kontextmaschine:

meanwhilebackinthedungeon:

– Fedor Bronnikov ..+-+.. Consecration –

Okay here’s how I read this picture: homeboy in bright white is the guy who commissioned this thing, as part of his “oh shit I’m old and mortal better tend to my legacy” thing. He gets to do the ceremonial duties, pouring out oil for his dead homies, dudes actually pushing it up are his servants.

At the stump in red with the sacrificial lamb is homeboy’s eldest son, the surrounding figures are his family, blondie at the stump in pink is a younger son.

And look at what’s stiffly vertical in this composition, that’s interesting. The herm isn’t. The herm’s whole purpose is to be vertical as a sacred object, but it’s like “oh nope, just a human creation being humped around by some sweaty dudes”. You can see the rough foundation that’d normally be buried underground.

Dude with the spade - the spade’s vertical which is correct because the spade represents the artifice and the work here and the work is what is true. Dude’s leg is only slightly off and he kind of gets a pass as being the close-enough respectability of labor.

Homeboy in white - straight up. Look at his face, look at the sculptured herm. That’s the dude. This is his legacy - he’s old now and thinking about eternity and transcendence. He is taking this seriously, he’s fucking loving this.

In the background, the tower of the compound on the hill - oh hi there, hazed out, you’re the even more impressive site of human creation we’re only recreating in miniature. Herms along the path and in the woods, that one that gets red at the base almost halfway to modeling the trees, the trees that shoot up higher and spindlier reminding you that the human creations are only inferior imitations of natural form.

Grandson with the fruit bowl, young enough to take his role in this seriously.

(The donkey’s standing up straight, doing his job, but looks sarcastic. I think that’s the point of donkeys.)

And look who’s not standing up straight.

Red son at the stump is frustrated, cheek in his palm waiting for this to be over. (You saw statue face and white homeboy’s face? Look at red dude’s face, you see the resemblance. Balding. Unfortunate.)

He’s old enough to realize this is theatrics, but not old enough to be the honored elder. Dad’s having fun spending his inheritance on a roadside dick statue. Awesome. He’s there because he’s obligated.

(Pink bro, what the hell. He says nothing to me.)

Granddaughter in pink is straight-ish, but not ramrod like the two males in the center. Slumped shoulders, garland hanging by her side she’s just putting up with this. Teenage girls were the same in 1874, when this painting was made, the same in whenever the hell it was set.

Naked babe taking the proceedings in uncomprehendingly, wife in blue kneeling propping the babe up, inducting him into the ritual.

The laborers of course literally wearing rags, all too busy exerting themselves to be either solemn or resentful and… IS STRIPEYSHORTS MCMUSTACHE EYEING UP GRANDDAUGHTER?

I THINK HE IS

holy shit

This is an amazing tableau on the subject of religion: an honorably ridiculous process by which old men fool young boys into taking them seriously.

gayasscommie:

gayasscommie:

gayasscommie:

gayasscommie:

gayasscommie:

When you think about it the 30 years war was about whether we could vore Jesus

(youth pastor voice) when you think about it the 30 years war was about whether we could vore Jesus

(youth pastor voice) now I know ya kids and ya krinks nowadays I’m hip I’m cool, to the krinks, and I want you to think, in Protestantism and Protestantism only, can we vore both Jesus’ blood, and his body,

(youth pastor voice) ya know what gets me “horngry”? The thought of voring Jesus'blood, and his body, with my thrussy

(me, the person next to you on a transatlantic flight voice) hey you ever think about how transubstantiation is just vore? Like it’s a religious practice that goes back centuries but it’s straight up a kink now how fucked is that

skelenabones:

actually reading religious texts before you practice a religion is both impractical and ahistorical imo, why worry about it

kontextmaschine:

HOT TAKE: by modeling self-denial as a virtue that builds capital over generations, reincarnitory Buddhism is the most bourgeois religion

kontextmaschine:

I was kicked out of three preschools, asked not to come back to a diocesan school after kindergarden, asked not to come back to that same diocesan school’s CCD program after First Communion but before Confirmation.

My favorite story (actually not even, but it is a good story) is from the second preschool, a nominally Presbyterian one (my mother’s nominal sect), located dug into the side of a steepish hill under the church itself. Some nice maybe 23-year-old girl was in charge of all of us, trying to herd us inside this long hall and said “now stay here, ‘cause in the middle of this hall there’s an invisible force field that’ll zap you if you cross it”.

