Author: lebelinoria

The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift Is Blowing Up in the World’s Face

zenosanalytic:

garbagefingers:

heyitsangryangel:

Has anyone posted this yet? It’s phenomenal.

“[…] the complete and inarguable disaster of the Bush administration—a failure of the conservative movement itself, one undeniable even to many consumers of the parallel conservative media—and his abrupt replacement by a black man, caused a national nervous breakdown among the people who’d been told, for many years, that conservatism could not fail, and that all Real Americans agreed with them.

Rather rapidly, two things happened: First, Republicans realized they’d radicalized their base to a point where nothing they did in power could satisfy their most fervent constituents. Then—in a much more consequential development—a large portion of the Republican Congressional caucus became people who themselves consume garbage conservative media, and nothing else.”

Reblogging to read later, you had me at “they’d radicalized their base to a point where nothing they did in power could satisfy their most fervent constituents.”

I object to the claim that periodicals like The Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, and National Review mislead their readers unintentionally, and given the long connection between the right wing and conspiratorial thinking(The Paranoid Style in American Politics was written in 1964, and you can draw that line further back to the Confederacy, beyond it to Jackson) I don’t think you can really say this is entirely new, or was ever entirely aimed only at “non-elites”, and Reagan is a product of this, not previous to it. BUT, having said all that, this is mostly polemical rather than scholarly and the devs he talks about are new, even if in different ways than he identifies, so is a good piece I think.

The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift Is Blowing Up in the World’s Face

frowningfoxbones:

former-fatty:

dear-tumb1r:

topsiders-tanlines:

thespacemaid:

if anyone would like to learn a couple tricks for carving pumpkins:

– dont cut out the top to scoop out the seeds, cut out the bottom instead. this way the pumpkin doesnt cave in on itself and lasts longer
– sprinkle some cinnamon inside at the top after carving. this way when you put the candle in it smells like pumpkin pie

this is the quality content I wanna see on my dash

– rub the i sides with lemon after you’re done scooping. This will also help preserve the pumpkin

It’s fucking June, at least wait until the fourth of July, you animal.

I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of me disemboweling this pumpkin.

ever-so-slightly-monstrous:

nightpool:

swamp-wizard:

folks are REALLY pitching a fit over 17776 being compared to homestuck but uhh heres the thing: homestuck is the biggest (and, as far as i am aware, the first – definitely the first of its scale) longform multimedia internet narrative. and 17776 is doing a lot of the same things homestuck did, particularly wrt how it handles dialogue and establishes character voice. its also following multiple groups of characters each pursuing their own seemingly-unrelated plot threads that you can expect will eventually intertwine, which is absolutely not a structure that homestuck invented but its interesting that the two works have it in common

finding commonalities in works from the same time period and especially when those two works are feeling their way around an entirely new medium and way of storytelling is to be expected. i have no idea if jon bois is familiar w homestuck but if he isnt thats even more reason to talk about those overlaps – these are tropes already being established in a genre that barely exists!

anyway 17776 is very good and made me laugh in real life and i am eagerly looking forward to seeing how it unfolds

i’ve been calling it post-homestuck, since while—as you’ve covered—it’s very similar to homestuck both thematically and tonally, from a structural perspective it goes places homestuck was only barely touching at the very end.

For example, the “text chat” conceit from homestuck has been turned into an actual, living breathing real-time chat in 17776—you can see characters hesitate, delete what they were typing, and pause in ways that homestuck never could express in the pesterlogs.

Or take the very first chapter, with the calendar sequence. in 17776, jon bois, designer tyson whiting and developer graham macaree have taken the infinite scrolling website and turned it into an entirely new art form—one that for sure takes tons of cues from homestuck, but is also about discarding some of the limitations homestuck set for itself and really breaking new ground in what is possible with web-based storytelling.

