"This is what it feels like to die."

what's this thing called again?

flippancy in the face of disaster is either disrespect or courage

This is why hell is underground. Like a reclaimed bad part of town.

falsified in the defense of poetry

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On the relationship of the cloverleaf to the end of the world

the freeway is both the antithesis and the source
the end is contained and trod upon

there's a cloud atop the mountain
the sand is giving way underneath my feet

tar and cement pose a response to violence
the infrastructure goads the bomb into dropping

do modern americans have a traditional tribal weapon?

A little door

A little door
Originally uploaded by nicolasnova

i can't focus my unhappiness

Braveheart is one of the worst movies ever to come out of Hollywood

Boy, I hate patriotic epics, especially when they're that florid.

Because of its club roots, the goth subculture is apolitical

Why does this bother me so much?

Eulogy for Armstrong and Aldrin, Had They Not Come Home

To: H. R. Haldeman

From: Bill Safire

July 18, 1969.

IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

PRIOR TO THE PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT:

The President should telephone each of the widows-to-be.

AFTER THE PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT, AT THE POINT WHEN NASA ENDS COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE MEN:

A clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to "the deepest of the deep," concluding with the Lord's Prayer.

William Safire for Nixon

hahah

awesome flyer

lookatthisdog
Originally uploaded by sugarfreak

Although its central character could exist in any place or time, New Orleans plays such a major role in Confederacy of Dunce that Hurricane Katrina means it will never be made into a film.

what a line

"Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain ... is perhaps the trippiest, most psychotropic, big-budget extravaganza since the Johnson administration..."

David (Foster Wallace) on David (Lynch)

This is a wonderful essay because it blends exuberance and joy at the mystery of Lynch's films with a critical eye towards the motives and limitations that inform him.

Advice: Don't get stuck on stupid.

This was on a bumper sticker. Is it actually intelligent or just pithy?

Either way it seems wise.

from Esquire in 2000

Greatest Generation chronicler Tom Brokaw has the difference pegged: “The World War II generation did what was expected of them. But they never talked about it. It was part of the Code. There’s no more telling metaphor than a guy in a football game who does what’s expected of him — makes an open-field tackle – then gets up and dances around. When Jerry Kramer threw the block that won the Ice Bowl in ‘67, he just got up and walked off the field.”

More on Star Wars as a fantasy.

Jedis are overrated samurai with a high gloss. Aragorn with rivets and a space fighter. That's okay- the "space knight" thing is a decent archetype, and it's actually reasonable believable.

You know where my ability to suspend my disbelief (and, by extension, my ability to enjoy the films) breaks down? It's their weapons. I don't care how cool a lightsaber is In fact, I hate how cool they are. In the context of the Star Wars universe, they're completely unbelievable.

The phrase "an elegant weapon for a more civilized time" says nothing about the utility of lightsabers as weapons. A katana's elegant. An épée is (arguably) a weapon from a more civilized time. As great as it feels to hold one of those swords in your hand, neither means shit if there's someone who doesn't like you holding a cheap pistol nearby.

Here's where I generalize: Anything popularly identified as science fiction which involves swords of any kind alongside firearms is actually fantasy. This includes Star Wars, 90% of the Final Fantasy games, a whole lot of anime, Shadowrun, and Warhammer.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but they all boil down to a fondness for romanticism and/or empty cool aesthetics at the expense of logic and accident: a desire to create dramatic confrontations in which a swordsman bests a nominally superior gunman (or, even better, gunmen) rather than allowing combat situations to evolve and occur naturally within a story. Sometimes this is due to a conservative desire to reference a "better time" and sometimes it's just because Swords Are Cooler. Either way it makes for bad, bad storytelling.

Some notable exceptions:

Dune, in which personal shields prevent fast intrusions (e.g. bullets) but allow slower intrusions (e.g. blades). This places much of the story-telling burden on defense in that anyone can wear a shield. Contrast this with Star Wars (or any fantasy story from the Eddas downward, really) in which a character must be "gifted" to wield the magic sword. I think this defensive focus makes for a much more practical explanation. Lightsabers might be difficult to wield, but that doesn't seem like it should stop anyone from trying, right? The only time you see a non-Jedi use a lightsaber is in Empire Strikes Back, when Han Solo cuts open the tauntaun. The widespread adaption of a technology that negates the use of firearms is a much more compelling idea.

