someone needs to build something to generate gifs from various sets of the old LJ mood system, I miss those bouncing purple stars.
Current Mood: hopeful
Current Song: Sixpence None The Richer - Kiss Me
update: the future is horrible and now i have to live here
oh my god. oh my god. oh my GOD>
microsoft why
there’s no such thing as bad virality
I always knew Games Workshop was British, and the Warhammer Fantasy factions were obvious mappings of medieval protonations, but it’s only recently struck me how much the W40K factions are mappings of forces from the more modern British imaginary.
Like, the Space Marines obviously take the place of the German war machine of WWII - technologically superior, purity-obsessed totenkopf ubermenchen, defeatable mostly by virtue of not being able to field enough expensive units. The Imperial Guard is the Red Army - tanks, tanks, masses of human-wave infantry, tanks, and ruthless commissars holding things together by executing their own troops.
A more interesting thing is how the “British” faction is… the Orks. Their dumb, violent, and happy warband culture is some straight hooligan/casual/skinhead shit, and the “run shirtless into battle wielding crap, it’ll work because we believe enough in the magic paint we slapped on everything” is maximum Celt.
(‘Course not all the factions are that resonant, especially the more recent cash-in ones. The Eldar are just Tolkein elves… in space! The Necrons are mummies… in space! The Tyranids are LOLGIGER, the Sisters of Battle are LOLNUNS. For a culture with an actual chaos magic tradition, the Chaos forces are pretty simplistic drawn-on-binder horn-throwing WOO METAL. The Tau are what, Japan? Maaaaybe nonaligned Scandanavian Social Democrats if you squint, but honestly screw the Tau.)
In this schema it’s a little curious how the “Nazi” and “Red Army” forces are fundamentally on the same side, though when you add in the wash of Popery I guess it makes sense as a unified British vision of the Totalitarian Other. Which makes it a little amusing that that’s the human side. I’m sure I’m not the first one to note that the whole effect is awfully rightist, though I suppose that’s why it fits in so well with the nerd right-populism of the 'chans (as I like to think of it, “waifus, warhammer, and white nationalism”).
eva_ebooks
i’m thinking about making a whole blog for this. thoughts?
This is basically Eva’s true meaning
that last one tho
XD So accurate! We avoid the branches in Sweden though………
Read the whole archive of Scandanavia and the World, and finally learned me to distinguish and properly stereotype a bunch of countries I always got confused. As far as National Personification Comix go, it’s halfway between Hetalia and Polandball in a lot of ways.
A little weird we even have three to compare right now, but I guess nationalism is hot in the zeitgeist lately. Marxism’s making a respectable comeback too, shame we don’t have a class-based comic. Prole and Bougie at each other’s throat, Petit scheming to play each off the other while Lumpen picks his pocket, Labor Aristocracy with his nose up and his hardhat crown down over his eyes… there’s material there, just saying.
Okay we start out with this architecture student, Roark, in a meeting with like the dean of architecture school? He’s getting kicked out for being too awesome, and coming up with original ideas instead of rehashing romanticism. He says goodbye to this other student - not a total twerp, but not as cool.
Notatwerp graduates, and gets a job as a drafter at a firm. He works his way up and starts dating this chick, meanwhile Roark’s become a construction worker. One day the chick goes to a site he’s drilling at and he forces himself on her, and she’s like “okay that was awesome” and starts seeing him on the side.
Meanwhile there’s a prissy newspaper columnist? Or maybe that was Atlas Shrugs.
There’s a competition to design apartments for workers, and Roark works up this plan for a really sweet-looking building with units that would be awesome to live in, they even have balconies.
Wait! First, Notatwerp gets a commission to design a church and goes to Roark for help, Roark designs this thing with like, subterranean entrances that gives people the total opposite impression of a greater glory, it makes them feel exalted about humanity and themselves. It’s awesome but people don’t appreciate it because they suck.
Meanwhile, the chick totally loves Roark so she stops seeing him and gets engaged to Notatwerp and totally rubs this in Roark’s face every chance she gets ‘cause it’ll make him more awesome.
