Well when I’d go to motorcycle forums all of a sudden ad network banners would start telling me about the new Hondas, but cookies, I guess that makes sense.

Monday I went in for an eye exam and to buy glasses for the first time since like sixth grade. I sat down and filled out the medical forms, they were all computerized this time, like there was a station just for that. Convenient!

Name, demographics, check off any of these conditions, non-perscription medicines? Well, acid reflux and Pepcid AC.

By Wednesday, the banners have suddenly started to push new Prilosec OTC.

That’s… actually pretty impressive, I guess. Humbling.

yamino:

queenston:

thefirstchurchofcyberpunk:

Hand-carved ‘glitch’ furniture made from wood.

holy shit

This is by Ferruccio Laviani.  He’s made other really cool furniture that mixed old and modern aesthetics, like the Evolution Dresser:

And the (W)hole Desk:

Went to Ground Kontrol for pinball yesterday. Before Rock Band karaoke started they were playing Total Recall on the projector screen. I’d never actually seen it, it looked better than I expected. I read the story, though. It’s funny, none of the great cyberpunk books ever got made into movies, but a few 12-page stories did. Johnny Mnemonic was based on a pretty good story, though the movie was ridiculous.

(The girl in that was supposed to be Molly, the mirrorshade-implanted, ex-meat puppet razorgirl that ties Gibson’s universe together, but she was tied up in the unproduced film rights to Neuromancer)

Its known and accepted that science fiction is always just a projection of the present, and we’re far enough away from cyberpunk to appreciate that. Gibson, famously, had never used a computer when he wrote Neuromancer and based his impressions off of video arcades, that’s something that definitely shows up in the “cyberspace as VR file directory” of the ‘90s.

Snow Crash now rings clearly as a dream of early '90s Southern California. The opening inciting incident a riff on “your pizza in 30 minutes or it’s free”, the burbclaves of housing developments, the Metaverse of text MUDs (note the way users can program their own locations and appearance but many just buy premade - I guess that accurately predicted Second Life, but not its eclipse by, say, WoW), the Raft is a mashup of the boat people and the Mexican overland wave that swamped the region in the '70s-'80s. The whole nam-shub of Enki thing is kind of a distillation of California technomysticism - post-Leary circuit theory, neurolinguistic programming, the Mondo 2000 shamanic magik, all rolled together.

I mentioned Jews for the Protection of Firearms Ownership a bit ago, that was the milieu the HEAP guns in Cryptonomicon came from, and today’s Defense Distributed and the printable firearms movement is the pretty damn cyberpunky endpoint.

Someone lent me a book of Philip K. Dick’s early short stories a year or so ago. They’re not nearly as drug-psychotic as his later work, a lot of them are post-nuclear-apocalypse tales. And it’s really interesting and makes you notice how much of later postapocalyptic fiction is really just a retelling of narratives about the settling of the savage frontier. Because these ones aren’t at all, instead they’re riffing off the reconstruction of Europe after WWII - the Marshall plan, the struggle for dominance between two spheres of influence, the rebuilders’ attempts to purge the defeated prewar regimes and establish their ideology by force, the locals’ subtle resistance. It’s all quite fascinating.

“Is the Pope Catholic?” is the canonical rhetorical question, so it’s weird seeing how many people are surprised the answer is “yes”.

Well someone grew up with Gunsmith Cats.

reblooged:

valterbenyamin:

lexcanroar:

who did this?? 

Hegel

That comment wins. ^^^^^

Reblooged~?

blackwingedheaven:

You tell ‘em, Diogenes.

One thing you notice, looking into the harder right and left, both present and past, is that the right is a lot friendlier to flirtations or contact with the left than vice versa.

From at least “social fascism” on, leftists definitely tend to have a sort of one-drop rule going, where anything that reeks of synthesis is dismissed as ideological scavenging OF the left, BY the right.

The right does seem to like a conversion narrative, but also I think a big part is that with an idealist rather than materialist worldview, the rightists can embrace the concept of a sense of honor.

But more than that, the right seems to accept itself a lot more than the left. I mean, I’m familiar with the Judean People’s Front groupuscule jokes, but seeing it play out in realtime over and over for years just makes it pretty striking how well the rightists get along by contrast. On rightist internet, literal Nazi revivalists coexist pretty well with the Jewish expat-anticommunist types, for example.