I mean, comparing a work to its predecessors and contemporaries within its medium is one of the foundations of critique?  Whether 17776 is directly or intentionally referencing Homestuck or not is important to analyzing it and being upset that people are making the comparison is beyond silly.  17776 shares a deep cultural DNA with Homestuck even if its just in how it is constructed and being presented in a way that I haven’t seen almost any other piece of work on the internet.  Even most currently running web comics are deeply rooted in the conventions of conventional comic forms, both news print and comic books.  They are structured with discrete panels, linework, dialogue bubbles and a fairly strict left to right (in western comics) reading progression.  Even comics that make use of animated panels and gifs are just taking the implied motion of a standard comic and making it literal.

The only other comic I have seen that approaches comics in a similar multi-media way is Prequel (now on a two year+ hiatus).  There is a reason that 17776 and Homestuck have been so quickly and deeply embraced by people who have grown up on the internet and I think there is a ton to be learned by looking at how each one has been tailored to internet culture and the conventions, expectations, tools, and opportunities they have utilized as somewhat freeform narrative works.  

For what its worth, reading 17776 yesterday, I was struck with the same kind of feeling I got in early Homestuck when Hussie started throwing flash games and videos into it, or the first time I clicked the ==> button and the entire RSS of his website changed to match the sudden shift in narrative perspective, including retooling the ad bars to be extra panels to the comic.  For better or worse, Homestuck radically expanded the way people thought an online narrative could be told and conveyed and 17776 has handily picked up that particular torch and run with it, perhaps even places that I don’t think Hussie would have.  Which is great!  I can’t think of a better thing for a new medium than people willing to push it beyond its current constraints and see how far they can take it.  There is a reason people compare Homestuck to Ulysses and at least part of that was Hussie’s willingness to use his readers’ expectations of narrative norms and subvert them as a way of creating metatextual tension that then fed back into the internal narrative arc of the comic.  17776 does a lot of the same and I am super excited to see where it goes.

mswyrr:

biwitchofthewest:

yknow what makes me emotional? that when Hippolyta gives Diana Antiope’s tiara she says “Make sure you are worthy of it” and Diana doesnt put it on (just like she doesnt let her hair down) up until she is going to go up the trench and like???? thats poetic cinema right fucking there my guys, Diana put on the tiara because she is basically the product of Hippolyta’s righteousness and Antiope’s fearlessness in battle, she put on the tiara because she feels like helping humanity and saving these people makes her worthy of it. 

finally a powerful woman is powerful because of the *love women have given her* and the things women have taught her – after freaking decades of “i was raised by a single father and 15 rowdy brothers!” and other narrative conceits entered on men being the explanation for a woman’s power

thoroughlymodernhippie:

gallaxiard:

raptorific:

when guys are like “girls over [relatively low weight] shouldn’t wear [revealing article of clothing]” a lot of the time they are trying to get women above that weight to say “OH REALLY?” and post a picture of themselves looking good in that article of clothing. It’s a creepy power play designed to prey on both women’s confidence and their insecurities and trick them into posting revealing pictures of themselves for the sexual gratification of men who they otherwise wouldn’t have given the time of day. It’s a sleazy pick-up artist tactic. It’s negging. When you see an all-too-common post that’s like “bigger girls shouldn’t wear bikinis” and the response is him getting “owned” because a woman replied with pictures of herself looking beautiful, he’s not getting owned at all, he’s getting exactly the result he was hoping for. They’re basically saying “You sure showed me by sending me, a huge sexist creep, a picture of yourself in a bikini! PLEASE don’t send me nudes, I don’t know if I could take the humiliation!”

The scary thing is that I’ve had a guy admit this to me. He said something about “fat girls always have ugly tits”. I am fat and a girl. I said “no, they don’t.” He said “prove it”. When I made it clear that a) I had nothing to prove, b) why the fuck am I gonna care about some beanpole-in-a-meme-shirt’s opinion?, and c) I wasn’t EVER gonna send him shit, he went crazy. Straight up admitted that the technique always worked blah blah, I must have been a dude pretending to be a girl blah blah, and basically had a temper tantrum till I blocked him.

So 100% guys that do this are garbage and even if they’re not, remember that you don’t have to prove anything to anyone.

“YOU DON’T HAVE TO PROVE ANYTHING TO ANYONE” ^^^^^^^