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kayteewritessteve · 6 years ago

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If Only You Knew - 9/19

Description: You arrive home one day to find a wedding invite for two of your best friends from high school. You knew this day was going to come eventually, but even with that said, you weren’t prepared to return home. At least not after 7 years of avoiding Buckhannon, West Virginia. Or rather, avoiding him; your ex-best friend and the secret love of your life. But maybe it was finally time to face your past, to face him, and everything else that happened on that horrible night. Who would have knew that your prom would end up being a total disaster, and the very last night you’d spend in Buckhannon for the next 7 years? you certainly didn’t. That’s for sure.

Catch up HERE.

Word Count: 3,700 ish.

Pairing: Modern!Steve Rogers x Reader.

Rating: 18+

Warnings: Violence. Drinking. Bad and offensive jokes. Possible triggering thoughts, feelings and emotions. Moments of bullying and harsh name calling. Lots of curse words. And a very sloooow burn.

A/N: I sadly don’t own any of these characters. And no beta reader, so I do proudly own all the errors and this story, so there’s that.

July 2018 - Present

“Steve?” You sniffled, quickly wiping the tears from your cheeks then crossed your arms. “What are you—Why are you here?” He was the very last person you wanted standing in front of you on your porch.

You had come home from the party, willing yourself not to cry in the cab. You didn’t even know why you were crying in the first place. It had been 7 years since you stormed away from him at prom. Where he was with her. Them being engaged now shouldn’t have come as a surprise to you. But yet, it had.

Maybe a little part of you—Okay, let’s be honest, it was a for sure part of you, and it was a lot bigger than just ‘a little’—hoped that you could rekindle even an acquaintanceship with him, but if Madeleine was in the picture, and as his damn fiancee at that, there was no chance of anything with him. She would never let you both be friends, in any form. And hiding your friendship with him was like basically cheating or being some weird version of the other woman. No, you were not that kind of woman. Nor did you want high school 2.0 with Madeleine fucking Karlington. Fuck that shit.

So when you finally walked through your front door, you ran up stairs, changed into comfy clothes and then allowed yourself to mourn what could have been, but now never would be. You allowed yourself to grieve the loss of him once again, knowing you needed that time to get passed it. Or at least get back to where you had once been in your mind. That place where you had pretty much accepted that he would never be a part of your life again. Okay, accepted isn’t the right word here. You would never accept it. More like …handle it. Yeah, a place where you could at least handle the outcome of that night. And the consequences that came from it.

He scratched the back of his neck, looking anywhere but at you, there was his nervous tick again. Which in turn only made you more anxious for the words that were about to leave his mouth. This was it. You’d hear the truth from him now.

“I came to check on you,” he paused and finally made eye contact with you as he softly said, “I ah, heard about your run in with the she-witch.”

Your brows knitted together and you shook your head. “Should you really be calling your fiancée by our high school nickname for her?”

“My what?” His eyes grow wide and his eyebrows damn near attempted to high five his hairline. “What are you talking about?”

“You’re fiancée, Steve,” you deadpanned. You were over this conversation, why he was dragging it out was beyond you. He’d clearly heard what you’d said, he might as well just own up to it, you both knew the truth now.

“Dial it back just a second,” he shook his head “when the fuck did I get engaged?” He looked around as if waiting for someone or something to answer his question. “I think I’d know if I was engaged, Y/N.”

“Wait,” you glared at him then stepped out on the porch, pulling the front door closed behind you then looking back up at him. “So you aren’t engaged to Madeleine?”

“Jesus christ, why the fuck—” he stopped mid sentence and shook his head. “God no, I can’t fucking stand that woman.”

You looked down at your feet, utterly confused and whisper your internal thoughts out loud. “But then why did she say she was becoming ‘a Mrs. Stark’?”

The sound of Steves laugh made you snap your head back up to look at him again. “Because that’s true, she is becoming a Mrs. Stark,” he cringed slightly. “A Mrs. Tony Stark,” he corrected.

Then it fucking clicked. All of it. She wasn’t engaged to Steve. She was fucking engaged to Tony, his older brother. That she-witch tricked you, and you let her! Fuck, who are you kidding, you should have seen that one coming. Madeleine was clearly still a bitch. “Ugh,” you crossed your arms again then mumbled, “that stupid bitch.”

Steve laughed even louder at that, then wiped the stray tear from his cheek. You always knew he found something really funny when it made him tear up. “So, wait. Let me get this straight, you thought I was engaged to Madeleine?”

“I mean,” you made awkward gestures with your hands, as if trying to pull the answer from mid air, “maybe?” You scrunched your face up.

“Then you left the party early, and came home?”

You shrugged, “sort of.”

“And when I got here,” his face turned more serious now, “you were crying,” he trailed off and just stared at you.

You shifted your weight from side to side. Once again looking down at your feet as you tucked a strain of hair behind your ear, “slightly.”

“Why?” He quickly asked.

“Why what?” You played dumb but the knowing expression on his face when you looked back up at him told you he wasn’t buying it. You sighed, “why was I crying?”

He nodded but didn’t say a word.

“I duno,” there were those damn awkward hand gestures again. ��I guess, I just figured if Madeleine was still in the picture, there was no hope in us being friends again,” you shrugged and shared off to the side. You decided to just be honest with him, plus he used to be able to tell when you were lying. So you assumed he probably still could. Might as well save him having to call you out for it.

A silence fell over both of you, it wasn’t exactly awkward, it was just…quiet. Then you felt two fingers under your chin, urging you to look up at him.

Once you did he locked eyes with you and a chill ran down your spin at the intensity in his deep blue eyes. “You actually want to be friends again?” He asked quietly, his face unreadable and neutral.

“Honestly,” you took a deep breath, “that’s what I’ve always wanted, Steve. I just—I could never find the courage to reach out to you.” You grabbed his wrist and pulled his hand down from your chin, “or the words to say to fix this. To fix us,” you released his wrist.

Before you could even comprehend what was going on you were tucked firmly into his chest. His arms around your shoulders and his face resting on your head. You wrapped your arms around his waist and just allowed the familiar comfort of his embrace to consume you. It had been far too long since you’d had a Steven Rogers Stark hug, and honestly, you had needed one many times throughout the years. His hugs always seemed to relax you, to make all your troubles drift away, even if just for a moment.

There was just something about his large body wrapped protectively and comfortingly around your smaller frame that made you melt. That made you feel both untouchable and invincible, like nothing could hurt you. Not while you were safely tucked into him. His hugs had healed many of your wounds during your friendship, one of those moments coming to the front of your mind…

March 2010 - 8 years ago.

‘Where are you?’ You stared at the text on your phone, wondering if you should reply or not. You were currently sitting on your bed, with your knees tucked up into your chest, trying to will yourself to stop crying. This day had been fucking hell, thanks to your archenemy.

The day had started off normal, nothing out of the ordinary. But by lunch it had taken a turn for the worst. You should have seen this coming, any day that Steve wasn’t at school was always hell. He had to miss class that day due to some family emergency so it was basically open season on you, as far as Madeleine was concerned.

It all started with your clothes being stolen from your gym locker during class. The lock being cut off so now you had to get a new one, though that quickly became the least of your problems. As you had located your clothes thanks to a text from Clint, however they were now attached to the outside flag pole and you had to spend most of your lunch trying to track down the janitor so he could help you get them down. Though your sweater was still missing but you figured you had left it in your actual locker. So that was pretty fun—Not.

So then when you finally did get your clothes back down, and got changed back into them, you headed to your locker. Only to find it covered in bright red spray paint and sharpies. Saying a bunch of really hurtful things, mainly centred around you being a loser, and a slut. So that was fucking awesome—Not.

But that wasn’t all. Half way through your last class of the day, a student entered the room and handed the teacher a note. She quickly skimmed the note then looked up at you and pointed. “Y/N, the Vice Principal would like to see you in his office. Now, please.”

You nodded then collected up your things and headed towards the office, not entirely sure why, but you had a sickening feeling Madi had something to do with it. Somehow. You could just feel it.

Turns out your gut instincts were correct, someone had broken into one of the computer labs and smashed a few of the computers. So why were you currently in the office being told about this? Well, because your sweater had been found beside the smashed electronics, that’s why. So that was just fucking great—Not.

Luckily for you, Vice Principal Coulson was fully aware of all the other things that you’d been put through today. So he figured this was probably the work of someone trying to get you in trouble. But unfortunately without you giving up the names of your bullies his hands were tied. He’d have to conduct an investigation and contact your father, and the police. So while that was all happening you’d be suspended from school. You wanted to tell him the truth, throw Madeleine under the bus. But what good would that do? She would just come after you again, and her father was a powerful man in this town. He’d have it swept under the rug and paid off in no time. Allowing Madeleine to walk away unscathed, yet out for even more blood.

Now normally most kids would love a school suspension, it being like a mini vacation to them. But to you, it was hell. Every step you made in school, and all the hard work you put in to have good grades and not fall behind again, was for your college applications. You needed a scholarship so you could actually go to college, as your dad couldn’t afford to cover the whole cost on his own.

But now, now you may not even be able to apply for one. Let alone ever be considered, even if you could apply. Not with possible destruction of property charges and a suspension under your belt. No, you could probably kiss any chance of a scholarship goodbye.

Mess with my stuff? Fine. Vandalize my locker and call me names? Go for it. But fuck with my future? No, that was not fucking acceptable. Not even in the slightest.

When your dad showed up to pick you up from school, he was surprisingly calm. He talked to Vice Principal Coulson privately and then walked you out to the truck. He didn’t say a word until you pulled into your driveway and he shut the truck off. You just sat there, waiting for him to yell or scream or punish you or something. Anything. But he didn’t.

He just asked you to be 100% honest with him about what happened, the whole story and then who set you up. You told him everything, except the names. That irked him a little, but you explained to him exactly why you refused to give their names. Not the parts that could narrow them down, just your fears that if you told the Vice Principal on them that it would only get worse.

He climbed out of the truck and pulled you into a hug the second you both got into the house. You’d honestly not expected him to take it this well, but then again, who were you kidding. This was your dad we were talking about. He always had your back and in return you always told him the truth. Well at least when North Korea wasn’t in effect. You should have known he’d understand you in this. He may not agree with your choice to keep the names to yourself. But he did understand.

So now, here you were, your dad had gone to bed and you were just sitting up, crying about your day from hell. All while staring at the message from your best friend on your phone. But then your phone pinged loudly in your hand, scaring the crap out of you, and damn near making you jump off the bed. ‘Y/N?’

You gave your heart a second to calm down then sighed, deciding to finally respond, ‘I’m at home. But I’m really not in the mood for company right now, Steve.’

*ping* ‘Well that wasn’t the response I was expecting. So FYI, I may already be standing in your backyard. Awkwaaard…’

You laughed at that, as you stood up from your bed and wandered over to your window to look out. It was pretty dark in your room, aside from the soft glow of your desk light, so you figured he wouldn’t be able to see that you’d been crying. At least you hoped he wouldn’t be able to. Your eyes landed on his large form standing in the backyard, once he saw you he waved, sheepishly. You waved back. ‘Why are you in my backyard in the middle of the night, you creep?’

*ping* ‘First off it’s 10, so not the middle of the night. Secondly, I gave you a heads up that I was in your backyard, so that vetoes the creep thing.’

You actually saw him shrug as he typed and that also made you laugh. ‘Whatever you need to tell yourself to get through the day, lurker.’

*ping* ‘Ha, you’re funny. So, are you gonna come down or do I have to come up?’

Your brows knitted together ‘Come up?’ What the fuck does that mean?

*ping* ‘Alright you asked for it.’

Your eyes snapped up from your phone and watched as he disappeared under the mid roof. What the hell is he doing? You opened your window to try to see where he’d gone.

But then you got your answer as you watched him pull himself up onto the roof and walk towards you. “Seriously?” You scoffed, “did you actually just climb onto my roof?”

“Move,” he laughed and gestured for you to back up.

“If my dad catches you here he is gonna be pissed.” You crossed your arms but backed up to let him in anyways.

“Then we’ll just have to keep our voices down,” he whispered as he climbed into your window then closed it behind him.

“You really are a creeper.”

“Only when it comes to you,” he laughed quietly. And you rolled your eyes.

“Lucky me,” you said flatly then went back to sit on your bed.

“And don’t you forget it.” He smirked and pointed at you as he sat down on your window bench and toed off his shoes.

“Like you’d ever let me.” You snorted then just watched him for a second, he was looking around your room, taking it all in. And it dawned on you that this was his first time in your room, he’d been in your house before, and he’d come with your friends a few times at night to get you to sneak out. But he’d never actually stepped foot in your room before.

He stood up from the bench seat and wandered over to your desk, looking over all the photos tacked up on the board above it. You just stayed on your bed, still watching him.

“I like this one,” he looked over at you as he pointed to one of the photos, “you guys look adorable.”

You squinted your eyes to focus on the photo, trying to figure out which one he was talking about. It was a photo of your dad and you, one your mom had taken, he was giving you a piggyback ride around the kitchen and you both were laughing really hard at something he had said. You were about 8 in the photo, the memory playing in your head causing you to smile. “Yeah, that’s one of my favourites as well.”

He smiled then looked over a few more photos before he walked back over to the bench seat. He sat down, resting his hands on his knees then looking up at you. “What happened today Y/N?”

“It’s a long fucking story,” you sighed and looked down, as all the emotions from this day hit you again. Your eyes started to sting and you blinked a bunch of times trying to prevent the tears from forming.

You felt him staring at you, and when you looked up at him that feeling was confirmed. He looked so concerned, but with a hint of guilt, and maybe a touch of sorrow. You pulled yourself together and forced a smile at him, trying to show you were okay.

He smiled back, but you could tell it was just as forced as yours, then he stood up and walked towards you. You watched as he sat down on the bed beside you and pulled you towards him. He wrapped his arm around your shoulders and tucked you into his side. “I’m so sorry,” he mumbled as he kissed the top of your head.

“Steve, we’ve talked about this,” you pulled away just enough to look up at him, “you don’t have to apologize, this wasn’t your fault.”

He nodded then pulled you back into him, “doesn’t mean I’m not sorry.”

A silence fell over the both of you, as he just held you tight to his body. If you hadn’t been so preoccupied with worrying about your future, and stressing about your day, you might have read more into this moment. You might have been grinning like a fool while the butterflies ran wild in your tummy. But right now you were just too distracted. Though the steady beat of his heart in your ears was calming, and the warmth radiating off him was comforting as hell.

You felt his chest heave with a deep sigh, then he took his arm from your shoulders and you sat up to look at him, just as he started to softly speak, “do you want to talk about what happened?”

You shrugged, “I duno.” And you didn’t. You weren’t sure if you actually wanted to relive it all again. But this was your best friend, the one person that if you did just need to vent to, it’d be to him. He’d sit quietly and just listen, only interrupting to clarify something or ask a side question. But usually he just listened, intently. However, you had vowed to keep him out of your drama with Madeleine. You didn’t want him to feel guilty or like he had to keep dealing with your problems. Like you were some small child that needed her ‘big brother’ to fight her battles for her.

“Okay, make me a promise?” He asked.

You smirked, “depends what it is.”

He chuckled then went serious again, “just promise me you’ll tell me one day—soon?”

“Promise,” you said as you held out your right hand with your pinky pointing up.

He laughed then linked his pinky with yours and you bounced your hands in the air quickly before ending the pinky promise. The rest of the night you both just talked about nothing, and everything. You laughed and joked and planned. And then after a while you started to yawn, every few minutes and Steve called it a night. He stood up and yanked you up to hug him. Then he said goodnight and climbed back out your window to leave.

You’d realize quickly that him sneaking into your room at night would now be a regular thing. And not always just on the bad days, but just really any night he felt like it. Or the odd night you’d invite him over yourself. These nights alone with each other are what truly built your friendship with him, and your crush. But you’d never admit that part out loud.

July 2018 - Present.

“You don’t know how happy it makes me to hear you say that,” he said honestly as he released you from the hug and took a step back, his hand once again rubbing the back of his neck. “I ah, I miss you, Y/N,” he let out a deep breath, “a lot.”

You smiled up at him, “I miss you too, you giant softy.”

He chuckled and rolled his eyes playfully, “yeah, yeah. I know.”

“Do you wanna come in for a bit?” You gestured to the door, “if you have some free time, that is.”

“Yeah, I’d like that,” he nodded and you opened the door and entered the house, closing it once you both were inside.

“Good, because we have like 7 years of catching up to do,” you laughed then walked into the living room, as he took his shoes off then followed you.

“That we do,” he laughed as well.

You both settled in on either side of the couch, and just talked away for hours about what the last 7 years were like for the both of you. It felt so good to have your best friend back, and you internally kicked yourself for not reaching out sooner.

But you were here now, and that’s what truly mattered most.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

@hopefulmoonobject @harlequinash @itsstillnotwhatyouthink @tessvillegas @boxofteenageideas @wangdeasang @giggleberts @casuallydarktiger @theonelittleone @agentbadbitch @ratwrites @starrystellars @bandsandanimefreak @rockyroadthepastryarchy @lovvliies @cuffski @icesoccerer @alwaysright4 @lilsthethrills @imdiegohargreeves @zombiepotterfour @mu-mu-rs @ledandan1244 @straightforwardly @badassbeckettswan @denzmallows @xremember-me-notx @gwynethjodie @lollipopdomination @capstopavenger

#au fanfiction #fanfiction #long post #long read #marvel au #marvel fanfiction #steve rogers #steve rogers x reader #steve rogers x y/n #steve rogers x you #modern!steve rogers x reader #modern!steve #modern!steve rogers #modern au #alternate universe #if only you knew #chapter 9 #no super powers here

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savageleewriting · 6 years ago

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I grabbed my cap and my hunting rifle, and she took up her knives and that weird electronic boomerang thing she stole off that old techno-witch who runs the hot-dog stand outside the art gallery, and thusly armed, we went out to the grocery store to do our shopping.

It was crowded. It was always is at night. There’s so many people hoping to avoid the authorities that the middle of the night has become a more active time for the city than the middle of the day. The authorities are always in bed at a reasonable hour; they must, for they have to get up early the next morning, every day. It’s pretty rough, being the authorities. Or so they say.

She was looking for something good to cook with, and I was just looking for an excuse to squeeze a bit of fresh fruit. I just like the textures. I imagine myself some simple raised-wild homo-sapien type creature, excited to see all these options of foreign produce. Better than drugs, better than sex, better than murder. Or so they say. Not that I’d know. Well, I know a thing or two, but that’s neither here nor there. Well, sometimes it’s a bit of both. But you know, we all groove on the same grounds, that’s just a folk saying my mom used to say when she was loading her gun and prepping herself for another onslaught from the police.

She found a lively looking piece of fish that still had sixteen of its extraneous eyes attached. They say those eyes, eating them or smoking them, will give you visions. Visions of your own untimely demise, and visions of those folks in the dark blue cloaks who we’ve been seeing all over town for the past few years. Nobody’s too sure what they want or how many of them there are, but who knows, a few mouthfuls of those strangely mutated ocular orbs eaten off a well-fried fish, might just impart a bit of insight onto whatever those dark blue cloaks are all about.

I found a rabbit hole in the shape of a hallway I’d never noticed before, coated in thick, wet graffiti and smelling of fresh paint and human blood. There’s something hiding down here, was the last thing I heard myself say, before I was tumbling, headlong, into the mystery of that dark place.

Breathe easy, trashboy, my companion said to me, tossing my transit pass in after me, as she turned on her heel and headed back towards our home. She had no time for my distractions, she had a meal to cook and consume and contemplate while watching reruns on her newly stolen TV.

But that’s a story for another time.

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weshallneverrevolt · 6 years ago

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MAGFest and The Theology of Pop Culture

I have never been an especially religious person.

That’s not to say I haven’t tried. For years as a kid I went to multiple churches, everything from a Quaker meeting house to a very Southern, weep at the altar church. I tried. I prayed every night before bed, I had a “real men love Jesus” shirt, I went on youth group retreats. But I never felt at home at any of those places. When I saw someone speaking in tongues or entranced by music, I couldn’t relate.

Instead, I threw myself into art and pop culture. I read insatiably. I nodded along to punk rock and hip-hop in my Aiwa CD changer. I spent hours glued to standup on Comedy Central and anime on Adult Swim. But most importantly, I played video games.

Video games shaped my childhood – and subsequently the rest of my life – in a way that nothing else really did. Even my family and friends, despite their dearness to me, couldn’t provide the exhilarating sense of newness that video games did. As I grew older my relationship with games fluctuated, and obviously there’s more to life than consuming media. I traveled, I fell in love, I went outdoors, and I made many friends. But video games have always been a comfortable, familiar place to return when the task of living wears me down.

