kontextmaschine

good goddamn, away from the discourse frontier the concrete’s setting, we might make it out of this intact after all

Besides, trying to find some primordially authentic culture can be like peeling an onion. The textiles most people think of as traditional West African cloths are known as Java prints; they arrived in the 19th century with the Javanese batiks sold, and often milled, by the Dutch. The traditional garb of Herero women in Namibia derives from the attire of 19th-century German missionaries, though it is still unmistakably Herero, not least because the fabrics used have a distinctly un-Lutheran range of colors. And so with our kente cloth: the silk was always imported, traded by Europeans, produced in Asia. This tradition was once an innovation. Should we reject it for that reason as untraditional? How far back must one go? Should we condemn the young men and women of the University of Science and Technology, a few miles outside Kumasi, who wear European-style gowns for graduation, lined with kente strips (as they do now at Howard and Morehouse, too)? Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren’t authentic; they’re just dead.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Case for Contamination (via memecucker)

An absurd share of the “traditional cuisines” of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea started as Portuguese fusion centuries ago

Fade & Bananaman ft. Abbey - A Dreams Surprise

dig that carousel organ bit at 2:05

kleinefreiheiten:

01.2017, Hamburg

which arcology is this?

4chansbest:

/pol/ diversity vs Huffington Post diversity

channers are like one of those racially integrated ‘80s kids media gangs that only exist to perpetrate aggressive vandalism

so let’s unpack this twitter thread with Ross Douthat, Michael B Dougherty and uh Dylan Matthews being all “I assumed everyone’s backchanneling with Moldbug, right?”

the deep story of American conservatism is popular math was on the conservatives’ side through the Warren Court, and whoop, no, them’s the rules, gotta earn the presidency to remake the Supreme Court

And then Reagan nominated Bork and suddenly whoop, no, them’s the rules, gotta hold the Presidency AND the Senate to change the Court

And Reagan admitted he couldn’t get his dream budget because Congress was Dems but when Clinton or Obama faced a Republican Congress it was their duty to bend, whoop no them’s the rules

And now the Republicans won everything and whoop no them’s the rules

[2/2]

           And don’t think your clown degree from the worst ivy is going to save you somehow. I have five siblings, I have 2 children, I have 5 nephews and 6 nieces and that’s just getting started, we’re going to have more. You have, what, 2 siblings max and are too busy playing pinball to reproduce? My cousins have even bigger families, white america is toast homie.             

THIS IS 👏👏 TEDIOUS 👏👏👏

not to mention transparently a channer fake

• trying to establish ethnicity through slang (”homie”) that sounded forced coming from white screenwriters in 1992

• structured to register as authentic by resonating with the author’s model of its’ target audience’s fears - like, this is just rewording one of those modern “Passing of the Great Race” essays as a boast, I can see all the alt-right applause lights in negative, I bother to actually pay attention to the people who eagerly anticipate the “browning of america”, and these aren’t the points that are meaningful to them

• tonal dissonance - like, in what world does the guy who says this shit know or care about the status anxiety of Cornell within the Ivies, in what version of 2017 does he reference the Rockefellers without any other reference to the Illuminati?

c’mon, kid

me: how long has it been since we got the internet?

also me: well just before AOL CompuServe was – wait, what's this about?

me: squats down swaying like a frog, smiling from ear to ear

BEATS: there are beats

also me: please don't

me: GOT A 20-YEAR DEGREE
IN LIBERAL ARTS
FROM THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS
AND PRIVATE PARTS

like I think I’ve been having a *great* hypomanic episode and inducting so many novices into the great mysteries but I’m getting so many remarks, so many abacks when I regale my old college now professional friends with the hyperdensity THEY COULD TOTALLY get if they bothered to keep up with their reputations

knmajorblogs:

discoursedrome:

kontextmaschine:

The Burger King Kids Club, representing all the ‘90s identities:

Black
Hispanic
Nerd
Tomboy
Disabled
Stacy
Geek
Dog

Technically I think the short butchy-looking guy is the nerd and the guy with the backwards cap is a “coolkid”, which is a distinct genus. This may seem like splitting hairs, but it’s important that we recognize the cultural distinctiveness of coolkids in order to honour their sacrifices during the Cola Wars.

The coolkid was a kind of cyber-Fonz, a “women want him, men want to be him” archetype as targeted toward twelve-year-old dorks with chunky white sneakers. It was a laboratory-designed hybrid of nerd and greaser engineered to target the market sector of the former using the charisma and popularity of the latter. Toward the late 90s there was some further crossbreeding with rappers in order to counteract the diminishing relevance of greasers, but in the early 90s that was still too threatening for mainstream white suburbanites with money.

Anyhow, I went looking for some more vintage examples but it’s surprisingly hard to find ones that aren’t later parodies so I’ll just link this fucker.

Zack the Lego Maniac is, for me, the prototypical coolkid character

This is a Canadarm appreciation blog

Wait, are there Trumpist porn caption blogs?

Everything I know about humans tells me there are Trumpist porn caption blogs

…

HAHAHAHAHAHA

someone show this to Ozy

who in the ladies’ golf scene stole the others’ look first, the ranchers’ wives or the lesbians?

hairdye twitter is concerned about changes to the Steam approval process

They’re dropping Greenlight’s approval-by-voting, which favored devs with social media followings, and intense niche identity appeal, and puts up low barriers to amateur, artistic, and experimental concepts

Replacing it with like a bond system of “refundable publishing deposits” up to $5000 per game which favors business operations with some degree of profit-mindedness

The concern is this will render the niche of “microcelebrity bullshit indie game dev” unviable

Thanks, Trump

mapsontheweb:

Ottoman map of North and Central America,1919/1920.