And I immediately thought

1) I’ve never heard of such a thing

2) I suppose it’s possible but

3) If such a thing existed this would not be the first place I encountered it.

So I took off booking down the hall. She didn’t chase me, ‘cause she needed to keep all the other kids in check I suppose. I passed the halfway point, got to the other end, and yelled back at the other kids,

“SHE’S LYING TO YOU!”

pengosolvent:

this one’s a few days late due to having a lot of doctors appointments sorry
it’s  just 9 pages, and about some rats… it’s more symbolic than anything really

(it’s completely unrelated to any of my songs that have to do with “puzzleboy”)

Patreon: www.patreon.com/PengoSolvent

argumate:

kontextmaschine:

The now-ubiquitous vidya “explosions ragdoll toss you” trope is a better reflection of cinema stuntwork than of real life, where explosions dismember you and ragdoll toss your components

it bugs me on a visceral level to know that my viscera is essentially a series of weak bags full of water waiting to be dispersed over a wide area by the slightest bit of overpressure.

kontextmaschine:

Empty Realm

This is an interesting article presenting the (rightist-marked) “NPC” meme as the natural heir to the Frankfurt School critical theory critique of mass culture as a dehumanizing force of control

One more point in favor of “current dynamics are not aberrant but rather return to the norm after the aberrant postwar Golden Age” – go back before WWII and America was ABSOLUTELY a country of overcrowded cities full of hobo jungles and pompous elites and henpecking scolds and hordes of ethnicized poor and nervous young college graduates scrambling to hold on and taking their nervous energy out on sex with a demimonde of lipstick and dresses and testicles and dicks, all surrounded by a sea of rural tedium and despair.

So maybe all that was just a Boomer bubble. One that started before The Sixties, though. The postwar right realized that kinda society was a breeding ground of communism though and the first step was throwing off the Popular Front culture.

“Stifling mass culture of the 50s” gets coded right these days, but remember that Ayn Rand (who’d lived through a national culture going commie and stifling before) had big counterculture (yes!) hits in the 40s and 50s with books where a pompous, clucking clique of “progressive” mediocrities dripping syrupy moralism dominated popular media and used it to suppress the liberatory potential of superior individuals and their ideas.

The scene in Atlas Shrugged where the protagonists blow up a bridge and send a trainful of them plunging to their firey comeuppance was the Day of the Rope of its day; in reality the payoff was the McCarthyite Second Red Scare cleansing them from positions of cultural influence, clearing the way for the Counterculture

Which rose, struggled, got overconfident, got knocked back, but returned in the 90s to devour Square Culture for once and all, and dissipated as people no longer realized it needed investment in maintaining

Or were devoured by, “selling out” was really a much higher-profile concept before say 2005. Why’s Gavin McInnes scrambling to build an apparatus of cultural influence? He already built one, with VICE! And sold it out. (For like a billion dollars split a few ways, and it’s not like “magazine from 2008 with a website and publishing arm and events w/ party photographers” is a powerful form rn)

Also, recent revelations are implying that many major figures stopped pushing boundaries in public too hard in return for a lifetime supply of 19±5 year olds soooo

But ANYWAY, does show that the theoretical energy is more on the upstart right these days. Maybe that’s ‘cause theory is what you do out of power – at the same time last decade’s efflorescence of left theory, Jacobin to n+1 to Rhizzome, is being increasingly discarded by a renascent left infatuated with its own dynamic action.

paxamericana:

can’t wait for the mueller report

kontextmaschine:

One of the things I really liked about L.A. Noire was its exploration of the mostly overlooked period of the late-40s, and how that set the stage for the more familiar 50s-60s-70s cycle that followed. That America as a country was at the top of the world but the experience of living through the Roaring 20s-Great Depression/Dust Bowl-mobilization and participation in the last Napoleonic total war* cycle left individual Americans immensely traumatized on a personal level, and that if the domestic consumerist fantasia of the Atomic Age ’50s was just escapism, well it was at least viable escapism, and Americans had some serious shit to escape.

* Napoleonic in the sense of being ultimately decided by huge massed formations of ground troops. The Korean War was really the last Napoleonic war albeit not total, and it was so “forgotten” largely because no one really knew how to conceptualize a Napoleonic war that didn’t ultimately resolve with a clear hegemony-producing victory for one side and collapse and liquidation of the other.

kontextmaschine:

@wirehead-wannabe said What’s the deal with L.A. then?

LA has no natural harbor, it started out as an inland nowheresville, founded as a feudal agricultural settlement by the seasonal Los Angeles River feeding the San Fernando Mission at the northern mouth of the valley. San Diego was the major city of the region.