There is the precedent of National Review trying to run its purges, but they were always pretty electoralist and so there’s a coalition-forming element to that. Also, I’ve heard the Stormfront joke about witch-hunting (which is to say Jew-hunting) as praxis, but they never seemed like the future of anything so I never got to know that milieu well.

Anyway, the distinction in broad-fronting does maybe form an argument against the Corey Robin idea that reactionaries aren’t organized around negation but rather an affirmative project in their own right.

(Another argument would be that this is a confusion of dependent and independent variables - if you take the “left” to mean those who dismiss synthesis as rightist, of course the left looks narrow and the right looks broad, and this is maybe an artifact of the 20th century organization of “left” around organs that were in the end Russian particularist; if on the other hand you seriously assigned fascism to the left or center, things look different.)

So one of my complaints about Benjamin’s notion of fascism as rooted in the aestheticization of politics is that it’s compared to a politics based in what, morality?

But morality is the aesthetics of power

So glad that I’m better than everyone

So glad that you’re almost as good!

cabinporn:

Morger & Dettli’s Stall house in Lumbrein, Switzerland.

Via Subtilitas

With the kids sing out the future
Maybe kids don’t need the masters
Just waiting for the little busters

Ragtime and the Tin Pan Alley era were closer to the invention of the upright piano than to today. The Old West saloon pianist (which was sorta a backwards projection anyway) even closer.

The piano was a one-person instrument; before that large orchestral music relied on court patronage and the concert house culture of urbanized merchant societies in Italy and Northern Europe.

The brass band was encouraged by the post-Napoleonic army and spread of universal schooling (who learns the trombone to play trombone songs for their friends?).

Small jazz groups worked great for nightclubs, which were great for cities of the early corporate era where a good chunk of the population had disposable income but needed to court mates.

The two crossed streams into a big band style that worked great with the new radio and recording industries.

All the while there’d been a one-man portable instrument tradition in the guitar, and then the electric guitar was developed to maturity.

Musical history has more material factors to it than are commonly cited. One thing that most distinguishes early Beatles from later Beatles was the number of layered tracks. It’s not for nothing that George Martin was called the fifth Beatle, he did a lot of his work by daisy-chaining 4-tracks. He got 8-tracks by the White Album.

Shoegaze and dream pop couldn’t have existed without effects pedals. If you read ‘80s cyberpunk, the future listens to dub reggae, which got lots of its aesthetics (looping, flanging, degeneration) from having two tape decks for a recording studio and being clever.

Early rap relied on the fact that secondhand soul records were affordable, neither it nor early rave could’ve existed without the direct-drive turntable (1969) or the crossfader. Later rap and electronic music relied on the fact that samplers, sequencers, and synthesizers (or especially software equivalents) were affordable.

The steel guitar was adapted under Hawaiian influences, the 5-string banjo African. The music of rural American particularism necessitated America first being and then having transoceanic colonies.

There are, depending on how you put it, between 2 or 5 (usually 3) ways of playing the banjo based on how you use your hand to pick. (It’s a violin or a fiddle based on how you use the bow.) The most popular one is named after a man who was alive this time last year. I thought I was teaching myself that one but I didn’t have fingerpicks, so what felt natural was for my thumb to stay on one string and the first two fingers to move, which is apparently the exact opposite of Scruggs.

Man how long has it been since FAQs were actually frequently asked questions and not “unasked questions we want to preempt”?

Man, Harley-Davidsons. Fuck Harleys. Harley engines are a 1990s tweak of a 1970s update of a 1930s engine built by people who learned engine design from 1910s farm machinery.

Not that there’s nothing to be said for that. A modern Harley mounts the most reliable 1930s engine in history, and when it fails it fails in very well-documented ways.

Mazda for a long time made cars with Wankel rotary engines (1960s, y'all) which were a significant step up from piston engines, but no one had a goddamned clue how to maintain them.

And I mean hell, before that we spent a few thousand years mastering the ox and horse.

What we really need is another world war to legacy us with a decent knowledge base on turbine engines.