Mechanical Man Blogging

mechanical-man
Disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings.
Blog operated by the automaton formerly known as malorisdead, a thirty-something who should really know better by now.
aprilwitching (deactivated)

an anecdote i think ive neglected to share with you up until this point is about this one time when h.p. lovecraft was part of a round robin exercise with a bunch of other well-regarded pulp weird fiction writers

the resulting story, “the challenge from beyond” is, frankly, not….good. like, at all. what it is, however, is HILARIOUS, particularly when conan the barbarian creator robert e. howard, taking his turn at the writing wheel directly after that other howard, slam-dunks every single generally accepted round robin rule about not contradicting things that the previous writers have already introduced/established in the story, not dramatically shifting the tone, etc. STRAIGHT IN THE GARBAGE in one of the most gloriously petty displays of trolling/ Fuck That-itis i have ever seen in this kind of game (and i mostly hung out with the creative writing + theater crowd in college, soooo)

basically you have lovecraft being lovecraft, going on and on and on, making the protagonist faint from terror a solid three times in maybe 1,500 words (just a guess there, i didn’t actually bother to count), and concluding with a HORRIFIC REVELATION:

But even this vision of delirium was not what caused George Campbell to lapse a third time into unconsciousness. It took one more thing—one final, unbearable touch—to do that. As the nameless worm advanced with its glistening box, the reclining man caught in the mirror-like surface a glimpse of what should have been his own body. Yet—horribly verifying his disordered and unfamiliar sensations—it was not his own body at all that he saw reflected in the burnished metal. It was, instead, the loathsome, pale-grey bulk of one of the great centipedes.

yup. dude turns into a grotesque giant centipede alien monster and TOTALLY LOSES IT. truly, this hellish transformation is too great a burden for his fragile human mind to comprehend, let alone bear while remaining conscious, or sane–

but wait! ENTER ROBERT E. “CONAN THE BARBARIAN” HOWARD:

From that final lap of senselessness, he emerged with a full understanding of his situation. His mind was imprisoned in the body of a frightful native of an alien planet, while, somewhere on the other side of the universe, his own body was housing the monster’s personality.
He fought down an unreasoning horror. Judged from a cosmic standpoint, why should his metamorphosis horrify him? Life and consciousness were the only realities in the universe. Form was unimportant. His present body was hideous only according to terrestrial standards. Fear and revulsion were drowned in the excitement of titanic adventure.

THE EXCITEMENT OF TITANIC ADVENTURE

talk about mood (and philosophical outlook on existence) whiplash, right??!

the best part, though, is that he KEEPS GOING ON LIKE THIS for about four more paragraphs:

What was his former body but a cloak, eventually to be cast off at death anyway? He had no sentimental illusions about the life from which he had been exiled. What had it ever given him save toil, poverty, continual frustration and repression? If this life before him offered no more, at least it offered no less. Intuition told him it offered more—much more.
With the honesty possible only when life is stripped to its naked fundamentals, he realized that he remembered with pleasure only the physical delights of his former life. But he had long ago exhausted all the physical possibilities contained in that earthly body. Earth held no new thrills. But in the possession of this new, alien body he felt promises of strange, exotic joys.

etc., etc.

…and then george-as-centipede monster goes on a STRAIGHT UP BLOODTHIRSTY RAMPAGE like some arthropodian conan and then just totally CONQUERS THE FUCK out of the ENTIRE centipede planet because why not and someone please make john darnielle write a song about this, i am begging you

pipistrellus

#……..how much metamorphosis fixit fic did rob e howard store like wine inside him

mystery-moose

Robert E. Howard had one fucking speed and that speed was “titanic adventure.”

Via archibaldtuttle (Source: aprilwitching-deactivated201808)

19,823 notes

July 20th, 2023 11:46pm
prefrontal-bastard

I’m not sure if this is permissible in other countries, but here in the US, advertisers are allowed to use any kind of malignant psychology they want in their ads so long as those ads fit within the allotted time-frame.

