kontextmaschine

You know how they say that success at X is in part a function of talent but also being in the right place at the right time? Starting to think my major skill is that for any two of those (X, place, time) I can make a pretty good guess at the third

Between the increasingly dated midcentury songs and TV specials, the legacy prewar department store stuff like the Macy’s parade, and Hallmark movies about rejecting yuppie urbanity for idealized small-town life, Christmas in the US is increasingly an American Golden Age nostalgia festival

kontextmaschine:

Bunch of Twitter users in different areas of focus who spent the last decade furious that things were going their way but not as far or as fast as they wanted and performed that fury as a way to whip things on harder dealing with the new situation that things are going to be going against them for the next 15 years at least and they no longer have any traction on the situation about as well as you’d expect

So yeah, that phase is over, we’ve cleared Charybdis, now we gotta try and slingshot off past Scylla, shift our stance to defend rightward. I mean, my circle on here is disproportionately trans Jews.

collapsedsquid:

In the case of the Valley, you know, you can maybe start that with Hewlett and Packard and the famous HP Way — what they called management by walking around. No corner offices, shirt sleeves. They still had ties, but we took off the jacket. And this was in the 1950s. You know, Hewlett Packard was founded in a garage, an iconic garage startup in 1939. By the fifties, it’s a publicly traded company. It’s extremely successful.

And Hewlett and Packard, are very kind of self-consciously working against the Organization Man paradigm. That was corporate capitalism in the 1950s. So creating a culture where management and the rank and file engineers are all kind of on the same side is taking the culture of the engineering lab and transferring that into a corporation.

And it also was I think philosophically too, this was the high water mark of private sector unionization. People like Dave Packard were very much against unions. Just saw them as a sign that something’s wrong with a company if you can’t find a way to get along. And that instead that employees of all rank should be rewarded with stock options, they should have a stake in the ownership of the company. So it was a different model. And that kind of percolates through. There are a lot of HP veterans that go on to start venture firms, start other companies, and they bring that laid back California more sort of ostensibly egalitarian corporate culture with them.

Oh I’m not sure they’ve even noticed it yet, it’s still at the scrabbling even more feveredly stage

But yeah, if I haven’t made it clear, the energy issues have been “echoing” back for a few days, I’m taking 3 or 4 5g scoops of creatine a day (at the onset of the 2nd case, I was taking 8)

Y'know, if I’ve been steadily losing weight lately, some of it is probably that even after I no longer needed to take creatine to ramp up anaerobic energy production to maintain sufficient energy levels, my ratio of anaerobic:aerobic energy production, using my body’s naturally-produced creatine, is still higher than it was before all this and I’m burning more fat

Bunch of Twitter users in different areas of focus who spent the last decade furious that things were going their way but not as far or as fast as they wanted and performed that fury as a way to whip things on harder dealing with the new situation that things are going to be going against them for the next 15 years at least and they no longer have any traction on the situation about as well as you’d expect

kaziusklasterzoroaster:

kontextmaschine:

So anyway, my sense now (since Covid went “long” in my brain, destroyed my personality, and left me to form a new one, from perspective of which I realized the old one had been well-“masked” autistic) is that autism is a matter of the personality constructing itself such that it has no role for pre-rational, pre-human “animal instinct”, and thus must do everything (including further self-construction) by conscious logic alone

(Like, I don’t know how social species without language would organize themselves if they couldn’t parse each others’ feelings directly, and we come from a long line of such species)

Autistic people aren’t more rational than allistic people. I don’t think you had autism to begin with, I think that the old you was just kinda obnoxious. 

It’s hilarious to me that your story is “Praise Long Covid, for He cured me of the triplet demons of Straightness, Anxiety, and Autism” and somehow the part of that that I believe completely is the part about Straightness… if for no other reasons than: 

+ there are people who are bisexual
+ I feel like someone would know if they went from wanting to suck no dicks to wanting to suck some amount of dicks

Sexuality seems more measureable to me than autism. Also, I have a hard time believing that you have zero anxiety? Just because I can’t imagine that. Less anxiety, maybe… 

BTW, have you gone to a neurologist about any of this? 

I can literally feel other people’s emotions empathetically now (which I always thought was a metaphor for being so moved by the intensity with which they were displayed to imagine for yourself what others were feeling), there are some other differences, things I hadn’t picked up on before because I had always taken them as constituative of like, reality or the human experience that, noticed as distinct things, were textbook autism.

And like “I had autism”/“you were obnoxious”, like yeah, dude, you ever known autists?

And like, yeah. I’ve seen stuff suggesting the anxiety-processing center of the brain is a regular Covid target, maybe because it’s close to the nerves it gets from the lungs by way of or something.

And yeah, absolutely zeroed. Last time I was manic for some reason it all came back (I hope that’s not a regular thing) but then it entirely vanished again afterwards. I am physically unable to worry about things, like I can evaluate them and judge that a negative outcome is possible or even likely, but then that thought gets filed in memory and my mind doesn’t return to the topic unless I consciously direct it there. I’m similarly immune to guilt, shame, regret, or loss, it’s really quite nuts.