In recent years – thanks to therapy, a supportive non-gamer wife, and like-minded friends – I have reconnected to my childhood love of games on a much deeper level. Part of this is because of an event called MAGFest. After my initial trip there in 2016 to meet internet friends, I successfully evangelized it to my entire friend circle. This year we rolled 11 deep, plus my internet friends and folks I’ve met at MAGFest. None of my other friends ever hear me shut up about it.

So why? Why do I care so much about this? Why do 20,000 other annual attendees care so much?

I should start by explaining what MAGFest is. MAG – short for Music and Gaming – is a 3-day convention outside Washington, DC. Thousands of geeks gather to play games together, listen to electronic and video game music, dress in costumes, listen to experts at panels, and generally rage. Calling it a “convention” is really a disservice, which is why fans and organizers are quick to say “it’s not a con – it’s a festival.” Essentially, MAGFest is a pop culture celebration, equal parts rave, music festival, and cruise without the ship.

Something that separates MAGFest from other cons is its nonstop nature. The schedule begins at noon on the first day and ends at noon on the fourth day, and doesn’t stop. There are no breaks. Also unlike some other cons, MAGFest is concentrated in a single massive hotel venue. You not only attend the party, you sleep and wake there. It is a fully immersive experience.

Speaking of the venue – the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center – it’s important to understand its size. The Gaylord is a 16-floor hotel with thousands of rooms, four warehouse-sized exposition halls, a rooftop nightclub, and an open-air atrium with one side entirely made of glass. Outside this glass façade you see the lights of DC across the Potomac. There are probably some European countries smaller than the Gaylord.

The Gaylord also sits on one side of National Harbor, a master-planned resort town. The restaurants and shops there are very much of the touristy variety, and many of them are overpriced and underwhelming. But when MAGFest takes over and the streets are filled with cosplayers and music, the phony veneer seems to slip away.

The Gaylord and National Harbor have no real identity of their own; they are a blank canvas on which to project whatever event they host. And when MAGFest comes to town, they become a sort of geek city. A futuristic, borderline utopian center of chaos, partying, music, and general celebration. It feels like another planet, and during the almost annual blizzards it looks like one too. The Gaylord is effectively a giant spaceship piloted by a bunch of nerds, hosting a sleepover with 20,000 of your friends.

And the sheer amount of things to do with those friends is overwhelming, especially for first-timers. There’s a full arcade with both popular and rare games to play, all included in admission. There’s a room full of every gaming console imaginable with 24/7 attendance and both pick-up and organized tournaments. A marketplace full of talented artists and experienced merchants. Concerts running all day, both with professional musicians and spontaneous jammers in the halls. An entire annex dedicated to tabletop games, with a two-room library of them to rent as you please.

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But aside from all the events, simply being at MAGFest is an experience. Much of my memories there are flashes, moments. Sitting on a balcony overlooking crowds and neon lights, having heart-to-hearts at 3am. Sipping whiskey and wandering through the halls as strange music plays and cosplayers pose for photos. Dancing at concerts until it hurts. Running a D&D game for my friends and hearing them shout with joy as they conquer my challenges. Connecting with costumed strangers in the glass elevators. Chatting with musicians after their sets. Meeting hundreds of other people who just get it, who understand why church was so weird and my TV set felt like such a safe place.

When I go to MAGFest, I don’t feel pressured to be anyone but myself. There are no obscure interests to hide. There’s no phony workplace air of professionalism. There is none of the responsibility or burden of being an adult with goals and plans and a schedule.

When I’m at MAGFest, I’m free.

The essence of being a geek is having an attachment to culture. Not just any culture, but culture that doesn’t intersect with society in the way that organized religion or even family units do. Because of this separation between geek culture and the societal hierarchy, so much of what we consume is based on fantasy. Escapism. Wish fulfillment.

If geek culture is based on this sense of leaving the world – of fleeing – MAGFest is something like a dream. A three-day dream of color, music and light. A haven where those dreams are suddenly made real, where the imagination that we wistfully seek in cubicles and traffic jams is tangible. It’s an escape, but more than that it’s a temporary reality. The hangover from MAGFest is certainly due to hard partying, but it’s also because of re-entering the gray, predictable, formulaic reality of living.

So for the guy speaking in tongues at church who I snickered at, for the youth pastor who glared at me for not crying at the altar, for the kids in high school who called me “baby killer” after I renounced religion…you know what? I get it now. That was your MAGFest. That hour every Sunday felt like a new world to you. You constructed it with your friends and family and let your heart go raw with love and passion. You found your new reality in those places.

But my reality of choice? It’s MAGFest. It’s a 3-day vacation, it’s a place for memories with friends, it’s a shit ton of booze and video games.

But most importantly, it’s home.

#magfest #magfest 2019 #convention #festival #music #gaming #cons #con #cosplay #geek culture #nerd #national harbor #gaylord

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brkfstfordinner · 7 years ago

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words by Fred

[Au]

In its most refined form, in function and currency, music is no less valuable gold.

Growing up, I had pals but my best friends all either held mics and played instruments, or could be completely wiped from existence with a pencil eraser. I wasn’t their friend but they were certainly mine. Blink 182, Pepper Ann, Em, System of a Down, Missy Elliot, Doug, Nas, the Recess gang. And later along the way Kid Cudi, BoJack Horseman, Morty, Lincoln Park, Frank, Mac, Chano, Ye, Tyler, Gene and Louise Belcher. These guys all seemed to ‘get it’ more than most people I actually interacted with every day. They were with me in my room for hours starring at the ceiling after moms would hit the light switch, they were waiting for me every day when I got back home from school and they even occasionally provided a wide range of advice on how to approach not dying a virgin.

The mic holders, in particular, I think speak to us all in two main ways. When a song is relatable, it means listening to Bryson Tiller’s ‘Don’t Get Too High’ after a breakup and ugly-crying because your estranged girlfriend of 5 years is now a Veuve Clicquot savant and stores every nuance of the French champagne in the part of her brain where she used to house the memories you made together. This is the kind of music you don’t just listen to, you hear it. The songwriting, composition and delivery feel like the artist twisted the lid off your head open, reached into your brain, and used your thoughts to decorate their lyrics.

A song can also be aspirational. This means when Jay-Z boasts, “I have cars I haven’t seen in months… Niggas thought Hova was over, such dummies/ Even if I fell I’d land on a bunch of money,” you can’t quite relate because that isn’t your reality… But, you’re empowered because it makes you feel like it could be. It’s a transfer of energy that makes the dream of wealth, of beauty, of notoriety and abundance, depending on what you’re listening to, feel tangible, even if that feeling is only momentary. It keeps the hope of better days alive.

There is a third, less cerebral, more visceral level that music connects. You don’t just listen or hear it, you feel it; like a painting or photograph you see and are completely enamoured with but can’t explain why. When it hits, it feels something like Mr. T punching you repeatedly in the stomach, with all his finger-rings on and all of his might. It hurts sometimes but when it gets going, you don’t want it to stop. You can’t explain why you are compelled by it – it’s not always the subject matter, may not quite be the lyrics (if there are any at all), not specifically the melody – you just are. It is its own, almost spiritual language, manifesting itself through any sonic means you are willing to receive it; able to penetrate through all the barriers that separate us from one another. It consoles the inconsolable, it comforts the comfortless.

I happen to believe that the force that makes these fourth-dimension connections possible through art, exists as a raw element floating in the universe, almost in the same way a precious metal occurs in nature. Sure, it’s valuable and has the potential to spark a revolution but it is too unassuming in its natural state to reach most of us. It often needs a vessel that will translate its value before it can be consumed. In the case of a valuable metal like gold, that vessel is a process called extraction; while in the case of music, I believe, it is the sonically inclined who are connected to the universe, that become that vessel.

Bar Macedelic, which is sentimental to me for many reasons, Mac Miller’s Faces mixtape is my favourite of all his projects. From the beginning of his career, Mac always had drug references sprinkled across his music, in the “causal” way we’d known suburban white kids to dabble in the forbidden fruits. This might sound weird but it never occurred to me that he had a real problem until he was on his GO:OD AM media run over a year after the release of Faces and he spoke openly about his mental and physical condition during its recording, and eventually overdosing. Probably because even when Mac candidly and very specifically rapped things like “I've been to hell and back trying to get attached to my better half/ Never that, the smile’s so gone, so bring the coke on”, the delivery and attention to detail that carried these words were always so masterful that it didn’t seem consistent with the image you have in your head of an addict. Also, you never ever got the sense that Mac was glorifying the use of the stuff. It was always more like he was speaking openly about himself in the sometimes quirky, sometimes dark candour that he always did and drugs just happened to be a part of that reality. Insomnia, nostalgia, melancholy, space, Bill Murray, and euphoria were also parts of that microcosm. The bluntness never shocked me. If anything, it was consoling that here was this guy who was at the top of the world with access to everything and anything he could possibly fathom and yet, the degree of separation between us and him seemed minimal. He had the same questions about life than I did. But, he was processing all of it and fashioning it into something beautiful.

Here he was, essentially taking the universe’s proverbial ore and through the painstaking, emotionally and mentally exhausting process of creating (not unlike gold extraction), turning pain, love, uncertainty and all the raw materials he was interacting with in the universe into pure gold. For him, quite literally because it made him a fortune, but for me (and others) it was gold because it felt at times like it was necessary for my sanity. More than something nice to hear or look at, the product of this alchemy became a tool.

There is a high cost to those who allow themselves to be vessels for this kind of transcendent communication though. As human beings, we each have the profound capacity to feel intensely; love, regret, ecstasy, shame, sorrow. These emotions are often reactions to our experiences and need to be felt in order to emerge from them into a place of relative peace. In practice, many of us don’t exhaust our capacity to be present in our feelings because the cost is too high. It’s why we stop ourselves from loving as hard as we could. It’s why we’d rather front than confront that we’ve deeply hurt or been hurt by someone. It’s why we’d rather get dumb-wasted than deal with personal traits that make us feel shitty about ourselves. Being completely vulnerable is not only painfully crippling but also actively requires a lot of work.

Music that accesses this dimension is almost always the result of an artist aggressively exploring their full capacity to feel. They give themselves completely to their emotions, often at a personal expense, and let the results of that process bleed onto pieces of paper, through instrumentation and into microphones. It’s harrowing and traumatic and exhilarating and once the piece of art is complete, we are ecstatic to receive it and that’s where it ends for us (the consumer). Except, that’s not actually where it ends. Because after the lengthy, complex process that is the extraction of gold from rock ore, there is an industrial vessel that is left filled with all the impurities and by-products of the process. The muck and dirt that had to be gathered somewhere so that this timeless, valuable metal that literally builds (and destroys) economies and will be used for fashioning jewelry and shaping the electronic and aerospace industries, can exist. Whose job is it to attend to that vessel? To make sure that the wear and tear of the strenuous process is not causing it to corrode internally with each cycle? Who makes the call to maintenance to find out if the vessel has been serviced after the gold has been dispatched to buyers and we’ve moved on to focusing on the Pateks and satellites it’s been for? Or, as Kendrick so poignantly put it on ‘Feel’:

“I feel like the whole world wants me to pray for ‘em

But who the fuck praying for me?”

There isn’t much I could have personally done to help Mac. Even though one day he got on the piano and played a beautiful ballad for me in my living that got me to call mother when I was being a shitty son, or that he talked me into reminding myself who the fuck I was one afternoon when I almost abandoned a project I was passionate about, the reality is I didn’t know him. And he certainly had no idea who I was. But there are people around me who I can call or go see. There are people who I interact with every other day who are vessels for gold. And we should all make it our collective responsibility to not just admire shiny stuff but also really try to take care of each other holistically. Put a call in. Get a hug in. Be kinder to one another. Listen more.

Because we rob the world and ourselves of our gold when we don’t take care of each other.

Rest in Peace, Mac. Rest in Peace, Pro. Rest in Peace ,Sharpa. Rest in Peace, Sammy. Forever with us.

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leam1983 · 3 years ago

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Having Weird Dreams, Lately...

I sort of feel like they're part of an overarching narrative, seeing as some elements keep coming back; but they're also mostly disjointed and subject to the usual dreamlike nonsense ranging from slow fades to jagged cuts. Still, I've arranged them by theme:

My Subconscious Being Years Late: that's nothing new. As far as my inner cockles are concerned, I should still call the folks every time I'm planning on heading out for a drink on my own, even as I near my forties. In my dreams, I still depend on them for transportation, and frequently arrive in my first setting by means of my father's black Corolla and its back seat. Once I'm settled in, however, I start walking around on my own. I even take the bus in my dreams, which I've always loathed doing IRL.

My Disability Being a Non-Issue: I usually lose my cane in my dreams, and never care to remember where I misplaced it. I sprint across streets, jaywalk across intersections, and even manage to crawl on all fours at a decent pace. I'll chalk all this up to video games and my levels of disability representation being close to non-existent across the medium. Power fantasies are a thing, but weakness fantasies tend to be less of a vector for AAA design documents...

Museums. Lots of Museums: I really don't know why, honestly. The last one was some sort of weird exhibition on the history of Japanese electronics, packed with Denon and Matsushita consumer goods that would be a better fit in a Mamorou Oshii design doc for an unproduced Cyberpunk anime. I remember a little Denon Hi-Fi system that was about the size of a toaster, and had a little robot of sorts, tethered to a horizontal rail, below the tape deck. Play a song, and the little robot would sort of boogie along following the BPM of whatever was being played.

Another area had a wing covering the supposed history of game consoles, but nothing in the hardware being featured felt familiar. A few "consoles" were strangely anthropomorphic in design, and the last one at the end of the corridor was just this undefined... thing waiting under some sort of tarp. Something twitched under the canvas as I got closer.

Leaving an Event with People I Don't Know: I guess my subconscious is more entreprising than I consciously am, or more daring. One of my museum dreams ended with my speaking with the curator of the exhibit, the lone, single, anthro pig in a sea of otherwise boilerplate humans. Sort of well-dressed although the details elude me, clearly educated - but with a fixation on milk-based cocktails and White Russians that would only make sense later.

Naturally, instead of heading back home with my parents to book-end the first theme, my dream self just declares I'll grab a cab in the morning, after spending the night at What's-His-Face's place. That's in-keeping with the one, single one-night stand I've allowed myself insofar, an event that's apparently been important on the subconscious level. I always end up in a dingy flat full of people that remind me of how much the Beat Generation's poets marked a good chunk of my twenties, with varyingly friendly and varyingly psychotic mishmashes of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Boroughs.

I soon realize after a few hours of sped-up debauchery that this isn't Mr. Curator's house, and he takes me to an equally dingy flat - but not without first spiriting two gallons of milk in plastic bags out of nowhere.

Fetishes I'm Not Conscious Of: for three nights now, Curator Pig Guy's idea of sex involves guzzling two gallons' worth of milk while having me hug him and massage his belly. He never spills any and manages to moan while drinking, occasionally freeing one of his hands to guide one of mine to various tender spots along his chest and abdomen. He acts like this is germane to sweeping love declarations, and I'm increasingly disturbed by his sudden attachment. It's usually at that point that the dream turns uneasy, bordering on being a nightmare.

On some nights, I try and escape only for my attempts to end with more sexual undertones. While the act itself never takes place, dream logic has me approach the pig's habit of pinning me to the ground as being penetrative in nature. I'm occasionally aroused, occasionally disturbed. I can't make out what he's saying, but it's clear that he wants me far, far more than I want him. There was some interest on my side, but I'm left feeling like Pig Fella skipped a few beats.

It's at that point that I transform into a pig anthro, a chestnut-colored-one, and suddenly have a behavior-related 180. I suddenly find myself as amorous as he is, as if the character's weird brand of attachment were a contact-based high, and typically wake up within a few moments of release.

The thing is, I've never gone for sexual anthro art. I've never gone for sploshing, I'm not tweaked by milk or semen in ways that would fit the overall theme. What the Hell, Subconscious?

Family Acting Out-of-Character: imagine having a Post-Doctorate aunt who manifests in your dreams as having the ability to handle live power lines with her bare hands, and to react to thousands of volts coursing through her like it's the sort of static shock you'd get on a doorknob.

Said aunt is assuredly not reckless and she would not treat failures in the local power grid as an excuse to fuck around. Again, what the fuck.

Repetitions: it feels like a part of me is keeping track of all this, seeing as Pig Guy shows up once a night, and mentions he wants to pick up "where we left off". Seeing as I can't seem to make up my mind between being disgusted or actually pulled in, I'm never able to assert control. Something tells me fellatio's on the menu, as targeted as the character's own fetishes seem to be.

I don't know how I feel about that.

All of this is despite 8 hours of sleep per day, a decent routine, a bit of exercise and one hour of meditation before falling asleep. I'm also not used to working while having characters or concepts from Dreamland mill about in the back of my mind.

Maybe I'll figure out how much the Weirdo Museum charges, tonight.

#dreams #cw: sex discourse #cw: intercourse #odd motifs

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deeeelightfuldee · 4 years ago

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How many cats and dogs have you had as pets in your lifetime? oooo boy. ok lets see. 5 dogs, 9 cats?

Can your mom and/or dad play any instruments, or how about anyone else in your family? My mom doesn’t play anything. My dad is a drummer

Have you ever colored in an adult coloring book as a stress reliever? Yes. I’ve done it this week alone, just to try and calm down a little.

Can you crack crab legs without a tool? i have no idea. I don’t eat crab or anything in the sea for that matter.

How many light sources are in the room you’re in? ooo good question. umm, eight? lol

What’s your favorite thing to put on bagels? uhhh cream cheese.

Who’s your favorite director? i really don’t know, i don’t follow who directs what.

Bats: cute or gross? i mean, I don’t really care.

What was the last really intense pain you felt? lung pain during this whole nonsense.

Would you rather vacation by a beach or a lake? either.

How would you feel about traveling abroad alone? I would love to, but I don’t see it happening with the travel restrictions these days.

What is your father's middle name? He doesn’t have one. he’s got a family name and the men who have it do not have a middle name. Where did your last kiss take place? uhhh I believe on my driveway

Which movie villain do you find the most terrifying? no clue, tbh. none that come to mind

Do you stick your tongue out often in pictures? I don’t think ive ever done that.

Which one of your family members are you closest to? My mom. one of my brothers and my sister.

Would you rather have name brand shoes or name brand clothes? brand names just don’t matter to me, but if i was forced to choose i guess shoes?

Are you a good liar? no. not at all.

Are you proud of your parents? Im super proud of my mom.

Which is better: orange or grape soda? orange

Was the last thing you ate hot or cold? hot. so yummy.

Who was the last person in your house who isn’t family? uhhhhhhh, idk who was here when I wasn’t in town, but prior to that I would imagine em/nathan

What color was the last swimsuit you wore? green

Can you remember the last song you listened to? something from the toy story soundtrack lol. I’m binge watching all four today... I am using Kile’s disney+ for as long as he has it. I don’t think he watches it ever, so I imagine it’ll cut off soon.

Have you ever been dumped really harshly? once. it was horrible. every other time I’ve done the break up.

Can you do a back flip, or anything else of that sort? heck’n no. unless im going into a pool maybe.

Do you have any exes you can’t stand anymore? yes

What happened to cause you to feel that way about them? he sexually assaulted me

Are you more of a phone or a computer person? my preference is laptop,

Do you have a job, and if so, where do you work? not currently.

If not, do you want one? yeah i’d like to have income.

Do any medical afflictions run in your family? yes. a few.

What’s your favorite Mexican dish? pork tacos from mama marias omggggggggggggg.

Have you ever been to a professional sports game? yes. bulls games, bears games

Have you ever ordered a specially made cake from a cake shop? of course.

What months were you and your siblings born in? january, july, august, august

What did you have for dinner last night? nicks.

Do you do anything to groom your eyebrows? absolutely. to keep the shape n such.

Has your town ever flooded? uhhhhh to my knowledge once. it had rained SO heavily for like a week and the local ponds and lakes were over-flowing. a car literally floated down my road. it was so weird.

Have you ever played at the McDonald’s play place? when I was a kiddo yes. not often tho cus I didn’t like the smell, it was always sticky, and there were always bratty kids.

Have you ever taken a picture of snow? only every single day it snows

Do you cry easily? i notoriously do not cry in front of anyone. I am not a crier. when I lost Kile I cried for weeks.

Are you happy with where you live? I love it.

Do people ever mistake you for being a different race? No

Do you hate the last person you kissed? no, i’m not a hateful person

What genre is your favorite movie? drama, romance, kids lol

Who was the last person you were in a car with? Mom. she picked me up from the airport.

Do you like the picture on your license/I.D. card? yes. I always seem to get the nice workers and they help so much.

When was the last time somebody hit on you? yesterday. blegh.

Was the last person you met a male or female? hmm. Iiiiiii wanna say male.

What brand is your underwear? I think the pair im wearing is hanes.

What’s your favorite Thanksgiving food? usually green bean casserole.

Do you have a TV in your room? yup. watching TS1 right now.

Are any of your electronics charging right now? my phone. of course it was on 2 percent.

What was the last video game you played? acnh on the switch.