Back in high school, my class watched a video on how a certain Coca-Cola advertisement was made. You may have seen it, but for those who haven’t: The ad featured a cinematic montage of a crowded beach with smiling thin white people enjoying their leisure time and drinking Coca-Cola out of a common plastic bottle.

The big takeaway from this video was that the ad wasn’t actually advertising Coca-Cola. It was advertising a lifestyle. By associating Coca-Cola with a desirable lifestyle (as well as qualities associated with desirability) it plants the association of “Coca-Cola” with “happiness” in people’s subconscious minds.

This becomes clear when you consider who the ad was meant for. The target audience wasn’t the smiling thin white people that the ad featured, but instead it was people who wanted to be smiling thin white people. This was an ad for the Gen X mom of three kids who worked full-time, who relied on shelf-stable foods to keep everyone fed, and whose nervous system was chronically fried from the stress of never having adequate time for herself.

If she was at the grocery store, and saw the very same bottle of Coca-Cola featured in that ad, she’d be far more likely to pick it up than she was before watching it. If she didn’t anticipate finding relief for her stress, then she could at least drink up the idea of it.

Of course, the thing about ads is that they stop working. Eventually, people’s minds grow wise to the fact buying a certain product doesn’t actually grant them the lifestyle associated with them.

But there’s a lot of other tricks ads employ beyond this.

The reason why Geico is the first company you consider when thinking about buying car insurance is because of the calm, consistent nature of their ads and the fact they’re ubiquitous enough to be familiar. Their mascot forms a kind of parasocial rapport with the audience, so Geico already feels familiar to you by the time you’re looking to buy insurance.

Cereal brands use cartoon-character-like mascots to make their product memorable to kids who can’t read. The reason why so many cereal mascots exhibit such frenetic, possessive behavior is to teach kids to emulate that behavior to compel parents into buying them the cereal, especially if they saw that behavior rewarded in the ad (with the cereal).

You only really see ads for apps on an app-based devices for a reason.

Then there are the ads that don’t look like ads, but look like people on TikTok sharing a new secret product with their audience using the only communication format we regularly trust: word-of-mouth.

And let’s not forget the sheer magnitude of ads that exist. I can’t go outside without seeing them. I can’t watch videos online without exposing myself to ads that wants to skewer my emotions within 10 seconds.

There’s no reprieve from it unless I wall myself off from our culture entirely.

Ads are parasites to both culture and to cognition, and they must be regulated.

prefrontal-bastard

#advertising #I have a degree in it #it was basically a degree on how to lose all sense of personality #in order to be consumable #I'm very good at it #(I grew up on an extreme form of people-pleasing now associated with instagram) #(white suburban culture with a woo bent is just being an influencer) #(having a mom who wanted to be a life coach is an exercise in canibalizing your life) #I mostly pulled up two lessons from it #1- those who control perception control reality #this was said in the context of a persuasion class#if you can control a person's view of the events#you can then control the reality they live in #and 2- the job of a hiring manager is to pay as little as possible #while still creating an environment good enough you don't seek greener pastures #all of my classmates discounted both of those as too dark and depressing #unreal and not true #I looked at them and tilted my head like a confused puppy #because I've seen how politics work #I've been exploited for clout since childhood #those two are the most true statements ever saidALT

You are right and you should say it.

alyanas-little-hideout

I always grew up taught this (alongside 'if you don't know what they're selling, you're the product') and seeing people like figuring it out for the first time in their 20s was wild to me like. how do ypu function in a world where every part of your life is being monetized by other people and not notice?

prefrontal-bastard

Cult behavior is obvious to everyone except those inside the cult. Many of us grew up none the wiser, by design.

The experience of the average USAmerican is this:

We aren't educated about this. This phenomena is only something that people of certain backgrounds and privileges learn about, for the purpose of participating in it. The only reason I learned it was because I went to a charter school, where the teachers were free to make up their own curriculums.

Many of us have never visited a foreign country, and if we have, it's as tourists, which in our minds means "consumer." The reason why many Americans can't participate nicely in other cultures is because we grow up learning culture is something you consume, not something you explore.

