kontextmaschine:

Your Granddad On The Internet

I’ve been thinking, as I always am, about the 90s and how we got here from there

And one thing I thought about was the figure we used to have of Your Granddad On The Internet - who would include you and all your brothers and sisters and parents on long e-mail FWD: chains about things that were transparently false on their face, frequently conservative-themed, frequently in ALL CAPS

Because apparently such a critical mass of people on the internet had that exact experience with their exact grandfather that it was a trope. Which brings up two points:

1) “People circulating viral conservative misinformation to their family and friends on the internet” is not a phenomenon of social media, it was there well before

2) Though these people were on the internet, ubiquitous on the internet even, they weren’t of the internet. Little or none of it was made for them and there was a hegemonic Internet Culture that recognized them as outside it.

So what was really going on? Well, let’s try to define the issue by subtraction.

It wasn’t just that he was a granddad - there were STEM professor wizards who’d been on USENET since the early ‘80s, or grey ponytail hippies from The WELL or whatever, and not only were they part of The True Internet, they were its founders.

It wasn’t just that he was out of it, on a tech or social level. Maybe your dad was wasting your inheritance chasing his brilliant day trading hunches, maybe your mom was going on Focus on the Family forums to complain about TV shows treating homosexuality as just another way to live. Probably they were both Eternal September AOLers who would ask you troubleshooting questions revealing an astounding ignorance of how computers work and somehow expect a useful answer that respected that absurd model.

But if they weren’t part of The True Internet they weren’t really rogues against it, at some level they got how you were supposed to interact with the internet - you found the site or community that corresponded to your interest and pursued it there. If anything their posts and e-mails too formally followed letter-writing structure, and they may have made dumb or tautological arguments in support of their points but they had the sense they were supposed to make arguments.

It wasn’t just that he was obnoxious - the notion of the “troll” dates to USENET at least, as someone who says things to get a rise out of people, or to bait them into wasting time rebutting something. To “own” them, basically. And annoying or not, this was accepted as part of what the Internet is, one of the signal features of its culture, really. But even when you weren’t sure if Your Granddad On The Internet actually believed something he sent you or just passed it on to signal what side he was on and how fiercely, he wasn’t trying to “own” you, he REALLY WAS on that side, he wanted you to associate him with that position, and ideally join him.

It was probably at least in part being retired and having spare time and no other social outlet, back in the day going online meant going to a specific piece of furniture in a specific room of your home when no one else was using the computer and spending maybe 3 minutes just getting online, it was something you blocked off time to do. The young generation could just come home from school to the cul-de-sac and get online for lack of anything else to do, the parents’ generation was too busy to have enough uninterrupted time to become Extremely Online?

The thing I’m really wondering about is class. What was the cost of being Online back then? Say a new computer and modem every 4 years at around $2400 (Grandpa sure wasn’t building his own, but then he didn’t have to keep upgrading video cards either), $40 for an ISP, ideally $10 for another phone line? That’s $100/month, or alternately $50/mo and the ability to make $2.5k purchases on demand. And the kind of senior citizen who, in 1998, lived separately from his children, could swing this, would think to swing this, has multiple agemate peers and children’s households who did swing this, was a particular group. “Middle-middle” class AT LEAST and probably higher, probably went to college back when only 10% of people did.

BUT that doesn’t make sense. My theory is that this used to be a more marginal behavior on the internet, but if it’s gotten more common since the late ‘90s I don’t think it’s because the Internet has grown more full of wealthy old patriarchs since.

So instead how about this theory: the internet in general was pretty wealth-marked in 1998 (far more than we realized, with our American mythology of universal white suburban middle-classness and “global village” Internet mythology) BUT, of people who were more wealthy in 1998, the most likely to NOT have internalized upper-class practices were the grandfathers from the “Silent” or “Greatest” generations before the postwar “mass middle class”. Our parents were beavery professionals who settled into the suburban cocoon, we knew we were destined for glory (or at least selective colleges) from birth, but THEY were socialized into some pool hall, street gang, farmhand, enlisted man kinda culture where boldness of assertion counted more than patient derivation from shared principles.

And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like this now maybe it’s cause it’s less of a professional-class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones where “people on the internet” went from “people who specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury” to “people with telephone service”? That’s a real possibility, that for all the “Global Village” stuff the wondrous effect of the ‘90s internet was to create a cultural space that was MORE gatekept by wealth and education.