What’s the biggest promise someone’s ever made to you? Did they keep it? that they will be there for me forever and always take care of me. no.

Google, Bing, or Yahoo? Google.

What was the last song you had on repeat? more by bobby darin

Who is your favorite person to watch on YouTube? froggy fresh

How many college degrees do you want? i have two. I’d like my masters and/or phd

Can you wink? yes but I dont think it looks good lol i have to get better

Do you own any jerseys? I did, I dont know if I have any still

Have you ever tried to snort Pixie Stix as a child, or even an adult? No. i wasn’t a dumb child and i certainly wouldnt do that as an adult

Do you like going to baby showers? Do you go only for the cake? not really no.

Has there ever been a time in your life, you felt sexually undecided? no.

Do you think tattoos and piercings are sexy on the opposite sex? im not into piercings on guys. tattoos are fine if they arent trashy

Do people ever ask you to do things they’re too short to accomplish? all the time.

What color are the headphones you have at this moment in time? kind of a creamy taupe-y color

Ever choked severely on something during lunch at your school? no

Do you eat more vegetables or fruits? What’s your favorite fruit/veggie? i probably consume more fruits? but i love both.

What would you say is the color of your favorite bra? white

Is anyone in your family a firefighter? Who is it anyway? no. sadly

What do you usually buy when you go to the dollar store? i cant even tell you the last time i went to a dollar store.

Ever peed in the pool? Be honest! I would have been murdered lol no i dont do that. it grosses me out.

When you’re older, what kind of house do you want to live in? something on a lot of land, big front porch.

Where do you want to get married? probably a courthouse. maybe outdoors?

Do you plan on having both your parents at your wedding? no. just mom.

What is your favorite childhood TV show? recess

Honestly, do you like school? no. i looooooooooooooooooooooooove it.

Last thing that made you cry? probably dejavu.

Honestly, are you keeping a big secret right now? sort of yes.

Last person you took a walk with? liza, em, dutch, della

Have you ever liked someone who didn’t like you back? i think currently to be honest.

Who was the last person to actually pick you up in the air? lol either mario or an old friend david

Does any part of your body hurt? yeah. my muscles have been weakening sooooooo bad it is so painful.

If you had to choose between a million bucks or to be able to change a regret what would you do? Million bucks. noooooooooooo question.

Can you keep a secret? Sure.

Your favorite romantic movie? sleepless in seattle probs.

How do you feel about Valentine’s Day? I loved it for the longest timeeeeeeee. i dont think ill love it as much this next year, but maybe by then ill have met someone new who knows.

Who was the last person you took a picture with? uuuuuhhh probably one of my nephews/niece

Do your jeans have rips, tears, and holes in them? Some do, some dont.

Do you celebrate 420? Nope. verrrrrry much not my thing.

Have you ever kicked a vending machine? i think so lol

How do you eat Oreos? with milk.

Do you wear your shoes in the house? sometimes. my preference is slippers. we usually wear something on our feet because gram needs to and so does mom.

Would you survive in prison? probably not, tbh.

Ever been to Georgia? the state, yes. many times. the country? never.

Do you get your hair cut every month? gosh no. my dream is to get my hair done professionally again sometime, but its so daggum expensive.

Current relationship in detail. I am single. i will probably start casually dating soon.

If you were kicked out of your house, who would you call/go to? i dont even know. I always imagined I’d go to kile. but who knows now.

List things you spend money on in an average week. i can go several weeks without spending.

Rate each of your sexual partners (if any) from 1-10. ooooooohhhhhh, id rather not.

Would you parents be mad if you were in a relationship? i am convinced bill would not give a fig whether or not im in a relationship. mom, however, would probably be EEEEEEEEXXXXXXXXtra cautious now.

Think of the last person you had sex with. Do you think they’ve slept with anyone else since they last slept with you? oh im sure.

Is there someone that you believe you will always be attached to? yes. even if we don’t talk anymore... theres just always a connection.

What board games are you good at? oooo, i’m very good at board games.

Is there a sport/hobby you keep thinking about taking up, but that you’ve never quite gotten around to starting? quilting. its expensive and im not wanting to get it all cvid-y

Do you think pranks like egging/toilet-papering someone's house are funny or immature? Immature.

Do you think “sleeve tattoos” are a good idea? there are people who can pull it off, but it is notttttttttt my style.

Is there anything in particular that your parents argue about? What? debt bill put my mom in. they don’t speak tho.

Do you ever actually read the “Terms and Services” when you sign up for websites and such? the first couple years.

If you have a handheld games console (a DS or GameBoy, for example), how often do you use it? I don’t use the switch handheld, despite really wishing i could. the controllers are broken and beyond what I can afford. so I just use the tv dock.

Your phone is ringing. It’s the person you fell hardest for, what do you say? i’d pick it up 1000000000000000% , I just would be so curious what they would say.

If your best friend was kicked out, would your parents let him/her live with you? absolutely.

Are you afraid of falling in love? I am. I don’t ever again want to feel the way ive felt with my two heart breaks.

Is there anybody you wish you could be with right now? yes, but the feeling is lessening. I responded to him for the first time in... idk how long. thinking he’d be eager to talk and be responsive. he wasn’t. it just pushes me further and further from feeling those feelings.

Have you ever kissed someone & wished you didn’t? no, i dont think so.

Did you get kissed last night? goodness no.

Do you enjoy going through a carwash? I love it.

How did you get most of your scars? benny. by far.

Ever had to take an inkblot test? I have taken 2. One for a fellow student in a classroom who had to administer it for a project. another time in a psych class the prof asked me to for a demonstration

Have you ever been in trouble for something you honestly didn’t do? yep! the only time ive been grounded.

Have you ever seriously slapped someone in anger? no. I do not get physical in my anger. I withdraw.

What/who woke you up this morning? Just me.

Who was the last person to be in your bedroom besides you? My mom. dropping off ice water and benny.

What’s one of your locked text messages? I don’t even know if this phone locks messages tbh. I used to do that all the time on my t9 phones.

Have you ever finished a game of Monopoly? I think maybe 1 time.

Is there anyone you know who’s in any way paralyzed? Yes.

The truth all comes out when someone is drunk, true? I wouldn’t say alllllllll, but i do think inhibitions are lowered so it makes it easier

When was the last time you felt disappointed in yourself? messaging kile and realizing he isn’t interested in responding. makes me feel so dumb.

How about feeling disappointed in someone else? something a family member did to me this past week.

For you, do you commonly feel more jealousy or envy? ummm. lately it’s been jealousy. i dont like people taking what was mine. but i’m learning if they had access to it, that likely means that it is best to let it go. so maybe im now leaning towards envy of like beautiful relationships.

Do you rely on the heads/tails flipping of a coin sometimes for decisions? uhhh, not unless its like in a joking, light-hearted manner.

Do you have any specific chores you do around the house? when im not sick... i vacuum, dust, do dishes, wipe counters and table, do laundry of others, disinfect, etc.

For you, does comfort or fashion come first in dressing? I would say 51% comfort and 49% looking nice

Have you had two friends that absolutely hated each other? yes. lots of jealousy due to their feelings toward me.

Do you like Laffy Taffy? No. not my style of candy

Do you prefer electric or manual pencil sharpeners? manual.

Are your biceps at all noticeable? hardly.

Have you ever seen a walrus? absolutely!

Did you ever have one of those Easy Bake ovens as a kid? no. one time moms friends daughter (who was significantly older than me) lent hers to us... but there were no mixes of anything. so I didn’t know what to do with it.

Does your bathroom have a theme to it? nope.

From inside of your house, how many doors lead outside? uhhhhhhhh 3 if you dont include the garage door.

Are there a lot of trees in your yard? i wouldn’t say a lot. I wish.

Have you ever liked someone that treated you like crap? treating me like crap cuts down my interest like immediately.

Have a best friend? meh.

Does it bother you when your best friend does stuff without you? no.

Is there a secret you’ve never told your parents? yes. I dont need to concern them or worry them.

Does anyone hate you? kiles ex(?) i am sure does.

What’s the one thing you regret more than anything? hm. i dont really have any.

Do you remember important dates? yes. almost always.

What’s some lyrics from a song that means a lot to you? “what if we could put the world on hold and finally meet somewhere inside of the world? I would meet you... would you meet me?”

Who gives the best advice? mom

Who do you usually see in your dreams? :) It varies. depends on who I think about.

What type of cake did you last eat? graduation cake.

How many of your friends are gay or bisexual? I have like 4 casual friends that are, but my closest friends are all straight.

What’s your favorite type of sandwich? buona chicken one. bless it.

When was the last time someone asked you out? Did you accept or decline? tonight. I said maybe once this quarantine business is over.

Do you like The Offspring? I know a couple of songs but I definitely can’t call myself a fan. << same

One pillow or two? 12

Do you like Mad Libs? not really no.

Are you suicidal? no. I mean there are moments where I think wow, i dont want to be here. but not like let me put together a plan.

Where do your grandparents live? my fathers parents were killed by a drunk driver bout ten years ago. My mothers father passed away maybe 12 years ago. My gram is fine and lives in the room down the hall.

Do you cut yourself? not purposely

What is your pet’s name? benny and lottie.

Have you ever been to Canada? not yet.

Aren’t babies overrated? no, no. theyre expensive af though.

Have a built-in pool in your backyard? i wish more than anything but no.

Ever won yourself a stuffed animal? maybe once or twice. I one time had a guy win me an animal at a carnival and i found that sooooooooooooooooo attractive.

Ever had someone else win you a stuffed animal? woops. yes. lol

Ever been to a circus? i think when i was really little.

Ever shot animals? I have not. i couldn’t.

Do you consider yourself intelligent? I do. It is something I have some confidence in.

Have you ever run away from home? when my dad was abusive, yes.

Do you put family first, friends, relationships, school, or something else? faith, family, friends, school, relationships (only cus im not in one)

What’s something you’ve stood up for in the past? my faith.

What’s something you worked extremely hard to get? my degrees and honors.

Are you satisfied with your body image? no. I am honored to have a body that is capable of all that it is.. that has been my “home” all these years. the body that still breathes life every day, thats all incredible. I dislike having the fat that I do, as I worry it could be off putting to others. but then I realize im fine being single, so then my body imagine is fine. its a weird cycle.

Have you ever been labeled negatively or otherwise been called something extremely derogatory? yes. when I worked and a customer didnt like a policy or whatnot.

Have you ever seriously taken advantage of someone or been taken advantage of? never to my knowledge have I taken advantage of someone else seriously. I have been VERY seriously taken advantage of.

Have you ever been seriously ill? trying to get over it now tbh

Have you ever befriended a former enemy? uhhhh, not that I know of. I tend to be friendly to everyone, but I can’t think of a situation where it was an enemy.

If you’re not religious, would you ever pray as a last resort? If you are religious, do you often pray for other people? I do pray for others quite often. it’s important to me. I sometimes will see strangers and immediately start praying over them. I actually almost started my GRE late because I was praying over every person I saw in the room lol.

Have you ever dated someone, then after you dated they came out of the closet or switched (for lack of a better word) sexual orientation? no. not to my knowledge anyway.

Has a boy/girl ever walked a ridiculous distance just to see you? How about vice versa? yes! like 8 miles lol. I have not.

When was the last time you felt really uncomfortable? this past week.

Is there anything that your mom is really known for as to how she is as a person? shes everyones favorite. shes kind, funny, sarcastic, down-to-earth, warm.

Who have you been talking to the most today? mom lol

Are you nosy? I think it could be perceived as nosy but I love to make people feel ridiculously special. So I will sit and ask questions just to get them talking about themselves. If I recognize the personal questions are not working, I’ll keep it totally light.

What’s the meanest thing you have done to a friend? i really dont know.

If your ex called you crying, what would it most likely be about? if we consider kile an ex, it would probably be that he feels overwhelmed and feels alone because he doesnt have me or his ex anymore. :(

Who was the best kisser out of all the people you have kissed? ooooo thats hard to narrow down.

Have you ever been told that you have an annoying laugh? no. everyone comments on how they love when it turns wheezy.

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droneseco · 4 years ago

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XGIMI Mogo Pro+ Review: Native 1080p Portable Projector Is Good, but Not Perfect

Xgimi Mogo Pro Plus

7.00 / 10

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If you're in need of a portable projector and have the money to spare, the Xgimi Mogo Pro+ is certainly one of the best in class options. The audio is clear and loud (if perhaps lacking in bass), and the image is bright and true HD. The software experience and ease of use are unrivaled thanks to deep Google integration. Overall, it's an incredibly neat little device. If Netflix or Amazon Prime Video is your main use case though, look elsewhere.

Specifications

Brand: Xgimi

Native Resolution: 1080p

ANSI Lumens: 300

Connectivity: HDMI, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi

Throw Ratio: 1:1

Audio: Dual 3W Harman Kardon tuned

OS: Android TV 9.0

Lamp Life: 30,000 hours

Pros

Runs Google Android TV 9.0, with thousands of apps available

Snappy interface and easy to navigate

Chromecast works well

Full size HDMI input

Bright enough for massive screens at night

Cons

Battery life is a little short

Lacklustre bass

No case included and lens is exposed

Buy This Product

Xgimi Mogo Pro Plus amazon

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The Xgimi Mogo Pro+ is a native 1080p projector with a maximum brightness of 300 ANSI lumens. Running Android TV, it has access to a wide range of apps, as well as a full-size HDMI port if you need it. The audio is tuned by Harman Kardon, and the whole package is rather nifty. But it's not cheap by any means, retailing at around $700.

youtube

Buyer Beware with Portable Projectors

The world of portable projectors is fraught with shoddy plastic tat. You'll find countless Amazon listings for small flat rectangles that claim to "support HD" with a brightness similar to any cinema projector that costs ten times the price. Look, here's one, and I've left the brand name in so you know to avoid this company in the future:

2600 lumens, indeed.

What they don't tell you is that it actually projects at a pathetic 480p natively, with about as much luminance as a birthday cake candle—because "lumens" or "lux" is an entirely made-up metric. Instead, you need to look for "ANSI lumens", which is a standardized metric. This is why I'm rather skeptical about approving any review of a portable projector. Thankfully, the Xgimi Mogo Pro+ is not one of those.

Xgimi, unlike other sellers, doesn't lie about the brightness of its projectors. It's about one-tenth the luminance of a similarly priced home cinema projector, and I appreciate the honesty.

Xgimi Mogo Pro+ Design

Measuring 5.8 inches tall, with a rounded 4 inch or so square profile, and weighing just under 2lb or 0.9kg, the Xgimi Mogo Pro+ truly is portable—but there's no carry case included. You should source a suitable protective case if you're taking it out into the wilderness, as the device itself has no ruggedization to speak of. There isn't even a lens cover, which is a little more concerning for something designed to be carried around.

Note: if you purchase from Xgimi's official site, there's a coupon code to get a free case. Our package didn't include this, so we can't comment on it, but worth knowing if you're happy to not buy on Aamzon.

On the underside of the unit is a mechanism you can pull out to tilt the device up to around 45-degrees, and you'll also find a screw thread for attaching to a tripod or other stand (not included).

Around the rear is a single USB port, the DC power socket, an HDMI port, as well as an AUX stereo out. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi round out the connectivity side of things.

Internally, there's an AMLOGIC T950x2 SoC, featuring Mali G31 graphics, 2GB of system RAM, and 16GB onboard storage.

Sofware Experience

Many projectors, portable or otherwise, claim to offer an Android UI, while at the same time only featuring a handful of apps from the Apptoide store.

Again, the Xgimi Mogo Pro+ is not like those. It runs actual Android TV 9.0, and is Google certified.

The included remote even has a button to summon the Google Assistant, and the system is Chromecast compatible, making the process of casting content from your other devices seamless. Anyone who has painful memories of trying to get Miracast to work will certainly appreciate this, and I had no issues casting from either iOS or Android.

In fact, setting up the device was seamless too, with a simple "set up my device" voice command on my phone. It all just worked, which was nice, and avoided having to use an on-screen keyboard on the projector, which is usually awkward and time-consuming on these kinds of devices.

But it's not perfect. Despite offering over 5000 apps in the Google Play store, not all are compatible. Netflix and Amazon Prime, for instance, are not certified for the Xgimi Mogo Pro+. To view those, you'll need to use an external streaming stick. I also found BBC iPlayer was absent from the store, but thankfully that one was easier to solve by simply casting it from my phone.

Auto-Focus and Auto-Keystone

Able to correct for up to 40-degrees of horizontal or vertical angle projection, the auto-keystone and the auto-focus feature worked well, and it kicks in automatically whenever it detects movement. You can disable this if you want, but there's no reason to. A micro-switch on the base of the remote control enables manual focus using the volume keys.

While impressive, it's worth bearing in mind that any kind of keystone adjustment will lead to a sub-optimal image. You can see below the keystone at work in the most extreme example.

The dark grey area of the wall is the potential projection size, distorted because of the placement angle of the projector. The Xgimi Mogo Pro+ successfully corrects for such extreme distortion, but in doing so, wastes half of the available pixels.

For that reason, you should always try to project as orthogonally to the surface as possible. Just because you can put it at weird angles doesn't mean you should.

For those looking to hang the Mogo Pro+ from ceiling, the projection can be rotated, as well as reversed for rear projection.

Throw Ratio and Brightness

As mentioned, the device claims to run at a maximum 300 ANSI lumens of brightness. While I don't have the right equipment to verify the claim, I do have a home cinema projector that runs at 2800 ANSI lumens, and it sounds about right by comparison.

The image below was taken in the daytime, with the curtains closed but still a good amount of ambient light from a side window. At this size (around 120-inches), full brightness isn't quite enough. But at night, it's absolutely sufficient. If you have the space to project from, you can go big.

The throw ratio—which is the relationship between the size of projected image and the distance you place the projector from the surface—works out at about 1:1. Which is to say, if you want a 6-foot diagonal projection, you'll need to place the Xgimi Mogo Pro+ about 6 feet away from the screen.

This isn't technically a "short throw" projector, but nor is it bad at all. But if you want a massive screen in a small space, this isn't for you. Short-throw projectors aren't something you often find in the portable market, so this isn't unusual.

Battery Life

For an extreme test, I fully charged and ran the battery down by streaming live over Wi-Fi, at full brightness and full volume. The battery lasted about an hour and a half before forcefully switching to Eco brightness. At this point, I got another good 15-30 minutes out of it. But I should note that once you hit the low power state, Eco brightness is the only option, and it's not good.

It's impossibly dim in the daytime, and even in darkness, it has a horrible green tint. I would have much preferred to just continue to run the battery down for another 5-10 minutes at full brightness.

90 minutes should therefore be considered a minimum battery life. Turning down the brightness, lowering the volume, and playing back local files with Wi-Fi disabled would all lengthen potential battery life.

Audio Quality

With Harman Kardon on the box, you expect some good quality audio. The laws of physics put a slight damper on that. You simply can't get deep bass from something so small.

The Xgimi Mogo Pro+ definitely gets loud enough for any impromptu movie night without distortion creeping in, and across the rest of the spectrum it sounds clean, crisp, and well balanced. I had no trouble hearing voices, which is ultimately the most important aspect of any projector speaker. I tested with a variety of TV and movie content, and documentaries, and had no complaints about muffled speech.

However, if you're watching explosion-heavy action flicks or gaming with electronic soundtracks, the lack of decent bass becomes more noticeable.

But this isn't hard to fix if it bothers you. Supporting Bluetooth 5.0 or AUX stereo out, you're free to connect your favorite pair of headphones or external speakers for an even better auditory experience.

Repairability and Replacement Parts

While projectors in the past had a costly lamp that would need replacing after around 5,000 hours, modern projectors such as the Xgimi use an LED light source rated to over 30,000 hours. This makes it effectively an end-of-life issue, and cannot easily be replaced. Xgimi doesn't sell replacement parts of any sort.

But to put that in context: even if you watched a 2-hour long movie every day of the year, it would still be 41 years before the LED light source broke.

More likely is that the battery will degrade to the point of being unusable in five to ten years. Of course, you will still be able to run it from AC power, but a built-in battery always reduces the lifetime of a product.

Should You Buy the Xgimi Mogo Pro+?

That said, I feel like a slightly larger all-in-one package would have served the target audience better. It would have allowed for larger speaker drivers and a slightly larger battery. I also would have liked to see a carry case included, and a lens protector built-in.

Before purchasing, you should also really consider how much you value that portability and the all-in-one design. If you're taking a large AC battery with you anyway, you could purchase a shorter-throw home cinema projector with larger built-in speakers, for around the same price. You'd get a larger screen, ten times the brightness, and better audio. And if sustainability is your primary concern, you should never purchase "all-in-one" products.

XGIMI Mogo Pro+ Review: Native 1080p Portable Projector Is Good, but Not Perfect published first on http://droneseco.tumblr.com/

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pogueman · 7 years ago

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VICTOR sums up the trends that dominated CES 2018

yahoo

For normal people, the end of the year is a time for celebration, vacation, and family.