The fact we can't grow or maintain culture outside of consumerism means we base our identities around consumption. Some people's entire sense of identity is based in the media, content, products, or commercial lifestyles they consume. There are times I actually struggle to connect with people in any meaningful way because I want to know who they are beyond what they consume, but they might not even know.

There's little-to-no infrastructure in the US that provides adult recreation or leisure that doesn't involve either spending money or going to a Christian church, with the exception of public libraries, which are less walkable than the churches are. This is a country built for corporations, not people.

The US functions as an oligarchy, and has since Citizens United was passed. This bill gives corporations permission to fund our politicians' re-election campaigns, effectively putting the political agenda in their pockets.

Via latining (Source: prefrontal-bastard)

2,078 notes

July 20th, 2023 11:18pm
guerrillatech

image
jv

This is akin all those hot takes about the 2k bug being an hoax:

"Remember when they told us every computer was going to crash on 1/1/01 and there would be chaos and then nothing happened?"

Yeah, I remember. And I'm sure every programmer and sysadmin that contributed the billion person/hour global effort to prevent it also remembers.

alarajrogers

No one talks about acid rain anymore, either. And that's a very good thing.

oligopspispopd-deactivated20221 (deactivated)

see also START and START II, which significantly reduced nuclear stockpiles

cop-disliker69

International cooperation is actually so effective that most people don’t even notice it happening, and then erroneously believe it can’t solve anything.

silly-jellyghoty

Fixing issues before they develop into actual disasters is such an underappreciated thing it hurts at all levels.

We don't talk about acid rain because there isn't any more acid rain because when acid rain started happening and we learned that the cause was mainly sulphur oxide and carbon monooxide from car exhausts, countries all over the world made it a law that car companies had to produce cars that produced less exhaust with better effectivenes (burning the fuel all the way to CO2 instead of the halfassed CO) and oil rafineries to remove the sulphur from the gasoline in the first place.

We don't talk about computers crashing because of the turn of the century, because thousands of programmers worked very hard to write updates and patches for Every Single Program humanity as a whole used back in 1999 and then somehow managed to failtest, distribute, and update every single device and system, be it an online or offline one before the midnight of the 1st january of 2000.

On a much smaller scale, no one ever commenta or notices cleaners and housekeepers doing their job - be it at home or at whole buildings - because they always make sure that there's nothing to notice. But don't be fooled - at any point of your life you are one week of them not doing away from swimming in trash and filth with nothing to eat and nothing clean to wear. Only then you would notice.

Now it's time to do that thing again and make sure that we don't kill our whole planetary ecosystem within the next century.

silver-tongues-blog

image

Via espressobean (Source: guerrillatech)

114,312 notes

July 20th, 2023 11:04pm

ironmyrmidon asked:

You said the idea of the American melting pot is bad. I would appreciate it if you could explain why it's a bad idea. I hope it's clear that I'm trying very hard to ask this question in good faith and in a respectful manner, because I am genuinely interested in your thoughts on this topic.

txttletale answered:

sure. i think that narrative is bad because of what it purposefully excludes – the story of “this person came to the usa to seek a better life” sounds inspirational if you leave out the part that asks “why did they think they’d have a better life there?”. which is that the USA is very wealthy (because of its imperialism) and the countries that immigrants to the US come from are often poor (because of US imperialism) or war-torn (because of US imperialism). and that’s to say nothing of the grotesque recent turn to “america was built by immigrants!” (cf. hamilton) – which draws a completely twisted parallel between the genocidal settler colonization of north america and modern day migrants fleeing the effects of usamerican imperialism to the state that caused it where they are exploited and marginalised

pupyjpeg

Even the immigrants from countries that were not victims of US imperialism (Germans, Poles, Italians, Irish) first faced brutal economic exploitation and racism* until they were eventually deemed useful enough to white supremacy and colonialism to be inducted into Whiteness and the American colonial project as a whole, at which point they by and large became its willing participants. The melting pot has never been real.