And no, from what I’ve heard from other brain-Covid sufferers online, a particularly decent neurologist would at best say “hm, yeah, that was a brain infection alright”, and I already know that.

multitrackdrifting:

in tears every time i check this account

star-trek-dumb-comics:

Lost DS9 season 8 episode plot : Quark becomes a rainbow capitalist

max1461:

shieldfoss:

ofthefog:

max1461:

This is true innovation. I hope you are actually putting these on 4chan because I want to piss them off

Incredibly enough, that’s actually against the 4chan rules on literally every board, including infamous /b/

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

therealjendavis:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

I can try to do a better job later, but for now (and since I know there are people who don’t use tumblr mobile), I’m just going to copy-and-paste from a post I made on Facebook:

Some time ago I made (canned) beef stroganoff for a potluck. In the process of doing so, I discovered that I had inadvertently prepared a vodka milkshake, and that this has since become my standard recipe for “sex brownies” or “cum brownies.” This is for the people who want to drink their cum and/or jerk off all the time (I am one of them).

Required Materials:

• ½ cup cum
• ½ cup vodka (or similar)
• ¼ cup cocoa/chocolate mixture (a couple varieties of chocolate will work)
• ½ cup butter
• ¼ cup milk

Instructions:

1. Combine everything together in a bowl and stir until smooth. Do not chill!
2. If you aren’t into the taste of cum and think that some people might be, you may wish to add ¼ tsp vanilla extract. Do not mix in the butter, it won’t work.

Eat by spooning or scooping into a dessert bowl or baking dish and adding toppings if desired.

I haven’t actually gotten around to the topping stage (yet), but a simple buttered-toasted-whole-wheat roll and a little sugar may be acceptable. Alternatively, if you like, you could substitute vanilla ice cream for the cocoa/chocolate mixture.

how would you rate the vodka/cum combo flavor, frank?

I’m a really bad judge of alcohol flavor in general so I’m not sure, but I think it would rate higher in terms of the average taster than usual – it certainly tastes better than any amount of cum I have ever tasted

fatehbaz:

85% of natural asphalt is found in the Western hemisphere; the most famous asphalt field is probably the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, but the largest reserves are in Alberta, which hold an estimated 2.2 trillion barrels. In addition to the natural reserves, asphalt has, for the last 100 years, primarily been produced by refining crude oil residue. Asphalt’s most common use is as the binder in blacktop; aggregate makes up the remaining 95% of the dark mix we see on roads and highways. […]

The largest antique source of asphalt was the Dead Sea, where chunks of seafloor asphalt periodically broke off and rose to the surface. In ancient Egypt, this asphalt was used to waterproof boats […], as well as roads, canals, and roofs, and it was prized enough that Alexander the Great’s general Antigonus started – and lost – a war with the Nabataean Arabs over the Dead Sea’s asphalt. […]

Asphalt was rare in road construction until it hit the big time in 1867 with the asphalting of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Soon Washington was an “asphalt city,” and the quiet, smooth streets inspired other cities to follow suit. Paving became ever more important with the popular rise of bicycles and then cars. At the turn of the century, refined asphalt was developed and largely supplanted natural asphalt due to its higher quality and volume. This was also the time when concrete emerged as a road paving material, and a competition between concrete and asphalt emerged […].

O’Reilly closely associates war and asphalt. In World War II, asphalt served many purposes. From the Aleutian Islands in Alaska to Tinian in the Northern Marianas, Navy construction battalions used asphalt to construct airfields and roads on short notice. Over 17,000 tons of asphalt were brought ashore during the Normandy landings. […] During the Vietnam War, building asphalt runways was fundamental to the American policy of aerial bombardment. Asphalt has continued to be the material of choice for ad-hoc roads and runways built during the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

—

Text by: Alexander Luckmann. “Asphalt and Sand: A Material History of Extraction and Consumption.” Published online at Cleveland Review of Books. 13 May 2022.

rationalists-out-of-context:

God, grant me the Adderall to change the things I can, the liquor to accept the things I can’t, and the psychedelics to know the difference.

feastofsnakes:

Had a dream last night there was a new Tumblr feature called “WANNA SHARE WITH THE CLASS?” (all caps) where if you thought about something too often Tumblr would reach into ur mind and post it for you

radiofreederry:

I am willing to hand it to the English, just this once

xenosagaepisodeone:

I think Jesus would listen to stuff like Deftones and Tool due to the fact that he was working as a carpenter in his 20s

asphodel-e:

corpsebrigadier-deactivated2025:

Love to be on a website where I can join such hit 2022 fandoms as “century old public domain novel being read very slowly” and “half-century old mafia film that does not actually exist.”

#the joy of not being sold anything#become unmarketable#forget death of the author. we’ve achieved death of the media#*kisses fingertips* the apotheosis of fandom

6x8-6:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

bbluejoseph:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

1. The Beatles T-shirt
2. Lemmings T-shirt
3. Hippie T-shirt that says “Don’t trust any hippies who don’t carry an ax”
4. Homer’s T-shirt that says “Homicide is bad”
5. Homer’s T-shirt that says “Don’t do crimes, kids”
6. Buster Keaton T-shirt
7. Nietzsche’s T-shirt
8. Lemmings T-shirt with a picture of Lemmings on it, captioned “Sapient beings who do not have any concept of time are of lower status than humans”
9. Jaws T-shirt saying “Jaws are an accurate depiction of a shark”

I feel like at least one of these is self-explanatory by virtue of being a quote from a classic novel

like this?

I just want to clarify that I have seen all of these t-shirts in stores, and they were all not at all self-explanatory

made more of the shirts