Really they should call spree killers “sequential killers”

Learned that Badger’s old friend Leo did not leave when his owner down the street died a few years ago, but actually predeceased him by a bit.

Learning to fly in Pennsylvania meant keeping track of the last field we could turn back and crash land in (perpendicular to the furrows so they slow you rather than catching a wheel to flip you) when flying over woodland

You don’t hear “desk” for a sub-“portfolio” government administration specialization much anymore. Like, the Malaysia desk at the State Department, or the soybean desk at Ag.

kontextmaschine:

One of the biggest pop stars of the ‘80s and into the mid-‘90s. She’s still doing something I’m sure. (One search later… releasing “Bitch I’m Madonna” ft. Nicki Minaj. Correct.)

And a big part of her schtick was Catholic burlesque. Rosaries and crucifixes as fashion accessories, songs titled “Like a Virgin”, “Angel”, “Papa Don’t Preach” (about standing up to patriarchy by… not aborting an unintended pregnancy, dedicated to the Pope), and “Like a Prayer”, like holy shit, look at that video. (Music videos were the most important art form of the 1980s.) I’d say calling herself “Madonna” was the topper, but that was her (and her mother’s) birth name. Nominative determinism, I guess.

The context here is that it was only in the 1970s that the “white ethnics” - descended from mostly Catholic, Jewish, or Orthodox immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, began being considered as fully the same race as plain “white”, which had heretofore been more specifically Protestant/secularist North/Western Europeans. You still saw echoes of the distinction into the ‘90s, uptight WASPs as opponents to the cool protagonists in cultural works by people who had lived through when that was plausibly a thing.

And part of the twist was that Catholicism had been coded as sexually repressive, particularly upon women but Madonna made a thing of invoking it as an accessory to female sexual assertion, very eroticized videos, wearing see-through clothing and lingerie on tour, you know back in the day she… wait, I should establish some other stuff first.

Also the other big thing she did was pull in this whole multi-racial, multi-sexuality dirty poor NYC thing - New York was still recovering from the bankrupcty of the 1970s, not yet made it to Giuliani Time and the walking-back of the last time we tried not repressing black people. So if we’re talking pop cultural touchstones it wasn’t quite Taxi Driver or The Warriors NYC anymore, but still a ways off from Friends NYC, let alone Sex in the City or Girls’. Ghostbusters/Burton Batman NYC, I guess.

So a lot of sexual contact with hot brown-skinned men in her videos and as backup dancers, also queer culture - “vogueing” and a lot of other things from NYC “ballroom” society (all you babby genderweirds should watch Paris is Burning if you haven’t yet, I am nothing if not insistent that one should learn the history of one’s people), in 1992 releasing a coffee table book of pansexual celebrity kink erotica.

Okay. Anyway, you know back in the day she was known for having her limousine driven through the (predominantly black and Puerto Rican) Lower East Side and picking up teenage boys off the street to use for the night? After a while the locals got tired of this, learned to recognize her limo, and threw trash at it.

I guess you could peg Lady Gaga as her successor, doing queer burlesque at the moment of their incorporation into the mainstream. Also she does that “present yourself as the perfect accessible celebrity friend/avatar to your audience” thing that Taylor Swift does better. Honestly, I think the big problem with her though is that music videos aren’t as big a thing though (and have better competition as “media for young people to consume”) so her visual peacocking doesn’t count for as much anymore.

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

wait a second, is “Borderline” (from 1983′s Madonna) riffing on Borderline Personality Disorder (from 1980′s DSM-III)?

dat video tho. I say that part of her brand identity was “has a thing for rough trade”, but woo.

Kinda clarifies how Paglia used Madonna as the key to her feminism, what I as ‘90s boy expected to inherit, eager like a kid on Christmas Eve

see not just that women would become men, but that then heterosexuals could get to be gay men together

like the idealized straight view from the ‘80s

(the early still-basically-the-’70s ‘80s, where that meant fun and not death)

like we could all have an urban tribe that were basically our friends but also our lovers on a fluid basis

in retrospect shoulda paid more attention to how the lyrics of all those house tunes were about being abandoned by someone you thought loved you but had been instrumentally using you

or the queer film festival entries about how without a difference-powered dynamic or a reproductive imperative so much of your social-sexual value came down to ability to perform superficial features of youth and wealth and beauty and life was hellish otherwise

oops

kontextmaschine:

Aw man planting that lavender under the window next to my sittin’ chair was such a good idea.

Like in general this year in Karafuto has been finally realizing things I had intended for a while and determining they were in fact correct ideal ideas all the while.

This has honestly been a lot of the last part of my life in general for me. Like the 2010s was – well first, coming to Portlandia-era Portland, which was a perfect realization of if the ‘90s had just kept getting better and look the whole culture sees it’s great and they’ll follow our lead and change yay!

But then the national culture turning worse, and okay Portland was a refuge though but then increasingly it wasn’t and and and…

And it getting so bad but what rescued me was – not a fluke, this is actually a defining element of my self-identity – my knowledge of American cultural history, I was like “NO successful cultural turn ever looked like this, but some failed ones kinda did before they backfired proportionally—”

But I was like “but I don’t see the escape mechanism, if Hillary fucking Clinton gets the levers of federal administrative control this stuff’ll get institutionally locked in but how would you pivot to preempt it, you’d basically have to dump the post-Reagan legacy and do Sailer Strategy and kinda recover some of that '80s vim but realize the path forward was the Wall Street crude bros not the Christians, but it’s hopeless the Republicans don’t have anyone lined up to pivot in time…

…and then like a month later the incarnated spirit of the 1980s came down an escalator and I was like "oh”. Come the moment, come the man.