*not remotely comparable in intensity or depth to the racism directed at Black or Indigenous peoples of course

paradoxius

The thing is, even this is a mid-20th century revision of what "melting pot" originally meant. The melting pot was an explicitly assimilationist, whitening ideal based on the idea that ethnic minorities could be "melted" together into a homogeneous population. It was explicitly about the loss of a distinct "foreign" identity.

At least it was until the anti-Black racial projects of the post-war era expanded the White identity in the US to encompass what were formerly seen as minority groups. Then, the "melting pot" experienced was revised into a false narrative in which Southern and Eastern European populations migrated to the US and had their culture incorporated into US culture without much strife, specifically to imply that the "failure" of non-White populations in the US to assimilate and move up the social ladder was the result of their own insufficiency rather than discrimination against them.

The melting pot was then revised again sometime in the late 20th century into the current multicultural liberal ideal, trying to erase the racial character of the melting pot to serve to notion of the US as a "nation of immigrants." This, I think, is very tied into a long-reigning false dichotomy in US political culture, that being white supremacy vs white guilt. The white guilt perspective can always easily position itself as the good and sympathetic "side" by contrasting itself with the outright malice of white supremacy, in this case by pointing at people who hate immigrants and want to subject them to violence and terror and saying, "those are the bad guys and we are the good guys." But that's a bigger issue deserving of its own discussion.

turquoiseproject

So, this is interesting because it causes diversity of backgrounds to have a different cultural context in the US than in other countries (to a degree). While it’s blatantly obvious that immigrants in the US exist, because of the assimilation pressure, we’re reluctant to openly admit it. Immigrants are treated as people that are transitioning to being American, which hasn’t been my experience in other countries I’ve been to. In other countries, people are just from different places, and the host country becomes a cultural context by which everyone finds a common ground. Moving from one country to another is just normal in a way that it isn’t in the US.

And this manifests itself in a really important way: paperwork.

You see, in countries that are more used to immigrants, you can go to a doctor, tell them you have a vaccination record from another country, and they’ll go “oh cheers okay, here’s what you need to do so we can help you get that translated and into the national system of record.” Or you have a foreign ID, marriage certificate, whatever, legal documents, and people can generally point you in the right direction.

But an American will have no idea what to do with you. You have a foreign ID at the DMV and suddenly you have two state troopers poring over a textbook scratching their heads figuring out what the hell to say to you. (you don’t even need an ID from another country, sometimes one from another state is enough to confuse them). Legal documents from other countries? Forget it, practically inadmissible (even if it’s in english). And if it’s not in English? Get ready to shell out hundreds of dollars for an official notarized translation from someone that’s miles and miles away from you and hope beyond hope that that’s enough.

Via latining (Source: txttletale)

854 notes

July 20th, 2023 10:50pm
teaboot

If I can recommend you do 1 low-effort thing for the love of God it is this:

Keep 5 cards in your pocket. One will say "yes", the second will say "no."

If you lose your voice, or lose speech, or want to make a dramatic embellishment at the right time, it is an elegant and efficient solution that is right there at hand.

But what if people question you from there? "Why do you have that card? Why would you do this? How long have you had that in your pocket?" For this, or whatever else they say, the third card: "I don't have a card for that."

"What the fuck," they ask. They laugh. They are bemused. You bring the energy back down with the fourth card: "I have laryngitis. I've lost speech. My throat hurts". Whatever you expect to occur.

The joke is over. Rule of threes. Now they are curious. YThey wonder about logistics. "How did you know I would say that? Is everyone so predictable?"

As a three-part bit, nobody ever sees the fifth card coming.

"I have powerful wizard magics."

