Category Archives: Art/Style/Culture

Brilliant, snarky humor of Paul Rudnick

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(Wikipedia) Paul Rudnick is an American writer. His plays have been produced both on and off Broadway and around the world. He is also known for having written the screenplays for several movies, including Sister Act, Addams Family Values, Jeffrey, and In & Out.
I’ve been reading his stuff all morning and have yet to find one that wasn’t laugh-out-load funny.

Ivanka says she won’t be joining her Dad’s campaign to focus on:

  • Guarding her money in a cave
  • Learning her kids’ names
  • Teaching Jared to sound out big word
  • Telling the mirror “Good job!”
  • Shrieking at the new nanny, “No eye contact! Tiffany, we talked about this!”

Mastodon is designed to be “antiviral”

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Clive Thompson provides a thoughtful look at how Mastodon is different from Twitter (and most other platforms):

Perhaps even more important than the design of Mastodon is the behavior established by its existing user base — i.e. the folks who’ve been using it for the last six years. Those people have established what is, in many ways, an antiviral culture. They push back at features and behaviors that are promoting virality, and they embrace things that add friction to the experience. They prefer slowness to speediness.

Mastodon will never really be a replacement for Twitter. It’s a subtly different place. You see less of the massively viral, you-gotta-see-this posts. You see a lot more murmuring conversation.

The MAGA movement is a bell curve… that has peaked

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The MAGA movement, based on aging white boomer victimhood is a bell curve. […] White boomers never faced the great depression, or a world war, yet we were particularly susceptible to the idea that we were victims of hardships. “Whatever the fuck is wrong here, it must be someone else’s fault. Women. Immigrants. Black people.”

After lifetimes of leaning into consumerism and mass consumption we boomers woke up to find ourselves angry and reactive to our own disconnection. Maybe a bigger SUV would help? Maybe a third marriage? […] Retirement is when a strange unnamed panic really set in for boomers. No longer able to rely on the stale connection of surface level workplace relationships, we were left sitting alone in our easy chairs staring at the Tucker Carlsons of the Fox News rabbit hole.

Trump is the ongoing final act of angry white boomers. No longer did we have to coyly perform the wink wink of coded racist language about welfare queens and urban crime. We were liberated to march with Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, our creeping panic weaponized into authoritarian rage.

For MAGA boomers to admit now, at this terribly late date, that all the white privilege and rage in the world isn’t calming our loneliness or our growing panic, means looking back on 70 years or more and admitting we fell prey to our most selfish, ugly, bullying instincts.

Essay by Mark Greene

McMansion Hell

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Kate Wagner is the creator of the viral blog McMansionHell, which roasts the world’s ugliest houses from top to bottom, all while teaching about architecture and design.

The city in which I live is rife with McMansions. Monstrous houses –all with 3 car garages– squeezed onto tiny lots.

Praise the Lord!

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I’ve been watching the HBO series, Carnivàle. First aired (streamed?) in 2003 so nearly 20 years old but holds up well. The scene above is a great example of what I call the “after thought” shooting. A staple in action movies but not so much back then.

According to Fashion Stylist Rebekah Roy: “It cost $4 million US per episode; it was one of the most expensive shows to produce. There were an estimated 5,000 people costumed in the show’s first season!” The costumes were designed by Chrisi Karvonides-Dushenko.

BBQ Gun

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(Urban Dictionary) “An old term from the Southwest that refers to a gun that is not worn daily. It won’t have the scratches, wear marks, etc a daily wear gun would have. These guns were not something that were never used or “useless.” In the time the term came about they were functional guns (sometimes, heavily modified for better accuracy/reliability/etc) that might have some custom engraving, polishing, or custom grips. They didn’t make many guns purely for show – they made guns to use and users modified them for show. They were normally worn in tooled leather holsters as opposed to daily wear holsters – which were plain.”

“In the revolver days (before semi-auto pistols) a church gun was a normal firearm as described above. After the semi-auto pistols arrived on scene this term applied to mostly Colt 1911’s. Current times this can apply to any firearm that has custom work designed to enhance mainly appearance and, much of the time – functionality.”

“However, this should not be confused with a (today’s term) “bling gun” – which can imply that the gun is more for show than effectiveness. Or that the user is not proficient in its use because it is only worn on special occasions.”

Bureaucracy

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Couldn’t find the artist’s name but he goes by lordampersand online. The medium (?) is ink and watercolor. From his Mastodon feed:

“Research for this piece has provided a name for an aesthetic I’ve always been fascinated by: “Liminal Spaces”, the depictions of places in-between.”

You can see his sketches as this piece progressed here. From his website:

“i’m a self-tought artist from switzerland. my drawings and paintings are usually analogue (ink, watercolor). i’m fascinated by the interaction between organic and technological processes, the things that grow and the things that are built.”

More art here »