kontextmaschine

nostalgebraist:

justhere4coffee:

When people call you a “snowflake” just remember they’re quoting Fight Club, a satire written by a gay man about how male fragility causes men to destroy themselves, resent society, and become radicalized, and that Tyler Durden isn’t the hero but a personification of the main character’s mental illness, and that his “snowflake” speech is a dig at how fascists use dehumanizing language to breed loyalty from insecure people.

So basically people who say “snowflake” as an insult are quoting a domestic terrorist who blows up skyscrapers because he’s insecure about how good he is in bed.

The thing about this is – to write a good satire you need to make it close to reality (in some ways, to some extent).  Which means you run the risk of creating something that your targets still find appealing.

Every other argument about the quality of Fight Club aside, I think it’s an important movie because it captured a thing that’s out there, which appeals to a certain large subsection of the male population.  The fact that this subsection celebrates an ambivalent-at-best depiction of the thing suggests that there wasn’t anything else out there crystalizing the same thing with as much accuracy – if there were more unambiguously positive depictions of the thing, you’d think their popularity would have swamped Fight Club’s.

Yeah, maybe it’s making fun of guys who like the thing (and maybe without their knowledge), but it also revealed that there are a lot of those guys, and showed us exactly what it is that they like.  (I’m not saying there weren’t other movies about masculinity; as I said, FC crystalized something more specific.)  Even if you think the movie’s a satire, the humor of “these guys misinterpreted a movie, lol owned” is outweighed for me by the gravity of the realization “these guys exist, they aren’t going away, and they do unironically want the thing.“  Feels like they get the last laugh, here.

pochowek:

proto kekistan

lilliburlero:

madamehardy:

goddamnshinyrock:

Someone in the notes of the last Leyendecker post I reblogged mentioned having difficulty telling his work and Rockwell’s apart, and I know from experience that many people get them confused, which is somewhat astonishing as, to my eyes, their styles are very distinct. Leyendecker was Rockwell’s idol and mentor, but they were very different people and were interested in portraying different aspects of humanity, even when the basic subject matter was the same.

Surface-level, here are some differences:

• Leyendecker smoothed out faults and imperfections (in the young. he stylized them in the old); Rockwell exaggerated them to mild or moderate caricature
  
• Leyendecker approached his paintings as sculpture- even the merest clothing folds are carved out of the paint; Rockwell approached his paintings as drawings- the underlying contour always shines through.
  
• Leyendecker used broad hatching brushstrokes and areas of smooth shine; Rockwell used more naturalistic texture and lighting
• Leyendecker created idolized, larger-than-life figures that feel Hellenistic in their perfection; Rockwell created intimate scenes populated by figures that feel familiar in their specificity
• Leyendecker’s best and most comfortable work was as a fashion/lifestyle illustrator; Rockwell’s best and most comfortable work was as an editorial/humor illustrator 
• Leyendecker created beautiful still lives with his figures; Rockwell told compelling stories
• Leyendecker often created erotic tension in his paintings; Rockwell almost never did.

See below: Two paintings of soldiers with women, but in Rockwell’s there is a clear punchline, and while the poses are contrived for the sake of composition, they’re not self-conscious. The women are pretty- as demanded by the central joke- but not truly sexualized anywhere but in the mind of the young soldier who is being overloaded with cake and attention. 

Contrast Leyendecker’s soldiers with a young nurse. Everyone in this image is posing attractively- no one has their mouth full or ears sticking out. Each crease and fold is sharp and sculptural, and the light picks out their best features- in particular the shoulders and posterior of the soldier facing away from the viewer. There is neither joke nor story, merely a group of beautiful young people, portrayed with deft brushwork and graceful lines. (and check out that hatching! That’s indicator #1 that you’ve got a Leyendecker image)

Leyendecker was very comfortable with “hot young things wearing clothes”, and did them very VERY well, but his facility with idealization came at the cost of personalization, which was fine for fashion illustration, but shows in his domestic scenes: 

Beautiful, but… cold. (Also, that hand on the left- who holds a baby with their hand like that??? Good lord, J.C.) Compare a Rockwell illustration (for a baby food brand, I believe) of a mother and baby: this is clearly a real and individual young mother and baby, interacting exactly how parents and babies really interact.

