kontextmaschine

When someone had to be picked from a group of boys, or alternately someone farted, everyone would have to put their forefinger to their nose and the last one to do it (often because they hadn’t recognized the minigame was active) was assigned responsibility

variants where there were further cycles of putting your thumb to your nose, and then sticking your other fingers up like rhinomoose antlers

whenever we’d see the number “55″ we’d sing the rhyme

there was a man
he was alive
he looked across the street
and he saw 55
::silly questioning voice:: fifty-fuyve?
::silly insistent voice:: fifty-fuyve!

(cf. modern “69″/”nice”)

“Mr. President”, where like the first one we’d put fingers up to our ears, like we were Secret Service agents with earbuds, and then when the last one of us hadn’t noticed someone would say “Mr. President, get down!” and we’d all tackle him

A little thing that really charms me is how you can go to Seattle and see the Japanese tourists and the Japanese-American locals on the same street and it’s the same underlying population pool and the same broad fashion sensibility even but there’s all these subtle differences in the hairstyle traditions and the cut of the tailoring you can’t even put your finger on, but it gives the distinction away instantly

I mean, for most styles, like “jacket-skirt businesswoman with straight midlength hair” or “mom in pastel knit top with hair loose at her shoulders” you’ll see it; for fashion and “streetwear” I get the feeling Japan and the Pacific coast are in the same tradition while the Atlantic coast’s aligned with the Paris-London-Milan-NYC one

sosbrutalism:

It’s not often, that a dairy complex goes down in architecture history. This one is a key work of Indian Brutalism:

Achyut P. Kanvinde: Dudhsagar Dairy Complex, Mehsana, India, 1970–1973

Photos: © MIT Libraries, Rotch Visual Collections, courtesy of Peter Serenyi 1985

crossconnectmag:

Urban Landscapes by Andrey Surnov

Selected works by Andrey Surnov, an exhibition designer and illustrator from Moscow, Russia. For more check out his website and follow him on Instagram.

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Art is the only way to run away without leaving home - run with us.

posted by tu recepcja

geostatonary:

You and your fellow players are time travelers living your lives in that dream, time.  At any point in play you may declare that you dream a new dream of time to alter the course of events, and roll the relevant attribute to see if you may make it true.  All time travelers will remember past events, but must respect your worldly changes should you succeed.  At any point, you may declare your intention to physically travel (as opposed to notionally traveling as with typical Attribute use) to a past or future point; if half or more players agree to it, you may travel to that point.  If a majority disagree, you are overruled. 

Resolution is via rolling 1d6, with a target below or equal to the relevant attribute to succeed.  A 6 is always a failure, and a 1 is always a success. To invoke an attribute, consider the scenario at hand, and propose a way things could be different that you may achieve your goals.  Propose it, and if at least two other players think it sounds possible, roll to see if you may accomplish this change.

Characters have seven points to spend on Attributes.  Attributes start at 1 and cost 1 point for every additional level.

Attributes

Foresight- This is your ability to justify causes.  Whenever you alter that dream, time, to retroactively have a thing or be prepared, roll your Foresight.  If your roll below, the dream changes and you have the resources you need.  If you roll above, you may choose to either fail and discard the dream of that possibility, or take it and gain a point of Wakening.  On a 1, you may waive the normal benefits of the role to instead lose a point of Wakening.

Selfhood- This is your ability to be yourself.  Whenever you dream of being some way other than you are now, roll Selfhood.  If you roll below, your life had always taken the course that had lead you to be as you wish to be.  If you roll above, you may choose to either fail and discard the dream of that possibility, or take it and gain a point of Entanglement.  On a 1, you may waive the normal benefits of the role to instead lose a point of Entanglement.

Empathy- This is your ability to understand others.  Whenever you dream a new dream of time to change how a person would act or react, roll Empathy.  If you roll below, they act in this new way.  If you roll above, you may choose to either fail and discard the dream of that possibility, or take it and gain a point of either Wakening or Entanglement- if you are acting against the world at large, you choose; if you are working against another player, they may choose. On a 1, you may waive the normal benefits of the role to instead make another player lose a point of any Menace; once per story, you may instead chose to remove a painful truth or an alienation from another player’s sheet with their consent.

Conflict

Whenever you would directly attack a fellow time traveler, in addition to the normal applicable rolls, the attacking player announces the Menace they wish to increase.  If the attacked succeeds on their role, the defender chooses an Attribute to defend themselves with. Roll it; if the defender both rolls a success and that number is equal to or lower than the number the attacker rolled, the attacker’s change fails and they gain a point of the Menace they chose.  If the defender fails to do this, the change in time takes and they gain the announced Menace.

Menaces

Whenever a Menace reaches 6, your character is no longer able to manipulate that dream, time, and leaves play. 

Whenever a Menace is gained, the dream frays.  Interpret this as you will.

Entanglement- This is a measure of how entangled you are in that dream, time.  When it reaches 6, you are so completely enmeshed in it that you can no longer choose a new dream for yourself.  Every four points you gain, define a painful truth you cannot truly be rid of, and add it to your character sheet.

Wakening- This is a measure of how divorced you are from that dream, time.  When it reaches 6 you are so completely separate from it that you wake up and cease to dream, vanishing.  Every four points you gain, define something that alienates you from the world, and add it to your character sheet.

brutalacademia:

University of Sydney is a treat.

Been playing Final Fantasy XV. As a longtime franchise loyalist who noped out of the brand after 12, it’s a welcome reintroduction. In ways it feels like a tribute to the other urban fantasy entries (7, 8, the X and 13 series) in the way that IX was a tribute to the high fantasy ones.

