huge congratulations to drugs for continuing to win the war on drugs

From: The Workers of the World To: Capital

COPE

I think I know why I'm so hard hit

It's because I see his posts, like I would if he was still alive.

Seeing other people talking about his death? Not so hard at all. Seeing one of his posts come by again? Instant reaction every time.

Because that's how we talk to each other on this God forsaken hellsite, that's how we're real to each other.

It's like

Every time I see a post from any random person, I'm in a conversation immediately. OP has never heard of me, I've never heard of OP, but there's a conversation happening and I'm thinking of what I want to say back (And then, for 9/10 posts the answer is "nothing" but still! That's what's happening!)

But every time I see a Kontextmaschine post scrolling by, I'm not. He's dead. But I'm thinking about what I want to say because that's how I use tumblr and we are now talking and it doesn't matter at all because death took him.

HELLO Kontext! None of this matters! I am writing a response to a dead man's introductory post and the only reason I'm gonna hit "reblog" once I'm done writing is because I want other people, living, not you, to know what I am currently feeling because you wrote something thirteen years ago.

And also because you deserve a cenotaph and the only medium I have is posting. FUCK.

Things NOBODY told me about being an adult that I wish they had:

The Curse of Babel

Via @redsteeze,

there's a lot of people in the comments yukking it up about regret, hypocrites, this is what you ordered now eat it, having one's bluff called, and so forth. (And yes, "LA" in the second headline does mean the City Council, I checked.)

While they're not wrong, I want to offer another take, which is that the Los Angeles City Council is suffering the Biblical Curse of Babel, the confusion of tongues, the inability to understand one another.

I speculate that the LA City Council in the first picture did not understand itself to be voting to take in every migrant of the proverbial huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. The LA City Council saw that "sanctuary city" was a term with positive affect, and thought of itself as voting to bestow positive affect on LA by linking the term with the city.

On the one hand yes.

On the other hand, alternatively:

Hello, I am Kontextmaschine. I am 27 and not entirely happy with my life.

I had a livejournal, got it way back when I was the kind of person who had a livejournal. Now I see the people still there still are, and I seem to have become the kind of person who has a tumblr. Maybe I’ll still keep it up, split topics between them, we’ll see.

I will write about history, modern society, and my life. I will often write as if these things are indistinguishable.

Also sometimes there will be happy hardcore.

The title comes from an idea I once had to write a column tracing the history and precedents of events in the news, like some sort of “context machine”. But we all know the story of modern journalism, and I guess this is the place for that, now.

I made it Kontextmaschine because a machine dedicated to historicism is obviously German.

Hello Kontextmaschine who would have been 40 but never did become entirely happy with your life.

I had a livejournal too, and I read your tumblr, about history, society and your life. I'll miss reading that. Never did share your taste in music though.

I liked your choice of name. It suited you well. Rest in peace, friend.

Fucking ephemeral

His death is affecting me way more than I thought it would. Hard to put proper words to it but he belonged here.

had a good night

Tell us about it lad.

Saying that Alberta has so little to offer the world that we should be seen as synonymous with our oil industry sounds like a dire insult, but that's apparently our Premier's official position

God, this is a masterpiece.

The US is deeply segregated not only along racial lines, but along class lines as well: from housing to schools to healthcare, many of our major institutions are designed to allow rich people to keep poor people as far away from them as possible.

Where do rich and poor people interact with one another? If I'm reading this study right, it's restaurants. Which restaurants? They find that some of the most cross-class locations in the country are cheap full-service restaurants: "Olive Garden, Applebee’s, Chili’s and IHOP."

The more I think about this finding the more it makes sense. Places like Olive Garden are some of the only locations in US society which are simultaneously "nice" enough to draw in high-income diners and cheap enough to attract low-income diners. Rich people go to, say, Outback Steakhouse because they see it as a cheap and easy meal that's better than fast food, poor people go because it's one of the closest things to a nice steakhouse you can eat at without dropping $100+ per person.