That’s… kind of depressing, though. “Haha you thought the world was getting better because you were eliminating elitist barriers but actually it’s cause you were making them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to the extent they’re on top of things the thing they’re on top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early adopter base and you’ll never ever get them back unless you make the non-elite economically and politically irrelevant.”

Depressing but very well precedented, that’s exactly the arc newsprint, radio, and TV followed before.

kontextmaschine:

FF7r continues to be brilliant

Like, the first game is apparently up through Midgar, expanded to fit and I can’t tell what’s new or just newly done well enough to matter, but it is just full of themes of parents and children and comrades and just the spirit of loss hanging over everything

Aerith in particular is amazing, a new type that later scholars will connect to the MPDG and the yandere, and she’s vocally aware that she’s an impermanent thing and her time is limited

The collapse of the Sector 7 plate is set up as a foreshadowing parallel - if you have previous exposure you know what’s happening, it’s loss and failure, with the built-up Cloud/Jesse ship as a loss, but at this point there’s been just enough divergence from the “real“ timeline you wonder until the end whether it’ll really happen

This time though Wedge survives (meanwhile obviously, in the original this sequence did not expect players to appreciate Aerith’s later fate)

The remake is aware the payload of FF7 is the Cloud/Tifa/Aerith triangle, it’s striking how marginal even Sephiroth is

So as it reaches a peak, this installment is whispering in your ear

Hey Aerith’s so great, she’s really a dream girl, but she’s telling you not to fall in love with her because her time is limited, it’s 2020, you know we’re going to kill her…

…right?

And oh my God, that’s the obvious-in-retrospect angle a compelling multi-game FF7 remake would have to take, and it’s brilliant

kontextmaschine:

Something maybe not obvious to casual players is that these outlane posts (Godzilla pictured here) can be set by the operator to 1 of 3 positions (or omitted entirely) which effectively sets how wide the opening is and thus how often balls bounced in that general direction go in and drain

kontextmaschine:

Also I knew a girl who told me this story that she went clubbing with her cousin once, and at the end of the night the cousin was like “let’s go to Jack’s place”

So they went up into the hills, got buzzed in at a gate, there are other girls there and obviously they and the cousin are used to this, walk in to a kitchen with the glasses and the ice and the gin and the tonic and the cut limes laid out, and prepare their drinks, and head out to the hot tub - and if this wasn’t the exact hot tub Polanski banged that girl in, it would be its successor - and there, of course, is Jack Nicholson.

And the girls take off their clothes and get in, and so does she, and then suddenly all the girls started making out with each other, and Jack turned to her and said

“You know, I’ve had sisters, but I’ve never had cousins.”

She was really freaked out and got out of there.

She told this story five or six times one night shortly after, and each time afterwards she was left looking at the listener, waiting for commiseration, and they blinked at her, uncomprehending, and said “wait, you turned down sex with Jack Nicholson?”

I was one of them, and I’d do it again. I mean, if you’ve seen Stevie Nicks lately she’s on a roughly comparable glide path, but if she told me to get down on my knees and eat her, like, she’s Stevie fucking Nicks, you know?

kontextmaschine:

so when I was in LA I knew people in the porn industry, this was back in the mid-late 00s when the industry was still a valley thing you could make money off shoots, before it became a loss-leader for escorts and then dispersed to so many semipro bedrooms

anyway one of the guys was a casting agent, which I got to talking about what that involved, which totally he admitted that it was the Backroom Casting Couch thing where he’d take the 19-year-old UNLV girls coming in and fuck them on camera and it was a dream job

(the actual Backroom Casting Couch is totally set-up, which means it’s a fantasy that only someone already in the industry would know to think up. it also means it’s a premise that’s not much of an acting stretch for any given girl)

and it’s not even that that was a corruption per se because “how you look and act while having sex in a variety of positions” really was the basis on which you were being evaluated for roles

but the thing that threw me was he was like “honestly, my biggest value-add was giving her a chance to say no”, like he’d do the preliminaries and get the camera and drop trou and be like “time to put you through your paces”

and she’d freak out or hesitate like “well, I wanted to be a porn star, not have unprompted sex with someone I just met, filmed for people to see”, this was like the 2000s height of “raunch culture”, Jenna Jameson and Sasha Grey and Stoya as mainstream C-list

and he’d be like “honey, if you have something to realize, this is the time to realize it rather than the first day on set when we’ve got a house rental and a permit and a director and equipment rental and makeup people and male talent waiting on you”

which is to say as skeezy as it sounds “the guy you have to fuck in his office” was a replacement for “the producer there to abuse/manipulate/coke you up with $20,000 on the line” and I think it might have been an improvement

kontextmaschine:

So when I first moved to LA I lived in Los Feliz and I don’t know why but there was def. a 24 connection. Looking it up I don’t think it had sets at Prospect Studios, but maybe the LA location shots were based out of there?