For people in the tech industry, though, it’s a time of frantic preparation for the biggest trade show in the Western Hemisphere: CES.

The Consumer Electronics Show takes place in Las Vegas every January, perfectly timed to drain the joy out of the holidays for 170,000 people. It’s not open to the public — only to members of the industry and the media that covers it.

The Consumer Electronics Show comes once a year, whether we like it or not.

The purpose of the show is for nearly 4,000 companies to show off what they’re working on. When will these products reach stores shelves? Some of it soon, some of it next year, and lots of it, never.

Every year, everyone wants to know: What was new at CES? The world is hungry for an exciting answer, like, “Oh, there’s this thing called an iPad!” or “They showed this car called a Tesla!”

But every year, there are fewer new breakout inventions; at CES 2018 last week, I’d say there were zero. (In fact, the most talked-about display at CES last week was when the power went out for two hours. At an electronics show. #irony.)

Instead, CES these days is more about the same buzzword, technologies seep into existing products from across the industry, cross fertilizing. This year, six of these seeping technologies were on display — which, for your convenience, I’ve boiled down to a handy acronym: VICTOR.

It stands for voice, Internet of Things, cars, TVs, oddballs, and robots.

Voice

At this point, you probably know that the Amazon Echo is that cylinder that sits in your house and responds to voice commands, kind of like Siri for the home. Google has its own copycat version, called Google Home. These things are incredibly popular — already, they’re in 16% of American homes.

Both Amazon and Google have been aggressively encouraging other companies to build their voice technologies into their own appliances: refrigerators, light switches, lamps, speakers, robo-vacuums, TVs, headphones, security cameras, door locks, washers, dryers, cars, and so on. “Works with Amazon Alexa!” and “Works with OK Google!” signs were everywhere at CES last week.

You couldn’t swing a cat without hitting an Alexa-enabled product.

What’s great is that this isn’t an either/or thing. It’s not another Betamax/VHS war, or a Blu-ray/HD-DVD war. Since Alexa and “OK Google” are just software, there’s nothing to stop them from coexisting in the same product. The Sonos One speaker, Vivitar smart speaker, and new TiVo models, for example, can all understand commands barked in either command language.

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things, of course, is the nonsensical name for home devices that are networkable, so that we can control them by pulling out our phones and opening an app. For something that’s supposed to make our lives simpler and easier, that’s too much hassle. Consumers have been staying away in droves.

What may save the “I” in VICTOR is the “V” in VICTOR — voice control. “Alexa, is the dryer done yet?” “Hey Google, make it two degrees warmer in here.” “Alexa, lock the doors.” “OK Google, I want to watch ‘Rambo.’”

That arrangement actually works — and was everywhere at CES 2018. Samsung and LG, among others, demonstrated entire model living rooms and kitchens filled with appliances waiting for your verbal command.

An LG employee shows how its new fridge has six cameras inside that let you see its contents.

Cars

The self-driving car courses at CES were a third bigger than last year. Every car company you’ve ever heard of, and a few you haven’t, were demonstrating their self-driving prototypes. Lyft was even giving a few lucky showgoers rides around town in self-driving cars.

Sleek-looking concept cars filled the CES exhibit halls.

For 10 years, people have been saying that these cars would hit the roads in 2020 — and guess what? Unlike most heavily hyped new technologies, this horizon isn’t receding. People are still saying 2020. That means it’s probably real.

Lots of people were also talking about Toyota’s e-Palette, a prototype self-driving store.

Toyota envisions its E-Palette as a self-driving store, delivery van, or even hotel room.

TVs

CES show floors have always been dominated by massive walls of brilliant TV screens, and this year was no exception. The industry is still hard at work pushing us to buy 4K TV screens, which have four times the number of pixels as hi-def screens. Only one problem: You can’t see the difference from a normal seating distance.

As it does every year, LG created a dazzling wall of TV screens—this time, in an undulating canyon.

Even if you could see it, there’s very little to watch. Not a single TV network or cable channel broadcasts in 4K. If you own a 4K television, and you want to watch 4K shows and movies, you have two choices: Buy a 4K Blu-ray player and buy new movies on disc — or stream your shows online, from services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu, and YouTube.

In short, 4K is kind of a hoax.

(What you can see — what is worth upgrading to — is a much less catchy format. It’s called HDR, for high dynamic range. Much brighter brights, much darker darks; more detail in those bright and dark places; and more shades in between. More shades of color, too. Really fantastic.)

So the forehead-slapping breakthrough of CES 2018 was — get this — 8K screens. That’s right: four times as many pixels as 4K. If 4K was a stupid hoax, then 8K is four times as stupid. Really? They think we’re going to re-buy all our movies on disc again, to play on another new special disc player?

Samsung displayed a new display technology called MicroLED, which it claims to be as great-looking as OLED but at a lower price and less chance of burn-in. Cooler yet, the company proposes selling these TVs as one-foot, borderless tiles, which you can assemble to make as big a TV as you like. The one on the show floor, at 146 inches diagonal, dubbed “The Wall,” was a huge hit with showgoers.

LG also displayed (in an off-floor, invitation-only hotel area) a huge flat screen TV that rolls up. It’s built like an upside-down window shade; when you need the screen to get smaller, it wraps up around a roller at the bottom, hidden inside a wooden box.

LG’s prototype TV rolls upward or downward into the box below, to fit the video material.

Why? Because, the company says, you may want to watch different movies or shows that have different screen proportions. The real reason, of course, is, “Because we could.”

Oddball things

The “O” in VICTOR is the catch-all for all kinds of other crazy stuff on display. Walk the 50 football fields’ worth of exhibit space, and you’d find:

Two laundry-folding machines. One, the Foldimate, will cost $980 but will require you to attach each piece of clothing to clips; the other, the Laundroid, will go for $16,000 but does everything for you.

A full-body suit for playing virtual-reality games, so that bullets can “hit” you anywhere, or you can walk into a hot or cold virtual place, and you’ll feel it.

An electronic breast pump that you wear secretly inside your bra as you go about your day.

A tiny, battery-free sensor that you wear on your fingernail to detect excessive exposure to UV light.

Another stab at the Google Glass concept. This time, the virtual screen is superimposed on your field of view by a full pair of sunglasses.

Not one, not two, but three self-driving suitcases that follow you through the airport.

The Puppy 1 self-driving suitcase balances on two wheels, using technology adapted from Segway.

Remember my exhaustive (and exhausting) report about the struggles of the through-the-air charging industry? The products that can charge your gadgets at a distance? Well, the FCC just approved some of these products, including the Energous three-foot charging system. The very first product to include it is called the Myant Skiin, a line of clothing that tracks your vital statistics as you wear it.

Robots

No surprise here: Robotics and automation were the stars of the show. Heck, they’re the stars of every show right about now. Everywhere you looked, there were shiny white plastic robo-things with big eyes and smiley mouths to look less threatening. Most of them seemed to be “because we could” designs, rather than “you need one of these.”

Here and there, though, you could spot far more purpose-built robots:

Honda displayed a series of robots designed for specific tasks: an all-terrain model for outdoor work; a self-balancing wheelchair; and a weird, globule-shaped, huggable “empathy robot” with facial expressions projected onto its face from within.

youtube

LG offered three new robots for commercial use: one for restaurants, to deliver food or drinks; one for hotels, to carry luggage up to your room; and one for grocery stores, which guides you to the food shelf you’re looking for, and scans the package as you drop it into its hopper.

LG’s new service robots are designed for restaurants, hotels, and grocery stores.

Sony is re-introducing its Aibo robotic dog, this time in a more advanced, more puppy-like incarnation (probably $1,700 when it hits the U.S.). Sensors make the dog respond appropriately when you pet it or swat it; it learns your voice over time and seeks you out; and, like the original Aibo, it plays fetch with a pink ball.

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Omron built a ping-pong-playing robot — not ever intended to be for sale, but to show off its robot-making skills.

Just to make sure all of Vegas’s bases were covered, the Sapphire Gentlemen’s Club featured two pole-dancing stripper robots as a CES gimmick.

Hail to the VICTORs

So, you get it: Same as last year, just more of it.

If all of that seems like a lot to read, well hey — here’s a rhyme to make it go down easier:

V is for the voice control in every gadget here — “Alexa, do my bidding!”… “OK Google, bring my beer!” In TVs, cars, and speakers, it’s a miracle of choice. The world’s at your command — at least if you don’t lose your voice!

I is for the second realm, called Internet of Things, It’s networked household stuff, complete with all the fun that it brings It’s thermostats, refrigerators, all your kitchen gear… So far, nobody’s buying it — but hey, perhaps next year.

C is for self-driving cars! So many at this show! We’re told they’re really coming soon — about two years to go. T is for the TV screens on all the expo floors. They look amazing when they’re here — but less so once they’re yours.

O is for the oddball stuff! The offbeat and bizarre: This laundry-folding robot, or this crazy concept car. R is for the robots — Sony’s puppy stole my show. This grocery bot asks what you want, then shows you where to go.

So there’s your whole mnemonic — VICTOR! Hope you liked the show And don’t forget the greatest part — you didn’t have to go!

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s [email protected]. You can sign up to get his stuff by email, here.

Exclusive: What Fitbit’s 6 billion nights of sleep data reveals about us

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Rejoice: Sonos Speakers are finally voice-controllable

Follow Yahoo Finance on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn

#tech #$SSNLF #_uuid:819089a2-8b67-3b1c-8498-a3c62627a980 #Pogue #_lmsid:a077000000BAh3wAAD #$GOOGL #_revsp:yahoofinance.com #$GOOG #CES 2018 #_author:David Pogue #$AMZN

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asheewrites · 7 years ago

Text

Communication is Key.

I yawned. It’s been a long day. But it’s also been the last day. Provisional teaching was over for a while. Actual university was ahead.

But for now? A full week of peace. I would enjoy it.

Teaching was a blessing, but it was also rather draining, if you needed to work up a reputation first.

I was glad to be home. A pot of spicy lentil soup was good company. And there would be a series I could watch on the internet. I’d made a list. I would find something and just be lazy for the rest of the day.

I’d earned it.

This was the situation I was in: My day was finished, the soup getting warmer on the lowest setting, I had gotten rid of my pants and now I could simply deflate, a little music playing in the background until my food was warm enough to consume.

I let out a sigh, sinking into my couch. Home.

At this very moment, my phone… chimed. Like a muted bell. And vibrated. Once.

And that caused me to wrinkle my forehead and make a bit of a face. It even even made me freeze up.

Of course, a phone chiming, in and of itself, was not all too unusual. Phones are supposed to ring. And they are, on occasion, supposed to vibrate as well.

But. There was a problem.

Actually, there were several problems.

First: This was not my ringtone. It was a somehow not-grating tone. And… that meant it definitely wasn’t on the phone, because I’d have used it otherwise.

Second: I never set my phone to vibrate. It was an odd feeling. Chest or pants pocket, it was strange.

But the strangest one was the third: My the battery had run out on my way home. I hadn’t been able to look up when the ETA of my train. And that it rang and vibrated now actually made me feel betrayed.

I fished the offending piece of electronics out of my pants.

And I would have pressed the power button and unlocked, but… there was a message on the phone.

Greetings, mortal

I blinked. Once. Twice.

There was nothing else on the there. Just the letters. Simple and white. Arial, I supposed.

No app-signature, no frame, nothing.

I tried to pull down the menu.

The menu did not appear. But the text changed.

Your phone will resume operating as per usual as soon as the message to you has been delivered.

Still the same type of letters. I stared at it. This phone had been empty.

But there were letters now. And they changed. So, obviously, it was not empty.

With a frown, I fished for the loading cable at the side of the couch and connected it with my phone.

The tiny battery symbol appeared at the upper right corner. Showing a battery and the tiny loading-bolt. Also the ‘0 %’. With the battery filling.

Well, that was not how it usually was. But… I didn’t actually pay muc attention to the behaviour of my phone when it was empty, so… maybe?

The text had changed again:

I am the Metatron, as you are aware, I am the voice of God.

Again, I stared at the screen. This was all a bit weird. I hadn’t heard of this virus before. Or a virus like this. I tried to pull down the menu again.

Not much luck.

We have contacted you to plan and execute the first divine miracle in over 400 years. You are supposed to be the human representative in the council.

… what.

This was a rather elaborate prank, but maybe I should simply switch it off. Which I tried, by pressing the power button. For three seconds. Five. Ten. Mh.

When I let go of the button to press a little harder, the text changed.

We wish to impede your life as little as possible, but seek input from mortals. Therefore, we propose the usage of a messaging app.

I did not exactly see how this was a messaging app. As there were simply messages displayed on my phone, which now had 4 % battery-power. And apparently wasn’t switched on.

When I took out the battery and removed the cable and the display still was not switching off, I got a little nervous.

We are aware your name is Henoch Loew.

Make that a little more nervous.

We are also aware you do believe in higher powers and are a genuinely good person.

Well. At least they got… a good opinion of me?!

We are aware the genuine nature of this proposal is doubtful.

No shit, Sherlock. This proposal was also terribly impossible and freaking me out a little.

If you wish to outright deny participation at this juncture, you have now the opportunity to do so. We will never contact you again.

There was now a keyboard on screen. I stared at it. Stared at it for a good, long while. This was very, very strange.

After maybe two minutes, the text changed again:

If you wish to participate and become part of the council, you will converse with angels and demons with a very low exposure to the human realm and no previous contact with one of your kind. You will plan and execute a suitable divine miracle and expand your own knowledge and the knowledge of the celestial beings you will converse with.

There was still a keyboard. So now I typed. Carefully, because this was still insane:

Can I ask some questions before?

Because I deserved that, and not telling me shit before I’m supposed to agree to some insane stuff was… insane. Also: I would see if this wasn’t just… I don’t know. Programmed or something. This was WEIRD.

Of course you can. Please, go ahead.

I frowned. This was so very strange.

What does Black Pudding taste like?

I thought this was… far enough away from the original topic and needed some actual human interference.

It is also called blood sausage. I never tasted it, but the high nutritional value ad strong natural flavours would have a favourable taste to most, ignoring any pre-evaluations of eating clogged blood.

I stared at the answer. It’s certainly not an answer that comes up first on google. And it’s… somewhat sensible? I didn’t know?

Are there other questions?

A lot. Jepp. So, I typed.

Why me?!

Because that was a good question.

You are an open minded human being that tries to better themselves constantly, you are a minority in your given community, you do not struggle for survival, but have to and are able to work for a living. You own a phone. With the lifestyle you chose, we would not impose in an overdue fashion. There was also a randomised factor

Another moment to stare at the screen.

That is not very fair. Or impartial. Or just.

Or anything. This was… did I mention this was weird?!

I did not claim it was. You are the human chosen by chance and circumstance. We seek to broaden the horizons of all involved individuals. You are the first, but we hope not the last human being we contact.

I simply did not know what to think or say? This was… not an ultimatum or a threat or anything. This was just… I didn’t even know what it was!

What do I have to do, then?!

That’s a thing to say.

Converse with your conversation partners, decide on a miracle to execute on earth. Renew the connection between our plane and yours in a sensible manner.

There was a lot of staring going on.

What if I fuck up?!

This whole thing was still insane.

There is no such thing. We wish to learn. No harm can come from communication between individuals that work towards a common goal.

I made a face at the phone.

The project will be monitored as well. Nothing harmful will come off of it. And you may stop at any given time without negative consequence.

I stared at the phone without a battery and energy source and…

I could go the the TV or make photos and expose this to everyone and it will be a great show and everyone will see!

There was no answer for a few seconds.

It would be a miracle without much impact, but yes, it would be possible. We believe it is not something you desire.

They were right about that.

So that’s a no strings attached… group project.

It sounded like it.

Yes, it could be characterised as such. I would like to ask for politeness towards your group partners, but I believe that is common etiquette in your world and practised by you as a person.

Well, this person was not wrong.

And I noticed that I was actually considering this.

I mean… this was very, very weird. But… I could stop any time? There were no strings attached? Well. Even if it was an elaborate prank, I would not give them my credit card number, so…

I suppose I will receive instructions how to talk to the other members of the group?

Yes, you would, if you accepted your position

What the hell.

Then yes, I accept my position in the council until further notice.

The screen changed again.

Welcome to Devinype

#Devinype #1556 words

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thesinglesjukebox · 8 years ago

Video

youtube

ST. VINCENT - LOS AGELESS [7.10] Where In The World Will Annie Clark Be Next?

Eleanor Graham: Particularly after the impossibly fine-boned "New York", this veers into the smart-soulless wall-of-bombast territory of Jungle, or the new Beck song. If all the lyrics were as smugly baffling as "in Los Ageless, the mothers milk their young," I'd probably hate it. What's that, LA is full of rich people who are a bit weird? Haha, no way! But "HOW CAN ANYBODY HAVE YOU AND LOSE YOU AND NOT LOSE THEIR MINDS TOO?" is a huge, irresistible demand. It sounds in the best possible way like a piece of Jenny Holzer art or a Red-era Taylor Swift line. The verses are perfectly structured too -- as she sings "burn the pages of unwritten memoirs" or "girls in cages playing their guitars," she's illustrating the chaotic, appalling city; as she falls into "I can keep running ah-ah" or "I just follow the hood of my car," she's gritting her teeth and leaning back into its all-consuming rhythm, riding a 300-foot wave. [6]

Cédric Le Merrer: At first it starts out like yet another song about the twisted city of sin and glamour, with a weird St. Vincent groove and seductive coos. Welcome To The Jungle of LA Hallucinations. Cool, I thought, but I'm already on my way to boredom. But I did not see the plot twist coming: it's actually yet another a breakup song! And my disbelief is 100% suspended and I do feel the heartbreak for the time of that painful chorus. [8]

William John: A song of contrasts: the verses are all distracted and fidgety, the sort of work one does when experiencing anxiety-induced stomach cramps, while the chorus is catharsis, decompression, an explosion of feeling. "How can anybody have you and lose you and not lose their mind, too?" asks Annie Clark, who's long been condescended to as a porcelain-doll figure who can shred. Here, she dismantles that characterisation with total abandonment of inhibition, and embraces the vulnerabilities exposed when one is proximate with a person who ostensibly exemplifies everything you think you're supposed to want and be. [9]

Nortey Dowuona: Bouncy bass, wavy synths, thick, sharp guitar and decent drum programming. Plus, the massive wave of overlapping vocals, fuzzy guitars, crackling synths, popping drums and stabs of synth horn coalesce then spilt apart as St. Vincent rides it with both calm and poise. [7]

Alfred Soto: The massive sound bespeaks a world conquering assertiveness: St. Vincent, per a recent New Yorker profile, wants a larger audience. The blues tropes conveying overpowering carnal desire are familiar to PJ Harvey listeners, just as the electronic squawks were gauche when LCD Soundsystem used them in 2004. This explains the title, maybe: in L.A. revivals are as constant as the smog. [7]

Joshua Copperman: Previous single "New York" makes more sense within Masseduction, recontextualizing the surreal production of the album by placing it on top of a simplistic power ballad. "Los Ageless," as evidenced by the way "Sugarboy" foreshadows the synth riff, is the true centerpiece of the album. Everything that makes both Annie Clark's songwriting and Jack Antonoff's production stellar is on display here, with a gigantic chorus and smart lyrics that casually eclipse the commentary La La Land made about Hollywood last year ("The lost sages hang out by the bar/Burn the pages of unwritten memoirs"). Yet on its own, I can't say I have the same attachment that I do to the rest of Masseduction -- even as most of the album rarely goes off the rails no matter how much distortion Clark and Antonoff throw on it, "Los Ageless" is a bit too extra to have the same impact. The outro is beautiful, but the instrumentation is -- for lack of a better term, I swear -- melodramatic. We get it, Antonoff, you like orchestral swells! Let Annie speak! [7]

Ryo Miyauchi: Before, Annie Clark either housed her desire in such perfect musical display in her songs, it became an object no longer hers; or she wrote about the feeling with lyrics too cryptic, as if she was yet too uncomfortable to flesh it out in more plain language. "Los Ageless" operates still with clinical precision, music-wise, yet this is the closest she has come to giving the experience with desire a physical form -- and she molds it to resemble all of its ugliness. Not only does Clark push her nose against the glass case to really take in a look,, she embraces her self-disgust with it whole, especially in the chorus: "how can anyone have you, lose you and not lose their minds too?" [7]

Ian Mathers: Annie Clark makes a meal of the gap between "how can anybody have you?" and "how can anybody have you and lose you?" as only she can, but on first encounter the slightly more synthesized/less idiosyncratic production feels like a step back from the last two album. But jeeze, if one of the pre-eminent voices in her field is merely just making exceptional songs that don't sound quite as much like she's blowing up the form around her, I guess we'll have to settle for that. [8]

Maxwell Cavaseno: There's something impotent about the ability to be insipid these days. People insist that there's some sort of inherent power in knowing better and simply basking in it, when the righteous can still end up mowed down without any sort of compensation or commendation. Annie Clark's always been pretty smart, smarter than me, and I tend to appreciate artists who are trying to make art from a place of benevolent nobility, but more and more I've come to feel like everything she does is frozen by a need to be wry. "Los Ageless" is very satisfied to know better, the dry processing on her guitar as artificial as what she herself is commenting on. But it doesn't necessarily try to understand or sympathize with its target, and instead punches down from a high-up tower. To snipe down at a world you find ridicule in behind walls of disaffection nowadays seems a tiresome lecture, and for all Clark's bountiful talents to bestow on us, her songs feel less benevolent and more like being subjected to someone's infinite wisdom. [4]

Rebecca A. Gowns: I'm the person who was born and raised in Los Angeles, and I can get defensive when I hear critiques of the city, especially a reading of the city as a whole as superficial, predatory, and devouring. To me, Los Angeles is its immigrants; its vibrant arts scene; its museums and libraries; its mystifying array of flora brought in from every climate; its topography as varied as mountains and valleys and river and oceans. And yet! I'm getting to an age where, as much as I resist the metonymy, I have to accept it: Los Angeles is Hollywood, a damned and unshakeable link. Hollywood is maddeningly hierarchal (and, it follows, racist, sexist, nepotist, and all the rest), and that system bleeds out into the rest of Los Angeles, as so much of our economy and image comes from it. St. Vincent sings it all out, and with her chorus, nails the heart of my defensiveness -- "how can anybody have you and lose you and not lose their minds too?" There is so much to cherish in Los Angeles, and yes, in Hollywood, that it hurts so deeply when you realize, time and time again, how fickle the city really is. Even for someone who was born amongst the palm trees. How cruel to arrive in Los Angeles and realize that the producers want you for your body, not your work; crueler still to be born here and look the city in its eyes, and it always looks away, pretending to not know your name. [8]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

#St. Vincent #Los Ageless #TSJ Best of 2017

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kinsie · 8 years ago

Text

Where Did All The Modmakers Go?