Yeah, I know they don’t
use shields in this scene.

Star Wars: A New Hope: Gunfights and swordfights are segregated and Jedis are kooks. Plus, the only swordfight we do see - Kenobi vs. Darth Vader - is performed essentially as ritual combat, removing a lot of restrictions on plausibility. Unless I'm mistaken, this is one of only two times a lightsaber is used (the other is when Kenobi cuts the arm off a bar patron who harasses Luke, a situation which, because it so strongly involves the element of surprise, is totally believable).

Ritual Combat

Firefly: During the series, bladed weapons are used constantly by Reavers. But rather than mystical swords that only the most privileged can wield, they're axes and crude machetes that function as slashing instruments just as much as bludgeons. They're used by psychopaths/Space Navajos/Wendigos, not "knights," while everyone else just uses rifles like sane people.

The believability of swords being used alongside guns is tested pretty severely in the film Serenity, though.

Are there other exceptions?

Am I wrong?

Remember when "tabletop game" meant you didn't play it in a field?

Wikipedia serendipity

I keep a link to the Wikipedia random page on my Firefox toolbar. It helps to incidentally satisfy my curiosity when doing Wikipedia searches.

Is there a word for the emotion I would experience if the Random Page turned out to be the exact page I was looking for? I mean besides "luck" - something a bit more modern but without the smacks of paranoia I would expect from such an intersection of private personal desire and coldly uncaring technology.

God, I love this look.

All the elements are there clothing-wise. They're like a haiku: so basic and elemental that they can either collaborate harmoniously or not at all:

The tight black1970s-filthy-dangerous-New York streets/rocker jeans and leather motorcycle jacket anchor her in the traditional American cool of James Dean and Joey Ramone.

The shemagh gives her a modern, political edge to that cool. Let's face it, as aesthetically appealing as it is, the James Dean/Ramones look has been pretty defanged. The shemagh also grants her maturity, as the traditional American Rebel is not typically cognizant of international politics, much less willing to display his or her knowledge or convictions. Interestingly, this modern maturity could have been completely negated by the use of a studded belt rather than the simple black for which she opted - that's an example of dipping too far into the rocker/rebel/punk look.

Here I'm getting subjective in a way that I can't defend with critical analysis, but the faint crags that line her face also play into it. I cannot place their relevance in the same type of context as her clothing, but I have a feeling that her entire aesthetic hinges on, or is at the very least, epitomized by the fact that she is both beautiful and weathered.

The boots give her an aggressive, equine height, which, far from making her masculine, accentuates her femininity.

I could probably continue by describing the elements (I haven't even got into the pose, the hair, or the gray, wet setting) or by attempting to tie them together into a single thesis, but why bother?

the depressing banality of simple loneliness

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

It's hilarious.

It's a goddamn 3-camera sitcom with 3 sets and a "wacky but comforting" premise, but it's fucking hilarious.

When did TV entertainment stop being a joke?

‘Everybody sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.’ — Robert Louis Stevenson

Sartorial Observation Regarding Leather

With the exception of shoes, new leather is not to be trusted. Someone wearing new leather is Bad News.

New Leather means Nickelback, Christian rock, club Guidos, mid-life-crisis motorcycle-purchasers. It means Harley Davidson. It means Doc Martens bought by Reebok. It means that weird, vaguely conservative neo-mod look popularized by the downmarket brands of Calvin Klein and Donna Karan. New Leather means Calculated Insincerity. New Leather means the specific, conspiratorial co-opting of rebellion.

Old, worn leather isn't a guarantee of trustworthiness, but New Leather is a guarantee of a bad person.

