Biggest thing I learned living in a state with video slot machines in the bars: it’s totally possible to build a bill acceptor that’s not picky as hell
im going thru my follower list and blocking everyone who i think is a robot and man some of yall dont make it easy to see if youre a human or not by first glance i respect your aesthetics but also holy fuck
like is this a human being or is this a robots approximation of human absurdity
I have a sneaking suspicion that this store-brand cleaner ripped design cues from this old envirohippie cleaning product line my mom used called Seventh Generation
I have no idea where the thermometer for this house’s furnace is, but it can’t possibly be in any living area it heats. It consistently gets way too hot immediately at sunrise but then drops at least 10 degrees so I have to go to sleep in shorts to not sweat the bed and then change into heavy bottoms when I get up so I don’t freeze making coffee
Today was the coldest so far this winter and somehow the result is my front room, set to 72, got up to 87
Unpopular opinion: Pawn Stars is actually a really good popular history show; the bits explaining and contextualizing the artifacts “customers” “bring in” do a good job of exploring history through material culture in a non-academic register; the other stuff is a human interest/conflict hook but it works; if you (correctly) compare it to PBS kids shows it’s got as much or more history per minute as 3-2-1 Contact had science, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego had geography, or Sesame Street had shapes/colors/numbers/letters
Unpopular opinion: Pawn Stars is actually a really good popular history show; the bits explaining and contextualizing the artifacts “customers” “bring in” do a good job of exploring history through material culture in a non-academic register; the other stuff is a human interest/conflict hook but it works; if you (correctly) compare it to PBS kids shows it’s got as much or more history per minute as 3-2-1 Contact had science, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego had geography, or Sesame Street had shapes/colors/numbers/letters
and since Trump won it’s worth pointing out how the authorities on this show, the “let me call my guy who’s an expert on X” are weighted towards collectors and semi-pro hobbyists and appraiser types qualified by experience not academia
the same time, a lot of “blue collar” reality stuff on the old guy channels, you realize - this, the chopper building/car restoring/aquarium designing stuff, Ice Road Truckers - is really about petit bourgies, small businessmen or the self-employed at least six-figure level who are “not white collar” in the literal sense that they wear polo or t-shirts, and I guess the figurative one where they tell dirty jokes to the woman with the waitress curls who’s basically their HR department
that and I guess there’s that other subgenre from Lizard Lick Towing to great-granddaddy COPS, where empowered “blue collar”-identifiers discipline the underclass for public entertainment
and the stuff like Duck Dynasty and Bear Grillis and all the Alaska shit that are about white guys having an authentic/mystical/instinctive relationship to the land that reminds me of the way I’m juuuuuust old enough to remember native americans being mythologized, like they’re working up a narrative of white indigeneity
same channels running Vikings and that…
some pretty interesting reactionary ideology going down on the minor cable channels these days, is what I’m saying
Anonymous asked: Unpopular opinion: *opinion that's been repeated in every single online discussion of Pawn Stars since the show started airing* // unpopular opinion: i enjoy.. chocolate
Is it really? Huh. I never run across discussions of Pawn Stars, just brief invocations of it as some sort of History Channel fall from grace
Excellent blast from the past about the dilemmas in “historically accurate” fiction.
Envision a scene in which two Renaissance men are hanging out in a bar in Bologna with a prostitute. Watching this scene, I, with my professional knowledge of the place and period, notice that there are implausibly too many candles burning, way more than this pub could afford, plus what they paid for that meal is about what the landlord probably earns in a month, and the prostitute isn’t wearing the mandatory blue veil required for prostitutes by Bologna’s sumptuary laws. But if I showed it to twenty other historians they would notice other things: that style of candlestick wasn’t possible with Italian metalwork of the day, that fabric pattern was Flemish, that window wouldn’t have had curtains, that dish they’re eating is a period dish but from Genoa, not Bologna, and no Genoese cook would be in Bologna because feud bla bla bla. So much we know. But a person from the period would notice a thousand other things: that nobody made candles in that exact diameter, or they butchered animals differently so that cut of steak is the wrong shape, or no bar of the era would have been without the indispensable who-knows-what: a hat-cleaning lady, a box of kittens, a special shape of bread. All historical scenes are wrong, as wrong as a scene set now would be which had a classy couple go to a formal steakhouse with paper menus and an all-you-can-eat steak buffet. All the details are right, but the mix is wrong.
That’s a good way to put it, and moreover I agree with her on the failure modes of getting too attached to historical accuracy.
Scorcese’s a big American history fan and loves using it as material (like I say I think the natural successor is Rockstar’s open world vidya) and Gangs of New York was basically a series of “hey didja know?” Easter eggs.
Didja know that NYC was an anti-Lincoln town? Didja know that playwrights’ texts didn’t used to be so sacred and directors would insert topical material and run fix fic endings? Didja know that moral reformers would try to co-opt the demimonde of saloon prostitution towards good Christian living and the demimonde would co-opt them right back?
I did know, and I got it, and loved it. I got the ending, “aah, the point is these quirks were never so much resolved as obviated by the modernizing nationalism brought on by the Civil War!” But even I thought there wasn’t enough connective tissue to hold it all together and other people I talked to were like “what the HELL was going on”
(occasional reminder that Wikileaks and Assange’s current Americo-political valence comes after Sady Doyle’s intentional and successful effort to spike his more intuitive bond with the anti-government left)
assumption was toooootaly about who would give authoritative-yet-corrective, charismatically-commanding-yet-vulnerable essays on medieval history and pop culture
in 2017
(wholly apart from my understanding of gender identity, which is “it is 1998 but I read SF/F on the internet”)
so not as an apology but an interpretive note (write for posterity) let it be noted
