kontextmaschine

kontextmaschine:

talkinggorillabutler:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

I wonder exactly which day it was that the amount of time Comedy Central had spent broadcasting The Daily Show finally caught up to the amount of time they had spent broadcasting PCU

This was supposed to be a culture war joke, in fairness on further reflection I was like “yeah but maybe put all the hours of South Park, Tosh.0, and The Man Show on the PCU side too.” Maybe the Kilborn years, even.

Okay, for the benefit of all the followers I’m getting with absurd ages in their profiles, let me explain this one.

When Comedy Central started in the ‘90s, they didn’t have much original programming, and what they did was mostly one-off (but frequently rerun) specials - filmed standup sets, basically.

So what they ran was mostly secondhand content they’d picked up rights to, and what was most common were these two movies, I swear to god I’d seen them run back to back and then over again, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same one run twice in a row. One was Throw Momma From The Train, a Danny DeVito comedic riff on Strangers On A Train.

The other was PCU, a campus comedy in the Animal House vein starring a visibly balding Jeremy Piven. It was a lovable frat fighting the dean and his Young Republican lackeys, but (because “boat shoe and dinner jacket-wearing WASPs” were overdone and increasingly anachronistic as villains by then) there was a third faction that took the brunt of the mockery: earnest, censorious social issue activists. Thus the title. The climax involved the activists protesting the big frat party (tagline: “Everyone Gets Laid”), but then realizing “holy shit, we’re against drinking, sex, parties, freedom, and fun, we’re the bad guys” and giving up and chilling out and hooking up with the frat members.

Because obviously you were supposed to see that as the only acceptable position for anyone with any pretensions to being cool and with it. Like I said, ‘60s-derived social liberalism used to offer something for everyone.

And it’s not like oooo, this was acceptable once upon a time, it’s that when I was growing up, this was the official line of media social liberalism. Who was that anon asking about the ‘90s? In the ‘90s, liberal Hollywood was putting out “message movies” the messages of which were America Is Finally Free, Thanks To Brave Heroes Like Larry Flynt Depicting Women As Violently Degraded Sex Objects, And Thank God For His Heirs Like Howard Stern, Still Fighting The Good Fight.

If you don’t know who Howard Stern is, he was the foremost crude “Morning Zoo” radio DJ in the country.

Like, in the '90s, white, blue collar (or “dudebro”) tits-n-beer vulgarity was plausibly coded left/liberal/Democratic. And that’s a little disorienting to remember.

I mean hell, Benny Hill was aired in part by an official arm of the most socialist Anglosphere government ever. Benny Hill.

If you’ve never seen Benny Hill, it’s from the British “light entertainment” tradition, a little variety but kind of sketch comedy, only a lot of the “comedy” was basically dirty old man leering. Sketch leering. Episodes famously ended with sped up comedic chase scenes where Benny would try to catch and grope some pretty young girls, then turn and run away as they tried to catch and punish him.

Now by the '90s that was already a bit off, but still, it ran in reruns on Comedy Central. It ran on fucking PBS.

If you ever wonder why intelligent educated sensitive me is wary of if not actively hostile to so much of what passes for modern cultural liberalism, it’s because it pattern-matches so closely not only to the apocalypse visions conservatives were warning of when I was growing up, but to the liberals’ versions as well.

The Chad PCU (1993) clasping hands with the Virgin “Fallen Angels” by Jerry Pournelle [1991]

That’s the one where the fandom alliance launched some sorta spaceplane that dipped back into the atmosphere to collect oxygen atop a museum Titan V to fight global cooling, right? I still remember the climax where the bureaucrat villain asks for her assistant’s pistol to shoot at the takeoff but he maliciously complies with safety regulations by tediously clearing it first. You know by 1991 I guess Pournelle might well have seen Wings of Honneamise.

As a reminder, the thing that can most reliably move me to tears is spacecraft launching.

talkinggorillabutler:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

I wonder exactly which day it was that the amount of time Comedy Central had spent broadcasting The Daily Show finally caught up to the amount of time they had spent broadcasting PCU

This was supposed to be a culture war joke, in fairness on further reflection I was like “yeah but maybe put all the hours of South Park, Tosh.0, and The Man Show on the PCU side too.” Maybe the Kilborn years, even.

Okay, for the benefit of all the followers I’m getting with absurd ages in their profiles, let me explain this one.

When Comedy Central started in the ‘90s, they didn’t have much original programming, and what they did was mostly one-off (but frequently rerun) specials - filmed standup sets, basically.

