So my mother recently got married (mashallah). And she set up this thing where guests were encouraged to take photos of the proceedings on their phones and text them in to a given number, after which they would be played as a slideshow on a screen at the front of the venue. I want you to take a minute to imagine how this went.
It began just about as you would expect. People taking photos of each other and the décor and taking selfies and having a good time. The slideshow was tasteful. Clearly not “professional,” but nice and personal.
And then people start getting a little drunk. A person who signs their work only as “Moo” posts this masterpiece:
[ID: a vertically oriented photo of a garbage can. A long table draped with lavender fabric at which the bride and groom are seated is in the background. The garbage can is centred in the frame, clearly the focus of the photo. End ID]
Someone at my table notices. “Is that… a photo of a garbage can? What?” We all express confusion and have a chuckle about it. Clearly someone is taking the prompt liberally. But the avant-garde approach to what is worthy of documenting does not end here, and our artist soon enters these submissions into the canon:
[ID: photos of a pendant fire sprinkler, a ceiling vent, a lightswitch, and a door handle. the photos show a casual, non-intensive approach to framing (neither perfectly even nor deliberately askew, &c.) end ID]
Meanwhile someone has uploaded this photo of the groom:
He is sitting at the bride and groom’s table alone with his hands clasped in front of him. I can’t show you his face but he has a bit of stubble and is wearing wire-framed rectangular glasses. I can best describe his vibe to you by saying that he wore this newsie cap to his wedding and this made perfect sense.
Using this photo, someone at our table makes their first few volleys:
[ID: the groom cut out of the photo from before and edited into an empty booth at an empty chain restaurant and an empty movie theatre, respectively. End ID]
At this point, basically everyone except the bride and groom have noticed, and are more or less following the evolution of this guérilla art project. Some people are trying to talk the instigators out of submitting their unworthy photos; others are riling them up.
Moo makes several more of their found object entries:
[ID: a cleaning schedule sign on a bathroom wall; a bathroom sign reading “men”; a digital thermostat; a framed photo of a smiling man, the sign for the men’s bathroom reflected in its glass. end ID]
And it goes back and forth like this for a while, Moo submitting objects (a close-up on the tines of their fork; a mop bucket; a framed fish head) and their nameless collaborator, not be to undone, putting the groom into more situations:
[ID: the groom’s head edited onto the body of a cast member in the Broadway musical Newsies, his cap causing him to blend in perfectly; the groom’s head edited onto Jamie’s head from Mythbusters as he poses next to Adam, his cap causing this edit to be perfectly seamless. end ID]
A further development in the form of these submissions occurs when The Editor invents reappropriation and collage, beginning to edit the groom into photos that other people have uploaded:
[ID: the photo of the groom at the table from earlier, edited so that there are two identical grooms sitting side-by-side: text over their heads reads “Just Married!”; another photo of the groom standing and smiling with a drink in his hand, apparently talking to another groom who is holding his stomach, throwing his head back and laughing aloud. end ID]
Meanwhile, Moo has taken his aesthetic ethos to its only possible logical conclusion:
A photo of a urinal. “Fountain,” Moo, iPhone camera, 2023.
People are now watching the screen even more actively, laughing each time a new silly photo arrives in the stream of genuine submissions. Moo submits a photo of a dented Pringles can seen through a grate in the street outside and a photo of a bag of road-salting ice. The photo of the groom at the table is edited so that he sports a towering Cat-in-the-Hat hat instead of the newsie cap; the groom is edited into an astronaut suit on the moon; he and the bride wearing her fur stole are edited as Jackie O. and JFK in the limo (this last The Editor wisely did not upload but sent only to me).
Not content, however, with editing the groom into non-wedding photos or with sabotaging earnest submissions to the photo album, The Editor proceeds to bring us full circle by reappropriating Moo’s recontextualisations, Sherrie Levine-like:
[ID: 1. the photo of the garbage can from earlier, with the groom edited onto the flap that you push garbage through; 2. the groom edited into the photo of the framed photograph from earlier; he has been made greyscale to match the photograph; 3. the photo of the urinal from above, with the groom edited into its bowl. end ID]
The people at Moo’s table (groom’s family) love this last submission (“Urine a Urinal,” Anonymous, iPhone camera, 2023). They watch the screen waiting for it to come up again, and when it does, they shout “there it is!” and laugh and clap.
Alas, our destabilisation of what constitutes artistic merit was not allowed to persist. Like the Society of Independent Artists sticking Duchamp’s “Fountain” behind a partition, the bride and groom silently deleted all of the unworthy submissions from the publicly shared album. Luckily, I saw this coming and was able to document the proceedings.
In conclusion, I recommend not crowdsourcing your wedding photos unless you have a very well-developed sense of humour.