Even when they did basically the same content, and putting aside posing or composition or anything other than objective visual analysis, it’s still obvious who is who:

• Red: NR’s smoother rendering vs JCL’s super cool hatching
  
• Green: NR’s naturalistic cloth folds vs JCL’s sculptural stylization
  
• Blue: NR’s natural lighting vs JCL’s world where everything is shiny

Now go forth, confident in the knowledge that you’ll never confuse a Rockwell or a Leyendecker ever again, and can refute any claim that their styles are ‘virtually identical’. 

Click all the individual pictures at the top.  They have wonderful captions.

Leyendecker is camp and Rockwell is kitsch.

okay, we know, you fucked the professor. we GET IT. Stop fondling the globe. awwww kiddo, congrats! JC Leyendecker never met a child in his life Norman Rockwell, on the other hand, definitely did. football players or greek sculpture? the only difference is amount of clothing. less sculptural, more pre-adolescent. you just keep stroking that golf club, posh boy. take it down like four notches, buddy. this is how I read everything. leaning on the mantle in my dressing gown and tie. 'the law student' who is really REALLY into Abe Lincoln.

One thing I’m disappointed hasnt come together to realize the potential of uh, Campaign Trumpism, is the alt-right seeing the potential of unions. (mostly)

Like, it’s an article of faith that one of the movement’s biggest vulnerabilities is to censorious bluehairs putting pressure on cucked employers to fire them from their jobs. But “dismissal for improper reasons”, particularly unrelated to job duties, particularly in regards to causes unpopular with the comfortable bourgeoisie, is a CLASSIC cause for labor action and impetus for unionization.

And if the bossman shrugs, points to the contract, “nothing I can do”, what are they gonna do, go after the union? Labor bosses are some of the least cucked guys out there, as you see with police unions lately half their job is to reply to ANY external pressure with “haha get fukt buddy”.

Plus there’s whatever that could do to split the left coalition, which has precedent – the hardhats and war economy workers against young hippies (which led to the Dems basically throwing the ‘72 election to Nixon), the NYC teachers’ strike of ‘68 (splitting the Jewish/labor and black/social activist wings of the city’s social democratic coalition, inspiring the domestic neoconservatism by which logic elites finally gave up on minority rights movements in the 80s-90s)

Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman is taking time off from commercial diving to have his 15 minutes of fame, but he doesn’t betray any insecurity that being the public face of the most aggressive faction of a controversial political movement might make it hard to return to his $6500/mo job. And I have to suspect that might have something to do with Pile Drivers Local 34.

argumate:

argumate:

argumate:

argumate:

argumate:

argumate:

argumate:

sad that Britney Spears lives in a world where “Britney Spears” does not exist.

anyone else can say ‘it’s Britney, bitch’ and achieve a certain effect on the listener that Britney herself cannot; she remains isolated, aloof.

in the scenario depicted by …Baby One More Time in which Britney Spears plays a besotted schoolgirl, “Britney Spears” does not exist, otherwise her classmates would immediately stop their synchronised backup dancing and say holy shit, that’s Britney Spears.

this is in stark contrast to I Want It That Way, in which the Backstreet Boys appear to their fans “in character”, trying to collapse the distinction between reality and musical fantasy.

Ocean’s Twelve attempted to have it both ways by having a character played by Julia Roberts pretend to be Julia Roberts, implying that “Julia Roberts” exists in the world portrayed by Ocean’s Twelve. However the movie “Ocean’s Twelve” does not exist in this world, otherwise the characters would say wait, isn’t this just what happened in Ocean’s Twelve?