Eventually it came time to build a southern transcontinental (“Southern Pacific”) railroad route, with San Diego as the obvious western terminus but San Francisco had issues.

San Francisco, swollen by the Gold Rush, terminus of the first transcontinental route, was the dominant power in California and didn’t want a rival, pulled enough strings to redirect to LA.

LA built an artificial breakwater and a port down by San Pedro several miles south of the city, before that they used absurdly long-ass piers off the western coast around Malibu and Santa Monica.

Then narratively unrelated to any of this there was oil discovered in the hills, which generated capital and drew Eastern money, Pasadena became the west coast WASP capital, or at least Palm Beach-equivalent. LA became self-sustaining.

Then the movie industry moved there for the weather and distance from Thomas Edison’s IP-enforcing goons

Then during WWI the aircraft industry got big because there was infrastructure and a population of workers in coastal shipping range of the NorCal/Oregon lumber industry, but WITHOUT SF/Seattle-style labor radical tendencies

Then during WWII that got even bigger and the US realized it needed to build up its Pacific (Japan- and Russia-facing) coast, which was honestly still frontier at that point

And the rest is history

kontextmaschine:

The idea of the Bible having chapters only dates to the 1200s and verses only date to the 1500s

In fairness having punctuation or spaces between words was also an after-the-fact innovation, as was the Old Testament having vowels

nostalgebraist:

raggedjackscarlet:

Hold on tight, folks. We’re going full post-structuralist.

So. I’ve been thinking about the discussions that @nostalgebraist and @cyborgbutterflies​ have been having about Undertale fairly recently.

And I think I’ve hit upon a Doylist explanation for why Undertale is so morally bizarre:

All the characters in Undertale have no canonical existence, they have all been preemptively rewritten as the characters that fandom would have turned them into.

Undertale as it exists now, is like the fanon version of a game that never existed.

Let’s call this hypothetical game-that-never-was “Undertale Prime”.

In Undertale Prime, Papyrus is pretty much an exact duplicate of Skeletor: an evil mastermind whose plans never come to fruition. Constantly frustrated, taking out his anger on his minions in the most hilariously melodramatic ways.

In Undertale Prime, Undyne is a deadly serious super-soldier. Even a bit of a sadist. She is acquainted with Alphys, but there’s no romance between them.

In Undertale Prime, Mettaton has no Mettaton EX form. He remains a rectangular robot for the entire game, but his personality shows small signs of the sass and flamboyance of Mettaton EX.

In Undertale Prime, Alphys is a tetchy mad scientist, more like Cumberbatch’s Sherlock than anything else. Prickly on the surface, lonely underneath. There’s no mention of anime or internet arguments or anything like that.

In Undertale Prime, Asgore is stern and serious, and completely in charge, but tormented by the necessary evils he has committed to protect his kingdom. Like a more sympathetic version of a king from a Shakespearean tragedy.

And finally, in Undertale Prime, all bosses are killed without remorse or punishment.

We’ve seen these character archetypes before, and we can guess how a typical fandom would reinterpret these archetypes:

the Thwarted Mastermind becomes a Bumbling Narcissist.

the Deadly Soldier becomes a Hot-Blooded Blockhead.

the Mad Scientist becomes an Adorable Nerd.

The Geometric Robot becomes a Svelte Bishonen.(look at Bill Cipher fanart)

The Tormented King becomes Sad Dad.

(and the most sympathetic/admirable women become lesbians)

But most importantly, all these villains would become sympathetic.

They’d become comedy relief, or even woobies.

Undertale takes the most probable fanon reinterpretations of Undertale Prime, and makes them canon. Why are the villains actions treated so cavalierly? Because typical fandom wouldn’t care. Typical fandom forgives villains, typical fandom makes villains cute.

But the discrepancy is this: in Undertale, the characters’ actions all remain the same as they would be in the dark and serious story of Undertale Prime. They play the same role in the plot, they are still Villains. The only things that change are their personalities, and the manner in which they are presented to the audience.

The result is that Undertale Prime makes moral sense, but Undertale does not.

It’s as if the Avengers canonically considered Bucky Barnes a family friend and acted as if the events of The Winter Soldier had never happened, as fandom wishes it were– But Bucky was still a terrorist.

It’s as if the characters in Borderlands 2 saw Handsome Jack as charming comic relief, the way the audience does– but Handsome Jack was still a murderous psychopath.