So what they ran was mostly secondhand content they’d picked up rights to, and what was most common were these two movies, I swear to god I’d seen them run back to back and then over again, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same one run twice in a row. One was Throw Momma From The Train, a Danny DeVito comedic riff on Strangers On A Train.

The other was PCU, a campus comedy in the Animal House vein starring a visibly balding Jeremy Piven. It was a lovable frat fighting the dean and his Young Republican lackeys, but (because “boat shoe and dinner jacket-wearing WASPs” were overdone and increasingly anachronistic as villains by then) there was a third faction that took the brunt of the mockery: earnest, censorious social issue activists. Thus the title. The climax involved the activists protesting the big frat party (tagline: “Everyone Gets Laid”), but then realizing “holy shit, we’re against drinking, sex, parties, freedom, and fun, we’re the bad guys” and giving up and chilling out and hooking up with the frat members.

Because obviously you were supposed to see that as the only acceptable position for anyone with any pretensions to being cool and with it. Like I said, ‘60s-derived social liberalism used to offer something for everyone.

And it’s not like oooo, this was acceptable once upon a time, it’s that when I was growing up, this was the official line of media social liberalism. Who was that anon asking about the ‘90s? In the '90s, liberal Hollywood was putting out “message movies” the messages of which were America Is Finally Free, Thanks To Brave Heroes Like Larry Flynt Depicting Women As Violently Degraded Sex Objects, And Thank God For His Heirs Like Howard Stern, Still Fighting The Good Fight.

If you don’t know who Howard Stern is, he was the foremost crude “Morning Zoo” radio DJ in the country.

Like, in the '90s, white, blue collar (or “dudebro”) tits-n-beer vulgarity was plausibly coded left/liberal/Democratic. And that’s a little disorienting to remember.

I mean hell, Benny Hill was aired in part by an official arm of the most socialist Anglosphere government ever. Benny Hill.

If you’ve never seen Benny Hill, it’s from the British “light entertainment” tradition, a little variety but kind of sketch comedy, only a lot of the “comedy” was basically dirty old man leering. Sketch leering. Episodes famously ended with sped up comedic chase scenes where Benny would try to catch and grope some pretty young girls, then turn and run away as they tried to catch and punish him.

Now by the '90s that was already a bit off, but still, it ran in reruns on Comedy Central. It ran on fucking PBS.

If you ever wonder why intelligent educated sensitive me is wary of if not actively hostile to so much of what passes for modern cultural liberalism, it’s because it pattern-matches so closely not only to the apocalypse visions conservatives were warning of when I was growing up, but to the liberals’ versions as well.

The Chad PCU (1993) clasping hands with the Virgin “Fallen Angels” by Jerry Pournelle [1991]

That’s the one where the fandom alliance launched some sorta spaceplane that dipped back into the atmosphere to collect oxygen atop a museum Titan V to fight global cooling, right? I still remember the climax where the bureaucrat villain asks for her assistant’s pistol to shoot at the takeoff but he maliciously complies with safety regulations by tediously clearing it first. You know by 1991 I guess Pournelle might well have seen Wings of Honneamise.

Huh, stillll dragging a bit if I try to go down to just 2 scoops creatine/day

Definitely better, quicker to fall asleep, more reliable and comfortable sleep for 8 hours (the new mattress helps too!)

It makes so much sense that 90s comics would introduce a crazy/hot bisexual manic pixie that it’s easy to forget Harley Quinn’s original concept was “woman in an abusive relationship”

I had a friend in LA who had done some anthropology fieldwork in Thailand and she described it as the ideal place to vacation – you want beaches, they got that. Rugged nature, modern nightlife cities, historical sites, picturesque rural tranquility, everything. And the location on river systems important for inland travel leaves the culture and economy deeply, especially hospitality-focused, and the price levels and exchange rate are such that with enough money to not be actively falling behind in America you can live pretty comfortably there.