So then Roark’s apartments win the competition, only when they build it the funders (maybe the priss is on the board?) change it to make it cheaper and more conventional, in particular they take out the balconies 'cause what do workers need balconies for?
And Roark’s like “NO, you are NOT going to make my idea suck” and before anyone moves in he rigs the building with dynamite, and it blows up behind him as he walks towards the camera. And the chick’s like “oh Roark, you so sexy!”
THE END
(Only that was like 800 fucking pages, 'cause it was written on written on amphetamine and not edited. I can see why Ayn Rand books don’t make good movies. 'course, I can see why publishers would reject the book in the first place, but joke’s on them so…)
Someone should do an update of 1001 Nights with the frame story changed to be a prisoner being interrogated at Guantanamo.
Sarah McLachlan - I Will Remember You
Our hearts go out to those who graduated from [SCHOOL] or died from [DRUG]
Arrakis is changing hands! It’s a desert planet, and House Harkonnen used to own it but just now the Emperor gave it to House Atreides! It’s a fucking terrible place to live but Spice comes from there and Spice is some hot shit!
Paul Atreides is a kid. He is the Brandon Stark of this series. He’s the heir of House Atreides and he is coming in on a starship. Starships work because Navigators, who are dudes who’ve done a ton of Spice, Spice here being LSD, can fold space with their minds. They turn in to giant octopuses in tanks though, supported by anti-gravity. Most things hover.
We’re down on the planet and things are cool. Paul is taught by a Space Nun, his mom used to be a Space Nun. He trains in knife-duelling with the head of the family guard, Duncan. There are shields and you’ve got to go real slow to get through them, so it’s all misdirection.
Baron Harkonnen really wants the planet back, also he’s a fat dude into little boys.
People have lasers but if you ever fire a laser at a shield they both blow up like a nuke. Paul and his dad go watch a mining expedition, flying in an ornithopter, which is a helicopter that flaps its wings like a bird. There’s a big sandcrawler that digs up the spice and the problems is that worms always attack. Worms are giant things that live under the sand and have gullets full of diamond teeth, and they will swallow harvesters right up.
There are scout ornithopters and they spot wormsign - a worm under the surface heading for the harvester. This is radioed in, Duke Atreides says ok let’s pull the harvester out, his foreman says no the worm’ll take a while let’s harvest as much and make as much money as we can, eventually the Duke insists and the rescue ornithopter pulls all the mining crew out just as the worm opens his giant mouth below them. Duke Atreides is A Good Leader.
The head Space Nun gives Paul a test, it’s like “stick your hand in this box and it’ll feel like the worst thing possible, if you take your hand out I’ll kill you with my poisoned ring.” Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total annihilation. Paul doesn’t pull his hand out and she’s like “well done, chosen one”.
The Atreides live on a rocky shield, one of the few parts of the world that isn’t sand to the bottom and the worms can’t get to. One of the Duke’s aides is a Mentat, who are the Maesters of this series, but also a bit psychic. Someone tried to hide an assassin robot in Paul’s bed, but he outsmarted it and his mother comforted him.
THE HARKONNEN ATTACK and Paul’s parents die, Duncan hauls him out through a secret passage, flee the castle and blow it up by time-delay aiming a laser cannon at its shield. They flee into the desert.
They meet the Fremen, the native tribe of the planet. The Fremen wear rubber stilsuits that recycle fluids and keep them hydrated. The Fremen take Paul in. The Fremen’s eyes are all blue pupils in blue irises, “blue within blue”, because they do so much Spice. The Fremen call worms Makers. Worms are attracted to sonic patterns and Fremen walk without rhythm so they won’t attract the worm, or they put down thumpers to draw worms away.
There’re some tribal things, Paul goes native and becomes Maud'Dib, The Mouse,Chosen One of the Fremen. He gets engaged to a tribal girl. Paul wins a deadly duel and wins a crysnife, a super-sharp knife made out of worm tooth. The Fremen ride worms by calling them with a thumper and then digging hooks into their segmented skin. You can pull back the segments and the worms will roll it away from the sand to protect the membranes, that’s how you steer them.
