The blog of Erik A. G. '59

thekalpar:

My spouse and I were talking last night and the jeans problem came up so I want to talk about it with tumblr here.
The jeans problem was the favorite lecture one of my philosophy professors in college gave about the history of jeans and how it ties into capitalism/mainstream culture absorbing and monetizing any counterculture it encounters. So prior to the 1950s jeans were mostly an item of work-wear that you wore on the job as a farmer or factory worker or miner because they were cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. If you were off the job you’d wear what we’d call now dress pants or slacks. This changes in the 1950s when youth culture start wearing jeans as regular clothing, again because they’re cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. But then jeans get absorbed by the culture and we start getting designer jeans, acid-washed jeans, pre-ripped jeans, and now we got people shelling out hundreds of dollars for “povertycore” aesthetic. And now jeans aren’t even cheap, durable, and hard-wearing.
This came up because my spouse was talking about thrifting and spooky things (two of her favorite things) and how there was this trend of buying a landscape painting from a thrift store which was probably going to end up in a garbage dump and painting a sheet ghost on it to make it art millennials would like. But now you can go to Michael’s or Home Goods or wherever and just buy a landscape painting with a sheet ghost on it, mass-manufactured by a corporation. The counter-culture once again being monetized and absorbed by the culture. It’s the jeans problem again.

datasoong47:

myjetpack:

ALT
my latest books cartoon for the Guardian.

briannyssey:

briannyssey:
Oh easy mistake. Yearning actually rises from the floor and longing hangs from the ceiling
ALT
🥺🥺

wanderinginkpot:

“I asked chatgpt-”
Well I asked the host of the community radio station of a small desert town and he said “Don’t let numbers tell you what to do. You are blood and earth, not theory and chalk”, so maybe think about that.

inkskinned:

how eerie to hear they’re going to remake carrie. how eerie to hear they have made the mother into some kind of gentle well-meaning figure.
carrie is almost explicitly about the cycles of abuse. it is almost explicitly about how women and girls are taught to reproduce the patriarchy. it cannot be isolated from either message.
it shows cruel teenagers not as a random whacky plot point but instead to highlight that we are taught to mock other girls for not being fuckable; lest we ourselves be considered not-fuckable. we will eat our own kind to survive. nobody helps her because to help carrie would be to turn against the patriarchy.
carrie’s mother has experienced abuse at the hands of her husband and religion not as a “sad backstory” but instead because it lampshades her behavior when she then turns and abuses her daughter while citing that same religion. we are forced to ask the question: what is the difference between the patriarchy and religion? aren’t they both systems of control? we often see mothers as being the “ultimate” in innocence and kindness - but this book challenges that narrative. abusive mothers exist, and and always have. abusive women exist and always have. white women, after all, love voting for donald trump.
men are almost absent from the book, but their presence lingers. it feels almost like the red mark made after a slap - the men do not have to be there; the women will continue to abide by the rules without question. it is a devastating, haunting condemnation of the notion of feminine fragility. it accurately asserts that women are cruel, are capable, are power-hungry - and often are hiding behind perceived innocence to mask that cruelty. the abuse carrie experiences rests in a doubled betrayal: it is because of another woman. the supposed “sisterhood” is revealed to be thin, a guise of equanimity that is only offered to the “right” type of girl/woman.
many of us were not the right type of girl.
to go back on these main and obvious themes of the book - to rewrite the mother as some caring and sad creature is… a curious choice. i can’t explain it, but it feels almost like censorship to me. it refuses a deeper meaning of the book (and one that questions the patriarchy) in favor of the incredibly thin plot of “what if scary girl had scary powers.” i literally don’t even know what level of misogyny it is that we have to defang everyone around her in order to tell her story. i’m baffled by it.
in the era of trad wives endlessly posting abusive content of their children online - the adaptation had plenty of meat to modernize her mother. in the era of AI and revenge porn and social media - there’s a huge amount of space for a competent writer to play around in. after all, if the abuse is recorded and posted to media - and as the audience we’re watching it without interfering - the story is now about us. it asks us who we are comfortable bullying.
it’s okay if you feel like you don’t have the writing chops to talk about how many religions are abusive and tacitly enable domestic violence. it’s okay if you feel like you couldn’t write a believable teenage bully. it’s okay if you’re just interested in “scary girl has scary powers.”
but maybe, i don’t know, choose a different fucking story?

inkskinned:

marzipanandminutiae:
inkskinned:
my most ungrounded and unresearched fear is that so many companies are pushing AI in part because it builds them a pathway towards a subscription model for a huge number of things that should not be subscription, but theoretically could be:
do you want to talk to verizon’s help desk because there’s an error on your bill? to access a real agent, you have to pay for Verizon Access+, only 5.99 a month.
want to filter out all the fake job postings from the real ones? subscribe to Indeed: Advanced Tactics and only verified postings will appear on your dash.
sick of the infinite ai slop? buy Google Premium; it’ll automatically detect ai within a site and gives it a credibility score. with premium plus, you can shuffle high-credibility results to the top.
do you want a “luxury” experience? well, you’d have to pay for that luxury, and since the company sure doesn’t want to pay its employees; the cost would fall to the consumer.
when automation has made every experience unpleasant; the experience of genuine humanity will be commodified.
This is already happening – one of the softwares used by a museum I work at only lets you talk to a human help agent if you have their premium subscription. It’s such bullshit
the fact you are not the only one in these notes saying “no this is already happening; i have to pay money to speak to a representative” is just… really awesome! you said a software used by museums is doing this shit? okay! great! wonderful!! anybody know where i can scream

quietwingsinthesky:

favorite thing in the whole wide world when a story is about how a typically “negative” trait is the one essential to saving the day. a character whose anger pushes them further than any of their kinder aspects. someone so stubborn that they cross a finish line no one else could reach. greed that becomes justification to protect people. ruthlessness that gets the job done right. the coward who becomes a hero because they were the only one with the sense not to face something deadly head on. selfishness that keeps you alive.
I love when our ‘worst’ impulses are shown to be as important to who we are and how we handle things as the best parts of us. sometimes you don’t conquer what everyone says is wrong with you; sometimes you learn how to make use of what comes naturally instead of fighting against it.

argumate:

a million years ago the hominids mastered fire and I’m confident that any day now they’ll master not immediately biting into something while it’s still hot

byjove:

byjove:
byjove:
Movie about a depressed and rather morbid autistic man planning to commit suicide and picking up a number of odd jobs in an effort to raise enough money to meticulously plan and prepay for his funeral so his mother doesn’t have to worry about it after he is gone. He begins to connect with people and enjoy life for the first time while working part time as a greeter in the funeral home, helping an eccentric old lady organize her basement, walking 7 dogs and maintaining a feral cat colony for a guy with a broken foot, playing a number of bit parts in local ads and stocking the shelves at the convenience store at night. In the end, he has befriended many of his neighbors and he decides he does not want to die and goes back to school to become a funeral director instead.
He is popular at his funeral home gig because he keeps accidentally saying things that are very reassuring and death positive. Because he wants to die. He eventually donates his funeral fund to the old lady’s granddaughter after her sudden death so she does not have to sell her grandmother’s prized possessions to pay for her funeral.
The old lady gifts him one of her ceramic cats at the beginning of the film which he reluctantly accepts out of politeness. Near the end of the film, he adopts a friendly cat from the cat colony that looks remarkably like the ceramic cat and names it after her, signaling his commitment to surviving and caring for his cat the way the old woman lived for her ceramic collection.