Future, Proof

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine // S04E02: Way of the Warrior, Part II 

Architecture is one of those fields that’s perpetually on the border of “You’re all full of shit” to me. This is an NYC office building that was built in 1977:

Apparently that little circular doohickey up top was, at the time, a revolutionary departure from modern design principles and had every prominent architect at the time absolutely furious for that reason. 46 years on and it’s seen as an architectural treasure that made the NYC Landmark list.

It’s. A circle. Literally just a circle. I don’t get it.

I can explain this, but you have to start with the understanding that this entire thing is a gigantic in-joke of a piss take. This is going to be long.

First, you need to understand about ornamentation. Ornamentation is anything in a building that is basically a slightly superfluous detail.

In this colonial revival house (which is supremely balanced and has very clean lines), you can notice how the bottom windows have these clean ornamentations at the top, the way the columns fan out into a small design; the way the dormer windows have their own different style of decor complete with arch and keystone! That’s the ornamentation, it’s the small touches of structural decor. The majority of the time, they were there because they were needed to support something, to give additional support

Modernism changes that. The arrival of concrete and steel on architecture means you can explore structures that were never possible before, ways of getting light into a room that were never possible before, shapes that were never possible before; it basically heralds a new era entirely. For instance, Louis Sullivan’s National Farmer’s Bank of Owatonna, though a late entry into modernism (1908!):

Look how none of the voids (windows and doors!) have any sort of ornamentation. There is some ornamentation around the corners, sure, and while the ornaments themselves are very baroque and refined, there’s also a textural element on the tiling itself being patterned. But that’s very up-close detailing, or very far away detailing. You end up with a mix of the shape and texture being where detailing is explored, less so the ornamentation of before. Importantly, none of that ornamentation is, in any way, shape, or form, anything that is fundamentally structural. It’s become nearly superfluous.

And this keeps developing and developing and you arrive at things like skyscrapers. Sullivan may have been the father of the skyscraper, but I can think of no better follower than the trio of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, who are most notable for the Empire State Building, but 500 5th Avenue may be the most direct example of what I’m talking about:

This modern-day ziggurat is almost all shape - the mullions (those vertical lines dividing windows) are largely decorative, and the ornamentation is very minimal and only serves to bring forward the shapes - notice how they only exist in what’s essentially the ceiling of each floor!

So we’ve established that ornamentation is steadily going away and no longer en vogue because architects are exploring the limits of shape itself, and they’re exploring unusual textures. But fast forward some 50 years, and this has become the singular architectural style that even exists. And a trio (Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour) go to Las Vegas on a trip and come back with post-modernism. The idea is that buildings are either decorated sheds (ornamented houses) or ducks (buildings where the shape itself is the draw). The duck is a bit of joke to Americana - they passed by a duck building where the entire point was that it was a duck. There’s a disagreement, but even among the detractors, you’re going to see a more humorous take on Modernism. They’re going to make buildings that resemble other aspects of buildings, or other buildings, or whatever. It’s extremely in-jokey. It’s amazing.

Venturi and Scott Brown’s first major work is the Guild House, which is an apartment for the elderly. See if you can spot the joke:

Did you get it? The entire 5-story building is topped off with a colossal arch, treating the balconies like a void that you have to add an ornament on top. It’s a call back to the windows that we saw on the colonial house! This is a joke for a specific audience, but goddamn it’s really funny.

So the post-modernists are basically gonna set up jokes with architectural elements and play with aspects of it. It’s architecture for architecture nerds. It’s so obviously trying to be clever, and I love it.

Which brings us back to 550 Madison Avenue, by Johnson and Burgee, at the top of this post. The circle isn’t just the circle. It’s the entire slope and circle. The thing crowning the building. And you’ve seen it above doorframes and windows in a number of places.

The thing atop this dormer is called a pediment. It’s that mini roof. In this case we have a standard apex (the top) and a broken base (the bottom). This means that the top is connected and doesn’t recede to let in any ornamentation, but the bottom is broken up into two parts to let in the ornamentation.

On top of this door, you have a pediment broken on the apex. It’s filled in by that egg-like thing.

But what if you put a gigantic broken pediment one with no ornament on top of a building?

And there we have it. 550 Madison, a gigantic, supremely large scale shitpost, brought to you by technological advancements in construction and shifting design philosophies. “This skyscraper is structured like a window” is a really funny gag to pull if you’re the kind of person who actively has the same degree of architecture nerdery that I do. And architecture is one of the most common forms of art that you can observe and pull apart on your daily life.