It’s as if, in Kingdom Hearts 2, Organization XIII were portrayed as the bickering sitcom family that the KH fandom made them into– but they were still trying to kill Sora and friends.

Every playthrough of the Kingdom Hearts franchise involves killing every member of Organization XIII.

But I guarantee you every Kingdom Hearts fan has their favorite Organization member.

None of the characters in Undertale are “held responsible” for attacking Frisk, because a game audience typically does not hold boss characters responsible for attacking the player. Instead, the audience sees them, through a Doylist/Mechanics-oriented lens, as a welcome addition to the game: a challenging battle and an entertaining character.

Undertale takes the player’s expected affectionate attitude towards bosses, and makes it the “objectively morally right” choice, according to the game’s in-world metaphysics.

Undertale is not just a game that preaches pathological altruism, it is, in itself, a pathologically altruistic text– a text that privileges the interpretation it expects to be subjected to over its own internal structure and logic, and preemptively changes itself to make those expected interpretations into objective truth, even when those changes create plotholes and morally repugnant implications.

A game, suffering to make itself everything the world expects it to be, about a child who suffers to make itself everything the world expects it to be.

oh my god

I am never going to be able to un-see this.

kontextmaschine:

The Simpsons debuted closer to the JFK assassination than today

kontextmaschine:

So if I told you someone was using century-old hand-crafted artisanal methods to adapt traditional folk tales into a quaintly obsolete art form from the American Golden Age that would sound like the most twee, precious, non-normie thing ever and I just described Disney animation.

Disney’s pretty weird like that. Like, take the parks. They’re combinations of Coney Island and World’s Fairs with this undisguisable midcentury earnestness. These are places that get seriously psyched about the potential of novel transit modalities.

And the theming - “Let’s look forward to the wonderful future of space exploration, celebrate our roots in farm towns and the frontier west, AND enjoy the exotic charm of the South Pacific and Old Dixie!”

THERE IS A PAGEANT WHERE ROBOTS PAY TRIBUTE TO EXECUTIVE-DRIVEN WHIG HISTORY.

Oh. Oh. And. “The rides aren’t very thrilling, but your kids will love the chance to explore the worlds of all their favorite authors - A.A. Milne, J.M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, Mark Twain, AND Lewis Carroll - while you’ll marvel at the exquisite background design.”

(Sun-dappled Edwardian neoteny and obsessive set decoration. Wes Anderson makes movies like Walt Disney made parks.)

And we’d recognize this all as a weird thing to exist in 2015 if we weren’t just used to it as the background noise of America. Like, I don’t really watch TV so I don’t see commercials much these days.

Oh man, they’re a trip in their own right if you’ve stopped taking them for granted. Like, “oh hey, for the next 30 seconds some of our best artists are going to use all their techniques and leverage all your emotions and desires and every social value in a masterful, unapologetic, and unforgettable bid for you to give us money, and then everyone will move on and no one will acknowledge this even happened.”

But the Disney World commercials in particular - you notice they don’t really make a case for going to Disney World, or even really explain what Disney World is. Because they’re not pitching Disney World, they’re reminding you of Disney World. It’s not “hey, Disney World is a thing you could go to”, it’s “hey, maybe it’s time for this generation’s pilgrimage”.

Disney’s weird. It’s kind of a company, but also custodian of some of the cultic functions of American culture, something like the priestly colleges of ancient Rome.

Like, they maintain sites of pilgrimage. I’m not saying that as a joke. Back of the envelope calculation, Americans go to Disney parks at a rate 7 times higher than Muslims go to Mecca. (The line between “tourist trap” and “religious site” has always been thin.)

And they’re custodians of the national narrative. Like I’ve said, they pitch “continuity with midcentury small town and earlier frontier culture” as a fundamental, almost taken-for-granted aspect of Americanness with a confidence and charm you don’t often see these days. And I mean, hell, the Disney animated canon itself basically is to America what Grimm’s was to Germany.

And as custodians, they curate that narrative - like, we joke about “you know your identity group’s made it in America when you get your own Disney princess”, and laugh at the people reediting Disney character designs to look like their specific subgroup, but that only works because it’s fucking true, your identity group’s made it in America when you get your own Disney princess. I’ve worked with Disney Channel casting, and they mix ethnicities with the same care, precision, and scale that Pfizer mixes drugs.

