So since 2017 is being written by a neural network trained on the last decade, Ja Rule and a few Instagram influencers just brought us the Coachella version of DashCon in the outlying islands of the Bahamas
I spoke to a woman who had paid 10k for a VIP Villa Package - she was promised an exclusive villa, VIP access, and an upgraded culinary experience - instead she got a partially constructed tent and all of the stuff she put inside it was stolen.
A source told Page Six, “It feels like [the event’s organizers] have good intentions, but are out of their league … Several companies bailed on working with them because they were very disorganized. They don’t return calls.”
The never-completed Liberia Ministry of Defense, Monrovia. Built by Israeli contractors c.1982-85, remained vacant. Eventually demolished late 2016. Photo May 2009 Bauzeitgeist.
Well Milo landed on his feet, I knew he would, he made alt-lite a hot brand and there’s no substitute for the original. $12 million to be producer-san of an alt-right celebrity factory and touring infrastructure.
Wouldn’t put too much emphasis on the “for-profit” thing, there might be a niche to be wedged open with Milo’s boldness and a Rolodex of reliable venues, security, lawyers, PR. More likely an ideological payload, the right’s been itching to rerun the ‘60s as the sexy youthful liberated bad boys for a while (anyone remember the libertarian culture jamming site Bureaucrash?) and the hottest thing on the right right now, anti-antifa, did grow out of his tour, after all.
All the funniest, smartest, most interesting young YouTubers and all the rest of them who hate feminism, who hate political correctness. This generation that’s coming up, it’s about 13, 14, 15, now have very different politics than most other generations. They love us.
Gotta say, that’s not that far off from the rumbles I’m picking up, the next generation’s lining up right for an 80s-style backlash.
K and I learned how to shoot guns today. It was interesting. And by interesting, I mean “loud”.
There was some helpful safety training beforehand. But it missed the most important part, which is that the gun will eject the spent bullet casing in a random direction. Somehow I managed to live in a “gun culture” and watch a bunch of action movies without realizing this was a thing. When you’re firing a gun for the first time and really nervous, and a bullet-shaped thing shoots out of the back of the gun and hits spectators in the face, this is NOT a minor point that you can forget to warn people about, even if it turns out to be nothing and everybody laughs that you were so worried about it.
Otherwise everything went okay. I think if I ever have to write a story involving guns, I can use words like “magazine” without sounding ridiculous to people who know what they’re talking about. I think the friend who brought me was expecting that this was going to be some sort of revelatory experience where I realized that Guns Are Your Friends and so gun control was a vile lie, but I feel like if guns were *really* my friends then the person who held one at a slightly different angle than everyone else would not have had a big security guy run up to him and freak out and yell at him until he changed the angle back.
Also, Ada Palmer (author of Too Like The Lightning) was at the shooting range and I got to get a picture with her!
so there was this style of dual-wielding pistols in the ‘90s by holding them sideways, it came from HK gun-fu action movies, it was in the original Unreal Tournament, it was popular single-wielded as “gangster style” for a bit
and the thing is if you hold two pistols upright and they’re not both rigged to eject brass outwards there’s a chance one will eject brass into your eye or face
If you hold them sideways against gravity there’s a chance they won’t eject right and jam
in a gunfight facial burns are trivial, your gun jamming can be the end. on a movie set facial burns can spoil 2 days of filming and a jam just means you swap guns with the armorer and shoot another take
But what if: several thousand words considering whether Mieville is right that the Weird is actually radically different from tentacle hentai
LIKE LISTEN I totally get his point re: the tentacle “representing” the phallus and therefore not being the radically antisemiotic Weird BUT IF I WAS THE KIND OF PERSON WHO LOOKED AT MONSTER PORN I’d question whether the genre actually is as unambiguous as Mieville implies
also, looking at the historical justification of the tentacle-as-phallus-substitute as a workaround designed for old Japanese obscenity laws, it makes sense even on a surface level—it’s a way of articulating what is socially unspeakable, and if you’re not making a huge distinction between what is unspeakable in Lovecraft terms and what is unspeakable in terms of what is verboten (something I think definitely applies even when we’re just talking about Lovecraft as-is), then I don’t think we have to dig that deeply to justify tentacle hentai as a genuine manifestation of the abcanny.
I want to comment on this but I’m honestly just too stunned at the moment by the fact that my goofy nonsense got a response this interesting (and that anyone knew what the heck I was talking about)
The thing is… the unspeakable thing the tentacle represents in tentacle hentai, and in older Japanese tentacle ‘porn’, is, one assumes, pretty-much specifically and exclusively the penis… or perhaps, more broadly, the act of penetration itself. Well, that’s really far too specific to be Weird in the true sense. The Weird certainly represents specific things at certain times. For instance, for Lovecraft it is often pretty specifically miscegenation. But the affect is one of incomprehension, of blank screaming horror at something beyond understanding, something rearing up from the previously-unglimpsed depths of a place we never knew was even there to do unknowable things for incomprehensible reasons. The affect relies upon a scrambling effect in the manner of the delivery. It relies upon a tactically deployed incoherence. This is very characteristic of the tendency/affect/mode that irrupted from within the Fantastic genres in Western culture (i.e. Euro-American capitalism) in the age of industrial imperialism. Because it happened as a result of the imminent failure of that culture to live up to its own ideological dream of itself as heading towards a telos of rational enlightenment. The Weird in the true sense (the haute Weird) is quite historically and culturally specific. Now, if you want to argue that tentacle hentai is one of its hybrid children… okay, it has a lot of those. It interbred like fuck. Which is where I have some arguments with Mieville. I think the ‘dialectical superpositioning’ between the Weird and the Gothic was never quite as absolute as he seems to imply, and that it certainly decayed after a certain point.
Surely his point (or at least the point I ended up using him to support) is that the superpositioning decayed instantaneously. The entire point of the exercise is that the gothically repressed and the external pure Other do not actually form a stable distinction.
but the supersession by nakadashi and the NTR turn, what’s that about, ya dweebs?