Cute how you can always trace design trends and themes through Square games as some experimental concept from 7 years ago gets developed or revived for a new game.

The “bros on a road trip” thing works better thematically and as a mechanic than I expected; I suspect the thing to do would be contrast it with X-2′s all-girl Spice World vibe but I’m not playing X-2 again.

One thing though, the world visuals. They still have the Square-brand epic vistas and lighting and palettes (seriously, those guys do “the carefree happiness of green fields under a blue spring sky” like no one’s business) but everyone does epic open worlds now and it really shows that they’re forcing legacy technology. Things like terrain and hair look like a “HD update” of a last-gen engine (and probably were, compare how GTA5 went out with story and online half-cooked before the console generation it was built for went obsolete), you see them do foliage and it’s like SpeedTree was never invented.

gayestjyn:

some soldier76 main: why the hell didn’t you kill that enemy tracer on the point?

me:

kropotkitten:

class-struggle-anarchism:

figgy pudding as a transitional demand

the cool thing about that song is it is a relic from when Christmas was bad ass before Washington Irving made it into the family-friendly holiday it is today. Before Irving created Christmas of today from nothing it was a drunken feast when rioting was common. Basically people would go out into the streets, get drunk, and throw snowballs at each other and shop windows. Sometimes the police would break it up but this would just make the celebrants escalate into riot. 

In 1828, a particularly violent Christmas riot in New York led the city to institute its first professional police force.

Christmas celebrations in 1800 owed more to the midwinter worship of Saturn and Bacchus than to Christ. By the second century, the Romans were regularly feasting, drinking, and cavorting like satyrs from December 17, the first day of Saturnalia, to January First. They also decorated their houses with evergreen boughs.

In the fourth century, Christians began to celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25, the winter solstice on the Roman calendar. This was a partly way to meet the challenge of pagan cults. The church tacitly agreed to let the holiday be celebrated more or less as it always was. The Christmas celebration that arose in Medieval Europe was an occasion for excess and extravagance, public lewdness, and violations of social order. In medieval and early modern Europe, celebrants often elected a “Lord of Misrule” to preside over these annual revels. In one episode in 1637 in England, the crowd gave the Lord of Misrule a wife in a public marriage service conducted by a fellow reveler posing as a minister. The affair was consummated on the spot! No wonder, New England Puritans sought to criminalize this rowdy affair.

Puritans were particularly upset by two irksome Christmas practices: One was mumming, the exchange of clothes between men and women; and even worst was the outbreak of rioting, drunkenness, and fornication. It was this raucous celebration that the New England Puritans tried to kill.

But despite the Puritans’ best efforts, Christmas in America became an excuse for dangerous hell raising. At Christmastime, men drank rum, fired muskets wildly, and costumed themselves in animal pelts or women’s clothes - crossing species and gender. In New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other cities, they formed Callithumpian parades, which involved beating on the kettles, blowing on penny trumpets and tin horns, and setting off firecrackers.

Then, during the early 1800s, Christmas became a cultural battleground. During the early 1800s, evangelical Protestants challenged the popular Christmas. They called for a shorter, more refined, more family-centered celebration at the end of the year, one that would banish “what is sensual and low, and very close to vice itself in the existing Saturnalia.”

So in reality, the “war on christmas” was actually waged by Puritans and later by protestants who thought it was too wild and needed to be tamed and so invented whole sale bullshit to replace the drunken, sex-filled, riotous feast it once was.

Make Christmas Libidinal Again

The general tendency of folk holidays in the absence of external pressure is to develop towards “drunken anarchy festival” and I think that’s beautiful

A modern GoT should be titled “State of Exception”
tagline “sovereign is he who makes the exception”, obvs
you’re welcome

coolbugfacts:

presidentobarna:

catgirlpresident:

“>” is the equivalent of a “stop” in a telegram

> Be me in 1810
> Receive telegram
> Bartholomew has died of tuberculosis

AT A FRIENDS HOUSE STOP CHECK OUT HIS ITUNES LIBRARY STOP LITERALLY ONLY ONE SONG STOP LINKIN PARK IN THE END STOP ALMOST 30000 PLAYS STOP

picayunetown:

Idakoos.com has a simple premise: make a million t-shirt designs, mechanically separate out the important bits, and allow the user to plug in any one of a billion replacements to suit herself. Oh, and also, just dump in enormous messy lists of things without spell-checking; also don’t bother checking for results that are nonsensical, vanishingly unlikely, horrifying, or offensive. On the surface, cute personalized shirts for every taste. Underneath, a dadaist nightmare, or a hipster’s paradise.

Here are a few of my favorites, mostly collected by the Something Awful forums goons, who are currently running around the site hooting and sharing the best/worst stuff on offer. Not even getting into stuff like ‘Kiss Me, I’m An Aboriginal Community Liaison Officer’.

not gonna lie: I honestly want this one well, yes, that's true not shown: 'Gay And Finnish Mythology And Finnish Paganism Interested' (really!) hardcore hide-and-go-seek ... I'm sure they do this is... this is beautiful BAHAHAHA aw, sweetie it's true, she is PERFECT FOR TUMBLR

kontextmaschine:

Police Navidad.

Researchers "Translate" Bat Talk. Turns Out, They Argue—A Lot

bogleech:

The four most common sounds roosting bats make at each other are apparently:

• Disputes over food
• Disputes over roosting position
• Disputes over “unwanted male advances”
• Disputes over being too close together

argumate:

femmenietzsche:

*Successfully models someone’s preferences, like some kind of fag*

it’s not gay unless they also successfully model yours

“I’M GAY” posts

(meaning “I find community in the collective experience of sadness and insufficiency”)

were close but missing something and there’s the answer