kontextmaschine:

Can’t help thinking about how the Cold War “peace dividend” was diverted from masculine professions like soldiering and engineering to feminine “helping professions” like teaching and nursing under Clinton and Dubya (NCLB!), and how much of our culture since that explains

And now they’re like wait, you expect me to risk my life in service of existential social function as defined by the elected government that funds me?

kontextmaschine:

America happened because the king made tea and paper expensive and the Important Young Men who spent all day taking stimulants and writing down their Important Thoughts were PISSED

England happened ‘cause some Vikings stole it on a raid

kontextmaschine:

Pleasantville (1998)’s message of “glad white people don’t feel the need to uphold the ‘50s anymore, that was tedious” was a better summation of the 90s than they knew

monkeyfaced-trickster:

non-bunnary:

Is Lupin III technically a fanwork considering it’s a sequel series to the early 20th century French novels?

It’s a bit complicated. During the 60s, at the time of creation, the Arsène Lupin property hadn’t fallen in the public domain yet, but at the same time, Japan’s trade copyright law had a loophole that allowed for the publishing of derivative works of imported fiction within the country. The LeBlanc estate discovered that fact a little too late when Lupin III had already become a hit in Japan, so they let them do their thing as long as the series never made its way out of the country without alterations to remove any reference to Arsène Lupin (hence why Streamline and Manga UK’s dubs in the 90s changed his name to Wolf). This remained the case until the Arsène Lupin property ultimately languished into public domain in the early 2000s.

It’s basically a very rare case of a fan sequel that manages to rival the original’s popularity, and it all happened thanks to a perfect storm of lax copyright laws.

kontextmaschine:

oh if we’re talking about vidya as repository of Japanese self-narratives, everyone realizes that FF6 was (in part) that classic Japanese form of “WWII metaphor, slightly kinked”?*

That royal/roughneck brothers Edgar/Sabin are England/America, captive general Celes is France

Emperor Gestahl is the old imperial Germany, and his usurping mad clown chancellor Kefka is obviously Hitler

Which means samurai Cyan of Doma is a self-pitying Japan. We only got into this cause honest feudal politics but crazy ol’ Kefka went to WMD and now everyone’s dead

The Ghost Train was about postwar Japan dealing with everyone having someone they love be dead

The World of Darkness is obviously about being nuked and ruined

* others: Strike Witches and Gate Keepers. Tag your faves!

kontextmaschine:

alexanderrm:

kontextmaschine:

meanwhile in Japan…

So this is the Japanese equivalent of Pounded by the Pound, pretty much? Our cultures aren’t as different as one might think.

in the sequel the post office girl drops a package into a lake, which becomes a riff on The Honest Woodcutter only it turns out the package was a masturbation sleeve and what’s she going to do with gold and silver ones of those so the goddess gives her a dick to use them with

so yeah, it’s kind of shitpost porn

kontextmaschine:

A funny thing about the 90s is it would tell you allll about how Reefer Madness (1936) was part of this absurd, melodramatic tradition of innocents violating bourgeois norms in pursuit of pleasure and coming to (sexualized, racialized a/o mutilatory) ruin

And then just not at all notice that Kids (1995) and Requiem For a Dream (2000) were playing with this exact tradition for their own ends

kontextmaschine:

multiheaded1793:

memecucker:

you know theres some fanfics especially AUs where by the later part of the story it bears absolutely no resemblance to the original work in any meaningful way well DuckTales is basically that but for A Christmas Carol

reminder once again that the film Birth of a Nation, which inspired the formation of the Second Ku Klux Klan, was an adaptation of a sequel to a gritty AU/Confederate fix-it fic version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was a popular trend at the time

kontextmaschine:

So “Tales from the Crypt” was the respected early ‘50s horror comic from EC that got squashed in the “Seduction of the Innocent” scare

In 1989 HBO used the brand for a horror anthology series, at the same time Sandman was recasting that comics era as deep myth