Anyway, “drunk Kiefer Sutherland” was the neighborhood mascot, I was there once when he bought the bar a round at the Drawing Room. Across the street, when an episode aired Ye Rustic Inn would do a thing called “Jack Bauer Power Hour”, you put your money down and get a shot of beer each minute, a shot of whiskey every time he kills or tortures someone and some other things, some of the crew came out to witness the finished production that way

Also Mary Lynn Rajskub, the indie comic who played girl-in-the-van Chloe, had one-woman shows at the atheist church down the street, the “Center for Inquiry”. I remember the one about giving birth and becoming a mother was called “Mary Lynn Spreads Her Legs”

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

understatedocelot:

kontextmaschine:

Friendly reminder I was at the AdultFriendFinder Christmas party in the Hollywood Hills in like 2008 and the PUA guru “Mystery” was there and all these industry professionals who blankly watched each other double penetrate each other for a living couldn’t take their eyes off him slouching in a lawn chair with that stupid hat, the charisma was real

fine, I’ll take the bait.

how did you get invited to the adultfriendfinder christmas party in hollywood in 2008?

As the +1 of a coke dealer called “Ross Angeles”!

One other time I followed him to the Hollywood Hills home of (okay at this point I want to interject these are places with one master bedroom built as entertaining venues for guests) this actor, it used to be Sammy Davis Jr.’s house, with an indoor pool, and he was apparently this recognizable name from the UK I had never heard of and his two agents – one of whom looked like a high school linebacker turned fat businessguy and the other had the biggest Jewish nose I’ve ever seen – explained the series he was here for was like “True Blood meets The Office”, and then there was a thing where the actor was inviting people (mostly girls) into his bedroom to see his wild cat

kontextmaschine:

Uh, other management office stories:

We had a former child star who once I knew him I noticed had bit parts in everything, and voices in half the kids’ cartoons in production. He actually took the biggest chunk of our time, mostly mediating between his (stage) mom and (former child star) girlfriend as they tried to outmaneuver each other for control of him. He booked hella jobs tho, so worth it.

Anyway when he was coming in we had to lock the door to the waiting room because otherwise he would burst in and monopolize our time because he’d just never learned how not to be the center of attention at all times. Like once when the managers were taking a call while they waited on a contract to print he used the time to come out to the assistants’ room, pull out a deck of cards, and do fucking magic tricks for us.

And the weirdest thing about it, it wasn’t actually grating. They were good magic tricks! And he was very charming and charismatic! Dude just didn’t have an off switch.

What else… oh, there was a guy who had been a soap actor but hadn’t worked in a while and the calls I overheard pushing him were these ridiculous dances of talking around things, like “Oh yeah, he’s GREAT, and everyone loves him, ALWAYS HAS, and aah, you know, that’s just catty rumors, really he’s never even been ACCUSED of ANYTHING, certainly not raping his costar in her trailer, anyway WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE, he’s a WHOLE NEW MAN now, have you heard about his newfound passion for animal rights activism?”

Oh also we had Aaron Carter for a while, which among other things means I’ve actually seen his shitty motocross movie. Dude would never ever return calls, if we actually needed to talk to him we had to contact him through Lou Pearlman’s office. Now this is an industry of assholes and these managers held their own, but that’s the only guy I ever saw them tangibly afraid of.

enye-word:

kontextmaschine:

over the wire:

           Previous anon is wrong as hell, the only place I’ve ever met ren faire people is in my local sex freak community

Right? I know faire folk. I’ve been faire folk.

kontextmaschine:

The fuck kinda backwards-ass rennaisance faire isn’t run by sex freaks? Christ, it’s like those SF cons that tell authors NOT to flirt with the teenage fans, no one knows how to do anything anymore

           The people I know who have worked at the faire for a long time all complain that there aren’t many orgies or LSD afterwards anymore. But they’re in their late 50s, maybe they just aren’t invited.