Other cross-class locations: churches, libraries, credit unions, alcohol stores, the DMV. Locations which worsen class segregation: golf courses and country clubs, bars, museums.

This reminds me of the most fantastic book liveblogs I've ever read (by ozy thingofthings). It's Times Square Red Times Square Blue by Afrofuturist scifi author Samuel Delany.

(full but paywalled review by that liveblogger here, although the visible portion of the text should give you an idea of what a weird and fantastic book this is)

A lot of it is about The Venus Theater, which showed adult films until a push to close all the porn theaters also shut it down in 1970. It was pretty normal to jerk off in the theater and cruise for (mostly m/m?) sex – both of the sex worker and non sex worker variety (although the line was very blurry). It was normal to e.g. jerk off your neighbor.

Delany was a college professor at Amherst the time he was a Venus regular. He had social and sexual relationships with a large number of people he met at the Venus Theater, including homeless people – he kept up correspondence with many of them, including at least one who went to prison. When establishments like the Venus shut down, one reason he didn't like this was that he thought it was unhealthy for society to get rid of spaces with high levels of inter-class contact.

Delany draws a distinction contact and networking. The Venus was contact, and more formal "people of various backgrounds who are interested in X, come mingle" events are networking. And if you get rid of interclass contact spaces, interclass networking spaces have to 'take up the slack' of facilitating connections, and they... can't do it. Example about parenting from the linked blog post:

And here's Delany on the value of public spaces that facilitate sexual contact:

After reading the above Delany quote I sat back in my chair, grinning wildly at the ceiling. You may not like it but this is what the optimal take looks like

If you don't see how "look how much consensual sex this guy is having, and how many women have admitted on the record to having consensual sex with him" is not an argument hat proves conclusively that the guy must also be a rapist, then I don't know what to say.

But please have the integrity not to call a notorious womaniser an "incel".

I think I see the issue: You're expecting integrity from people who use "incel" as an insult.

Suppose you are reading the rules for a game with friends, could be a boardgame or RPG. At one point it says to calculate something by taking half the value of your greebles; and if this is an odd number, round down. For example, if the greeble value is 5, you get 2.

One player has done something weird with the rules and gotten a negative value of -5 greeble. This starts a discussion of how to calculate half of it.

One argument says it's literally "round down" right there in the rules, if you look at the number line (illustrated above), half of -5 rounded down is -3. The mathematicians have settled this. Other argument says the rules probably weren't made by a mathematician. If half of 5 is 2 rounded down, then half of -5 is -2, that's sensible. If you used a math definition of "round down" then half of -0.1 would round to -1 and that's dumb, it should round to 0.

Which way would you interpret the rules?

RaW but only because there aren't near enough context clues here to go RaI

pushing the 'no such thing as inborn talent' line seems downright cruel sometimes

oh, no, it's not that i had any advantages over you. i just put in more work. no don't look at people who are getting far better results than you with half the effort, they don't exist. just bang your head against the wall harder, you lazy piece of shit.

you can say 'your skills can and will improve with practice' without saying 'the amount of practice you put in is literally the only thing that matters'. and you should, because the second thing is a fucking lie.

Some of the God damn people teaching programming are like this

"It is hard but everybody can learn if you just-" no the fuck everybody can not.

It's not the hardest thing in the word, you probably only need to be in the world top 1% technical intuition[1] to even begin to do it but then, you're on the path! Next step is the one where you find out if you also have talent for abstract spatial reasoning. And then, you're on the path.

[1] If you think this is wrong, I invite you to come at me

going out with, probably, a metastatic brain tumour, telling everyone and himself he was being born again as a superman, a tragic but really fucking AMERICAN🦅🇺🇲 end to one of Tumblr's strangely quiet and respected pillars

rip @kontextmaschine

Extremely valid.

I would say probably 500 based on counting to 100, seeing how much space that was, then multiplying by how many times I've used up that amount of space.