Okay, this last bedload of mulch I took 3 days to distribute and think that was my limit for retaining a functioning body, I think I maybe have 1.5 or 2 yards of medium hemlock left and .5 of bark nuggets to create a nice durable top layer where I’m mulching around trees.
Scooby Doo is a warning about late stage capitalism as every episode the monster turns out to be an old white guy looking to steal all the money
Scooby-Doo is a Stirnerian parable about the stateless, individualist insurrectionist vanquishing decadent, amoral “spooks” squatting on unused land and capital rather than a call for collectivism
Scooby-Doo is a document of a particular point in automotive-mediated postwar culture where a collection of different types might be mobile from setting to setting yet not yet have dispersed into fully post-local subcultures according to their types.
“Programmers are poly” joke that falls apart because that’s not actually what it would mean for someone to implement their dongle in your wife’s software
I love these little gummy packs, I’ll be like “ooh but do I really want one just because?” but like, it’s $5. I was getting down to smoke like ten full percent of a $50 eighth, at 1998 inflation and a 1998 teenager’s budget 25 years ago
Yeah, even though I don’t have flat feet anymore (and setting aside that I’m 40) I could never be a soldier now off the memory jukebox thing, I’d be keeping watch and totally miss the sound of the enemy creeping up on us cause I was hearing it as fucking Mega Man tracks or something
I used to be a gaffer on movie sets in the early nineties and me and my boss would suck each other off after almost every gig. He was so hot but I haven’t felt any attraction to another man since then
Lot of parts around this neighborhood look like parts of my hometown, and I’d gotten used to that, but the other day found a part that looked like I remembered from my time in LA, and that threw me.
(It had been built around the same time, and the house architecture, cinderblock store architecture, early mass-automotive collector streets and the earthmoving capacities for what steepness of slope you could go straight up were all the same)
isn’t it insane though how schizophrenic people are viewed as violent and dangerous by the majority of society when in reality schizophrenic people are nearly 14 times more likely to be on the receiving end of violence than to be the perpetrators…
schizophrenic person: makes a post trying to raise awareness about the disproportionate abuse and harmful stereotypes schizophrenic people face
yall: “yeah im not gonna reblog this they used the word ins*ne which is so problematic ://”
What the fuck happens that changes these stats to such a massive degree?
1) schizophrenia hardly ever causes people to be violent so schizophrenic people aren’t more likely to be violent than anyone else
2) schizophrenic people’s autonomy is often taken away from them because of their schizophrenia. because the authorities and mental healthcare providers often automatically assume schizophrenic people to be violent, they’re more likely to immediately react to schizophrenic people’s symptoms with violence, without even knowing for sure said schizophrenic person was going to be violent. all of this causes schizophrenic people to be more likely of being victims of violence and abuse. schizophrenic people also have a harder time getting out of abusive households because of the risk of their autonomy being taken away. if a schizophrenic person’s relative or partner is abusive, often the schizophrenic person has no way out of the situation, both because our disconnect from reality can result in us being easier to manipulate, and because the system is built in a way that it takes away our autonomy because of our condition.
also schizophrenic people and psychotic people in general, please do a lot of research before picking a provider for your own sake, and if they try to treat your psychosis in a way that you think is harmful then don’t hesitate to switch providers. your safety and wellbeing should be a priority over everything else.
can y'all please reblog this version instead
Also to the extent a guy being schizophrenic is seriously gonna cause a problem for me it’s probably because I encountered him in the kind of place where homeless people live and he’s gonna make a big nonsensical scene, and honestly I imagine the kind of people who make big nonsensical scenes in the kind of places where homeless people live probably get beat up pretty often.
Not a lawyer, but iirc the American interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, a contract is created by ~two elements: a "meeting of the minds" (i.e., mutual understanding about the terms of an agreement) and an "exchange of valuable consideration" (i.e., an agreement is only a contract if it involves swapping things of value). Some quick googling suggests that the stuff I've bundled under "meeting" might be disaggregated but w/e. Paper doesn't matter! Signatures don't count!
right, if paper and signatures were vital to the magic ritual then we wouldn’t be able to use apps for stuff
This is why bullshit unilateral “we agree to do this” contracts and deals will formally be in exchange for $1, to make them legally valid and binding. Scots law, at least, recognizes binding unilateral “promises” without this requirement, I was looking forward to seeing that come up somehow if Scotland became independent.
i bought a fancy ultra light sleeping bag and guys. guys. it is the Most Texture imaginable. it shouldn’t exist. it’s beyond science. i put my hands on it and i start looking for descartes’ demon.
now im not saying that you should go and spend 500 on a thing you won’t use just to touch it. but you should go by your local REI whenever you’re feeling stressed for a little cloud touching time.
Yeah no this is something I appreciated with the silk sheets, going “ohmygod, textiles” feels very primally human in a rewarding way
