Off the Top of My Head: The Giver

The kids and the Kid are ready for their lifetime role assignments! Some of them get middling stuff, or laborers. A bunch of girls are laborers but they birth two kids each and get pampered first.

The Kid is gifted so he’s going to be the new Giver, who bears and transmits community knowledge! So he apprentices with the current, old one

Whose role involves to… weigh the babies when one of the girls has twins, then throw the lighter one down a garbage chute?

And they’re both like “oh woe, this sounds like The Holocaust, which I remember from Lois Lowry’s last award-bait YA novel, Number the Stars”

And like, The Kid toboggans down a slope to escape and I just realized this was the same ending as Calvin and Hobbes?

prokopetz:

dukebee:

prokopetz:

I truly believe what the video game industry needs is to bring back the aesthetic sensibilities of mid 1990s JRPGs. An epic tale of sacrifice, betrayal and true love, culminating with the heroes murdering God and shattering His throne, starring a pirate, a cowboy, a sexy librarian, and this little Pikachu-looking fucker, and – this is key – played 100% straight, without the faintest hint of self-awareness nor irony.

Also everyone has queer vibes

The male lead is described as a heavily armoured knight, but his actual character model is wearing dancer’s tights with gauntlets, boots, and shoulder pads on top. It’s unclear where he keeps his sword when he’s not using it. His hair is magnificent.

Now that I’m aware that The Secret World of Alex Mack was the ur-model of my sexuality, looking back over it and notice the synergy behind the “sinister company behind middle-class utopia” and the way it was shot in the master-planned community of Valencia

Just like Snow Crash, American History X, White Men Can’t Jump, and Falling Down, one more 90s cultural text that was ultimately about the end of LA as a white middle-class paradise

thinking about the more psychological trauma-themed grimdark antiheroes of darker 90s comics

The Crow was almost like trauma as empowering you with a sense of purpose, but it was always a ‘70s rape-revenge plot in goth makeup and that fit with this early-90s romance of the broken – grunge, “heroin chic”, the normalization of “depression” now we had Prozac

John Constantine they kept piling things onto only to suddenly clear out in some sort of breakthrough, because there wasn’t anywhere else to go with it

This is distinct from the issue I think the Walking Dead comics inherited from Preacher, where you’re not really sure how to develop your characters so you just end up piling physical mutilations on them

there used to be a stronger career directionality in screen acting such that a TV star could become a movie star but established film leads wouldn’t take (non-guest) TV roles

That was falling in the 90s which was the spirit I took the noise of Brooke Shields – who I knew as a recognizable name – returning with Suddenly Susan

Now with more context I realize “it’s that actress you remember as America’s Most Fuckable Twelve-Year Old, back when it wasn’t clear things weren’t getting more 70s forever, now in an adult normie-fodder three-camera role!” was a kind of weird angle

apostaterevolutionary:

ratliker1917:

I feel like at some point the internet had the entire piracy debate settled and then a bunch of money got pumped into making people believe the slogan “intellectual property rights are human rights” and now we’re stuck with like, that kind of millennial/zoomer whose entire lifestyle is based on feeling guilty and never wanting to do anything even slightly ethically questionable, who will try to lecture you about how you’re causing real human harm and suffering because you torrented skyrim.

Millennial here: the secret to pirating ethically is just only pirate from big companies. Indie stuff? Pay for it, if you’re able. If it’s a big company, particularly an evil one (*coughdisneycough*)? Torrent that fucker and feel no shame. You haven’t hurt anyone. All the profit goes in the CEO’s/shareholders pockets, not those of honest workers who were already paid for their work via their contract

Like this is really interesting to me as an example where base determines superstructure (i.e. economic structure as constrained by mechanical possibility creates power hierarchies that ideology is then picked to legitimate)

Because software was really proprietary when it was individually trackable in the mainframe era… but then kinda common in the early “microcomputer” era to share with your user group or BBS… but then again proprietary off limited physical media or keygens… but then cheap CD collections and the Internet and the “shareware” concept (and keygens and [k]racks to get around disk insertion requirements…)

thinking about The Offspring’s “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)”

and how it’s about the “wigger”, which meant “white nigger” in a jocular tone but not in the earnest sense of Norman Mailer’s “White Negro”, like the white-suburban kid who identifies with black roughness as processed by the media filter that let anything into white suburbia

interstellarvagabond:

hostbox:

given the common threads between things people on this website are inexplicably attracted to (pinstripes, bow ties, really thin, literal skeletons) i present to you

grandfather of all sexymen

The collapse of “alternative” culture.