Architecture is one of those things where because its so aggressively public, communal, and (seemingly) long lasting, its design should be equally so. But it turns out architects are just a bunch of little guys doing their weird hobby shit like everyone else, with back-and-forth fuck you’s to match. And that’s beautiful, it should never change.

everyone who ever asked “is that a bad joke?” of some bit of bad 20th century architecture feeling p. vindicated by this post

I was there when this thing was being built. My GOD but the ruckus about it! It was hilarious. :)

I need everyone to know that Anne Rice and guy who started Popeyes (the fried chicken place not the cartoon) hated each other and once spent weeks/monthes taking out page length ads against each other in New Orleans newspapers because the Popeyes guy opened a tacky restaurant where Lestat was supposed to have died, or something like that

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/19/us/where-a-vampire-walked-tastes-clash.html

In case anyone thought I was kidding

why am i not at all surprised to read of Anne Rice being litigious about petty bullshit

It gets even better when you realize that, before the restaurant opened, it was an abandoned used car lot. She was literally complaining about an abandoned property being bought and actually USED for something. Because in Lestat’s final scene he walked by the car lot and looked at his reflection in one of the car windows.

I have never enjoyed anything more as I have enjoyed imagining Lestat’s reaction to learning that his final resting place is a restaurant owned by a fast food executive.

I bed everyone to read this article, which includes not only mr. Copeland writing “PS see you in court” but also anne rice writing AS LESTAT and thereby ADJUSTING “CANON” that lestat isnt in the restaurent bc it was so ugly it woke him from his slumpers

Anne Rice could gaf abt canon this is all amazing

This is SUCH a Lestat thing to do though…Lestat most definitely would take an ad out in a paper to critize an ugly restaurant he believed didn’t suite the ambience of New Orleans . If that’s not Canon idk what is . I can see him looking across the street in horror and calling his lawyers while Louis just sits there done with life.

This is the best part. It’s 2:00 Am and I’m losing my mind .

DD: And this is why an author tries not to get a rep for D&C-ing her fans.

PM: …“C&D-ing.”

DD: (glaring at recent glass of wine) (mouth drops open, shuts again) …Uh. What you said.

Anne Rice reveled in her rep for C&Ding her fans, though.

Playing Chrono Trigger on stream tonight I realized I should not be trusted with time travel at all

Nobody should.

The thing you need to understand about the rules of Magic: The Gathering and why the official rulebook is Like That is that a large portion of the game's tournament scene consists of people who approach the turn structure the way video game speedrunners approach terrain collision, and they've become very good at glitching out of bounds.

Checks out.

I know you're talking mostly about ethics and the Darkover precedent, the situation gets even more tangled legally, given that the property in question is an adaptation of an original property that just entered the public domain (and the grasping hands of the rightsholders to that original property were getting really clawed towards the end there)...

Okay, so the way that Earth society works in Star Trek, as near as I can tell considering only the show itself, is:

a. Everybody gets free housing and huge gobs of replicator credits.

b. However, there's still a private service industry, in the sense that if you can convince Earth's government that your hobby is providing a service to your community and convince members of your community to actually make use of that service, the government will subsidise all of your operating costs.

c. This arrangement is used almost exclusively to operate restaurants catering to people who are snobs about eating replicated food.

Now, I'm not saying people wouldn't use the described arrangement to operate restaurants, and I can even see an argument that this would represent the majority of such cases, but I can't help but feel that there are opportunities that are being underexplored here. I can think of much more eccentric hobbies than cooking that you could probably persuade members of your community to claim are furnishing them with a needed service.

I firmly agree that there are underexplored opportunities here; seeing as we do mostly see members of Starfleet, I am not shocked.

But seriously--if you could operate within this system, wouldn't you?

It’s true and you should say it.

Americans are strangely confident that their utterly bizarre ideas concerning ethnicity are universal, and then they get confused when that's not how things work.

Like apparently as far as they're concerned, the spanish are latino but italians are white, despite of ranging in the same colours and speaking languages so similar that I can vaguely make sense of italian by understanding the basics of french and spanish, and they're baffled when J.K. Rowling manages to be racist against white people.

“Spanish people are Latino” is definitely bound up in the fact Spanish is a major language in Mexico and South America (thank colonialist Spain for that part), I still wouldn’t call someone from Spain or Portugal Latino because obviously they’re European. The dividing lines are weird as hell to me, too, they really just wanted to draw some boxes and didn’t think too much about it imo.

Meanwhile Rowling is the sort of person where them being racism against other British people wouldn’t surprise me.

Wait so by the american definition, Spanish people who speak Spanish aren't even included in the category of people who are occasionally referred to as Spanish because they speak Spanish. So spanish people are white but spanish people are latino. Am I understanding this right.

This is going to cause you physical pain but there’s a number of Americans who don’t realize Spain is a country.

Another factor is that, by this point, a lot of Latinos are mestizo, meaning a mix of European (primarily Spanish) and the various native tribes that were in the Americas when Europeans came over descent. So they tend to have darker skin or eyes or hair colour.

