kontextmaschine:

You know what my favorite piece of reactionary media is?

Ghostbusters.

Hear me out, I’ve mentioned this before, but forever ago. It’s a movie about a bunch of guys who, in the go-go ’80s, give up on academia to found a startup based on cutting edge technology. They settle in gritty New York City, specifically rehabilitating decaying public safety infrastructure, and their job description is literally “drive around town with the siren on, rehabilitating once-glorious locations by imprisoning vandalous spooks”.

They clean the city up, create jobs for the black and white ethnic working class, but face resistance from pointy-headed bureaucrats. (The dickless EPA guy manages to represent both “overregulation” and “safety-threatening prisoner releases” with admirable efficiency.) Ultimately though, the meddlers have to relent in the face of their success at making the city safe for innocents, as represented by yuppie singles in their 30s.

(Ghostbusters II is about the guys making the city a safe place for those yuppies to raise kids by cleansing cultural institutions of evil influence using the power of American patriotism, while the judiciary and mayor come to accept that whatever the law or political elites might say, busting is both necessary and popular.)

Meanwhile, it’s fucking Ghostbusters.

The ironic thing is that today’s actual New York City values - moneyed, credentialed, cautious and middlebrow - are exactly what people meant by “country club” Republicanism.

scavengedluxury:

William Blake House, Soho. London, July 2015.

Oh man I just had the most ridiculous dream. I was playing a new one of those “LEGO (X)” games. I guess it was “LEGO City” but it was really “LEGO Millennial Life”.

First thing you’d do in a new zone is climb a building to build a cell tower, that’d let you use your smartphone to get tasks.

(Your smartphone was a 1x2 flat graphic tile, also there was a visual joke once where someone’s phone was the old handheld black walkie talkie piece.)

You’d use an app to find dates, who would all turn out crazy in some funny way. You’d get jobs, like, you might have to build a cafe and then work there as a barista.

When you’d completed all the tasks and built all the stuff in a zone it would be fully gentrified and you couldn’t afford the rent so you’d move on to the next one, that was a cute touch.