Shit, I guess I just took for granted that was gonna pass on like a standing wave but maybe we’ve dropped the ball on properly cultivating the next generation. I’m having that thought a lot lately

wtf i love conservatism now

kontextmaschine:

slowleaner:

Leonardo DiCaprio’s doing an impression of Jack Nicholson on a Japanese tv program

When I was in LA Jack Nicholson gave me shit about the contents of my cart in a supermarket checkout line, not even kidding. In the Albertsons on Alvarado there was this dumpy old guy behind me wearing mirrored shades and out of nowhere he said “I can tell you don’t have a girlfriend, ‘cause you don’t have any fish in there”. And it just went from there. He asked what I was doing in LA and when I explained the spec script I was writing he said “fuck, that sounds terrible”.

Eventually he put his groceries on the conveyor belt and it was like, Capri Sun and boxes of microwave burritos. I was like “dude, what the hell”, and he said that yeah, one of my friends lost his job and I’m buying food for his family to eat, ‘cause god knows I’m not about to let him stay at my place again.

It was all really charming and towards the end I was starting to suspect, but I was like “no, Jack Nicholson isn’t that old and decrepit” and a short drive and google later, well.

kontextmaschine:

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 prewar 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:

(October 1994)

kontextmaschine:

yeah maybe I should, what’s it to ya

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

I remember in the ‘90s when the reputation of France was just pissy fucks mowing bulldozers through McDonalds and other Adbusters shit

kontextmaschine:

The rise of the English term “creampie” has made “nakadashi” much easier to translate over the last two decades

kontextmaschine:

facelessbitchmage:

‘As the website of the current Laurel Canyon Association notes, “restrictive covenants were attached to the new parcel deeds. These were thinly veiled attempts to limit ownership to white males of a certain class. While there are many references to the bigotry of the developers in our area, it would appear that some residents were also prone to bias and lawlessness. This article was published in a local paper in 1925:

Frank Sanceri, the man who was flogged by self-styled ‘white knights’ on Lookout Mountain in Hollywood several months ago, was found not guilty by a jury in Superior Judge Shea’s courtroom of having unlawfully attacked Astrea Jolley, aged 11. 

“Wealthier residents were also attracted to Laurel Canyon. With the creation of the Hollywood film industry in 1910, the canyon attracted a host of ‘photoplayers,’ including Wally Reid, Tom Mix, Clara Bow, Richard Dix, Norman Kerry, Ramon Navarro, Harry Houdini and Bessie Love.”

The author of this little slice of Laurel Canyon history would clearly like us to believe that the “wealthier residents” were a group quite separate from the violent hooligans roaming the canyon. The history of such groups in Los Angeles, however, clearly suggests otherwise. Paul Young, for example, has written in L.A. Exposed of Los Angeles’ early “vigilance committees, which stepped in to take care of outlaws on their own, often with the complete absolution of the mayor himself. Judge Lynch, for example, formed the Los Angeles Rangers in 1854 with some of the city’s top judges, lawyers, and businessmen including tycoon Phineas Banning of the Banning Railroad. And there was the Los Angeles Home Guard, another bloodthirsty paramilitary organization, made up of notable citizens, and the much-feared El Monte Rangers, a group of Texas wranglers that specialized in killing Mexicans. As one would expect, there was no regard for the victim’s rights in such kangaroo courts. Victims were often dragged from their homes, jail cells, even churches, and beaten, horse-whipped, tortured, mutilated, or castrated before being strung up on the nearest tree.” 

And that, dear readers, is how we do things out here on the ‘Left’ Coast.’

Had a college girlfriend who passed on that when her mom was a girl at a sleepover in the foothills at the Valley mouth of the canyon, in one of those hillside houses where the basement has a sliding glass door, Captain Beefheart and his band showed up drunk and uninvited and had to be shooed away.

Only Canyon story of my own is that when I was riding Blue Bitch up around there the timing chain snapped and I had to glide/push her down, not only was that the only time I’ve ever had motorcycle problems that someone else didn’t stop to offer help, but the other drivers on the road were downright obnoxious about me being in their way.

No overnight weekend parking in that part of Weho so I just pushed it east down the sidewalk on Hollywood. Stopped in a liquor store and got a flask, pushed it 200 steps on one side, took a drink, switched. By the time I was clear of the nightlife district I was kind of drunk and figured I was close enough to Vermont where it starts to go downhill, so I kept going and managed to mostly glide back to my mechanic’s place behind the Mexican Mafia nightclub at Sunset and Silverlake.