The Space Nun shows up and lets on that he’s part of a centuries-long breeding program to meld the masculine and the feminine, and there’s another deadly test for him. Worms turn into the Water of Life as part of their metamorphosis, then this blows up into a Spice geyser to spread the seed. The Fremen have a tiny Maker that they drown underwater to create the Water of Death. The Water of Death will make women trip out and command the universe, but kill men. Paul takes the Water of Death and survives by transmuting it to the Water of Life with his mind.
Space Nun says well done, but Paul wasn’t even supposed to be the Chosen One, rather the chosen one’s father. He has a kid with his girl, and then neglects them for years to go get high on Spice. Spice can show you multiple pathways to the future. Of the ones Paul can see, most of them have him leading a jihad on behalf of the Fremen and most of them he fails. Eventually he finds the right timeline.
Paul attacks the Harkonnen in their base, riding a fleet of worms up towards the stone shield wall and jumping them over. He kills some dudes and then threatens to drop the Water of Death into the Water of Life, which will kill all the worms in the world and destroy the Spice economy forever. Somehow, he wins.
THE END
And then there are sequels that are even more ‘70s. Which is a high standard!
i also remember hearing one theory that the reason German philosophy seemed to have become more popular in post-Meiji than British or French philosophy is something to do with it actually being somewhat easy or at least not very awkward to translate but idk if Im able to get the grant for researching the Kyoto School and Heidegger I’ll look into that
After the Perry Expedition and the unequal treaties opened Japan and the Meiji Restoration shook up the country’s politics, the guys who found themselves in charge realized they weren’t going to be able to maintain a distance from the world anymore. So they looked around and asked “okay, what’s the most advanced country out there?” And in government, medicine, science, philosophy, natural resource management, it was Prussia. (Also Prussia didn’t have an apparatus of overseas empire that Japan was afraid of being captured by.)
So they sent a bunch of diplomats and students over there to figure out what they can and bring it back, and invited a bunch of advisors to come to the Home Islands, and engaged in a program of reconstructing Japanese culture largely along Prussian lines.
German became the most commonly known European language in Japan, and was used as the base language for sciences, medicine, and engineering, much like Latin was used in Europe. In addition to granting access to western knowledge, German fluency was useful because Japan was only starting to standardize its language and kanji nationwide, and a readymade common language was helpful for scholars and technicians to share ideas.
In terms of human culture, the education system and the bureaucracy were built up along heavily centralized Wilhelmine lines (which is why, if you follow anime, all Japanese schools are still mostly identical, from curricula down to floor plans), though sometimes with an eye towards avoiding problems revealed in the German experience - for example they’d noticed that bureaucrats had become a problematically strong interest group, so in Japan any government employee - from soldiers down to teachers and mailmen - was denied the vote. This led to strikes later on and played into the takeover of the government by the military, but that’s another story.
So in summary, German philosophy was more popular in the Meiji era because German everything was more popular in the Meiji era. There’re still traces of it now - Utena, for example, is all about student duelling, Hesse-style spiritualism, and the seminar system of education as a subversive force. It’s not well known in the US, but until the American occupation, Japan and Germany were the same kind of Super Bros that Japan and America are now. The fact that Japan twice in succession remade their society as a mirror of another country’s has a lot to do with the Japanese inferiority complex about being a nation of perfect copiers but not innovators.
Hum “Stars” - live on 120 Minutes, 1995
God, I loved Hum.
One of the only times I ever listened to Howard Stern he kept talking about how much he liked this song. He kept playing it over and over again and having them rewind to the loud part and play it again and talking about how much he loved it.
I once wrote a letter to my local paper - because I’ve always wanted to be a blog commenter, I guess - saying that the local morning radio DJs should be replaced by Howard Stern. I don’t know why I wrote this, since I didn’t listen to Howard Stern (I kinda couldn’t since it was 1996 and I was in upstate New York); I think MTV told me he was cool and I liked the book he wrote, or something. I certainly don’t know why the paper printed it other than that they were just grateful for a break from the constant stream of pro-life letters. But they printed it, and then the local morning DJs called my house in the morning to talk to me about it on the air, but I was asleep, because I was a teenager, and so my mom took the call and told them I was asleep and couldn’t come to the phone. They didn’t call back.