Whiteness in America is less about racial ancestry and more about how much an individual can pass for Caucasian; specifically, White Anglo Saxon Protestant Caucasian. Someone from Spain who looks White Anglo Saxon Protestant Caucasian would be considered white. (Catholics are technically considered white but are on thin ice). And because we (america) don’t really talk about race, a lot of people don’t understand that our concept of whiteness and race are a cultural construction, and get really confused at the idea someone who looks what our culture says is white isn’t considered white by another culture.

There’s a term that I think is helpful for understanding US-specific racism: Conditional whiteness.

Basically, if you LOOK like the popular idea of a White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) you’re perceived as white and are treated as such.

When you deviate from that idea, you are no longer white, you lose your “conditional whiteness.”

For example, I am white. I am perceived and treated as white (95% of the time). If I tell someone that I’m Jewish, depending on their understanding of Jewish culture and ethnicity and whether or not they’re antisemitic, I may lose my “conditional whiteness.” If I tell someone that, along with being Jewish, I’m also part of a Native American tribe, I am even MORE likely to lose my “conditional whiteness.”

I’ve had the BIZARRE experience of standing next to an actual WASP girl who happened to have darker, curlier hair than mine and hearing her get called an antisemitic slur. She didn’t even know what the slur was, or what it meant. Her hair color and texture was enough to get her considered “not white,” while I maintained my “conditional whiteness.”

American racism is based heavily on a “white”/“not white” divide. Because whiteness is — more obviously and dramatically in the past — a way to access money/power in the US, European immigrants had a strong incentive to homogenize/integrate and view themselves as “white,” instead of maintaining their cultural identity. From what I can gather of European racism, whiteness and non-whiteness is part of it, but there are ethnic/cultural/national nuances that are lost on Americans. Like, if you asked an American the difference between a Polish person and a Bulgarian person, most would be like “Idk, are their foods different?”

I draw too many vash recently he started to look like woodstock to me

people's voice is heard

now you have wolfwood as snoopy

Imagine if you met someone who can't eat watermelon. Not that they're allergic or unable somehow, but they just haven't figured out how to do that. So you're like "what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon."

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

If someone can't do something after being repeatedly told to "just do it", there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.

Yep.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

My fiance played the clarinet when he was in school. When he was first learning to play, he rented an instrument from the school to learn on. He was the last chair clarinet, had been for years, because he could not make notes that required the register key. For years, they kept making him do embrature exercises and he started to get a few notes, with lots of effort. Eventually he had to get private lessons to stay in band.

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

Sometimes you don't need to brute force a problem. Sometimes your clarinet is just broken.

How did we end up shitting on redheads so hard can you BELIEVE how cool it is that some humans just HAVE red hair?? Like a group really saw the irl equivalent of a shiny pokemon and collectively went "I'm gonna bully that" and everyone went along with it for a hundred years. Like WHAT

Apparently its antisemitism again

Taken from the Wikipedia for red hair

GOD FUCKING DAMMIT IT'S THE FUCKING ANTISEMITISM AGAIN.

THIS FASHY SHIT IS LIKE FUCKING MOLD. YOU THINK YOU'VE FOUND ALL OF IT AND THEN IT'S IN YOUR FUCKING DISHES.

my last game is actually overwatch haha… wbu?

Midnight Suns. So am I holed up at the Abbey chilling? Maybe consulting on the drafting of infernal pacts? Or am I in NYC keeping my head down as slightly-more-supernatural-than-usual MCU nonsense goes down? Either way I can probably do a year.

I'm living in Tokyo, "perception is reality" is a bit more literal than normal, corruption, heartlessness, and apathy are the enemy and powerful forces are fighting against them, and I have a million bucks?

I'm never leaving.

(Persona 5.)

DC version of AO3 is called Tales of Our Own??

WHY DC MAKING ALTERNATIVE VERSION OF AO3

(Far Sector: Green Lantern)

(polite cough) That was me. Just showing a little love to one of my favorite sites!

His face in the last one! If anyone wants to know what Peter Parker is like these panels are the perfect summery.

And then there's this one

sometimes I think, "I want to learn how to do more things," but that's really not it at all. I want to know how to do more things. learning sucks!

some people are reblogging this to add like "no, learning is great, what an uplifting experience!" and I want you guys to know that you're better than me, but in a way that will annoy people

this is incredible

goodnight, sweet prince

Thesis: enemies-to-lovers fanfiction is the opposite of cosmic horror literature.

Elaborate

Well, clearly the opposite of Lovecraft is hateship.

Somewhere on the upper West Side: “…Out of pastrami again.”

(First-light test of a New York bodega set I’ve been eyeing for a while.)

The Zabar's bag makes it art.