The Red Knight by Ami Thompson
The Lowtax thing has a bunch of people coming out of the woodwork to talk about Something Awful, so I’m thinking about that now. I never used SA because I didn’t much approve of it, so take anything I have to say with a grain of salt, but I was surrounded by people who used it, and we’re all surrounded by the products of its existence, so it’s, I guess, relevant.
There’s a take people enjoy that’s like “SA got Trump elected by creating 4chan”, and that’s been trotted out for the occasion, and to be clear, this is a stupid take. There’s a real sense in which SA is responsible for 4chan, not just by kicking out the community that would go on to create it but also by defining the culture they took with them, a variant of the broader SA culture. But the chain of causality breaks down rapidly after that, and, like, the thing is: there are very few things about the modern world that SA can specifically be said to have caused. But almost the entire English-speaking Internet is downstream of SA. The influence was diffuse and indirect, but all-encompassing.
Anyway, my take on SA is basically: people who liked the site always advocated for it by saying that the heavy moderation lead to a higher quality of users and discussion – the argument was basically that it was the Singapore of the internet. The problem with this approach is that, in practice, SA was more like if Singapore was run by Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and the Kiwifarms people – it had a kind of “droog culture” that prefigured 4chan and was actually stronger in the staff than in the wider userbase, and while it prided itself on being more refined and tasteful than the rest of the Internet, in practice this boiled down to being the coolest and playing high school clique politics the best, which was IMO not a great fit for the level of authoritarianism involved. There was also just the fact that “banning people a lot leads to higher-quality discussion” was, while to some extent a real phenomenon, largely a happy accident – SA routinely banned people for really stupid reasons, and that’s because maximizing the number of people banned was central to their business model. That’s the opposite of what you want if you’re trying to run a site with strong norms, and all their other revenue sources were actively damaging to the site culture as well, so, like, it wasn’t great.
The weird combination of lumpen vandalism, haughty tastemaker shit, and posturing via competitive humour are really what I think define SA as a site, and they’re its gift to the larger internet culture – sure, you see something related from the alt-right, but you also see it from Harvard bluechecks; it’s everywhere so trying to trace specific “lineages” isn’t that interesting. If you want to talk about the site’s cultural influence in a deeper way than “look at all these seminal things that came from SA”, I really think it has to be about that sort of vague stylistic bequest.
Still weird as shit to me that one of the formative figures in the Middle Ages of the Internet named himself after infamous Tennessee politician/murderer Byron (Low Tax) Looper. Apparently he once worked for the guy briefly or something?
The significance given by amateur online historians to Lowtax banning moot is quite silly. 4chan has the same culture as 2ch–it’s direct inspiration which it is literally named after– which has the same culture as DCInside and 2ch.ru/Dvach. That’s just what anonymous boards are like
(I haven’t noticed this before but do imageboards cluster by writing system, rather than language? There are German and Spanish *chans boards but they seem pretty anemic compared to the Korean and Russian ones. And it’s much easier to navigate eg: French sites as an english monoglot than Russian or Japanese ones)
If you want to trace the influence of SomethingAwful the line leading from the offsites is a bit less overdetermined:
SA attracts people who want to stalk lolcows or make racist jokes but it bans them if they seem too serious about it, the exiles congregate sites like SASS and SomethingSensitive which are enthusiastically and humourlessly into both. The breakdown of the first generation off-sites leads on the one hand to SA-influenced gangstalkers like Kiwifarms and on the other to SA-influenced far-right forums like MyPostingCareer. Without those two the history and culture of both the alt-right and terfism would look very different.
Which implies that the cultural figure who owes most to Lowtax is Mary Harrington
so I was wondering, what’s the best example of a long-form series entirely based around a heterosexual romance?
She-Ra spends five seasons getting two girls who already share a bed to kiss, which seems realistic and the entire plot of the show is built around that relationship arc, even if that wasn’t necessarily how the writer sold it at the time.
The Untamed begins with a guy failing to prevent his bro falling to his death and ends fifty episodes later with the two of them definitely not an item if you watch this show on the Chinese mainland, and of course the entire plot of the show is built around their relationship given that it comes from a boy-love novel.
where are the straight lovers whose passion drives the plot? the first and only example that springs to my mind is the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, which begins with Elizabeth and Will meeting as children and ends with them marrying, him dying, him reborning, them boning, and him ghosting her (so to speak) before eventually returning from his supernatural duties to see his child, which is certainly a very stereotypical heterosexual romance plot for a man who prefers to spend ten years at sea in the company of other (dead) men and a woman who prefers dressing up in men’s clothing and calling herself king.