Mel Brooks went one step further and took advantage of temporal anomalies to place a VHS copy of the movie “Spaceballs” within the movie Spaceballs itself, allowing the characters in the movie to gain insight into their own future, though they remained curiously incurious about the revelation that they were merely figments of the script writer’s imagination.

all of our minds contain a reference to “celebrity performer Britney Spears”, but the mind of Britney Spears does not; we can never be her, and indeed to be her would be to lose her.

amelia-quining:

argumate:

imagine if StackOverflow answers were written like recipe blogs

TeamCity build fails because of TypeScript - TS2304 and TS7006

I love the fall, don’t you? Nothing lifts my spirits like the crisp crunch of dry leaves underfoot as I walk through the local park with Casper, my corgi dachshund cross. The faint tang of wood smoke from the nearby cottages takes me back to my childhood camping trips in the Yukon. We used to grill sausages on sticks over the campfire and heat up our hot chocolate in tin mugs as the evening chill settled in around us.

The other day I was chatting to Susan about TypeScript. We go way back Susan and I, ever since we dated the same guy in college without knowing it, at the same time, oops! But although Chad was a jerk I ended up with a friend for life, so who’s laughing now!?

Anyway Susan was telling me about the TypeScript project she was working on in TeamCity, when the build failed-

Fun fact: The reason recipe blogs do this is because recipes aren’t copyrightable, but random tangential vignettes that nobody particularly wants to read are.

So the flip side of this is anyone can just strip out the value-destroying walls of text and reprint the actual recipe on their own ad-supported site? Well fuck, where’s that?

this Freddie deBoer thing (the bit about mini-Hollywoods specifically, combined with context from his previous output) is just the latest in a series of rumbles suggesting that the most important effect of Chapo Trap House is that it’s serving as the seed for NYC young media mutual-promotion cliques alternative to the reigning ones that grew out of Mid-2000s Salon/Gawker Media/feminist blogs and have been responsible for so much of the cancer in our culture since they started assuming editorships a few years ago

ranma-official:

slartibartfastibast:

mitigatedchaos:

mitigatedchaos:

Fuck, I’ve become incomprehensible to normies.  

At this rate, it may only be several months before I hit @slartibartfastibast tier and my blog is only understood by a few wise world-travellers and the members of a remote Buddhist monastery high in the mountains of Nepal.

I’m sorry, guys.

< slartibartfastibast reblogged this post >

Though tbh m8, I feel as though what you’re trying to convey is not a bucket of facts per se, but a sort of network of weights about reality, an intuition module, of which the facts are a part.  Thus all the callbacks in so many posts both for evidence and tying things to other things, tying each new post into a massive graph.  I don’t know how you remember all those posts to go link.

The guy who started gamergate is my roommate and he created a search app for tumblr: http://siikr.tumblr.com

Didn’t @kontextmaschine make that?

No I did not at all make siikr, I just appreciate and promote it

reasonableapproximation:

the-grey-tribe:

argumate:

I want different quote marks for direct literal quotations vs. sarcastic paraphrases.

Take «French quotation marks» for sarcasm and „German quotation marks“ for actual quotes, if you want to go by national stereotypes.

Alternatively use ＂straight quotes＂ and “smart quotes”. See what I did there?

I try (on Tumblr) to use «French» for paraphrases, sarcastic or not, and “normal” for literal quotes.

「Japanese quotation marks, baby」

archiecovers:

February 1974

memecucker:

zsnes:

lisa is about humans being innately terrible people, who are only driven by their narcissism their need to escape and their need to be violent

undertale is about how violence isnt always necessarry and that people can always try to be friends with anyone

No Undertale is about how through forsaking friendship and severing all feelings of connection to others you can realize what power truly is and this become like a god

slimetony:

Essential apartment decor

ranma-official:

bambamramfan:

discoursedrome:

bambamramfan:

kontextmaschine:

this Freddie deBoer thing (the bit about mini-Hollywoods specifically, combined with context from his previous output) is just the latest in a series of rumbles suggesting that the most important effect of Chapo Trap House is that it’s serving as the seed for NYC young media mutual-promotion cliques alternative to the reigning ones that grew out of Mid-2000s Salon/Gawker Media/feminist blogs and have been responsible for so much of the cancer in our culture since they started assuming editorships a few years ago

