Video games as cultural heritage: DOOM and Duke Nukem strategy guides officially bound and stamped with LC call numbers. “Video Games at the LOC” presentation from our recent “Preserving.exe” meeting.
Digital Preservation, Library of Congress
FUCK
our legacy is secure
i always wondered why people would run away from the internet
and then i became a real person?
“drama”
like, as in drama?
people have incompletely revealed motives, and complete encompassing and coherent accounts that actually make shit make some sense are on a regular basis completely dispelled only to be replaced with others?
it’s kind of fun!
destiny is a bitch though and
SO MUCH DESTINY
midi monday: evanescence - bring me to life
it’s your first day at school. 8th grade. junior high. you’re a little nervous but you try not to show it. you smooth back your hair. it’s straight, long and black as night. your friends call you raven, because you told them to. you carry your portable cd player discreetly in the front pocket of your linkin park hoodie. evanescence’s fallen is on repeat, as it has been all summer long. you walk into the bathroom. check your eyeliner in the mirror. perfection. you untuck your pentagram necklace from inside your shirt and lay it proudly against your chest. no more body glitter, platform wedges or cheerleading camp. there is only darkness now. my spirit sleeping somewhere cold, you mouth along with amy lee. a girl comes out of the stall behind you and makes a face when she sees your striped kneesocks and puffy skirt that you got at hot topic. you sneer back at her. fuck off, prep.
So I’ve mentioned that I found the British left’s long-planned celebration on the occasion of Margaret Thatcher’s death to be quite endearing. American liberals seem a bit more subdued - the thing they most regularly seem to snipe about her was her refusal to yield to the 1981 Irish hunger strike. The strike, in which imprisoned Irish republican insurgents lead by Bobby Sands refused to eat until they were recognized as Special Category Status political prisoners - domestic POWs, essentially - and not common criminals, ultimately failed after 10 died.
I think this is actually a little odd, given the American left’s complaint about the use of military tribunals and military imprisonment as part of the “war on terror” for acts of insurgency, especially when committed by American citizens or on American soil.
Now there are some distinctions to be noted. One is that SCS would improve the position of the strikers - whereas the use of the tribunal/Guantanamo system rather than standard civilian process is generally considered to leave internees worse off.
In fact, SCS was introduced after a previous period of arrest and imprisonment without trial and tortuous interrogations, similar to the initial state of the American WoT system. Later on, republican militants were processed by the formal justice system, with trials and convictions.
(Thatcher’s steeliness here, like her war in the Falklands and her moves to undermine Scottish political and economic autonomy, were part of an effort to finally put a brake on the trend of post-WWII decolonization before the once-mighty British Empire was reduced to a pre-1707 rump of England and Wales)
Civilianization and SCS were two different solutions to the same problem of unchecked authority, and honestly in demanding the benefits of both the strikers were really overplaying their hand. So liberals who want American civilianization (and not SCS-style formalization of extrajudicial internment, with protection against abuses) should consider that that’s exactly the position Thatcher was defending.
Two is the fact in the midst of the strike Bobby Sands had been elected as an MP (for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, a nationalist constituency) and the claim that he should have been given greater deference, having been democratically sanctified by an electoral majority.
Following this logic, though, would lead at the least to a doctrine of parliamentary immunity, and further on to a doctrine of nullification, by which local majorities would be empowered to grant exemption to or suspension of national laws. I think there’s something to be said for local nullifying forces - the Roman tribunes seem like a cool institution, and I’ve previously appreciated the historic role of elected county officials as populist nullifiers in America.
But it’s a position typically anathematized in modern American liberalism, and some of the writers knocking Thatcher for this - like Charles Pierce, a man fond of Homeric epithets who seems to have chosen the Sands thing for use with her, specifically take nullification as one of their bête noirs.