Which makes it particularly irritating that if I announce a solo trip to there I look like I’m gonna go blow money on hookers

kontextmaschine:

Thinking about how all the classic ‘80s decolonial conflicts saw the ruling power leveraging an altitude advantage: the South Africans used paratrooper sticks and airmobile helicopter-delivered troops to interdict rebel movement, the Israelis used armed helicopters to observe and intervene in territory where they lacked on-the-ground hegemony, and the British built observation towers in “bandit country” along the Northern Irish frontier to physically look down and see what the IRA was doing

Then of course there was the Russian Afghanistan occupation where the ability to take down Hinds and neutralize the altitude advantage was so key – the famed Stingers never took as many as AA gun emplacements, but in their portability they drove the Soviets to treat any force, no matter how small, as potentially AA-capable and opened a lot of strategic space for the mujahideen

Thinking about how all the classic ‘80s decolonial conflicts saw the ruling power leveraging an altitude advantage: the South Africans used paratrooper sticks and airmobile helicopter-delivered troops to interdict rebel movement, the Israelis used armed helicopters to observe and intervene in territory where they lacked on-the-ground hegemony, and the British built observation towers in “bandit country” along the Northern Irish frontier to physically look down and see what the IRA was doing

etherea1ity:

Azumino, Japan ( via )

That 曇野 do be 安

Never had any firsthand exposure to Andrew Tate but from what I hear regarding his popularity among today’s teen boys I’m reminded of how Andrew Dice Clay’s vulgar, misogynistic, misanthropic 1980s comedy was part of shaking off the ‘70s on the way to the '90s

Housecats are crepuscular animals, most active around dawn and dusk, when both nocturnal and diurnal prey is at the very edge of their optimal conditions, and I appreciate that at least in the winter, at least in the nights between, Badger tries to stay by my side (presumably, to share body heat)

kontextmaschine:

Interesting starting to see people start to “revisit” the years of my young adulthood, particularly in seeing what they get wrong.

So let me be clear, no one in the 2000s was hearing emo when they went out.

There was “let’s do ‘alternative’ again” massified “indie”, 80s revival, and “blog house”/electroclash (white people were maybe listening to rap, at home, and collecting sneakers). To the extent emo had any sort of regular touring scene, it was limited to the midwest. It was something high schoolers listened to. It wasn’t even the thing that high schoolers listened to that left some impression on the culture – that was “scene”.

All the emo nights, that’s not a throwback to how the 2000s were. The 2000s were never like that. (If anything, emo night is a replacement for the '90s-era marginal-throwback institution of “goth night”)

Oh and mashups. Songs made by mixing two or more previously existing (and recognizable) songs together were absolutely a 2000s thing.

Interesting starting to see people start to “revisit” the years of my young adulthood, particularly in seeing what they get wrong.

So let me be clear, no one in the 2000s was hearing emo when they went out.

There was “let’s do ‘alternative’ again” massified “indie”, 80s revival, and “blog house”/electroclash (white people were maybe listening to rap, at home, and collecting sneakers). To the extent emo had any sort of regular touring scene, it was limited to the midwest. It was something high schoolers listened to. It wasn’t even the high school identity that left some impression on the culture – that was “scene”.

All the emo nights, that’s not a throwback to how the 2000s were. The 2000s were never like that. (If anything, emo night is a replacement for the '90s-era marginal-throwback institution of “goth night”)

cellobuster:

cellobuster:

Sure

pervocracy:

argumate:

pervocracy:

Part of the New Internet Grammar: using question marks not to denote questions, but upturns in voice, so that a tentative statement gets a question mark but a flatly delivered question doesn’t.

why would you do this

It just seems right?

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

cesalt:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

rougelikesandrunning:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

cloveroftheforest:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

A guy’s a man. A girl’s a girl.

A girl’s a tumblr user.

But the moon is a planet.

A planet is not a tumblr user.

You’re an idiot.

Tumble to the ground

A girl’s a tumblr user. (A tumblr user’s not a girl.)

A girl’s a tumblr user. (A tumblr user’s not a girl.)

(No, a girl’s a tumblr user.)

A girl’s a tumblr user. (A tumblr user’s not a girl.)

(No, no, a girl’s a tumblr user.)

A girl’s a tumblr user. (No, no, a girl’s not a tumblr user.)

(Yes, no, yes, no, no)

(I’m a tumblr user.)

(No, no, no, no, no)

(I love my tumblr user.)

Frank we call them women not girls, and there are lots of them on Tumblr.

I guess I know now what “women don’t like fish” means

Frank is fighting sexism demons right now bro. The parentheses internal dialog

I’m going to start having sex with the fish

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

Me, haunting the narrative: “I’m the author!”

Me, narrative haunting itself: “I’m the author!”

plum-soup:

Man I had sex with so many hot Jewish daddies when I lived in New York and looking at the Tel Aviv grindr now I’m like. Damn what happened? Did we send all our uggos to Israel? Is that why they’re so violent over there?

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

holyscreamingintothevoid:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

*gives you the book of my lives*

You gave me the book of your lives, and I read it, fell in love with you, married you, had children.