Image Credit: Walter Marino

On the PC platform, now perhaps more than ever, releasing mod tools for your game is a pretty damn good way to win hearts and minds. Bethesda’s ongoing Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises make their name and many of their sales on their obscene levels of user-generated content (and, let’s be honest here, the levels of obscene user-generated content…) to the point where many people half-jokingly claim that the fanbase often finishes the games for the colossal publisher through “Unofficial Patch” bugfix mods. 2K’s XCOM 2 responded to the horrifying and hacky methods (likened by the original developers to sadomasochism) used by fanatical fans to modify the first game by releasing full-featured tools and contracting modders to produce high-quality sample content. And of course, the original Doom continues to be an ever-flowing tap of new content decades after its release.

But just as apparent as mod support is a lack of mod support. When EA DICE, who openly took great inspiration from Battlefield 1942’s legendary Desert Combat mod for future games in the franchise, dropped mod support, it raised more than a few eyebrows, and when Doom 2016 elected to include simple, multiplatform in-engine tools instead of the more traditional external level editors that defined the series, it confounded many… especially in the face of its precursor’s legacy.

DICE famously dropped mod support with the transition to Frostbite. Image Credit: Electronic Arts

Now, official tools aren’t exactly necessary in this day and age. There’s an eager army of hackers and reverse-engineering enthusiasts out there eager to document file formats, build powerful tools and generally blur the lines between demonstrations of technological prowess and middle-fingers towards copyright law… but try as they might, they typically won’t be able to match the capabilities possible with an officially-supported solution that doesn’t have to reinvent every wheel just to get Polygon One into the engine.

It’s not uncommon in the circles I tend to frequent for people to curse the lack of modding tools for modern games, and to frequently blame the lack of such tools on the grim spectre of DLC. Why, after all, would somebody buy a Horse Butt Helmet add-on when they could download a Realistic Lore-Friendly Immersive Ultra-Ultra-HD Anatomically Correct-Horse Butt Helmet mod for free? Personally, I don’t buy that as a reason, and it goes back to the examples listed at the top of this article – Elder Scrolls, Fallout and XCOM 2.

CapnBubs Accessory Pack, an example of a high-quality mod for XCOM 2.

These three games have plentiful DLC on top of their mod support, and in many cases mods develop around individual DLCs, augmenting their feature-set and content, creating something of a self-feeding ecosystem where DLC doubles as a pile of new functionality and professionally-made assets for the code-oriented to play with. And they aren’t the only ones that share this weird relationship with their player base. They’re just the most prominent examples.

So, if the obvious strawman answer is wrong, what’s the real reason? Well, there isn’t really one true overriding thing we can all point our fingers and scream angrily at like Donald Pleasance, it’s generally a combination of several smaller factors…

Internal Affairs

The development of a modern videogame is ridiculously complex in this day and age. It’s practically like gluing a Pixar movie to a suite of business software, with small armies of experts in different fields applying their crafts. Often from all over the world, once multiple studios and international outsourcing come into the picture.

Yes, that is half an hour of credits. Well, more like 25 minutes once you cut the ending out. Point being, lots of people work on this stuff.

This necessitates a strong online network for version-control, documentation and communication, and in many cases internal development tools are deeply tied into this system. You can even see this in some mod-friendly engines – try saving a new particle system in the Source Engine, and it’ll scream at you to check your work into Valve’s internal (and obviously inaccessible) subversion repo. In many cases, untangling the tools from their hardwired networks would require a titanic amount of effort, which leads me to the second common reason…

Time is Money

Even in situations where development tools aren’t attached by an array of wires and cables to a sinister-looking wall of internal servers like that one bit in Ghost in the Shell, the tools are rarely ready to just throw into a zip file and kick onto public web hosting. Documentation needs to be either written or revised to work with the assumption that you can’t just walk down to an engineer’s desk and ask them how something should be done. In many cases, the toolset will also have huge bugs or missing pieces that would internally be dealt with by grabbing the responsible programmer or just… not clicking those buttons.

Doctor, it hurts when I do this. Image Credit: Running with Scissors

These holes and cracks need to be patched up before a public release, and it’s not a task that’ll do itself. Resources (which is a gross business-y way of saying “living breathing human beings and their accompanying salaries”) need to be assigned to the task, when there is often more immediately pressing tasks that need doing, like urgent patches for launch-day issues or commencing work on post-release content (whether that be free, DLC, microtransaction or some fucked up Voltron-esque amalgamation of the three), and a limited amount of time in the day to get things done.

Loathsome Licensing

Many games these days typically license out third-party materials – middleware, fonts, etc. etc. – that are typically developed by companies that don’t want the keys to their kingdom handed out to XxGoKuFaRtZ_69xX. You might know them by that legion of context-less logos you futilely try to skip every time you start a modern game, mindlessly tapping away at the A button with one hand while grabbing a drink and making a sandwich with the other.

OH MY GOD I DON��T CARE Image Credit: Bethesda/Id Software/Sabre Interactive/et al.

As a result, the tools and resources provided by these licensors typically need to be stripped out from a public release, and in an increasingly large number of cases this simply isn’t possible – middleware often encompasses such huge chunks of a level creation process as lighting and optimisation, things that can’t be removed without either compromising the results of modding (Nobody likes fullbright lighting. Nobody!) or rewriting that system completely... which misses the point of licensing something out to do it in the first place!

And of course, font licensing is an incredibly serious business where distributing things in even the most slightly incorrect manner will result in you getting fined a small African nation’s GDP and sent off to that endless, sanity-consuming white void that people like to take photos in for some fucked up reason. It’s a really touchy subject and in many cases, discretion is the better part of not getting lawyered to shit for letting a 13-year-old get their hands on Helvetica Neue without paying thousands for the privilege

One such portal, shortly before claiming another victim.

Reality

Looking back at this, it’s a sad state of affairs. Mod support is entering a strange state, where less and less games and engines support it by default, but more and more people are circling their wagons around those games. It’s coming to a point where some franchises, like the aforementioned Elder Scrolls, are defined and differentiated from competitors purely by how much they can be stretched and distorted by random internet people.

It’s a bizarre situation, made stranger by how some game and engine developers, made strong by past modding support, have changed their tune over the last few years… but that’s a spittle-riddled rant for another time.

#gaming #modding #gamedev #long-form

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cmc-alumni · 6 years ago

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19TH STREET, Manhattan

In mid-September 2008 I embarked on my first Forgotten mission after a brief, but horrendous battle with a stomach flu of some kind that struck on September 11th, of all dates, a couple of hours after a meal of baked chicken and boiled frozen vegetables. (Even now, in mid-October, your webmaster hasn’t returned to frozen corn, beans or peas, but I know I have to eventually for the sake of health; I have been depending on salads for vegetative intake). So, I opted for a relatively brief hike on 19th Street, which I had found interesting some monhs back and filed a mental note to revisit. Not only did I find interesting architectural elements, but also some oblique references to my own life, as we’ll see…

The Joyce Theatre, at 8th Avenue and 19th, is a 472-seat dance performace venue opened in 1982 in the renovated and remodeled Elgin Theatre, opened in 1942, that had come on hard times in the 1970s as a porno palace — the renovation was suprvised by architect Hugh Hardy, whose Radio City Music Hall tour I attended — he revived RCMH as well — as part of Open House NY in 2008.

Your webmaster is not a ballet or modern dance fan, but I note the theatre because it is named for one of the founders of one of my workplaces. Joyce Mertz-Gilmore along with her parents, Harold and LuEsther Mertz, founded Publishers Clearing House, the premier direct marketing company in the country, in their basement in Sands Point, NY, in 1953. photo: wikipedia

The Joyce Theatre exists in great part due to the philanthropic efforts of LuEsther Mertz.

Directly across the Joyce, on 8th Avenue and 19th, was a Blimpie where I would get lunch once a week while employed at an international-language typesetter, ANY Phototype, on West 29th. In June 1990 I acquired one of my worst-ever stomach flus (until this year) at that Blimpie. Look, it made me remember the place. It was decorated unusually: it was filled with house plants.

I’ve only been in the Peter McManus Cafe, at 7th Avenue and W. 19th, once — in 1993, I had just gotten out of class at the School of Visual Arts, went in and called a friend to meet me there, whence we went to see The Fugitive, the Harrison Ford version. (I had a splitting headache that day.)

McManus looks as if it has been here forever, but it isn’t nearly as old as, say, the Old Town Bar or the granddaddy, McSorley’s Ale House. It has been owned and operated by the McManus family since it opened in 1936.

Looking south on 7th Avenue toward the old Barney’s. Several new residential towers have appeared on this stretch in the last few years (not at the fever pitch of 6th Avenue in the West 20s, though). Dominating the landscape is the new Coke bottle-green-glass-clad Yves Chelsea tower at West 18th. The penthouse will go for $10M, at least it was going to before all the Wall Street hotshots, bankers, and ill-advised real estate buyers tanked the economy.

Speaking of the economy, the last time your webmaster was out of work, all my unemployment check arrangements were handled electronically and there was less of a need to cut up paperwork before throwing it away. Nevertheless there will always be a neeed for scissors and shears, and that’s where Griffon came in. According to faded ad historian Walter Grutchfield, the Griffon Cutlery Works was founded by Albert Silberstein in 1888 and was located here on West 19th between 1920 and 1968. As you can see from the link the ad was in much better shape in 1986, and time is gradually taking a toll.

Note the palimpsest at the bottom. The company changed from “Works” to “Corporation” in the 1940s and painted over Works with Corp. Both are showing up now.

This sign is also an “example” of unnecessary quotation “marks.” They’re all over the place.

Pinking shears, by the way, are shears with jagged edges, used to cut thick cloth.

2008, meet 1908 along the south side of West 19th just east of 7th Avenue.

The Henry Siegel-Frank Cooper Dry Goods store, built in 1895 and in business until 1914, is the largest of the 6th Avenue Ladies’ Mile emporia, containing 15.5 acres of floor space. It used to have a clock tower as well as a large fountain, since removed and placed in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles. A ramp from the old Sixth Avenue El (razed in 1938) allowed passengers to walk directly into the store from the platform on the 18th Street side. This is Beaux Arts at its most Beaux.

The store pioneered the use of free samples, female salespersons, and air conditioning as customer inducements, and one of its mottoes was “Everything Under The Sun.” Industrialist/barbed-wire king John Warne Gates once made a bet with financier J. P. Morgan that the boast was just rhetorical. Gates asked a floorwalker if the store sold elephants, whereupon he was directed to the toy department; Gates responded that he meant a real elephant. The representative asked him what color, Gates responded “white” and the answer was “we’ll let you know the delivery date.” A few weeks later Gates received a telegram informing him his order would be arriving the next day at the docks: an albino elephant shipped from Ceylon. Gates paid Morgan the bet and donated the pachyderm to the Central Park Zoo.

I see something new every time I pass or enter the Siegel-Cooper building. For example, here is one of the intertwined S/C’s that flank the arched entrance.

All 4 corners of West 19th and 6th are held down bu beautiful buildings of varying beauty and fame. On the NW corner (above right) is the Simpson-Crawford Building, constructed in 1900 and home to the titular store until 1915. The store popularized the phrase, “if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it” and indeed the store eschewed the use of sales tags.

A Greek Revival building on the NE corner (above right) is home to a Sports Authority. Paragon, on Broadway between East 17th and 18th Streets since 1908, is the big sports dog in the area.

At the SW corner (left) we see the first Benjamin Altman Building from 1876-1906, whereupon the store moved to a massive building that filled an entire block between 5th, Madison, East 34th and East 35th Streets, where it was in business for the following 83 years. Altman opened his first store at 3rd Avenue and east 10th Street in 1865.

At a time when real estate has gotten so prohibitively expensive that even big retailers like Barnes and Noble are forced out by high rents (as they were from their 6th Avenue and West 22nd Street location in 2008) it’s comforting to know that Apex Tech is still holding down the corner plot on West 19th. The school offers training in automotive, refrigeration, electrical, plumbing, carpentry, welding and auto repair since 1961.

Throughout the 1980s, when local channels 5, 9 and 11 were independently owned and showed mostly reruns and movies, the Apex tech commercials featuring the mustachioed Apex Tech Guy were a staple. His catchphrase was “Now, I can’t call you…”

Naturally, he doesn’t utter the famous phrase in this vintage Apex tech spot, but you get the idea…

A couple of midblock views between 5th and 6th Avenues. 35 West 19th, on the right, now home to Sala, a Spanish restaurant, is notable for being the longtime home of The Magickal Childe, ostensibly an occult bookstore but also featuring hexerei of the weird such as voodoo dolls, herbs used in potions, tarot cards and wicca (not witchcraft to devotees) paraphernalia. The Charmed girls would have fit right in.

The Cluett Building at 22-28 West 19th runs right through the block to 19-23 West 18th. The name of the building stirred a memory. Walter Grutchfield: The building was constructed in 1901/02 as the New York headquarters of Cluett, Peabody & Co. of Troy, NY. They were collar manufacturers and created the Arrow brand of detachable shirt collars. According to the Free Dictionary, “About 1905 the company began an advertising campaign that featured an idyllic young man wearing an Arrow shirt with the detached collar… Hundreds of printed advertisements were produced from 1907 to 1930 featuring the Arrow Collar Man. The fictional Arrow collar man became an icon and by 1920 received more than 17 thousand fan letters a day.”

I had to reach deep in the ForgottenArchives for this: Cluett, Peabody was a name I heard frequently in youth; both my grandmother and my mother (who I indicated, at left, in the photo of a company gathering that I’d estimate was from the early 1950s) worked at the Troy, NY company in the 1940s and 1950s.

Free Dictionary again: In the early 1920′s Cluett, Peabody & Co. began manufacturing their shirts with attached collars in response to consumer demand and became the most successful company in the U.S. at that time. Their sales increased to 4 million collars a week and arrow shirts with attached collars were being exported to foreign ports such as Jakarta, Indonesia, Java and the Belgian Congo. The Arrow Collar Man campaign ended in 1930 having been one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history.

My mother, of course, is the most attractive woman in the picture.

The Flatiron Lounge at 37 West 19th takes its name, of course, from the famed Fuller (Flatiron) Building at 5th Avenue, Broadway and 23rd Street.

I’m rarely in Sam Flax but only because I fear that when I’m in here, I’ll spend too much. Flax is second only to Pearl Paint in providing art supplies and everything necessary for putting pen or brush to paper. I hope its locale between 19th and 20th Streets west of 5th Avenue isn’t closing.

LEFT: Idlewild Books, a new travel book store, has become one of my new favorites (especially since the ForgottenBook is displayed prominently within). “Idlewild” was the old name for John F. Kennedy International Airport. Good luck, though, in the shadow of the Barnes and Noble flagship at 5th and East 18th.

At the SE corner of 5th Avenue and West 19th is the Arnold, Constable Building, yet another former department store.

Jim Naureckas, NY Songlines: Nine West, Victoria’s Secret are in former department store (1869-1914) that took up the entire block from 5th to 6th avenues; founded by Aaron Arnold and son-in-law James Constable, it offered “Everything From Cradle to Grave.” Mary Todd Lincoln was a frequent customer, as well as Carnegies, Rockefellers and Morgans.

Another Constable building can be found on Canal Street.

Briton Arthur Arnold opened a dry goods store in 1825 and took on James Constable as a partner in 1842. After the firm thrived for over a century, the last Arnold Constable store, at 5th Avenue and 40th Street, closed in 1975. (The comma, like the New York Times period, has disappeared along the way, so latterday customers thought an Arnold Constable was the original shopkeeper.)

Two narrow 1900-era towers flank West 19th Street at 5th Avenue. The building on the right was the longtime home of Weiss & Mahoney Army & Navy store and the former locale of the 5th Avenue Presbyterian Church (1852-1875). Your webmaster’s first job out of school was in 150 5th Avenue, a block away on 20th.

A pair of great escapes on East 19th between 5th Avenue and Broadway.

ABOVE: ABC Carpet, SE corner Broadway and East 19th, formerly W&J Sloane Furniture. RIGHT: contrast 35 and the Modernist 37 East 19th. 35 was the residence of Horace Greeley, editor, abolitionist and politician, from 1850-1853.

LEFT: NW corner Park Avenue South and East 19th, new tower tries for a Starrett-Lehigh vibe but doesn’t quite get there; I prefer the Doric-columned neo Renaissance apartment building at 105.

The American Woolen Building actually is entered on 221-227 Park Avenue South (marked with a ram’s head), while this, at 102-104 East 19th, is the freight entrance.

I’ve always loved the corner apartment building at 81 Irving Place and 123 East 19th — it’s festooned with dozens of terra cotta gnomes. And more gnomes.

For this 14-story apartment house, architect George Pelham, one of New York’s most active apartment-house designers, exploited the requirements of the zoning law to create an exuberant design [in 1929-1930] with dramatic setbacks and a striking rooftop pavilion surrounding the water tower. The building, planned with 107 small apartments, is faced with brick, often laid in intricate patterns to add excitement to the facades. The building is ornamented wth beige terra-cotta detail of a very high quality. Terra-cotta features include columns, balconies, and gargoyles embellished with animal heads, monsters, and other fanciful detail. NYC Architecture

The figure below right seems to be influenced by cartoonist R.F. Outcault’s 1890s creation, the Yellow Kid.

East 19th changes character, rather abruptly, for the block between Irving Place and 3rd Avenue and transforms itself into a tree-lined, suburban-style stretch dotted with small brick buildings, carriage houses and cottages. The tone is set by the ivy-covered NE corner building. Pete’s Tavern is one block south of here at East 18th.

In the early 20th Century the creative community had a great presence on this block, which was home to actresses Theda Bara, Dorothy and Lillian Gish, Ethel Barrymore and Helen Hayes; playwrights, authors and activists F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Reed, Emma Goldman and Eugene O’Neill were visitors.

There’s some riotous terra cotta tilework on the north side of the block; much of it is the work of architect Frederick Sterner and artist Richard Winthrop Chandler.

146 East 19th was home to painter George Bellows from 1910-1925, a man who lived the high life. “I went there in the evening a young girl and came away in the morning an old woman,” as Ethel Barrymore once said. Bellows, along with Edward Hopper, studied under Robert Henri at the NY School of Art and became a luminary in the modernistic Ashcan School. Possibly Bellows’ most famous painting was his depiction of Luis Firpo (“The Wild Bull of the Pampas”) knocking Jack Dempsey through the ropes in the first round in a 1923 fight. Dempsey recovered to KO Firpo in the second round. Artist Eric Joyner does a takeoff on Bellows’ vision in The Final Blow.

At 226 3rd Avenue on the NW corner is a terrific painted sign for the Piccolo restaurant.

The block of East 19th between 3rd and 2nd Avenues is dominated by the rather forbidding Mother Cabrini Medical Center, originally Columbus Hospital. Andy Warhol was treated here when he was shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968.