And yeah, that went basically exactly how I expected, and I was like “WOW, I do know this stuff! But… what do I even get for it. Hmm, much to ponder…”

But then I was struck by a falling star and reborn perfected, so there’s my answer and… okay?

My topsoil work is basically all John Henry vs. the Dump Truck now, at my fastest I can take like 80 minutes and a short pitching shovel to empty upon the ground a bed less than half as tall as a hydraulic lift can in 10 seconds.

I would honestly jump at the chance to fight a female UFC fighter.

Like, in a sport where weight classes are like 8 pounds wide and competitors are always matched at the top of theirs, even newly trim I’d have several classes and inches of reach on any (cis) woman fighter, and I’ve specifically been trained in both striking and grappling for MMA.

Which like, I’d still have no chance if she wasn’t recklessly stupid, which means she’d get range, make a few probing attacks to test my defenses, and then disassemble me.

From which I’d learn exactly what vulnerabilities a high-level fighter would see in my defenses and how they’d exploit them, which is in fact knowledge I’m willing to get a little beat up for.

If you look at their actual points on size vs. bed capacity it’d seem that I – as someone who has hauled about 30 loads in my ‘80s compact pickup this year alone – would be recognized by the sneering Twitter millennials as one of the ones doing pickup ownership right, but still the lines about how pickup drivers are all small-dick losers feel unwelcoming.

Oh nice, I can’t do pull-ups again yet but I can jump up and hold on and slow my descent, which means at this speed of development not long before I can hold on and stay there, and then on to lifting myself up, which means I’ll be able to casually knock out a few sets a day in the doorway bar between my kitchen and sitting room.

kontextmaschine:

Aw man planting that lavender under the window next to my sittin’ chair was such a good idea.

Also how amazing is it that lavender essentially means “laundry-smelling?” Like, this plant has just been called “soap additive” for millennia.

Aw man planting that lavender under the window next to my sittin’ chair was such a good idea.

shadow-banned-the-hedgehog:

kontextmaschine:

nsomniacsdream:

shadow-banned-the-hedgehog:

This is how capitalism is designed, so its not surprising. It’s just incredibly stupid and morally indefensible. Capitalism is a failure of a system that never should have become the dominant system. Hundreds of years of slavery, death, and disgusting violations of human existence is all we have to show for it. None of it was worth the cost.

I assure you that “the system optimizes for the interests of large landholders” is not specific to capitalism and was a well-recognized, load-bearing feature of the systems that preceded it.

The system before was feudalism, which was just pro capitalism

Karl Marx is spinning in his grave. Eric Hobsbawm, who is also buried in the East Cemetery at Highgate, has come to join him. Malcolm McLaren is there too, but mostly because it’s something interesting to do.

nsomniacsdream:

shadow-banned-the-hedgehog:

This is how capitalism is designed, so its not surprising. It’s just incredibly stupid and morally indefensible. Capitalism is a failure of a system that never should have become the dominant system. Hundreds of years of slavery, death, and disgusting violations of human existence is all we have to show for it. None of it was worth the cost.

I assure you that “the system optimizes for the interests of large landholders” is not specific to capitalism and was a well-recognized, load-bearing feature of the systems that preceded it.

official-torfmoor:

kontextmaschine:

Yeah, if plants aren’t right they get worse every year, in contrast most of the interior will eventually be totally replaced, so I’ve been prioritizing outside. I continue to progress on tidying Karafuto and when everything is at least correct place-adjacent I’m getting professional cleaners to do a deep clean.

Until then, witness my newest life-improving delivery from Amazon,

a USB-charged scrubber stick, w/head attachments not pictured, that’ll make it practical to give my floors a good go when my cleaning fluids arrive.

I’m considering getting one of those rotating brush things. Is it actually cleaning better than just manually scrubbing with a manual scrubber for fuck’s sake tumblr why won’t you let me type a question mark

I’ve been using it in my shower. For cleaning the grout between tiles you kind of have to hold the wheel edge-on and do them individually in a way that you do have to hold them there for a bit, but you can do a whole wall of it at a stretch no prob; on tile or tub liner where you’re scrubbing with the flat face it’s astoundingly faster and more thorough.

Yeah even when I had anxiety combining with the depression side of manic depression I didn’t think of myself as particularly unfortunate in any particular area, social stuff wasn’t my thing but well within common norms

The first miracle, just the personality change stuff, well that’s weird like brains are weird and everyone’s gonna have something be the weirdest thing that happened in their life, and mine also takes weirdest thing to ever happen to anyone I know, so that’s kinda neat.

The second miracle, the creatine weight loss thing, insane how that’s perfectly on track to take all the fat I built in life and leave me attractively slim with like no effort, but I do feel some agency by way of figuring it out and it seems fitting that I get some kind of reward for putting everything together there (while still deliriously half-brained!) to fix it immediately

The third miracle, this muscle gain testosterone stuff, it’s like you already gilded the lily, what are you doing now, gilding the gilding? Fuck, man.

kontextmaschine:

I mean, I’ll be damned, Covid broke me down, mind and body, but then it rebuilt me better, didn’t it?

Really feels like someone used a Game Genie though, sheesh.

I mean, I’ll be damned, Covid broke me down, mind and body, but then it rebuilt me better, didn’t it?

Even under the beard, my face is like seven years younger worth of thinner already, which is a little uncanny when it doesn’t make the beard any less white.