Sterling on Ballard and Lem

quote:Well, I think it’s Ballard’s youthful acceptance of life in a prison camp that allows him to cheerfully look at the major breakdowns of the bourgeois world and accept them. Lem is very much the same way. I remember Lem saying something along the lines that the Nazi concentration camps had conclusively destroyed the ability of literature to be written about the individual – that from now on you could only write serious work with the scope of the annihilation of a whole population. It simply made no sense to write to any scale less grand than a response to genocide. Lem has the experience of somebody who has witnessed the unspeakable. It’s like going out one day and finding your capital city reduced to ruins by Stuka bombers – that gives him a grandeur of the imagination.

Do you want to see what your car crash would look like?

Bene Gesserit

WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THE MODEL (her pursed lips indicated an overreliance on sexuality, and her eyes are the eyes of a victim, not a killer) , this is how I imagine the Bene Gesserit.

On Parking Structures

"Take a structure like a multi-storey car park, one of the most mysterious buildings ever built. Is it a model for some strange psychological state, some kind of vision glimpsed within its bizarre geometry? What effect does using these buildings have on us? Are the real myths of this century being written in terms of these huge unnoticed structures?"

-Ballard

void bldgblg

I don't just mean that Los Angeles is some friendly bastion of cultural diversity and so we should celebrate it on that level and be done with it; I mean that Los Angeles is the confrontation with the void.

It is the void.

It's the confrontation with astronomy through near-constant sunlight and the inhuman radiative cancers that result. It's the confrontation with geology through plate tectonics and buried oil, methane, gravel, tar, and whatever other weird deposits of unknown ancient remains are sitting around down there in the dry and fractured subsurface. It's a confrontation with the oceanic; with anonymity; with desert time; with endless parking lots.
And it doesn't need humanizing.

Portions of the world after the apocalypse might look like cuba does today: poor, in disrepair, but culturally distinct.

I can't articulate this properly yet because I haven't yet completed the mental exercise necessary to form the concept.

fear

here's something clever from tvtropes.org

One of the original (and still the most useful) definitions of the difference was that Science Fiction is about the social consequences of improbable events or technologies, whereas Fantasy is just about telling a good story. While more clear-cut than most definitions, this one does place some works of fiction in the opposite category to the one they are most commonly associated with, for example Star Wars would be definitely in the Fantasy category.

tim burton has never made film worth watching the whole way through

prove. me. wrong.

Weh-nil kun-boo-leh?

Where is the bomb?

gawdamit

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ugh~

"it's getting to the point i can't afford to eat"

-Receptionist/Troll

Gene Roddenberry is the 2pac of science fiction television

disgraced member of the stasi

spending his nights in cheap state-sanctioned strip clubs

letting his hair grow from fascist buzz to sleazy neck-tickling

getting stains all over his brown shirt

Have you heard anyone play "Walkin on Sunshine" since August 2005?

"Katrina and the Waves," what a fucking name. Play them alongside "When the Levee Breaks" by Zeppelin and you're basically committing a hate crime.

Plans for Sputnik launch anniversary?

OCTOBER 4 1957: The Soviets launch the first artificial satellite into space, thereby signifying the victory of Communism (and, by extent, humanity) over the Heavens.

OCTOBER 4, 2007: Armed only with a 30.06 hunting rifle, the most powerful Bushnell scope Walmart stocks, and my eternal patriotism, I WILL SHOOT DOWN SPUTNIK.

http://www.handicappedpets.com/

The Russians, Space, and Pigs

The Russians, Space, and Pigs
Originally uploaded by abneypark

It's worth enlarging.

morning commute

only attractive women on bicycles, everyone else covered their faces

here's a good way to enjoy Star Wars episodes 1 and 2:

They're brutally cruel parodies of Episodes 4-6!

strider is to aragorn...

as bob dylan is to robert zimmerman?

nope, doesn't work.

To our generation the word ‘radicalism’ evokes images of al Qaeda, not the Weathermen. ‘Campus takeover’ sounds more like Virginia Tech in 2007 than Columbia University in 1968. Such phrases are a dead language to us. They are vocabulary from another era that does not reflect the realities of today.