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917), the first US Citizen to be canonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart and established 67 orphanages throughout the USA , South America and Europe. Since 1931 her preserved remains have been displayed at Mother Cabrini Shrine in Fort Washington in upper Manhattan on a street named in her honor, Cabrini Boulevard.

Some bits of an increasingly retreating Little Old New York in the easternmost segment of East 19th, between 2nd and 1st Avenues.

We’ve already seen an item on 19th Street that reminded me of my mother. Here’s one that reminds me of the old man, who worked at Stuyvesant Town from 1955-1988 as a custodian. The apartment complex was constructed in the 1947 by Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; Peg Leg Pete, the Director-General of New Amsterdam, lived in this site on his farm in the late 1600s. It was championed by Robert Moses as part of his slum-clearance program in mid-century. When first opened, the complex would not rent to African-Americans, and the discrimination was held up in court. “Stuy Town” reversed the policy several years later. For many years, though the project didn’t have the necessary wiring for air conditioning, the waiting list for an apartment was quite long. The list was abolished when Met Life set about converting and upgrading the apartments to market rents beginning in 2006. Your webmaster foolishly never asked to get on “the list”, though Stuy Town would no doubt be trying to get my rent stabilized self out if I lived there now!

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renegadesector · 8 years ago

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Down with Features!

There are three disciplines that maintain a strong influence over the medium of Videogames: Art, Technology and Business. Videogames are a commercial, technology driven, art form. If you’re in the field of games, it’s hard to think about one of these aspects without being at least some what influenced by the others.

One of the ways that this is most evident is our predilection with “features”. You don’t often see “features” on other pieces of art. If you look at the back of a book or a movie, you’ll see a plot synopsis. Probably the closest thing to a “features list” you could find would be the taglines of a cheap exploitation film.

Where you do see features are in areas where Business and Technology meet. Features are a great way to develop and sell pieces of technology. They satisfy the technology side’s desire to innovate and the business side’s desire to have concrete selling points. Features lists are the hallmark of consumer electronic and software utilities. “Buy our toaster: it’s got 4 slots, a timer, and can even be set to toast only one side of your bagel!”

But art is less about what you do and more about how you do it. A game could have all the innovative features in the world and still fall flat, while another game does nothing which hasn’t been done before, but puts love into the details and pays attention to how the whole coheres *cough, Dark Souls, coughs*

And, not only are features a bad judge of quality, but designing around features can limit what we can do with the art form. Features are all about adding More to a game, when often times, the right artistic decision is less.

In these situations, I always trot out the example of Megaman. In Megaman, the game is built around the fact that you can only shoot horizontally. It allows the designers to carefully craft each challenge around that limitation. If you could shoot in any direction, the game would break down. You would lose out on that type of precise level design. But “Can only shoot horizontally” is not really something you can use as a feature, while “360 degree freedom! Aim in any direction you want!” certainly is. On a features list, “100 levels” sounds a lot better than “10 levels”, but that doesn’t take into account the quality, length and variation of those levels.

But here’s the weird bit: features have become such a pervasive part of the medium that even the artistic side often thinks in terms of them. Just look at the games that were coming out in the early indie scene: we were finally free of corporate influence and the need to use the most up-to-date technology and what do we make? It’s a platformer but with This One Cool New Feature. The New Feature is what Elevates it to Art.

To give another example: I remember some time before Fable 2 came out, Peter Molyneux did his standard shtick of hyping up his game with claims that it would completely revolutionize games as an artform. To this end, he said that you would have a dog in the game, and over the course of the game, you’d grow attached to the dog, and then, two-thirds of the way through, the dog would die, and you would feel sad (unfortunately I can no longer find this interview, so, take the caveat that this is just my recollection). So, let’s ignore, for a moment, that “killing a beloved dog” is more in the realm of cheap melodrama than high art. Instead, let’s think about how what was supposed to be an emotionally resonant moment was brought up before the game was even out, as a selling point for the game. “Sadness” is a feature. This is how we think of games. Even when we’re trying to evoke some real, emotional reaction out of the player, we think of it in terms of a bullet-point we can put on the back of the box.

Buy our brand new toaster! It has four slots, a timer, a bagel setting, and it will even make you sad!

While this has gotten somewhat better over time, Features still permeate how we think of games as an art form, and we certainly still lean on them heavily when trying to sell our games. How many games are content with a tone-setting synopsis on their Steam page or on the back of the box as opposed to a sentence about how many different types of enemies there are and a sentence about how the game features the ability to slow down time? Even a quick look at my games will tell you that I’m not immune from this.

It’s a hard habit to break, but I think it’s worth it.

Movies, music, books and paintings all do fine without features lists. Leave that to toaster ovens and smart phones.

#Game Design #Rant #Indie Games

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Cool It: You Don’t Have to Be on Every Social Media App

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.14.17

11:30 am

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

Do I have to try every social media app?

You’ve Got Mail starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and was an awful movie. I watched it in a hotel room recently and found myself thinking about you—thinking about all of us, really. To summarize: It is 1998. Hanks is the cocky, hard-charging scion of a massive Barnes & Noble-ish bookstore chain, about to open a new location on the Upper West Side. Ryan, meanwhile—vulnerable, sappy, like a human kitten—owns a tiny children’s bookstore nearby called the Shop Around the Corner. Ryan’s shop is everything that Hanks’ is not: quaint, neighborly, beloved. And, of course, it stands to be crushed by this encroaching tentacle of Hanks’ Machiavellian empire.

There’s a lot of anxiety in the air. Thematically, the film is concerned with what modernity (symbolized by Hanks and maybe also his high-octane girlfriend, who literally shouts, “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” at her espresso machine) might be doing to our souls (symbolized by Ryan and her boyfriend, who is referred to at a party as the “greatest living expert on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg”). This anxiety is everywhere. It’s a shame kids don’t know what handkerchiefs are, someone says. When office workers play solitaire on their computers, it’s lamented as “the end of Western civilization.”

It’s all so heavy-handed. But here’s the thing: As the bitter Hanks-Ryan bookstore rivalry escalates on the street, Hanks and Ryan are falling in love with each other via email, anonymously. They meet in some kind of chat room and begin emailing each other relentlessly, pouring out their feelings and the poignant whispers of their simpleton hearts. It’s dramatic irony, you see—they love each other in cyberspace, hate each other in meatspace—and the filmmakers milk it for all it’s worth. Scene after scene cuts back and forth between Hanks and Ryan, reading emails on their laughably briefcaselike laptops. Every time that cheery voice tells them “Welcome. You’ve got mail,” it’s a Pavlovian cue that flutters their stomachs and tingles their privates. It’s hard to think of two happier people in the history of film.

But you know what? Joke’s on them. Because what Hanks and Ryan do not know, and can’t possibly predict, is that the same series of tubes that’s serving as a conduit for their love will soon obliterate both their businesses! Soon they’ll both be irrelevant! They’re just too blissed out by each other’s electronic mail messages to recognize that this thing in front of them—this Internet—is also a merciless destroyer of worlds.

Reader, they are us; we are them. We’re blind to the transience of so many things we feel attached to, or else we are so attuned to their transience that we don’t allow ourselves to get attached. The truth is, even as I type this, laughing and smirking at You’ve Got Mail, I understand that someone in the near future will be similarly laughing and smirking at me. (“Typing?!” they’ll say.)

Are you obligated to try new social media apps? Not at all. Use what you enjoy. Try what you think you’d enjoy. Or don’t. You alone get to map out the borders of your online life. But you are, I think, obligated to stay open to exploring new social media apps—to keep yourself from becoming too jaded, too dismissive—and to always entertain the possibility that one of them might become meaningful and useful to you. I mean, I sunk a lot of time into Friendster back in the day, and I don’t regret it. I recognize that, like Hanks and Ryan, I was merely living contentedly in the present, without knowing that the magic of that moment would inevitably crumble—or even worrying about whether it might.

“Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life … And sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it or because I haven’t been brave?” Ryan typed that, sent it to Hanks. Now I’m putting the question to you.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.10.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I’m horrible at emoji—it’s like a foreign language for me. I always get “???” replies from friends. What should I do?

In 1918, a moderately but fleetingly famous Belgian man named Jean Pierre Pierard published an intriguing column in an American newspaper. Pierard was an actor, sometimes billed as “Le Colosse,” since he happened to weigh 342 pounds. (He was just a tremendous, tremendous fellow.) He was also the “Most Married Man in the World,” and this was the particular expertise with which he was writing. What does it mean to be the Most Married Man in the World? Well, at the time, Pierard was on his 23rd wife. Since 1886 he’d averaged one marriage every 1.4 years. But still, he felt strongly that “it is not good for man to be alone.”

This is the most important thing for you to know about Pierard—and I mean you specifically, my weird emoji-aphasic friend: Jean Pierre Pierard loved being married. He loved the institution of marriage—held it in the highest esteem—and felt a strong obligation to defend and venerate it against anyone who was starting to view it with the least bit of cynicism. “I believe in marriage,” he wrote. Deep down in the hallows of his giant being, the man was a romantic. And an optimist. And nothing about the clumsiness with which his optimism or romanticism kept colliding with reality was going to drain those feelings out of him. “It may surprise you to hear it,” Pierard wrote, “but it’s the truth, that every one of these 23 times I’ve taken out a marriage license I’ve done so with the same glow of hope and faith that I had the first time.” Being married brought him joy, so he kept getting married, even if he was lousy at it. Then he kept getting married some more.

I assume that you see where I’m going. It should be obvious, especially since I’ve written it all in not-fun alphabet letters. You’re correct that emoji are essentially a foreign language. So the only way to increase your fluency in them is with real-world practice—which is to say, by failing a lot, but paying enough attention to your failures to learn from them, and by asking more skillful speakers, people you feel totally supported and unjudged by, for help and safe opportunities to practice. But most important, don’t let anyone, with their snide ???s, spoil the pleasure those emoji bring to you. Don’t be ashamed!

OK? Just one more thing about Pierard: For a time, he attempted a career as a professional wrestler. It seems like the ideal job for Le Colosse—he could just fall on people and flatten them—and yet he was terrible at this too, maybe even more terrible than he was at marriage. Because he was ticklish—tremendously ticklish. He simply could not “permit of any contact with his ribs while wrestling,” The New York Times wrote, without being debilitated by his own giggling. All that his opponents had to do, no matter how small they were, was flutter their fingers around Le Colosse’s colossal midsection, topple him, and hold him down for the count. It was basically over before it began.

And, honestly, that’s how I’d love to picture you: joyously thumb-typing your syntactically jumbled, incomprehensible kissy faces, fires, whales, and eggplants without a care in the world, pinned on the mat but laughing and laughing and laughing. Do that and you’re .

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.09.17

11:00 am

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

My girlfriend got me a Fitbit, but the data makes me feel lazy and ashamed. Do I have to keep using it?

I was in my kitchen the other night, slow dancing with my toddler before bedtime, when the Coldplay song “Fix You” came on—a song, I remembered reading, that Chris Martin wrote for then-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow after her father died—and I found myself feeling genuinely bummed, all over again, that Chris and Gwyneth had split up. I wondered what had torn them apart or whether—as these things often go—they hadn’t been torn apart but slowly undone by some dark, unspoken dissatisfaction or resentment that gradually multiplied until there was so much cumulative darkness between them that it blotted out whatever had been luminescent about their love. And that’s when I thought about you and your girlfriend and your Fitbit.

I also thought about Steve Etkin. Etkin is an engineer by training and by temperament who enjoys walking. And so a year ago, his daughter, Jordan, bought him a Fitbit. It seemed like the perfect gift. “I started receiving daily updates,” she told me, “about the number of steps he walked, the stairs he climbed. After a few weeks, I was like, ‘Hey, Dad, you’re really treating this like a job.’ ” (She was also like, hey, Dad, I don’t need all these updates.)

Anyway, it got her thinking. And, because she studies consumer behavior at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, she designed a study to test whether, as she put it to me, trackers like Fitbits have the capacity to “suck the enjoyment” out of previously pleasurable activities. Guess what. They do.

Etkin’s study was published in the Journal of Consumer Research. She ran a series of six experiments. In one, for example, she gave her subjects a 16-pack of Crayolas, then made a big show of tracking how many shapes one group colored in while letting others color freely, unencumbered by quantification. She did similar experiments with walking and reading, and in every one discovered the same basic result. “Measurement led participants to color more shapes, walk more steps, and read more pages. At the same time, however, it led people to enjoy coloring, walking, and reading less.” In short, people did more but felt worse doing it. Tracking redefined fun activities as work.

One problem here is that by focusing on quantifiable outcomes, trackers can diminish intrinsic motivation, which makes people stick with activities. Therefore, “measurement may sometimes actually undermine sustainable behavior change,” Etkin writes. Those insurance companies giving Fitbits to their policyholders might be shooting themselves in the (demotivated, stationary) foot.

But you know all this. It’s precisely the cycle of incentivizing and disincentivizing, of judgment and anxiety, afflicting you: that feeling that you can never take enough steps or unlock enough REM sleep. (“When you try your best but you don’t succeed … When you feel so tired but you can’t sleep.”) And, as it afflicts you, it widens the emotional space between you and your girlfriend—it feeds a smoldering grudge, because she handcuffed you with this thing. She tried to fix you, my friend. But her fixing made you feel more broken.

So you’ve got to talk to your girlfriend and take the Fitbit off, even though Etkin’s research suggests this is the worst thing you could do. (When people start tracking then suddenly stop, the fun is still ruined, but they also lose the benefit of increased output—a double whammy of underperformance and joylessness.) But who cares? It could be the only way for you and your partner to remain consciously coupled.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.08.17

7:00 am

Christoph Niemann

When my 5-year-old asks a question, is there a difference between looking it up in a book and just using my phone?

Recently, I watched David Kwong do some sleight of hand in a crowded theater lobby. Kwong is a magician who often consults on Hollywood films. (When a director needs, say, Jesse Eisenberg to learn a magic trick, they send him to Kwong.) Anyway, Kwong sauntered over to a guy with a deck of cards and asked him to pick one.

Honestly, I don’t know how to describe what happened next. For 30 minutes, Kwong made cards materialize in outrageous, stupefying ways, as though he were nonchalantly sliding them in and out of a parallel universe. Someone’s card flew out of the deck, spinning through the air. Another turned up in a guy’s back pocket—and not just in his back pocket, but buried deep, between his wallet and a bundle of crumpled receipts. Kwong asked someone to rip a card into four pieces, then hold them in his fist; when he opened his hand, the card was reassembled!

Maybe this doesn’t sound that impressive, written down. We all know card tricks are a thing. But the way Kwong kept relentlessly confronting us with the impossible—seeing this sorcery at close range—seemed to not just entertain people but to make them feel vulnerable and a little scared. People mewled and screamed, “No!” One poor man was reduced to crouching on the floor, laughing so euphorically he couldn’t catch his breath. (OK, that was me.) The guy with the ripped-up card in his fist refused to open it at first, shaking his head like a child terrified to look at his boo-boo, afraid of what he’d find. “He has total power over us,” one woman said quietly, gravely. She sounded creeped out. It was so much fun!

Now, I’m sure everyone in that crowd wondered how Kwong was doing it, but it’s a rare bird who goes home and actually labors to understand the mechanics of how such tricks are engineered. (Those rare birds become magicians—it’s how Kwong got his start.) Most of us perceive magic tricks to be unreplicable, to violate the reality we inhabit. They’re, you know, magic.

To a 5-year-old, phones are magic. The internet is magic. An older kid might be able to understand the technology and infrastructure involved, the nature of Wikipedia, and so on, but for a child so young, the answer just appears, miraculously, like a playing card yanked from a bystander’s back pocket. Leafing through a book together, by comparison, is a more collaborative, tactile, self-evident process. It’s a journey toward the answer, one that your child gets to go on.

What I’m talking about is the difference between learning and being told, between answering a specific question and getting a child excited about answering it on their own. It’s fun to amaze your 5-year-old, sure. But it’s more gratifying to set your kid up to one day amaze you.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.06.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

Is flirting on LinkedIn less weird than on other social media? After all, it can vouch for you in a substantive way.

Whoa. Hang on. Let’s first poke at the premise of your question, because the implications here are huge. Notice how you casually presume your résumé offers a more substantive representation of your basic humanity than, say, all the tweets you’ve tweeted or all the digital artifacts amassed on your Facebook page. Think of the photos on Facebook alone: You in a rowboat with the gentle-looking man playing a banjo whom we understand to be your deceased (too young) father. You being silly—but not obnoxiously silly, just innocently, endearingly silly—in the Halloween aisle of a big-box store. You tagged in a photo of that kid you mentored that one summer, as he graduates from Berkeley. You climbing a goddamned mountain! Like, with pickaxes and stuff!

Do these not substantively communicate the substance of your life? Don’t they “vouch” for you to potential dates as a safe, noncreepy, sufficiently together human being, a sympathetic soul tumbling through the fundamental experience of being alive and looking for companionship? Or is that better captured with a line like this: “January 2013-November 2014, Senior Operations Associate, Mobitly Inc.”?

You seem to think it is. And I’ll admit—begrudgingly—that you may have a point. Because the lines have been blurred between our work lives and our emotional lives, our careers and our intrinsic selves. We subconsciously gauge a person’s character by their professional standing, and our experiences and attitude toward our work aren’t only sometimes relevant to our love lives. In fact, the two can feel crucially interwoven: The best startup founders are those who operate out of passion and devotion and with a kind of hyper-monogamous obsession. On the other hand, we all feel obligated to work on our relationships with the same myopic, idealistic intensity. And it can feel natural to apply the lessons we learn relating to people in one realm to our relationships in the other.

Take, for example, Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO. I confess, I’m not a LinkedIn user, but I’ve been reading up on Weiner and, I have to say, he seems like a wonderful guy—a principled, thoughtful man who says very grounded, Jerry Maguire-type things like, “I’ve never been title-driven; for the most part, I’ve been purpose-driven.” He also reads books by the Dalai Lama, contemplates the difference between compassion and empathy, and practices mindfulness techniques like “being a spectator to my own thoughts,” which enhance his ability to relate to and motivate his employees. He calls his style “compassionate management.”

In an essay he wrote a few years ago, Weiner described leaving work one evening, feeling proud of the strides he’d made as a compassionate manager, only to be felled by the epiphany that he’d been very uncompassionately neglecting his wife. He was working so hard, he wrote, that at night, “when my wife would try to bring up her day, or talk about the things we need to get done, I would reflexively say something to the effect that it had been a long day, I was exhausted, and could we talk about it some other time?” In other words: “For as hard as I worked to manage compassionately at the office, I was not always actively applying the same approach with my family.” So Weiner applied the same compassionate management style to his marriage and made things right.

I worry that sounds off, like the emotionally tone-deaf insights of a stereotypical tech baron. But trust me, the way Weiner explained it, it sounded cool—real. (And know this too: Worried that I’d gush in this column about Weiner’s coolness and realness only to learn later that Weiner is actually not cool and not real and is, in truth, as imperious as Genghis Khan or a Grade A, misogynistic, steroidal jerk, I sat down and Googled “Jeff Weiner LinkedIn jerk” and was happy to find, as the first result, a post singling him out as a “counterweight” to the industry’s many other CEO-jerks. So that was reassuring—even if the post was published on LinkedIn. But even that can be interpreted as a testament to Weiner’s character, because it was Weiner, I learned, who had the vision to expand LinkedIn from a bland résumé farm into a successful publishing platform.)

I’ll go even further. I wouldn’t be surprised if a man as smart as Weiner already knows all this, knows that we live in an age where one of the prime, romantically reassuring things about another person—the thing that “vouches” for them best as a potential mate—is that they’re a trustworthy, hardworking, successful employee. And therefore, he also secretly knows that LinkedIn could be the ultimate dating site, though he wisely stops short of saying it. Instead, he just dog-whistles about that potential to attentive users and eagle-eyed investors, thus preserving the opportunity to pivot the company explicitly in that direction should the climate change and the need arise. Recently, for example, he told an interviewer, “Our core value proposition to members is to help them connect to opportunity,” and touted “the power of this as a platform to enable capital”—especially “human capital”—“to flow where it can best be leveraged.”

Isn’t he talking about dating, about setting people up? When Tevye and Golde’s daughters sang, “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match,” weren’t they basically asking a kind of social networking platform to send their own human capital flowing toward whichever shtetl boy would give it the highest valuation and invest? Why shouldn’t you flirt on LinkedIn? Why shouldn’t love be one of the opportunities LinkedIn connects us with?

So, yes. You are right. And you’ve taught me a lot—you and Jeff Weiner both. I can see clearly now how we’ve all tied ourselves into a knot of careerism and affection and equity and sex, and maybe that’s just the way it has to be. I’m remembering now what happened when Jerry Maguire—the real Jerry Maguire—showed up in that living room, shivering, trying to win back his wife, who also happened to be his business partner at their new sports-agenting startup, how he told her, “You … you complete me.” But, more important, there was the line he slipped her right before that famous line. Suddenly, in the middle of his monologue, he was compelled to say, like a man giving a keynote at a conference, “We live in a cynical world, a cynical world, and we work in a business of tough competitors.”

