in the next decade we are going to be seeing so many movies where characters have arcs about wanting to be accepted that are stretched out to vaguely resemble a metaphor about being trans with really no other narrative commitment to the concept. and all of them will read to me like this image.
Los Angeles uses its influence in media to make people into thinking it’s a city where everyone is a fit and attractive upper middle class person that’s super hot while New York uses its influence on media to make sure everyone hates New Jersey as much as they do
There are many canards about that generation, but the most persistent is that the boomers were central to the social and cultural events of the nineteen-sixties. Apart from being alive, baby boomers had almost nothing to do with the nineteen-sixties.
A much larger number of young Americans went to Vietnam than dropped out.
You know, this is a really good point: the median young American involved in an organized effort to end the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s was a soldier and his organization was the Army.
Youth culture is manufactured by people who are no longer young. When you are actually a young person, you can only consume what’s out there. It often becomes “your culture,” but not because you made it.
Some people name their child after themselves, and some people say they think of their pets as their children, but rarely do you see a pet owner name their pet after themself. “Hi, I’m Dave, and this is my dog, Dave” – you just don’t see that a lot.
tumblr’s obsession with brainwash aesthetics when communicating political information (repeating a one-line fact about 20 times as your only contribution to a post, “say it with me now,” etc) is one of those odd little things I try not to think too much about because it’ll make me insane if i think about it too hard
there is a spectrum specifically for actors that used to be wrestlers and one end of the spectrum is dwayne johnson who’s like, a pretty competent actor, but like he really only has the one performance he can do and that performance is just The Rock. but that’s okay because you don’t hire the rock to Not have him just be the rock in your movie. the other end of the spectrum is bautista, who is like actually shockingly good as an actor and seemingly has a genuine love and interest in the craft and is actively working to expand his range and see what he can do. somewhere in the spectrum in some unidentified quadrant is vin diesel who has never been a wrestler but just seems so much like a guy who would be a washed up meathead wrestler turned washed up meathead actor that it’s impossible to shake but also impossible to pin down. an enigma
“This indictment is obviously an attempt by the Democrats to use against
me the complex webs of power relations that influence the nature of
rights and consequences in a given society and that we conceptualize as a
legal system,” Trump said before quoting verbatim a passage from
political philosopher Michel Foucault that reads, “The judges of
normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the
teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the
‘social-worker’-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the
normative is based.”
the NSA or whichever agency has collected all of our private texts and emails and phone calls has way more data than they could ever productively use, at least until some bright spark trains a language model on it and then accidentally leaks that model to the public internet, raising absolute havoc
if 9/11 happened today someone would post “my plane just got hijacked lol” and it would be doing numbers on tiktok before the first plane even hit the tower
Don’t get me wrong, WW2 was a tragedy. But we have gotten some truly epic games and movies out of it, and for that I will always salute my fallen brothers.