It was kinda Twilight Zone in its irony but more visceral, with gore and tits. HBO’s premium cable original programming brand was always “with gore and tits”, before SatC they had an aging boomer sitcom called “Dream On” where the conceit was his retro-themed sexual fantasies were shot as part of the plot

argumate:

the Internet of Things is just an attempt to make animism real again by imbuing all the objects around us with wilful trickster spirits that attempt to trap us into misleading bargains and waylay us with petty inconveniences.

kontextmaschine:

thessalies:

revolutionary girl utena + shitpost generator

i am so sorry 

But was that really such a good idea?

like-pancake-deactivated2019101:

instead of online and become worldmind schizophrenic I should embody book culture’s radical individualism by simply, cracking open one of those good ole’ novels

transhumanesque:

was worrying about how sapiosexuals can’t have bimbos but actually it’s okay cause the classic spacy, head-in-the-clouds scientist figure is exactly this

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

Sudden “I wonder if I should go to therapy” thought: now I have made a Tumblr account, and can log in at all, so why not sign up for the troubles of evil.

fishermanofponibooru:

Fair Enough

Hi-res

altonin:

idc for oscar wilde & flowery chintz aestheticism is the exact opposite of my taste, but the worst crime of the thin gays was stealing his legacy for their annoying pseudo renaissance painting photoshoots full of wan british twinks surrounded by shiny fruit, when oscar wilde was 100% the original fatfem

every chosen moment he had was spent, like, eating toasted quail served in a smashed fabergé egg. the only gay men with genuine inheritance to oscar wilde’s aesthetic legacy are fat drama students with enormous floppy hair who stan opera singers from the fifties

kontextmaschine:

Just discovered Barstool’s “Grading the Newest Sex Scandal Teacher” where every few days since like 2009 they put up the hottest photos they can find and a few hundred-word lascivious “review” of female teachers caught fucking their students (they’re pro-)

Barstool actually reminds me of the turn-of-the-19th-century “sporting press”. Focused around sports, with an eye on reports of use to sports bettors, these publications were really a men’s press, circulated through masculine outlets like saloons and barbershops, offering up tittilation and sex industry advertising on the side, playing to a rough tits-n-beer (-n-fisticuffs) single men’s culture. Y’know, punters. The guys on the barstools.

Some vestiges remained in America - racing forms, Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue, the way “alt-weekly” urban tabloid newspapers took a gritty tone and sustained themselves on prostitution ads. But Europe’s stronger sports betting and prostitution culture (arguably both downstream from a stronger urban working class culture absent the US’s midcentury “mass middle class” suburbanization) and national publication markets means the tradition carried on more intact.

And now we’ve got the internet, and a return to the cities, and moves to open up sports betting, and a new sex work culture and a growing men’s culture that doesn’t even aim at bourgeois respectability (both downstream from the end of the mass middle class) so no surprise Barstool’s a thing RN

kontextmaschine:

Well, that last post is showing up with huge chunks missing or duplicated or in different order in different views and reblog chains because tumblr can’t handle cross-platform reblogs, so let’s do it alone here.

First off there are too coal mining majors, they’re things like “Mining Technology” and “Mineral Engineering”, you find them in Tech and A&M schools and community colleges in mining areas. Like the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology.

Second off, I’m not sure if OP’s point is “Imagine a college for prostitutes, that’s hot” or “Imagine not realizing how many college girls today are experiencing their college years as an intro to sex work already, that’s naive”, I could see it either way.

But like the idea of post-secondary education to make women more appealing semi-mercenary mates… that’s a real thing! That’s finishing/charm school! (Which was about social mobility, landing a higher-ranking man, either in the sense of comfortable bourgeois or literal European nobility)

Not as transparently and been professionalized since then but that’s part of what secretarial/stewardess/nursing school was about at midcentury.