Why? Why include that? What could Jerry Maguire possibly have meant? I think he meant: The internet is full of sinister strangers. It’s a hostile place in which to offer up your soul. But here I am. Look at me. View my profile. I’d like to connect with you on LinkedIn.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.03.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I work in a casual tech setting and I’m shocked by how much everyone swears. Should I say something?

Imagine what it was like to be a Puritan in 1642. You’ve come to America. The landscape is crude and endless; the soundtrack, all hissing insects and howling wolves. “Everything about the place seemed godforsaken,” writes the natural historian Tim Flannery in his book The Eternal Frontier. That lawless emptiness is why you’re here—it means freedom. But in all free and empty places, there’s also room for wickedness to grow. Everybody in your little settlement is aware of this, which is why they panic when, one day, someone happens upon a young man named Thomas Granger having sex with a horse.

It’s worse than you thought: When confronted, Granger rapidly admits he’s also had intercourse with three cows, two goats, five sheep, and a turkey. This behavior is so savage—and feels like such a threat to the ethical society you’re laboring to build there in the wild—that you respond with a campaign of ruthless cleansing. You round up each animal Granger has had sex with and force the young man to watch while you slaughter it. (Not the turkey, though; for some reason, Flannery notes, no one bothers with the turkey.) And since you can’t tell which of the village’s sheep were the particular sheep Granger penetrated—his descriptions are imprecise—you herd every sheep in front of him, like a police lineup, and force him to ID the five in question. Then you kill those five sheep too. Then you kill Granger. Then you throw all their bodies together in one big pit.

Now, fast-forward 373 years. Let’s talk about you.

It’s easy to imagine you, hunched in your tech company’s open floor plan, forced to sit on an inflatable ball or perhaps issued one of those iconoclastic standing desks without a chair at all. You are a wary pilgrim on the wild, godless edge of America’s economic frontier. And, as such, you understand that the foul language your colleagues are using isn’t just unpleasant but morally precarious; if it continues unchecked, it could lead you all—your entire industry, really—to much darker places. You know, just as the Puritans did, that this kind of impropriety needs to be nipped in the bud.

That’s how you feel, right? Well, you’re wrong.

You’re not the Puritans. You’re the kid shtupping the cows. Because the lesson of the Granger story—as I read it—isn’t that morality always wins. It’s that the mob always wins. The majority’s norms always beat back and outlast the minority’s. And the mob can be cruel: They’ll kill the thing you love right in front of you, then dump you in the ground.

I think you need to go along with the mob.

Does it matter if my kid’s handwriting is terrible?

Well, I happen to love handwriting. I think it’s curiously fun to look at and a considerable, if mostly esoteric, value-add to the written language—even in an era of tablets and smartwatches and speech-recognition software. But does it matter if your child writes illegibly? My answer is no, probably not. Handwriting is an old technology—about 5,000 years old. And as with newer old technologies (muskets or floppy disks or cars with human beings driving them), some people may inevitably feel a tinge of melancholy watching it sputter into oblivion. And yet the truth is that humanity has always replaced old tools with new ones, and often, once we’ve pushed through the emotionally charged transitional phase and come out the other end, everything feels fine again.

Take, for example, a woman named Kristin Gulick in Bend, Oregon, who often has trouble reading messages scribbled by her chronically illegible office receptionist. “Yesterday I tried to dial a number that she’d written down, and I couldn’t read it,” Gulick told me recently. “I had to go back out and ask, ‘What does this say?’” And the receptionist was just like, ha ha ha, I know my handwriting’s terrible—you know, giggling the annoyance away. Was Gulick peeved? Yes. But was this a fireable offense or some irrevocable inconvenience? Not even close. In fact, Gulick really had no choice but to laugh the whole thing off too. “Thank God she’s good at other things!” she said, and life went on.

So there’s your answer. But who is Kristin Gulick, anyway? So glad you asked!

Handwriting may be one of those fundamentally human abilities—one that binds us to our own identities.

Gulick has been an occupational therapist for 28 years, specializing in arms and hands. She’s in private practice now, but shortly after 9/11 she found herself working at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. A recent government report disclosed that more than 1,000 of the 50,000 soldiers who’ve been wounded in action in Iraq and Afghanistan—2.6 percent—have come back missing limbs, and Gulick was there to greet some of the first ones, helping them work around their loss and rejoin their life. Part of this work involved “transferring dominance” from one hand to the other; if a righty lost their right arm, say, they needed to learn to be a lefty now. And part of that was relearning handwriting—even just enough to fill out the deluge of hospital forms and sign their name.

Gulick found a total dearth of tools and curricula. Really, there was nothing. While she encouraged people to use first-grade handwriting primers early in her career, they were full of infantilizing penmanship exercises involving anthropomorphic animals. These books were not only unhelpful but degrading: Having lost a limb, many of these people were already feeling vulnerable and diminished. Now they were being treated—literally—like children. Gulick and an officer in the Army Medical Specialist Corps, Katie Yancosek, decided they could do better. “We’d give them exercises about balancing their checkbook and not about a little bunny or whatever,” Gulick said. The result was a six-week program, laid out in a workbook called Handwriting for Heroes. (The third edition was published this year.)

Look, I don’t mean to play some righteous, wounded-veteran card and make anyone feel bad. But I think we all see where this is going: It’s easy to write off handwriting only because most of us take it for granted. But I listened to Gulick talk about handwriting for a while, about what the ability to jot off a simple grocery list or be-right-back note for your spouse—functional but maybe also aesthetically pleasing or expressive, something you have created—does for a person’s sense of self-sufficiency and pride after working hard to regain that skill. How handwriting, really, may be one of those fundamentally human abilities—one that binds us, in a tiny way, to each other and to our own identities.

Your child won’t feel anything remotely like that sense of loss if they let their handwriting go to seed. Their lives will move forward in standardized fonts. If they absolutely have to write anything by hand, it may be disordered and illegible, but they can just laugh it off and explain (or text) what they meant. And that’s why I’ll stick with my first answer: It probably doesn’t matter. But I also think that, if we’re prepared to let handwriting go—to not care how ugly it gets—we should, at least, take a second to think about how beautiful it can be.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.01.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

The same person keeps accidentally pocket-dialing me. Should I confront him?

Let's zoom out for a second: For more than 40 years, scientists have been debating whether we should be actively sending messages into outer space or just using projects like SETI to listen for messages sent to us—and not just whether we should broadcast anything, but what and how. Do we shoot out a bunch of math, to show aliens we understand math? Do we send pictures? Music? And if so, what math? What pictures? What music? There have been scientific workshops to hash this out in Toulouse, Paris, Zagreb, Houston, and Mountain View. There have been peer-reviewed journal articles with titles like “The Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition.” It's a big, messy, excruciatingly meticulous back-and-forth.

And yet—all this time, while all those eggheads have been arguing—gobs and gobs of our satellite transmissions, television broadcasts, radio shows, and cell phone conversations have been quietly, sloppily spilling into outer space. It's all just oozing off our planet and into the cosmos like so much electromagnetic sewage—a phenomenon scientists call leakage. In other words, we're already beaming messages into the void—weak signals, but millions of them every day, without even realizing it or being careful about what we say. We are butt-dialing the universe!

Now say someone out there actually picks up that call. Wouldn't you like to know? Yes, it's embarrassing to realize we've made that sort of clumsy connection. But isn't it always just a little bit nice to know we've made a connection at all? So my advice is: Tell this person. Tell him he reached you. Tell him you were there.

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

Is it unethical to crowdfund a project I don't totally believe in?

A month after the Boston Tea Party, in January 1774—with the idea of rebellion gaining momentum in Boston and patriots feeling more powerful than the remaining loyalists in town—a strange character who called himself Joyce Junior started stoking that new sense of boldness on the streets. Junior walked around elaborately costumed, like some anarchist harlequin, and posted flyers threatening any “vile ingrates” who were still loyal to the crown. Loyalists should be punished, he wrote. And he slyly suggested precisely how, signing his treatises: “Chairman of the Committee for Tarring and Feathering.”

Ten days later, a low-level British government customs official, John Malcom, got into an argument with a well-known patriot shoemaker on the street.

One thing led to another, and soon an angry mob had “swarmed around [Malcom's] house,” wrote Nathaniel Philbrick in his book Bunker Hill. Very quickly, all of Boston's frustration and resentment with England began to come down on this one middling bureaucrat. The rioters bum-rushed Malcom's home with ladders and axes. Once inside, they lashed him with sticks, then pushed him on a sled for hours through the snowy, unlit streets and bitter cold, collecting more irate Bostonians as they went. The mob mocked him. They threatened to cut off his ears. They beat him and beat him. Soon more than a thousand people had joined in. They ripped off Malcom's clothes. They coated his skin with steaming tar. They covered him with feathers.

The abuse went on for hours. When they finally dumped Malcom in front of his house, Philbrick wrote: “his frozen body had begun to thaw, his tarred flesh started to peel off in ‘steaks.’”

It was awful—all of it. And apparently, it was particularly distressing to Joyce Junior, the Wavy Gravy-esque performance artist who'd threatened British loyalists with tarring and feathering in the first place—the man who'd hammered that idea into the public consciousness, inspiring all that brutality. We know Junior felt culpable, because he immediately started doing damage control, scrambling to disown his idea. Junior issued another statement. It began: “This is to certify that the modern punishment lately inflicted on the ignoble John Malcom was not done by our order.”

Now, I don't think this project you want to crowdfund is likely to inadvertently encourage an angry mob to parboil an innocent man in his own flesh, then blanket him with feathers. But it's important to remember that ideas are volatile, powerful things. And so are crowds. They have a way of infecting each other and taking on a life of their own. So all I'm saying is, be honest—be real. If you only kind of think it's a good idea, it's OK to say so. The crowd will decide for itself if you're right. And it may surprise you.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.28.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

My dad leaves incredibly embarrassing comments under every photo I post to Facebook and Instagram. What should I do?

Let’s face it: Dads are embarrassing. I remember, a couple of years ago, reading a newspaper story about a boy named Brooklyn who was so distressed by the prospect of his friends catching sight of his dweeby father that he insisted his dad drop him off around the corner from school and stay out of view. Why was this a newspaper story, you ask? Don’t millions of mortified children do this every day? Yes, and that’s my point. In this case, however, the dad in question was David Beckham.

See, dad-barrassment is universal—a condition of existence, like the weather. What matters is how well we endure it: whether we slough it off or allow it to seep inside us.

Consider another famous dad: Teddy Roosevelt. Yes, that guy—America’s first presidential man’s man. This is a guy who hunted bears and lions, who got into bar fights with cowboys, who resigned as assistant secretary of the Navy to actually fight a war rather than just plan one. Teddy Roosevelt loved war. War was his jam. As the historian Alexis Coe told me recently, “He treated everything like a battlefield.” In October 1912, Roosevelt was about to give a campaign speech in Milwaukee when a would-be assassin shot him in the chest. The bullet ripped through the copy of his speech in his pocket. There was a big bloody wound. Still, Roosevelt spoke for more than an hour, like a wounded infantryman still bayoneting people on the battlefield.

I’d called Coe after listening to the podcast , which she cohosts with former Daily Show head writer Elliott Kalan. Their Roosevelt episode suggested that Teddy’s warmongering machismo was bound up in his dad. During the Civil War, Roosevelt had watched his father, Theodore senior, pay for a surrogate to fight in his place. For Teddy, Coe says, “this was always a great source of shame. His celebration of masculinity and war, his romanticization of war as an experience to all men, is a reaction to his dad.” And if, to overcompensate for this excruciating embarrassment, Roosevelt felt compelled to speechify for over an hour while his torso hemorrhaged, then that’s his decision. But it also affected his own parenting.

Roosevelt had four sons, and he wanted his boys to be the valorous warriors his own father hadn’t been. When World War I broke out, the youngest, Quentin, memorized an eye chart to ensure he’d pass his exam and be able to serve. He was, in short order, shot down and killed by the Germans. Roosevelt was crestfallen. “To feel that one has inspired a boy to conduct that has resulted in his death has a pretty serious side for a father,” he wrote. He died himself six months later.

But the misery he wrought continued. One son, Archibald, had his knee ripped apart by a grenade. Another, Ted Jr., was wounded in France, then died of a heart attack while serving in World War II. Kermit, Roosevelt’s second son, served in both wars, then ultimately shot himself in the head on a base in Alaska.

You wrote because you didn’t like some comments on Instagram and Facebook. I’m talking about shame and war and death. It’s hardly fair, you’ll say, and you’re right. But this story shows, I think, that dad-barrassment is a powerful and unpredictable force; it warps the imagination, it pollutes the soul. The perpetrators are, inevitably, also victims.

By all means, ask your father—gently—if he wouldn’t mind toning down the comments. Tell him to text you privately instead, if you’d prefer. But ultimately the onus is not on your father to stop embarrassing you, but on you to reconcile the embarrassment you feel. I worry you’ve started seeing your father primarily as an engine of embarrassment, not as a complex human being entitled to express his wit, his playfulness, his love.

So, stomach it. Take the bullet, carry on.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.27.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I’m an omnivore, but are there animals that are just too intelligent to eat?

During high school, I went to visit a friend in Louisiana. Because I was a Northerner who’d never been to the South, I was given a lot of exotically Southern stuff to eat, like alligator and rattlesnake. Then came the big Louisianan feast: heaps of spicy crayfish, which we savagely twisted the heads off of then washed down with gallons and gallons of Dr Pepper.

When I got up to go pee, one of the men at the table told me to be sure to wash my hands first. He said it with a tinge of darkness, a whiff of trauma. He explained that it was unwise for a man to go from handling spicy crayfish to handling his penis. He’d been careless once and paid the price. So I washed my hands. But I still remember how worried I was, unzipping, and how hesitantly I moved my hand down, like a kid playing Operation, dreading that horrible bzzz. I’d absorbed the trauma vicariously, but my anxiety was real.

I thought of this when I read that researchers at the University of Bordeaux in France detected a similar kind of intelligently learned anxiety in crayfish. (After suffering a trauma, the crayfish were reluctant to venture into brightly lit, risky areas.) The scientists also found they could alleviate that anxiety by giving the crayfish a Valium-style drug. And while the scientists were careful not to embellish these findings with any anthropomorphic presumptions, I think we all sense the underlying epiphany here: Crayfish are a little more like us than we expected.

These days, it seems, everybody wants to know how smart their meat is. There are all kinds of startling farm-animal-cognition studies. We know that cows enjoy solving problems and have been known to jump into the air excitedly when they finally crack a tough one. Chickens are exceptionally good at delaying gratification, understand small numbers and basic physics, and can adroitly manage the thermostat of their coop. Sheep can remember and recognize as many as 50 human faces without making a mistake. Pigs excel at videogames played with special pig joysticks. And even opossums—yes, some people eat them—turn out to be excellent maze runners. One study ranked opossums’ “probability learning” skills second only to humans’ and higher than dogs’. Opossums! Those things that do very little and look dead most of the time!

The upshot, I’d argue, is that all animals are likely too intelligent to eat. Whether you go on eating them, with that knowledge, is up to you. You probably will. I do—proof that intelligence may be massively overrated.

Should I worry that my kid can’t spell? Does spelling matter anymore?

Did you hear about Thomas Hurley III? He was on Jeopardy! last year as an eighth grader—a likable kid from Connecticut with Peter Brady bangs and a blue dress shirt buttoned up to the jugular. He lost. And he lost, in part, because in Final Jeopardy, he wrote “Emanciptation Proclamation” instead of “Emancipation Proclamation.”

Does spelling matter anymore? Honestly, I don’t think so. I mean, initially, even schoolmarmy Alex Trebek read right over Hurley’s mistake. As a defiant Hurley told his local newspaper, “It was just a spelling error.”

Then again, spelling isn’t just about communicating. The culture still views it as a sign of intelligence, diligence, and sophistication. Bad, lackadaisical spellers are not looked at kindly. And neither was Hurley’s contention that he’d been “cheated.” (“Learn how to accept defeat, kid, or you will be disappointed for the rest of your life,” one Facebook comment read.) Clearly, autocorrect and other technologies have started a slow sea change, and maybe one day the persnickety spelling police among us will all have died out and we’ll be free to spel thingz howeEVA weeeeeeeeeee wonte. But, until that day, allowing your kids to blow off spelling may empower them to go against a societal norm without considering the day-to-day discomfort and judgment it could bring: the consequences for them but also for you, their parent.

“He was a little stunned by it,” Hurley’s mom said after the defeat. “He felt embarrassed. It was hard to watch.”

Should I give myself a weekend phone time-out? What if I miss important work?

What kind of job do you have? What kind of boss do you have? How tolerant? How demanding? One possibility is that you’re a senior adviser to the secretary of state, and your inability to be reached during a flare-up by a North African paramilitary group—because you’re lying in a park with a kale-and-bee-pollen smoothie and that copy of The Goldfinch you’ve been meaning to get to—leads to a severe diplomatic misstep and a weeks-long umbrage carnival on Fox News that can only be quelled by the semi-ritualistic firing and public shaming of the bureaucrat responsible: i.e., you. Another is that you’re a beverage distribution middleman, and your boss—who happens to be triple-checking stuff at the office on a Saturday night because he’s going through a divorce and doesn’t know what to do with himself—discovers a niggling glitch in your paperwork that may have sent an extra case of Fresca to Denver, but because your phone’s off he calls Greta, and after a couple minutes of digging she assures him that all the Frescas are, in fact, where they need to be.

See the difference? You’ve given me absolutely no information—just dashed off your question as quickly as possible without a second of reflection. And this suggests that you’re whizzing recklessly through life and, still accelerating, throttled by permanent urgency. You need a break. Your soul needs a break. I have no idea what the consequences might be—how could I?—but I think you should switch off that phone.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.24.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I read that mice injected with blood from younger mice improve on cognitive tests. Should I bank my blood?

So yeah, I went and read about this too. I read that for years scientists have been taking an old mouse and a young mouse, putting them next to each other, and stitching their circulatory systems together, just like jump-starting a car. Then they let the blood of one mouse circulate through the other—a process called parabiosis. And introducing the young mouse's blood—or even just introducing one particular protein found in the blood, called GDF11—to an old mouse does all sorts of wonderful stuff: It allows the old mouse to run longer on a treadmill. It changes the old mouse's brain in ways that suggests its memory has been improved. I read that it even rejuvenates a crusty old-mouse heart. Like, voilà! The heart isn't crusty anymore.

I also read that a Harvard scientist named Amy Wagers was “already working to commercialize” GDF11, which is found in human blood too. And this was the eye-opener for me: Even as scientists are always cautioning the media that it's way to soon to speculate about their studies' implications, one of these scientists—the one named Wagers, aptly—was already placing her bet.

Good for her, I say. I'm all for capitalism! But I'm also all for hematological self-determination. (Or, say, blood freedom.) I'd hate, one day, to have to pay some multinational corporation for a synthetic knockoff of my own younger self's blood—the very stuff that was pumping through my body for decades without costing me a damn cent. What a dystopia that would be! There'd be kids on the corner with clipboards, asking for donations so Americans for Hematological Self-Determination could sue these corporations. There'd be Blood Freedom teach-ins and Blood Freedom protest songs—which would be hard because “Blood Freedom” really doesn't rhyme with much.

So my answer is yes, absolutely. Stockpile your blood now, as much as can be squirreled away at the proper temperature. Just in case. Think of it as a tiny hedge against the Wagers of the future.

I get a lot of swag from startups—messenger bags, fleeces, hats, T-shirts—and my girlfriend makes fun of me for wearing it. Which is the douchiest to wear? Like, is a fleece cooler than a hat?

Look, I don't care what you wear, but I do think that a startup fleece is definitely not cooler than a startup hat, because a startup fleece puts the name and logo of the startup in closer proximity to your heart than a startup hat would. My instinct is, keep this stuff away from your heart. Far away. The closer to your heart, the douchier.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.23.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

My best friend dropped our Snapchat streak, and I’m hurt. What should I do?

Oof. I know how it feels. Streaks are magic; streaks are wild. There you are, you and your bestie, slinging those pictures and videos back and forth, getting that sacred pendulum of digital adorableness and hilarity moving between you, and you start to feel momentum, don’t you? A rhythmic bond—a fellowship, a closeness—taking hold. You’re in it together! And, better still, that little flaming number keeps ticking up, higher and higher. You’re watching your progress, reciprocally microdosing the endorphins. Then suddenly, all that excitement stops. You send a snap, and no snap comes back. It’s a gut punch. It’s over. You’re dropped.

Like I said: Oof. I empathize. And yet I can’t claim to understand the hurt of being dropped nearly as well as Maica Folch, who has been literally dropped and literally hurt from the dropping.

