kontextmaschine:

Something that sticks with me so well I’ve almost certainly posted about it before is once in LA I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard, where they’ve got the walk of fame stars in black terrrazzo with glistening silver inclusions, and I was behind this really stereotypical midwestern tourist family in front of me, puffy overweight with fanny packs, and the dad said to the others “Look, the streets really are paved with broken dreams.”

The actual area there is like big buildings of a ratty but architecturally ambitious 1930s newsie-ass city with one-story retail from when it was the main streetcar corridor of LA since then turned over to tourist trinkets and seedy (with a bunch of old independent motels, it was apparently a major prostitution corridor from the 70s until just before I arrived) low rent stuff

Something that sticks with me so well I’ve almost certainly posted about it before is once in LA I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard, where they’ve got the walk of fame stars in black terrrazzo with glistening silver inclusions, and I was behind this really stereotypical midwestern tourist family in front of me, puffy overweight with fanny packs, and the dad said to the others “Look, the streets really are paved with broken dreams.”

Hey, are shockingly old/young M/F couples doing a Mad Hatter/Alice thing still a feature at every rave?

I will say before I got a cane I didn’t really understand what it was for, the best mental model I had was crutches, like you use them as a substitute for a weak leg on that phase of the stride?

But no, it’s that by tapping them down with every stride you can absorb lateral instability with the forearm instead of letting it build up like a pendulum, standing still you can plant it and rotate the top around in like a foot radius to stabilize on each and every axis, you can hold it to the side and move your arm or rotate your wrist to twist it and shift the system’s center of mass like a tightrope walker’s pole

Oh shit guess what they’re opening next to my local bar? A ballet academy. Reminds me how the original TGI Fridays in Manhattan that pioneered the “fern” singles bar was located just down the block from a stewardesses’ dorm

Been getting random really bad knots in my back muscles I’m not sure how I’d deal with if not for my Liba self-massager

I really endorse this thing.

Just left a bar early cause I was starting to be concerned with how a girl I’d been talking with was taking it and didn’t want to deal with it, that’s the first time that happened

Having to try on and sort my shirts because I’m pretty sure they’ll all fit before I have to do laundry if I wear them in the right order

Didn’t get to the nursery today, but the backyard’s almost trivially ready to photograph and show off, which means somehow it’ll take 3 more days.

When I was a kid like, the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders got referenced sometimes as sex icons, and I was wondering why them specifically when being sex objects was like, the point of cheerleaders, but that reputation must have been from schoolgirl amateurs in the American golden age of high schooling, because apparently the Cowboys had pioneered the “sexy NFL cheerleader” in the 70s

(thinks about the anxiety zeroing) Oh my god, watashi wa itu de mo RILAKKUSU

Alright, the stage of gentrification where there are attractive young women walking the neighborhood streets in summer hitting just in time for the thing where I suddenly become incredibly charismatic and attractive

Cool Tribal Tattoo. Is It From the ’90s?

Just as those seeking tribal tattoos 20 and 30 years ago were drawn to the aesthetics of an exoticized, ancient culture, so too are many of the new, Gen Z tribal fans: specifically, to the years 1997 to 2004, and their curious folkways.

That is the cultural period Aesthetics Wiki defines as “Y2K,” an era that is in the process of being strip-mined by cool internet people under 30 for outfit ideas, design trends and general vibes.

Instagram is building an app for text-based posts.

What?

Just want a throwaway bit where as part of an angry rant some character calls something a “clown show” and a straight man undercuts him by saying “you mean a circus?”

teathattast:

One thing that kind of concerns me about the new personality is it seems to do reasonably complex social manipulation naturally. Like, if I could really move closer to someone’s esteem by committing some trivial violation and then charismatically reconciling over it I’ll do that, but it’s not like I ever considered and planned it out and decided on it, it just did both the transgression and apology parts in realtime automatically as the natural next step, I think I’m only even noticing this because I’m doing after-action review

kontextmaschine:

fireleaptfromhousetohouse:

kontextmaschine:

st-just:

txttletale:

i’m gonna have to disagree with you on this, tbh–i think the fascists who love the empire are ‘getting it’ just fine.

sure, the stuff that comes out about the empire and space marines is clear that they are cruel and violent. but they are cruel and violent and right. but they’re also very very big on the heroism of the space marines, the glorious power of the god-emperor, how real the threat of chaos is. chaos as it exists in warhammer 40k is basically the fantasy of the fascist made reality–a creeping, ever-infiltrating, ontologically evil force that will take root and destroy everything if perfect purity and control are maintained for even a second. like, yes, the empire is very clearly fascist, but they exist in a setting in which fascist propaganda is fundamentally true. fascists are able to see themselves in the empire because empire is, again and again, justified and vindicated by 40k’s writing.

and tbh this was barely better in the early days, as much as people like to cry 'well it was meant to be satire’, but at least the empire used to be also extremely fucking textually useless and incompetent to the point where they were doing more harm than good. but over the years this has entirely given way to the hypercompetent Tough Men Doing What Needs Doing space marine wank that makes up 99% of 40k output nowadays

Honestly I even think ‘a universe where the premises of fascist mythology are true’ isn’t, like, an impossible conceit to do something interesting and worthwhile with. But 'and our protagonists are the literal spartinate unbermensch action heroes’ does kind of close off like 99.99% of them.

The Empire is totalitarian continental Europe as seen from late-20cen Great Britain: the Space Marines, all technologically-advanced ubermenschen stormtroopers but not enough of them, are the Nazis; the Imperial Guard, all masses of tanks and infantry kept in line by ruthless commissars, are the Red Army; and all the rococo gold-filigreed God-Emperor stuff and heresy-hunting are the Catholic Church

> The Empire is totalitarian continental Europe as seen from late-20cen Great Britain

For this reason, while the median Britisher would instinctively prefer the Empire to the race of Gundam-people, the ripoff of Heinlein’s tasteless metaphor for the Chinese, the robot Egyptians, and the worryingly French Eldar, only a clot would mistake that for actually liking them.

I maintain that the truly “British” faction in WH40K is the Orks, understood as a colorful bunch of football casuals going mental

Whose yob’s-eye-view of colonialism is a “gained an empire in a fit of absentmindedness” one where there isn’t a plan, raucous conquest is just their default behavior but sometimes they slam into someone else’s home

When I put both hands at the bottom corners of my stomach and grab handfuls there’s starting to not be enough for my index fingers.

Yeah, okay, this is going into the first summer since I really got my mind back. I dig it.