And that robot pageant, the Hall of Presidents? Look at this history. It started out in the ‘70s as a celebration of consensus history and popular triumph, with character actors playing great men and Civil War tensions understood as a challenge to national unity. In 1993 it was reworked by Eric Foner to be narrated by Maya Angelou, use “regular people” unknowns to portray more vulnerable takes on historic figures and re-frame the Civil War in terms of slavery as a moral challenge. In 2009 they redid it again, mostly keeping the changes but bringing back some of the old Hollywood charm and putting Morgan Freeman as the voice of civic authority.

And like, as a representation of how America understands itself and its history, correct. That is absolutely, in every way, 100% correct.

(In the other direction, Walt Disney originally wanted to call it “One Nation Under God”, which yikes)

They say American copyright terms keep getting extended under pressure from Disney who wants to keep hold of all their founding properties, I almost wonder if it wouldn’t be less of a corruption of the civic system to just carve out special protections for Disney in recognition of their distinct role in America.

But… at the end of the day, it’s all just a strategy to maximize profits.

I used to be a lot more libertarian than I am now, and one of their tribal boogiemen, the idea of a “Ministry of Culture” - a government that sees the national culture as its domain, to shape as it will, “as it will” meaning as it always does with governments “through the instrument of bureaucracy” - that still rankles.

But what’s the alternative, though? You think about it and you realize it’s this - the national mythos rests in the hands of a publicly traded corporation.

(And then you maybe start to appreciate WHY having your king as the head of your church once made sense as a symbol of liberty and self-determination.)

((And start to recall the CIA going around giving grants to the avant-garde with a certain fondness.))

We live in the capitalpunk AU.

kontextmaschine:

So someone was asking me for more Hollywood stories recently.

This one’s inspired by the recent case of a black woman in the audience at a Trump rally who realized she was being seated behind the candidate for the purpose of appearing in frame on broadcasts and, insulted, tried to ruin the shot by determinedly reading a book.

Anyway the story goes that in LA I knew one guy who worked in production on a bunch of game shows. When I knew him he was working the debut run of National Bingo Night.

Anyway, the centerpiece of the set was a super-sized bingo cage and balls that would serve for the drawings that drive the action. Like most game shows, the provision of prize monies - and thus the bearing of risk - was bid out to a bond company, and two bond company stooges on set were the only ones allowed to touch the balls, to guard against tampering.

The problem was that when the cage gadget was introduced, it malfunctioned constantly and would spew these giant man-sized balls all over the set, and then the entire crew would lean back and laugh while these two 20-something goons in suits scrambled around trying to manhandle them back one by one.

ANYWAY, that’s not really what I came here to talk about, the bit that hangs off that news hook is a more general truth about game shows, or any show with an on-camera audience, and that is that those audiences are all rigorously filtered and selected for aesthetics’ sake. The very first step in audience processing is to be paraded before production assistants, who make ruthless snap judgements on who’s telegenically attractive enough to be sorted into the “Pretty Audience”, to be seated in sections that cameras sweep for audience shots, and who’s relegated to the “Ugly Audience” that doesn’t appear in frame.

If you come in a group of friends, they won’t hesitate or apologize to split you up by attractiveness, because after all this whole process isn’t something they’re doing for you, it’s something you’re doing for them.

kontextmaschine:

infraredarmy:

mapsontheweb:

Mascots of police commands in Poland by voivedoship.

this is the perfect example of how the cops, who are inherently violent and threatening, try to make themselves seem cute and harmless so people will give them more power and not call them out when they murder people. it’s propaganda, and pure evil. anyway tag yourself i’m mis; they’re really cute

Oh there’s something. You kids might not know that the Reagan law-n-order “tough on crime” ‘80s had an animated furry mascot, “McGruff the Crime Dog”

wearing a trenchcoat to represent “detective”, which is one of the things a trenchcoat represented in those days, the other being “flasher”, a man who would suddenly throw it open to show his naked body cause surprise! he’s an exhibitionist and the cities aren’t policed and even caught criminals aren’t punished anymore

oh he had a real ‘80s mascot catchphrase though, “Take A Bite Out Of Crime” (bcuz no one could save this whole ruined world by themselves)

ethnianmandarin:

kontextmaschine:

As this weird in-between residue of an attempt to erect and enforce a Air Force/Army binary, “attack helicopter” is one of the queerer things an American could identify as tbh

Amborompotsy, Shaka. “The Marine Corps: the Third Sex of Classical America?” African Analyses of Baseline Man vol. 3885, no. 92, 2433, pp. 199-203.

jerryterry:

Did you know that M83’s Midnight City and Smash Mouth’s All Star have a tempo difference of only 1 BPM?