This is analytically true, but there’s no reason that an ideological culturkampf made from failsons with a focus on socialism and hating bankers will actually be less toxic. “Currently powerless” is not the same thing as “innocent.”

every hegemony is toxic but there’s an incubation period before they get to that level so you need to keep cycling through them for hygienic reasons! it’s the same as how you have to dump political incumbents every 10 years or so

I get what you mean, but remember that power is local. It’s very easy for an ideology to obsess about its impotence in other realms (like the Mideast, or Red State America) and use that as an excuse to demand orthodoxy and hyper-vigilance from people in their immediate sphere. So it doesn’t take very long before the new ideology is secure enough to bend the truth and show intolerance to people in their own little community (I’m looking at you, rationalism.)

It’s not inevitable for every belief system, but you have to show a commitment to not dehumanizing people, not choosing glibness over complicated truth, and not justifying beliefs out of fear, not blame oppression on individual moral failings over systems, and not being vulnerable to memetic efficiency, before you’re out of the woods of being Just Another Ideology. Chapo Traphouse has not done that (despite the Brooklyn-Marxist True Left’s concrete policy goals being closer to mine than any other group out there.)

Despite the veneer of detached irony poisoning, the chapo trap house subreddit is the exact same fetid pool of rotting shit I’d expect from shitty internet communists anywhere, and I assume that it represents the community.

I haven’t been called a fascist for not condemning​ the existence of Israel anywhere else ever.

There’s also performative condemning of tankies alongside cheerful gulag “”“”“jokes”“”“”

Yeah and on Twitter I see all these new rose-emoji names who joined/started DSA chapters at their grad schools doing the same seething at them for exiting the Vampire Castle and like as the classic question goes

Q: is some jerk going to try to schism my Marxist party out from under me?

A: some jerk is going to try to schism your Marxist party out from under you

argumate:

storywonker submitted:

Star Wars but every time someone shoots a laser it gets faster

pew pew

Opinion analysis: Justices hold ban on “disparaging” trademarks violates Constitution

So in a unanimous 8-justice decision in Matal v. Tam, the US Supreme Court says that the US Patent Office may not constitutionally refuse to register “derogatory” or “disparaging” trademarks (here, the name of Portland-based dance-rock band The Slants)

They reasoned that the clause allows an applicant to register a “positive or benign” trademark, but “not a derogatory one.” Because it “reflects the Government’s disapproval of a subset of messages it finds offensive,” it “is the essence of viewpoint discrimination.”

The obvious immediate effect will be to end assaults on the trademarks of the Washington Redskins; further on tho the precedent might stop the DMV from refusing custom license plate “DRGN BLS”

I schism, you schism, they schism, last week I schasm and they schosm

pesky-plumbers:

grawly:

pesky-plumbers:

tremendouslysizzlingsandwich:

pesky-plumbers:

unyielding–justice:

pesky-plumbers:

graffyn-guy:

pesky-plumbers:

treaclethetortoise:

pesky-plumbers:

graffyn-guy:

The funniest part of this, to me, is that they didn’t use the “G” in Super Mario Galaxy? 

There is no war in Ba Sing Se

The Moon landing was faked

Major words in Mario games have never used a G

please stop bringing attention to my mistakes i already feel terrible

What about the H in Super Mario Sunshine? @pesky-plumbers

@pesky-plumbers what about the F from Mario Golf?

y in mario party

this one is actually justified so kiss my fucking ass ok the Y is from Mario Teaches Typing

your ass tryina 1-up me like everyone else but you failed uwu

there was a g in this one too tho

charlesoberonn:

charlesoberonn:

The Colossus of Rhodes, a statue that was destroyed over 2000 years ago, has a 4.1 stars score on Google reviews.