I somehow forgot this song - it reminds me of summers at the neighborhood pool, along with Counting Blue Cars and Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand.
Got a chance to play the new Avengers pinball table the other night. This was a Pro model (cheaper and stripped down from the LE/Premium models, but more features than the distinct “The Pin” home models) at The Know in Portland.
First impression: reminds me of X-Men - the main dynamic is shots that, hit enough times, start a mode keyed to a particular Avenger, and you want to collect them all. Haven’t triggered all of them yet, but they seem like your basic “make this shot to start, keep making it to complete” modes.
A major difference, though, is that these shots are a *lot* narrower and harder to hit, and require 4 shots to start. I assume that’s hard-coded, as each shot has 4 lamps. (Also, compared to when X-Men showed up on location, the code seems much more polished, I wouldn’t expect nearly as much change on updates.)
There’s a few things that compensate for this difficulty. For one, if you soft-plunge and flip to an Avenger shot you’ll (I’m told) start the mode immediately, kind of like Sopranos. For two, modes don’t time out and remain active across balls. For three, there’s a pretty open lower playfield where missed shots can bounce fairly safely and probably advance something useful (Thor stand-ups, Hulk drop targets, S.H.I.E.L.D. standup mystery awards, or the Tesseract Cube)
For Hulk you need to drop 4 targets and then hit a saucer - it’s pretty shallow but there are some shots that serve it up perfectly. That starts a straight-up 4-ball multiball with a decently long save - I didn’t have time to take my eyes off the flippers to see if you could advance anything else while it was running - my guess is maybe the Loki and multiplier rollovers but nothing else. (Looking it up online, you can apparently make shots to complete Avengers during this mode, but I’m still not sure about starting them.)
The Tesseract Cube is basically the TotAN lamp. Spinning gives you points, spin it enough and you start a mode where… spinning gives you points. Meh, but the geometry of the table’s such that you can put some wicked spin on it pretty easy.
There’s a Loki multiball, LotR sword-style inlane/outlane rollovers light lamps, all 4 lights a lock at the orbits, 3 balls locked starts it. Haven’t discovered anything special here yet.
Finally, you get your multiplier from a standard “3 rollover lanes above a bumper triangle” setup in the back right of the playfield. But each lane has 2 lights (one per Avenger) - a skill shot plunge to the lit lane will give you both, but otherwise each rollover seems to only give you one (as long as they’re not both lit already). As usual they rotate with the flipper buttons, and all 6 will advance the multiplier. Bumpers and the multiplier lanes seem to get a lot of action on the multiball, so that works out.
I’ve just barely made it to a replay at 16,000,000 so far, but on reflection my scoring strategy (which I’m going to go out tonight to try) is to play a game of Avengers like a ball of Monster Bash - get shots 4 times to start features, and then hit the big green guy just left of centerfield for a multiball to complete them.
I like it a lot - when Stern was first left as the only manufacturer standing, they made some really iffy tables (maybe due to their attempts to cut costs and make pinball newbie-friendly). But between AC/DC, X-Men, and now Avengers, they really seem to be on a roll lately.
Things I don’t like:
The ball can get stuck under the arms of the Hulk toy without triggering him pretty easily. The arms are the first things to trip in a ball search, but for a mechanism that doesn’t really do much in gameplay that’s an annoying flaw, especially if you’re on the cube timer.
Ramp returns over the inlanes mean it’s pretty much impossible to see whether the Loki letters are lit there without craning forward - might be the “trickster” theme, but meh.
Also it’s tough to see if the 3 Avenger lights nearest the top-right corner on the multiplier rollover lanes are lit.
A Cruel Angel’s Thesis (Neon Genesis Evangelion theme)-CHIPTUNE VERSION
before I went to college I got my anime from the comic book store that would rent out tapes and DVDs for $5 a week or $2 overnight. Have fun with your new trilogy, kids, but Eva’s one of the few I prefer dubbed.
Kim Jung Gi, a work for Japanese magazine Monthly! Spirit.