Folch is an aerialist in San Francisco who spent much of her adult life working as a trapeze artist. She started when she was just a teenager. Has Folch ever been dropped? Yes. Yes, she has. And, somewhere beneath the acute pain of impact, did she also feel something akin to the abandonment and resentment you’re dealing with? No, she did not.

It’s 1987, Barcelona. Dress rehearsal, the day before a big aerial dance performance. Folch has been hoisted 80 feet off the ground in a meticulously engineered elastic harness. And yet not so meticulously, because there’s been a miscalculation with the rigging and, before Folch can comprehend what’s happening, she sees the floor racing toward her.

She is falling, most likely to her death. And it’s just like everyone says: “I saw the movie of my life,” she tells me. She hears her gasping colleagues calling out as she speeds down at them. What happens next is unexpected, and yet it happens so naturally. “I was so peaceful,” Folch says. “And I fell down like a feather.”

She hits the ground. She bounces. Bounces! Remember, she’s basically tied to an enormous rubber band, and this serene feather of a woman bounces so high that she’s able to grab a rope up there and steady herself. “If I had freaked out and come down with an intense energy,” Folch says—if she’d stiffened and steeled herself—her body would have shattered. Instead she was bruised, like a fallen apple, but “didn’t break a bone.”

And here’s the most helpful part of the story: It never occurred to Folch, after being dropped, to feel jilted or angry. “When something goes wrong,” she says, “there is no one to blame.” It’s a kind of aerialist credo, really—put loyalty and trust first. You say to each other, “I love what I do, I love doing it with you, and if I start doing it with you, it’s because I trust you,” she explains.

“We don’t live in a perfect world,” Folch says. Carabiners fail. People fail. Friends don’t always return your snap. And it’s probably not because they don’t love you but likely just because none of us, zipping around on our phones and in real life simultaneously, swinging like trapeze artists between these two platforms of frenetic distraction, can be expected to do it all perfectly or to recognize the many distant and private emotional burdens our little snaps might bear. We will let each other down. It’s just a fact. But we all deserve some slack, some good faith—especially from our best friends.

The secret to a thriving trapeze partnership, Folch says, is not necessarily forgiveness but refusing to think of the inevitable disappointments of life as requiring forgiveness in the first place. “You create unconditional relationships. There is pain. There is guilt. But you don’t disappear from the picture.”

And so my answer is: Move on. You’re fine. Learn to love more. Learn from Folch, who knew, deep down, how to handle being dropped and how to bounce back too.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

10.28.16

7:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I pictured this Nest Cam looming over you—pictured its one dark eye, unblinking—and I immediately thought of that nasty old Cyclops who terrorizes Odysseus and his men in The Odyssey. What was his name? What was the story, exactly? I figured I better reread that bit.

In a nutshell, Odysseus and his men are returning from a long, atrocious war. Landing for a stopover on the island of the Cyclopes, Odysseus confesses he’s at a loss to understand this mountaintop-dwelling race of one-eyed savages: They don’t fear the gods! They have no laws! They are just too alien to be intelligible; Odysseus sees them only as “brutes,” beneath his regard. So he leads his men into a cave—the home of one particular Cyclops who isn’t home—and ransacks it. They build a fire and help themselves to all his many cheeses.

Well, the Cyclops—his name is Polyphemus—is pretty ticked off when he returns (the original “Who moved my cheese?”). And Odysseus suddenly turns diffident and cloying: “We’re at your knees in hopes of a warm welcome,” he tells the Cyclops. But does he apologize for what essentially amounts to home invasion? No, he does not. Instead, he demands a gift! That’s right, Odysseus asks the giant for a “guest-gift,” the giving of which, he explains, is a mandatory and sacred custom between guests and their hosts, as dictated by his Greek gods.

Let’s pause the narrative right there. I was sure the story had something instructive to say about what happens when the expectations of a guest and the expectations of his host don’t match up. Because your problem seems to be that you expect privacy, while your hosts expect to continue protecting their home with the latest Wi-Fi–enabled surveillance tools. They’d like to keep their minds at ease; you’d like to keep their eyes off your privates. And I felt obligated to defend their interests—privilege them—and conclude that the host-guest power dynamic is tilted toward the host and that, like it or not (and in your case I certainly wouldn’t like it either), being a guest means accepting a degree of powerlessness. Keeping the camera running is disrespectful to you, and creepy, but maybe that’s just how it’s got to be.

But then, back in The Odyssey, things escalated. Polyphemus bashes two of the men on the ground of his cave until “their brains gushed out all over,” then rips off their limbs and eats them. So Odysseus sharpens a stake, heats it in a fire, and stabs it through the Cyclops’ single peeper. It’s an ugly story, in other words. And its ugliness snapped me back to reality. Because you are not some pea-sized Odysseus trapped in a terrible colossus’s cave. You are a human being staying in another human being’s house, and part of what makes us human is our willingness to engage in empathic back-and-forths to reconcile conflicting expectations. We compromise. We try to act decently toward each other.

And suddenly I pictured you, alone in another person’s cavernous house, with that ominous, unyielding eyeball trained on you 24/7, and I imagined how vulnerable and exposed you must feel—how stripped of self-respect—and also how resentful. Because why else would the first solution that occurred to you be, essentially, to blind the camera? No, you don’t have a right to do so. But couldn’t you take a more obvious, less defiant tack? Couldn’t you just respectfully ask your host to deactivate the camera? Or to program it around your daily schedule, so it only flicks on when you leave?

I really don’t think it will be a hard conversation to have; part of me assumes it never occurred to the homeowners how uncomfortable leaving that camera on would make you feel. But I get it: Sometimes we stew for so long that we get lost overthinking these things. Maybe what we learn from Homer, ultimately, is that not every problem is epic.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

09.25.16

6:40 am

christoph Niemann

My cat will only drink from a running tap—not even a cat fountain. But I live in a drought-stricken state. Help?

You’re familiar with the Misfits, I assume. They are iconic, the so-called horror-punk band that played hard and demonically fast while singer Glenn Danzig—a huge, dark creature from New Jersey with a forbidding curtain of long black hair—screamed. Danzig’s songs had titles like “Skulls” and “Die, Die My Darling” and, of course, “Mommy, Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight?” That last one could, arguably, be read as a bloodthirsty anthem written in solidarity with America’s imprisoned house cats because, as the world would eventually discover, Danzig is a cat fancier.

A few years ago, pockets of the Internet had a good laugh at Danzig’s expense when a photograph surfaced of him walking out of a grocery store carrying a tub of Fresh Step kitty litter. (If you don’t understand why this was funny, one incredibly left-brained commenter on the site Metalsucks.net provided this analysis: “It is funny because it is something of an ironic satire to see someone who has widely been written about as an offbeat satanist buying kitty litter.”) Danzig himself had another take: “Why do people even care?” he shot back. “Why are they wasting their lives on this?” He had a point. People laughed at him for not being punk enough; he outpunked them all by not caring.

“Glenn Danzig is my spirit animal,” Daniel Quagliozzi told me recently. Quagliozzi is the proprietor of Go, Cat, Go!, a feline behavioral consultancy in San Francisco; he comes to your house and troubleshoots your cat problems. DQ, as he’s known, also grew up in New Jersey and spent his formative years deep in the punk scene, whipping his then-mohawked head around to the Misfits. “They don’t want to be told what to do. They don’t want your hands on them or their lifestyle,” DQ explains—and this, he adds, is precisely what he appreciates about cats as well.

“I relate to them. I relate to their F U attitude toward society. They make you wonder, ‘Why the hell did I invite them in the house in the first place?’” In fact, DQ has regularly seen owners of defiant felines reduced to “wearing shrouds of cardboard to protect themselves from their swatting cats, or carrying water pistols or air horns to blast their cats away.” One guy resigned himself to keeping the litter box on his couch, because that’s where the cat insisted on pissing and crapping. All too often, DQ says, people are “just not ready for the hostile takeover.”

When I asked DQ about your problem, he let out a long sigh and said, “The running water thing is so … God.” There are countless reasons why a cat would demand a running faucet. “Maybe the water in the bowl is stale or not the right temperature, or the bowl might be too small and it’s creating whisker stress.” (Yes, whisker stress: Google it.) Maybe the cat feels more secure on the counter. “Or it could be boredom.” Maybe your cat leads such a dreary life that trickling water qualifies as fun.

My advice? Hire DQ. Fly him in if you have to; frankly, the guy’s aptitude with cats blew me away. Otherwise, he suggested trying to “mimic what’s happening in the same location.” Start by putting a recirculating fountain next to the sink; often, DQ says, we overlook the importance of location when assessing cat problems. (Maybe, for example, your cat just wants its water separate from its food, or up off the ground.)

But most of all: Steel yourself for confrontation—for a kind of protracted, brutal brinkmanship. Your cat isn’t likely to go on strike and die of thirst, DQ says, but any change you make will likely leave the animal “anxious and unsettled.” And that is “definitely going to be harder on the guardian than it is on the cat.” That is, the cat will try to own you—belittle you. Find your inner Danzig and flip the script.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

05.24.16

9:00 am

I think someone is hate-retweeting me. She has 25K followers! Should I call her out?

Easy. Couldn’t be easier. Hate-favoriting and hate-retweeting is childish behavior. So if you want to be bold, by all means call her out. And if you want to be less bold but perhaps more effective, just block her: Game over.

And yet, can I be honest? This may be the most subtly perplexing question I’ve ever had to pretend to be a know-it-all about. Because if I push just a bit on your premise, it all goes soft. I can see ancillary dilemmas, qualifications, and niggling unknowns pile up until the kind of clear, objective truth I’m required to find gets hopelessly boxed in. There’s a lot here to pick apart. Let’s start with the corrosive, discombobulating nature of spite.

Ever heard of the Spite Fence? Go back to 1876. San Francisco’s Big Four—the four main bazillionaire railroad barons—all decided to build mansions on a scenic, empty hilltop: Nob Hill. At least, it was mostly empty. Bounded within the large property purchased by one of these magnates, Charles Crocker, was a little house on a small, separate parcel owned by an undertaker named Nicholas Yung. Crocker wanted Yung gone; Yung wouldn’t sell. Crocker, bewildered that his money hadn’t made this inconvenience go away, kept making offers. Yung kept declining. So Crocker—overcome with spite—started a flame war. Or a wall war.

Crocker built his mansion. Then he built a 30-foot-high wall on his land that effectively surrounded Yung’s property. It shut out the light. It shut Yung in. It was ridiculous looking, and people came from all over to gawk at it. There was a kind of class war brewing in the city at the time, and one activist pamphlet singled out Crocker’s fence as a “very obnoxious” symbol of “the domineering spirit” of the wealthy. The San Francisco Chronicle called the Spite Fence an “inartistic monument of resentment” and a “memorial of malignity and malevolence.” Yet Yung—the simple undertaker, just wanting to live his life, in his house—didn’t sell. The undertaker was himself essentially buried, though still aboveground. But he just took it, took the high road, and let that towering manifestation of Crocker’s out-of-control id speak for itself. Yung never even retaliated, though he thought about it. His wife said, “There are some things to which people like ourselves do not care to stoop.”

You must feel like Nicholas Yung: tweeting through your life in a pure, happy-go-lucky way, only to see a wall of spite building up in this other person’s timeline, one hateful retweet at a time, to rebuke you. And like I said at the outset: How nasty that is; how immature. But why do you think these likes and retweets are hate-likes and hate-retweets, as opposed to supportive likes and supportive retweets? What would lead you to this conclusion? I can’t help but wonder if there’s something you’re not telling me—if you yourself worry there’s an arrogant, airheaded, obnoxious, or self-congratulatory tone to what you’re tweeting, the sort of attitude that typically elicits that kind of resentment online. Are you, for example, relentlessly issuing tidbits like “So lucky my baby sleeps for 12 hours each night!!!!!! Almost enough time for tantric sex with my amazing partner!” or “Just had lunch with Bon Jovi! #blessed”?

I’m not saying you are. I’m just wondering. Honestly. I don’t want to blame the victim. My point is, the victim of one kind of obnoxiousness can be a perpetrator of another. You ought to give that a hard think and figure out which side of this Spite Fence you’re actually standing on, before you poke your head over and start shouting.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

04.07.16

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

Two stories. Try to hold them together in your mind.

The first involves a man named Muki Bácsi, at a Hungarian wedding in 1879. Muki was a drunk, apparently, but a beloved and awe-inspiring one. He was the region’s “champion drinkist,” according to the London Telegraph. And so, arriving at the wedding banquet, Muki found a tremendous 3-pint glass at his place and was told that, as the party proceeded through toast after toast, he was expected, each time, to suck this hulking receptacle dry, then fill it up again.

Muki sighed. “Lads, I am about to die,” he began. He was certain he was on the verge of a stroke, and the last thing he wanted was to flood his ailing innards with wine. And yet, Muki also knew he was at a gosh darn wedding and that weddings are specially charged, sacred days that temporarily reorganize the universe entirely around love and joyousness and mirth. Muki considered this, considered his glass, and pushed a great gust of air out of his weathered lungs. His lips formed that air into words: “So be it! A man can die but once!” And then Muki started to drink and drink. He drank until 2 in the morning. Then Muki asked to be carried to a bed, groaned once, and died. He was, the paper reported, “the merriest wedding guest of them all.”

The second story is shorter: In 1912, Elizabeth Lang shot a woman dead in Indiana. The case was open-and-shut, according to The New York Times. Elizabeth offered a clear confession. “She said I was ugly. She said I was old. I killed her for that, and I am not a bit sorry for it,” she told police. If it sounds extreme, it is—I’m not going to excuse it. And yet, monitor the slight shift in your own understanding and feelings when I reveal that this incident occurred at Elizabeth’s wedding.

It’s possible these stories aren’t entirely true—that they are, instead, the truth extruded through the melodramatic, yellowish journalistic conventions of their time. But even as fables, they offer some relevant lessons.

From Muki, we learn that the ideal wedding guest is submissive. Making the day a success requires that, to some degree, everyone subsume their needs and join with a larger collective spirit of conviviality. We guests arrive when we’re told to. We wear what we’re told to. If Abba comes on, we dance to Abba—even subpar Abba, like “Fernando.” We do these things because we care; it’s the Muki in us.

And from Elizabeth, we learn never to piss off the bride and groom. Even as all of us guests work to put our individual feelings aside for the day, we must understand that the bride and groom’s desires can become grotesquely elephantine and should be allowed to carry extra weight.

These are extreme examples, of course. But you are not being asked to festively drink yourself to death. You are being asked to use a hashtag on Instagram. And if you didn’t use the hashtag, and the bride murdered you for it, that would be nuts. So no, I can’t claim you are “required” to use the hashtag. But whatever your objections, using it seems like such a trivial sacrifice. The couple is merely asking for help gathering your photos into a larger virtual collection, easily viewed by them, their guests, and their would-have-been guests (excluded by head count costs, travel expenses, family feuds, and so on).

Hashtags can be dumb. I get it, I do. But this hashtag genuinely feels like a force for good. Like the wedding itself, it’s a mechanism for bringing people together. Why stand in its way?

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.10.16

4:35 pm

Christoph Niemann

I’ve declared evenings and weekends a digital holiday. Should I set up an email autoreply to let people know?

Compassion. Sensitivity. Openness. Tolerance. I’d like to think that these are the core values of the Mr. Know-It-All column—the imperturbable foundations on which, every month, I try to build this tiny chapel of words. I’m not going to lie: This job is intimidating! Your questions come ricocheting into my inbox from WIRED HQ, sweeping toward me like a flurry of screeching bats from the mouth of a dark cave. And it’s up to me—only me—to lasso one of those unruly mammal-birds and tame it, transmute it into something more approachable, a gentle, sweetly singing canary whose song is Truth. Admittedly, sometimes it goes better than others. (Like that weird bat-and-canary bit—that one kind of got away from me.) But my feeling is, if I approach your questions with an open heart—if I try to locate, within that cryptic line or two you’ve submitted, some glint of shared humanity and try to understand you—then I cannot fail.

But I don’t understand you. I just don’t. I read your question on Friday evening, after a hectic week. I typically like to get an early jump on knowing-it-all, but I figured—just this once—I could mull over your question all weekend and bang out a thoughtful answer just before it was due. Then I thought to myself: “Why wouldn’t you set up an email autoreply?” I assumed I was missing something.

I fell asleep wondering what it might be—wondering about you. I slept very well. On Saturday I woke up to discover my car was dead in the driveway. I jump-started it. Then my sister-in-law visited. I made some soup. Sunday: took my kids on a hike, learned to use a chain saw, caught a few minutes of The Bourne Ultimatum, cooked a so-so chicken dish.

Now it’s Monday morning. The sun is rising; the column is due. I still don’t understand you. Do you have a justifiable reason to not set up an autoreply? I can’t imagine one. (How much of an inconvenience can it be? It’s automated!) I also wondered if, in a society where we all seem slavishly and often necessarily tied to our devices—where so many of us feel perpetually on call—you worry that your obstinate rejection of email every weekend will come off, to the rest of us, as a preposterous, selfish luxury. Does an automated email responder rub your privilege in our faces?

Yes, maybe a little. But guess what else it does: IT TELLS US YOU’RE NOT THERE. Imagine if I’d reached out to you for clarification on your question on Friday. Now imagine me waiting for a reply, consulting my phone as I continued to turn your question over in my mind. Imagine how that would have colored my weekend—impinged, just a bit, on my enjoyment of my family, my soup, my chainsawing, my Jason Bourne, my chicken. And, as you depleted my various joys with your unresponsiveness all weekend long, imagine how I might have come to resent you for it.

But I don’t resent you. Because, although you say you’ve declared your weekends a digital holiday, you’ve so far only declared it to me. And thanks for that. It saved me some hassle. Me and you are totally cool.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.09.16

4:40 pm

Christoph Niemann

How long should you wait before shutting down someone’s Facebook account after they die?

“This is for all you lovers out there.” That’s how it begins—one of the most existentially horrifying moments in American cinema.

I’m talking about the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance in Back to the Future, in which we see a temporally displaced Marty McFly onstage, sitting in with the band on “Earth Angel” with a guitar, while his teenage parents, George and Lorraine, move toward their first kiss.

This is it: the precise, excruciatingly brief moment in which the cosmos will offer up the possibility for them to fall in love—a doorway they can step through or not step through. But if they do, it’s a straight shot from here through the sinews of the spacetime continuum to marriage, and to Marty’s birth, and to all the circumstances of life that Marty had always mistaken for the one and only, inviolable reality. But he’s wising up now. While traveling through time, he’s learning that his life, like all of our lives, is only an exquisite and provisional fluke—a haphazard product of so many collisions and coincidences that were never guaranteed. Up on the stage, he’s about to be confronted with this truth in a deep and terrible way.

You know the scene, right? It turns on an obnoxious redhead who tells George to “scram,” then cuts in between him and Lorraine and sweeps her away. Slowly, a warped and nightmarish score rises over “Earth Angel.” Marty becomes disoriented, diminished. His strength—his selfhood—is draining out of him as, out on the dance floor, that insufferable ginger cackles and whips Lorraine around like a rag doll. He is dragging Lorraine farther and farther from George—and dragging our universe (or maybe all of this is proof of a multiverse?) farther from its capacity to produce Marty’s life, diverting the sacred headwaters of his personal history.

Marty’s compromised hands batter his guitar, making a discordant mess of “Earth Angel.” He raises one hand and watches it turn … translucent! His face is stupefied, powerless. Somehow Michael J. Fox—that cocky scion of 1980s precociousness—pulls it off: this look of violated innocence and panic, of a carefree boy suddenly thrown down and dying on the battlefield of time.

What is happening to Marty? Doc Brown has already explained the process: Marty is being “erased from existence.” Stop and think about those words for a second. They are horrifying. (A thrash metal band from Belfast called Scimitar even wrote an abrasive, ear-pummeling song called “Erased from Existence,” inspired by this scene. It’s very hard to listen to.) But the worst part isn’t even that Marty himself is being erased. The true, piercing horror comes when he looks at the photograph slipped through the strings of his guitar: the one of his brother and sister and him standing against a low rock wall. Earlier in the film we’ve seen the images of his two siblings vanish from that photo, and now Marty’s image is fading too. This is what it means to be erased from existence. And this is what frightens me most: not just that Marty is vanishing but that all evidence of his life will vanish. No one will know who he was, because—here’s the thing—he wasn’t.

You ask how long you should wait before shutting down the Facebook page of a loved one who’s died. I ask why you’d ever want to delete it. Consider the ripple effects—the many ways their absence would be felt across that platform, on so many other people’s pages and their community’s collective, digital memory. Everything the deceased had said, not just on their own page but on others, would be gone. And so would everything people had said to them. They’d be instantaneously untagged from hundreds or even thousands of other people’s photos, exiled into some anonymous interloper status: a nameless human void.

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Source

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/kia-social-media-apps/

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