By the mid-2000s electro and indie weren’t even considered the same thing, whereas in the 90s the Chemical Brothers and Meredith Brooks and Rage Against the Machine and Sublime and Korn and even bungee jumping and the films of Quentin Tarantino somehow were.

This tracks with the cosmopolitan college-educated “creative class” as ironically weakening as it expanded, going from narrow enough to achieve hegemony over the culture to sufficiently broad as to be captured by its own interests and divisions

Yeah honestly I mentally gloss everything from 56k internet until Rilo Kiley released Under The Blacklight as “the late 90s”

retrocgads:

USA 1991

Oh shit people don’t realize what a thing Battle Chess was, with the animated captures where the pieces killed each other

That was HUGE, it was the standard display in computer stores for years, there were variants like the Star Wars one where black queen/king was Vader/Palpatine, etc.

retrocgads:

USA 1991

kontextmaschine:

“In the virtual dream world, the two embark on a motorcycle journey and sky-dive, as well as engage in a steamy makeout session.

One part of the video shows the characters boarding and taking flight in a biplane which, combined with the digital technology, creates what is often regarded as a fascinating dichotomy between antiquated and modern technology, in some ways presenting a parallel for the characters.”

“The music video for “Livin’ on the Edge” is notable for a number of things, including depicting vandalism, theft (notably grand theft auto), joyriding, airbag crashing, unprotected sex, and violence among school-aged youth, cross-dressing teachers, a naked Steven Tyler holding a zipper by his crotch with half his body painted black (to give the effect he pulled down a zipper, unzipping his body) and lead guitarist Joe Perry playing a lead guitar solo in front of an oncoming train. Directed by Marty Callner, the video was praised for its groundbreaking theatrical scenes and special effects. The video featured acting by the young Edward Furlong.“

“A music video was produced to promote the single. The video was directed by Michael Bay, and had a surreal landscape described as "12 Monkeys meets Brazil”, which was meant to parody grunge videos. Many supermodels, such as Angie Everhart, are featured dressed as nurses, dominatrices and princesses.“

"In the final scene, Steven Tyler finds a sandwich on the beach. When he puts it in his mouth, he learns too late that it was a bait as Steven is reeled into the ocean.”

I remember an episode of the early-90s boomer retro HBO sex fantasy sitcom Dream On where the episode message was “aw come on, everyone’s first sexual experience was early-puberty same-sex hand stuff, why don’t we just admit it?”

“How did the author of Harry Potter become an avatar of conservative cause?” like

“how did VICE give rise to the Proud Boys”, “how did celebreality competition TV give us a president”, “why is 4chan still Like That but now geopolitically”, “why is Billy Corgan conservative now”, “why was Dan Savage’s Seattle Stranger the cradle for Jesse Singal’s clique”, “why is Matt Yglesias at least anti-bluepilled now”

“Cultural conservatism” has updated its golden-age referent from The Fifties to The Nineties (in both cases it showed up late and bled into the next decade). The people who rose to the top of The 90s Culture will defend it as fundamentally legitimate, which is now coded as archconservative

Meditate on the way the Reaganite 80s (lasting into the Clinton era, remember school uniforms and prayer as issues lol) were taken as an unstoppable onslaught of 50s revival but in the 90s it was obvious that people who kept the spirit of the 60s alive had won

(And how in fact performatively dirtbag VICE was really part of 2000s 70s-revivalism, same as American Apparel)

In retrospect, the Jerry Springer Show was a load-bearing element of the 90s, huh

me, stuck in some 90s hell where the swing revival devil won: barbershop quartet version of “Me And A Gun”

also me, stuck in that same hell: but ALSO, lounge version of “Face Down, Ass Up”

me: nice! Let’s have a Zima

That Picard was a humanist but he just accepted he’d have to deal with these Ferengi living by the Rules of Acquisition because it’s not like they or anyone really had anything he needed is a lot of where the 90s were at

TOS was at least honest w/ dilithium crystals – sometimes we’re just going to have to ::ahem:: deal with some randoms over fuel sources

Anyone else remember the “young Elvis/old Elvis” thing from the 90s, when the US Post Office was going to put out an Elvis stamp because boomers were starting 2 run the world

But they had 2 designs, like 50s heartthrob with a mic and 70s star in the white jacket, and they had people vote?