I suppose you could call this story type a romantic epic– oh bugger that’s just Gone With The Wind, isn’t it.
bpd-anon said: I haven’t seen it but this is how I hear How I Met Your Mother talked about
*pained grimace* I suppose The Nanny would also qualify.
*heavy sigh* or Big Bang Theory, really.
Obvious example here would be Superman and similar superhero stories where the main way the secret identity stuff comes up is that it prevents the hero being honest with their crush, so that they finally get together at the climax of the story when events force them to come clean.
It rarely actually works out as neatly as in She-Ra because superhero writers can’t finish a story properly but you can see it clearly in Smallville because they do it twice: Clark tells Lana the truth, gets together with her and defeats Lex all at around the same time and then she gets written off and the writers proceed to spend another 5 seasons or so doing the same routine with Louis and Zod.
A more organic and better example is Agents of Shield which after the first season is increasingly driven by Fitz and Simmons having their romance derailed and coming up with insane mad science plans to get back together.
I remember reading some anecdote about the Manhattan Project scientists who ordered a solid gold sphere to test whether it would work for some problem they were having with the bomb, and when they got it they would go around having people lift the sphere to show off how heavy it was, and gold and tungsten have very similar densities, so the tungsten fad is like a democratization of that impulse
It was fabricated into a hemisphere a few inches across. They were measuring its neutron reflectivity to see if was any use as a tamper. It wasn’t, so they ended up using it as a doorstop. Nobody would steal it because it was the door to the room containing the entire world supply of plutonium, worth far more than the doorstop.
Reblog to allow the person you reblogged from to upgrade to a larger-size cube
The year is 2025. You visit a guy’s office and are impressed by the size of his tungsten cube. “That guy must be really successful,” you think. In reality, however, he had to go deeply into debt to buy a cube beyond his means, and can hardly even afford food.
The year is 2040. You’re flipping through a brochure for tungsten cubes that your daughter brought home from university. You don’t really understand the appeal, but since you’ll be cosigning the loan, you want to get your money’s worth. “I don’t understand why we can’t just get one of the smaller cubes,” you say.
“If your cube is small, people will think there’s something wrong with you,” she explains. “They explained this to us in class. With the job market so tight, employers want to see a big cube to make sure that you’re a good prospect. A big cube shows that you have skin in the game. In the end, a good cube pays for itself!”
Okay but, like, WHY are nfts so ugly, anyway? If you’re investing that much cash into money-laundering or whatever, couldn’t you at least use a couple hundred of it to commission a half-decent artist?
Think it’s a combination of the fact that most of them are ripping off CryptoPunks, an ugly procedurally-generated NFT that was one of the first lines to be successful and profitable, as well as the fact that most of them are scams being shovelled out in large quantity, often just for rugpulls, and that kind of setup isn’t even worth spending a couple hundred dollars
thinking about how if we hadn’t had like a six-year misalignment they could have made My Little Pony NFTs at the peak of that series and made a trillion dollars. they’re already designed for this sort of clones-with-variations approach, and you could totally train an AI to autogenerate a billion My Little Pony names to go with them
Having seen a lot of commentary on this topic gesture in the direction of all the money that’s lost interest in the normal international art markets since they introduced know-your-buyer laws/generally started cracking down on money laundering, I wonder if the ugliness of most NFTs is a result of the kind of incompetency-signalling that is rumoured to occur among italian academics.
An aesthetically pleasing NFT might have an issuer or artist, even fans and gallery curators, who will want to know who is buying and selling it and generally asking awkward questions about it’s actual value. An ugly NFT is much more trustworthy.
On Tuesday, the Guardian published an interview with the American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler, which included a scathing critique of so-called “gender critical” transphobes and trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who don’t believe trans women are women, and oppose the right of transgender people to exist in gendered spaces, such as a bathrooms.
“The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times,” Butler said. “So the Terfs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism, one that requires a coalition guided by struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence, one that is mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people.”
Hours later, this section of the article, including a question from the interviewer Jules Gleeson and three paragraphs from Butler, were removed. The only explanation is a cryptic note at the end of the article, stating: “This article was edited on 7 September 2021 to reflect developments which occurred after the interview took place.” Screenshots of the deleted section of the interview have gone viral on Twitter.
According to Gleeson, who provided Motherboard with a written statement, the Guardian’s editorial team, and in particular its team based in the UK, “folded” under pressure from readers who took issue with the article and decided to “censor” Butler. The Guardian did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Habitual bigots online are going to do their thing, and usually respond to pieces without even reading them,” Gleeson wrote in a statement sent to Motherboard. “What’s been more unexpected was how quickly the publication folded. I was expecting the Guardian US to stand by me as a writer, and while I have received apologies from their side, this has been a draining and consuming episode that I didn’t expect.”
