‘80 (I’m guessing 14% for friggin’ Anderson), 54% for Mondale, 62% for Dukakis,  64% for Gore, 72% for Kerry, and batshit nuts against legendary tyrant George HW Bush.

Who the fuck was behind the times voting against Mondale?

David After Dentist was cute and all, today I saw two different things on social media like “check out the funny/heartwarming things this grown-ass adult says disoriented and disinhibited coming out of anaesthesia, as we had the camera rolling!” and I’d prefer that not be a meme

slavojzyzzek:

surprised I haven’t seen anyone mention the Roscoe Arbuckle case, like, ever

had been looking for a place to mention I saw it referenced in passing maybe 3 times in the 90s, like books or SPIN magazine-level stuff

clearly on the assumption that you’d recognize it as a shameful, conclusive lesson against the press indulging a moralistic audience or attention-seeking ditzes

back-then:

Air
Kern County, California, November 1938

bowhurst:

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