VOL 4, NO 3
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Reality Pee-Ve. / “I went and hung out with weirdos at a thing” has been my favourite kind of feature since “Big Red Son.” There is a rich history of cruise ship writing, most recently from Gary Shteyngart. Just last week I linked to a fantastic n+1 essay from a ventriloquists’ convention. And now Defector goes to CES (or, I suppose, Zombie CES as it’s not quite what it used to be):
❝Consider the problems that, taken altogether, add up to our shameful and unworkable political moment. It’s the abandonment of not just any sense of a common cause but a workable consensus reality; it’s the swamping of any collective effort or any nascent social consciousness in favor of individuals assiduously optimizing and competing and refining and selling themselves, not so much alongside the rest of humanity as in constant competition with all of it; it’s the rich buffing all human friction from every aspect of their days so that they can more cleanly and passively move through them, a circuit of Teslas circling silently underground forever; it’s everyone else, somewhere offscreen, leaving whatever those restless protagonists have ordered on the doorstep and getting tipped 10 percent for it; it’s an efflorescence of dead-eyed scams and ever taller fences.❞
About six years ago I went to a weed conference, which was an odd mix of money-dudes, marketing losers (this was the group I was in), hippies and obvious charlatans, and it is now the great regret of my life that at the time I was a copywriter for a weed company (i.e., a marketing loser) and not someone looking to spin off 7,000 words of depressing-but-amusing observations. So it goes or something.
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Fine realities / Rene Magritte / 1964
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Confusions. / 🎞️ More Defector: When did movies stop moving? ❝They seem to lack any sense of cognitive completion by the artist themselves, which translates to the screen. They read instead as sketches, as elevator pitches, as high concepts an executive got excited about without much concern for the follow through—Nosferatu in color! Hunter Schafer in the Alps! Nicolas Cage doing whatever the fuck! You could stick shots from these films into a View-Master and I imagine it would be an improvement.❞ / 💸 The rise and fall of Canadian Tire money. / 💻 Marginalia Search for non-commercial content (and, frankly, better search results than I’m getting from DDG and Google right now). / IndieBlog, random blog posts from the indieweb. / 🎨 Uncut.wtf, a catalogue of free type. / 📸 Who took the “Napalm Girl” photo? / I kinda want this Instax camera. / 🗺️ A Better World, change the past and fuck shit up. / 👾 Duck Hunt(er). / A cozy video game to explain cozy video games. / 📺 Watch Something Wonderful. / 50 years of SNL music.