Gets them every time

feral-bookwoom

On it boss!!

image
teaboot

[id: a set of 5 UNO cards upon which has been written, "Yes", "no", "I don't have a card for that", "can't talk right now 😢", and "I have powerful wizard magics 🙂". End id]

Via thisistabsreblogs (Source: teaboot)

33,200 notes

July 20th, 2023 10:22pm
bidoof

what farming items in mmorpgs has taught me: i used to think using ice trays to make ice cubes was free but after thinking about it i have to pay the electric bill to power the freezer so every moment that i’m not freezing new trays of ice cubes is a moment that i’m underutilizing the freezer and increasing the cost of ice cubes. i have to constantly swap out ice trays for new ice cubes on an hourly rotation on a 24 hour basis or else i won’t produce the maximum amount of ice cubes possible and will underutilize the full potential of my electric bill. i need to stop using all other appliances and utilities in my home to make more ice cubes

saccharine-tar

image

Via thisistabsreblogs (Source: bidoof)

95,040 notes

July 20th, 2023 10:08pm
teaboot

I think I just accidentally became someone's loan shark??

teaboot

Okay it sounds bad but bear with me:

Someone owes me a significant amount of money, and has made it clear that they do not intend to pay me back.

I sent them one text to follow up about it around two months ago, letting them know that I wasn't stressed about it and I could wait or do installments if they needed time or things were rough, and they promptly blocked my number and deleted me on social media.

I was kinda bummed, but then, you know. I figured, it's a lot of money, but at least they've removed themselves from my life, right? If I were to choose between thinking someone like that was a reliable friend or paying a lump sum for the trash to take itself out, I could make peace with it. Whatever. Live and learn.

So, I haven't seen them in a few months. Cool. But then I was walking downtown and I see someone out of the corner of my eye just sitting around, having a drink. Don't know who, don't know what. Not paying attention, yeah? I'm living my life.

But as I get closer to walk past them, I see them get up and start booking it. And as I turn to figure out what's up, why is someone running, I recognize the back of their head, and as they look over their shoulder, we make eye contact, and then they're gone.

And I realize

I just got off work. I'm power-walking in what could ostensibly be interpreted as their direction. They look up and see someone they ghosted, who they have screwed monumentally, coming at them with a hundred-yard-stare and what they may not know is a regular resting bitch face. I don't even care about the money anymore, I've accepted it as a loss, but they blocked me on everything so they don't know that. And they went, "fuck this shit, not today" and dipped.

And that would be funny on it's own, but we do not live in a large, heavily-populated area. It's definitely going to happen again. So my question is this:

How long are they going to let themselves live in fear of my stumpy 5'3" ass hunting them down like John Wick or the devil himself before they snap

And how good is this gonna get while I let them

teaboot

I need to be clear that I look like this

A cartoonist doodle of a small masculine figure with short hair and an undercut, making a kitty face and waving with both hands. They have multiple necklaces and bracelets and are wearing an oversized men's shirt that says "DILF" on it. An arrow pointing to them reads "hardened criminal"ALT
teaboot

Post by Scumfuckus: interrogation scene In a move where the guy refuses to cooperate and he's like "fuck you" and spits blood and the people interrogating him are like "what the fuck. Nobody's even hit you yet. Where did you get all that blood from." I just think it'd be funny. Comment from Aelita15: "dude are you ok"ALT

Via thisistabsreblogs (Source: teaboot)

10,586 notes

July 20th, 2023 9:54pm
joeyridersvoid

Thinking about when I worked at a shitty restaurant + one night it was just me + 3 other women on closing shift, so some guy came in the back and waved a knife around, presumably for money but I’m not actually certain, bc he was met with the bartender holding a much bigger knife, a tiny teenager wielding a cast iron pan, an elderly woman holding up a crockpot of clearly boiling water, and me, turning on the meat slicer with eye contact for maximum effect. He left, but the moral of the story is not girl power or whatever, it’s just. Why the fuck would you threaten a room full of underpaid and sleep-deprived blue-collar workers surrounded by lethal weapons.

flipocrite

Even ignoring the quantity of workers or weaponry, I think there’s something special about specifically

  1. using a knife
  2. to threaten a cook
  3. in a kitchen
earhartsease

not the

not the shar

not the sharpest kn

Via thisistabsreblogs (Source: joeyridersvoid)

49,612 notes

July 20th, 2023 8:42pm