The “Mrs. degree”, college as a place to become a bougie wife. Cornell has a college, “Human Ecology”, that used to be “Home Ec” and still has majors in cooking, sewing, childraising, and interior decoration (plus a pre-law/business track as a backdoor for Long Island boys to get an Ivy degree and become donors)

Like, in the 20th century the mainline Protestant churches tried to deal with the romantic drift of “spouse as soulmate” from “spouse as partner in household as institution” by introducing mandatory classes in their colleges to teach the students how to fuck each other better.

kontextmaschine:

Like, in the 20th century the mainline Protestant churches tried to deal with the romantic drift of “spouse as soulmate” from “spouse as partner in household as institution” by introducing mandatory classes in their colleges to teach the students how to fuck each other better.

Oh and you know what I just remembered? Marriage manuals.

Which I think even still existed in the 1980s as a degenerate genre of erotica, but early in the 20th century, that was a serious earnest concern of mainstream bourgeois WASP culture in say the 1920s-30s, that young people get on birth control and be good at sex.

There was a concern that marriage was under threat from Romantic ideals, and people were neglecting spouses in favor of lovers, and that this had to do with Christians being sexually repressed and unpracticed and being totally incompetent at getting each other off

(especially with America’s rural homestead culture leaving people so isolated without partners to practice on. Except relatives and barnyard animals, which is absolutely a thing in isolated rural cultures!)

Like in the immediate postwar when the whole “going steady” teenage culture came up, journals of upper-middlebrow tradition were seriously fretting that teenagers were getting too sexually exclusive too soon, and that this boded poorly for the formation of their mature character. And when you think of the divorce wave of the 60s-70s, well…?

(really, a lot of postwar teenage culture was about how the car changed rural life by giving kids the range and mobility to find each other to fuck)

Mind you this was going on while the churches were still in their great missionary boom. In fact, it was kind of related. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, 1928. A lot of period linguistics, anthropology, archaeology was handmaiden to Protestant missionary evangelism, and the churches invested heavily in them. (The rest was a handmaiden to European nationalisms.)

And half a century before Club Med, before the hippie ‘60s, the mainline Protestant churches sent the cream of their young elite off to spend a few years living with tropical islanders and other brown people and one of the bigger things they brought back was “Oh yeah, they’re a lot less uptight about sex, premarital, extramarital, teenage casual, it’s all good. We should try that.”

American culture works by weird paths

argumate:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

argumate:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

birdblogwhichisforbirds:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

I’m not sure if the reason I feel unsettled about the American Dream is that it seems too dark, or that it seems too ominous, or that it seems too “forward”.  Either that.  I’ve had bad and good nights.  I don’t feel quite that certain anymore, but I feel unsettled.  And I want to believe that I can do something better, that I can make this work.  I want to believe that I’m better than what I’m feeling.  I want to believe that I’m not the sort of guy I used to be.

I’m stuck in a house that’s on fire.  I don’t know how long it’ll last.  I’m tired and I’m hungry and I’m cold.  I can barely see anything.  The fire is coming out of the vents.  The girl who lived here with me is dead.  Her name was Mary.  I don’t know why I’m alive.  I’m going to die.  I’m going to die.  I’m going to die.  Stop the fire!  I can’t do it.  I can’t stop it.  I can’t stop it.  I can’t stop it.  It’s coming out of the vents.  I can’t stop it.

holy shit frank call 911

Thanks.  I keep having this experience where when I see things that I should be able to understand, but are not quite right in some way, I instead become convinced that they are wrong and that I’m in a bad place in which to live.

if this is the American Dream I’d hate to see the American Nightmare

Hearing the Dream is about the horrible things you’re capable of doing to someone when you treat them badly.  The Nightmare is that you can’t even notice the difference.  The Dream is a good story that you want to live in because it sounds good and you want to live in it because you’re not very good at reading people.  The Nightmare is very bad at not noticing the difference.

thanks! once again I’m terrified