In the end I’m with Thatcher on this one because Blazing Saddles was, in fact, a farce, and allowing people to extract concessions by holding themselves hostage is fundamentally pathetic.
the thing is when actual people talk w/ each other it’s to communicate information or be entertained or solve problems or any of a huge number of reasons. when corporations talk to people they’re cognizant of people’s motives, and so they try to mimic them, but their ultimate reason for discourse is always “feed our all-consuming maw”, and they know that’s creepy so they want to get subtler and subtler until it’s unnoticeable.
they also make this easier by reconfiguring how actual people talk w/ each other so the bar is easier to clear
The most amazing sentence I have ever been paid to create, acting in the capacity of the voice of a corporation acting in the capacity of the voice of a brand, was “Thinking that babies are human royalty, the aliens are planning to use their Matter Exchanger to turn themselves into Babyz and rule the world!”
I think what set me off about it was that, in addition to the fundamentally ridiculous subject matter, from the multi-clause condensed narrative to the nouns rendered proper for brand reasons to the terminal exclamation mark, it felt completely normal, even typical in its habitat (a manual for a licensed video game) in spite of it being a thing that no human would ever possibly think to say.
I have Irish readers? That’s cool.
Well, makes sense to me, I’m the one who thought it, though I guess that means some of the conceptual and rhetorical connections might be left in my head rather than on the page.
If you take the strikers as heroes that’s cool, you’re right about the willpower thing and they make good ones, unsuccessful in a way that renders them tragic rather than discredited. The Irish are good at that.
Guess I think of it like the Cairo swordsman in that Indiana Jones movie - skilled and disciplined, bold and brave, hero and champion to the locals that this random foreigner from nowhere started beating up, but from the other side the correct course of action is obviously to just shoot the guy.
I’m Irish on one side, but dear lord are we shitty loyalists, the family left for England at one point to make money and changed the name from Mc to Mac to make people think we were Scottish. Moved to America and became the WASPiest people I personally know. Like, we rock our alcoholism in a quiet scotch rocks and passive aggression way.
Hopefully we’ll have more enemies in common from here out.
last night i was standing with my girlfriend outside of philly flavors and a dude who literally had horns on his head (like he was impersonating an animal with horns) and some crazy outfit came up to us and was like “SHE’S GORGEOUS BRO! SHE’S A KEEPER!” i guess that’s good, you know, getting props from the horn people etc
In capitalist Philadelphia, Homestuck lets you tell people about them.
So, that Red Wedding, huh?
A month ago when I was dogsitting, I hit up that strip of restaurants on Glisan at 27th that do takes on various styles of meaty staples a little too tryhard, a little too expensive, portions a little too small.
I was eating outside at a bench reading a book and and there were a bunch of high schoolers hanging out at the next table having a conversation I mostly tried to block out, but at one part one of them asked, really loud, “who the hell is Robb Stark?”
This ropy musta been 65 or 70 years old guy powerwalking his way down the sidewalk in tight black sportswear turned his head and said “Why, he’s the King in the North!” and kept going without breaking stride.
Anyway I decided I didn’t need to go out drinking that night.
Got my stuff back from the frame store. Ended up going with no matting, the subject was already kind of bordered in the print. Came out looking pretty sweet. Went to the antique mall, got some small Nagel prints. Did some decorating. How is there no fuckyeahnagel tumblr?
Some guy “de-shook” Star Trek turbulence
Kitty Pryde - Thanks Kathryn Obvious
Actually, in general Red is pretty heavily channeling the Silverlake sound of a few years ago, back when I was hitting up Spaceland on the regular. I definitely notice some Submarines in there too. Combined with the lyrics and the shift in her media persona, that’s actually a pretty interesting subtext, that this is the album where she fully abandons Nashville in favor of LA.
I mean, I guess the Silverlake sound was a legitimate descendant of the Laurel Canyon sound, as a sort of wistful, jaded country pop-rock minus the drawl and light on the twang. (Which would put Sheryl Crow as an honest-to-god missing link, huh?)
John McAfee explains how to uninstall McAfee Antivirus, reminding you throughout the process that an eccentric millionaire who is a total heathen originally created the software, and that total heathen has nothing to do with the product anymore and hasn’t for 15 years. (Note: NSFW, features drug use, sexual content, and heavy profanity.)
this is amazing.