Gleeson told Motherboard that Judith Butler has also emailed the Guardian about its decision to remove that section of the interview, but has not heard back.
Gleeson said she last heard from the Guardian last night, and that her editor said “there’s not much I can do” because a decision has already been made.
“I have not encountered anything like this,” Gleeson said of the Guardian’s decision. “A few people I’ve spoken to, including at the Guardian US, said this is unprecedented.”
in 2021 one of the most famous gender studies scholars alive got censored for saying transphobes are bad
#butler is also nonbinary so like#they’re censoring a trans person talking about transphobia
I think somebody tried to do Butler a favour. Imagine being confidently wrong about that Wi Spa incident in a way that doesn’t even matter for your point but that means the editors will have to add an asterisk* to your answer. Better to just memory-hole the question and answer outright, right?
Nah, that’s not it.
The question was just about TERFs and right-wing alliances in general, and mentioned the spa incident offhandedly as an example, which was the reporter’s fault. Because it was a question about generalities, Butler talked about her general impression of the TERF movement, and didn’t talk about the spa thing at all.
Thus, the problem was purely with the reporter’s question, and since the part of the question that had issues didn’t have anything to do with the response and obviously readers were there to hear Judith Butler say stuff about gender, the most sensible edit would have been to asterisk the question in a way that didn’t implicate Butler (who didn’t say anything that anyone has deigned to criticize), or to simply remove the not-that-relevant offending portion. The reporter herself suggested this, and drafted a proposal for a question rewrite herself – she made that public along with an archive of Butler’s response here, if you’re curious. This is to say nothing of the fact that the Guardian also killed a totally unrelated trans feature their American branch was doing at the same time as this!
It seems clear that the response was mostly about the intensity of the reaction they got from this or that public interest group, and they concluded that the correct response to that was to just back away from anything relating to trans-inclusivity, out of a recognition that the backlash was more against trans-inclusivity in general than about anything involving this peripheral detail.
- Harry Potter: Welcome to a whimsical fantasy world! Come see the hippogriffs and the nifflers, or perhaps play quidditch and catch a quaffle
- Luna Lovegood: Yes, but watch out for the wrackspurts
- Harry Potter: The what? The wrackspurts? What the fuck are you on about? Are you mental? What's this fucking nonsense you're mouthing now, you fool, you cretin
“horror movies are about love” Ok so that guy got his arm cut off and replaced with a chainsaw because romance isn’t dead?
yeah exactly
The Evil Dead trilogy starts with a proposal and ends with a kiss, it transitions from horror to comedy as the protagonist runs out of people he cares about to kill, as examples of horror movies not being about love go it’s ….not the best
It’s like if the CW did a reboot of Community where the chicken fingers mafia wars are a season long plotline and the paintball fights have double digit body counts. (On the other hand, imagine a straight-up high school comedy version of Riverdale where the speakeasy, D&D cult, drug dealers etc each last a single episode before collapsing under their own absurdity)
Whatever Riverdale’s flaws, you know how adaptations are always like “we’re going to make a fucked up adult version of this beloved children’s media”, but the writers don’t really understand the material they’re working with and aren’t willing to commit to the premise and end up creating an ostensibly mature-audiences production that’s actually less fucked up than the all-ages source material it’s adapting? Riverdale is the exception that proves the rule – it’s the one mature-audiences show adapted from children’s media that is actually, genuinely more fucked up than its source material. In this, if nothing else, it succeeds!
Isn’t what makes Riverdale so fucked up that it doesn’t drastically deviate from it’s source material, like the plot equivalent of those photorealistic illustrations of characters from the Simpsons where they still have yellow skin and three fingers. The original stories are highly compressed caricatures of more adult stories and the show restores them to normal resolution while keeping the bowdlerised elements.
“Veronica finds out her Dad has been supplying the Fizzle Stick dealers of the Gargoyle gang, gets back at him by opening a mocktail only speakeasy for kids under the burger bar” isn’t a darker and edgier take on Archie at all. But comics can play up the ambiguity in the way they represent things like that whereas on screen it’s all literal.
“meme” is now the generic term for “stuff on the internet” btw. funny comments on Reddit? memes. funny posts on Tumblr? memes. Good tiktoks? oxymoron, but memes. Your great aunt’s anti-vax conspiracy theories on Facebook? memes. The homepage of The New York Times? memes, baby!
[astronauts meme]
“It’s all memes?”
“Always has been”
loving-n0t-heyting