legacy
- I grew up on a farm until I was 14 where fiddling with small engines (which I never got tired of and realized I’ve missed quite a lot thanks to this experience) and interacting with centrifugal clutches (one of those things that sounds really neat in theory but just leaves you wanting for - and suffering without - basically any of the other options lol)
- Adjacent to go karts but somehow still haven’t got the opportunity to actually figure out to Do The Thing - always wondered. Kinda same thing with pouring concrete. Watching you poke your way through both for the first time felt like a real luxury haha.
- Been watching Sarah’s build videos for a year or so now, always absolutely flabbergasted at the diligence… the persistence… the intelligence… all the while doing like 5 full time people’s jobs in video production, with much reverence but zero resonance with my own bumpkin ass behavior in similar pursuits. Curious because getting to capital R Relate with her and y’all’s troubleshooting here does have value, turns out.
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Outline * Preface * Not necessarily directed at young men of color. (Or definitely not directed at them, but at white, CIS, straight young men.) * Describing the “real” scope of my authority. * While I have not traveled outside of America whatsoever, I have traveled within it fairly extensively. * My authority is especially strong when it comes to protestant Christianity. * Function of the book. * Chapter 1: “I Don’t Care What You/They Think”
"Apathy's Misconceptions"
(as I commented)
Dude this video gave me so much in so little time, it’s stupid.
Remembering BYTE Magazine
What today’s tech journalism must learn again from the legendary computer publication.
This is a very much unfinished bit I began writing in November 2020 and just found in my Dropbox Paper archive.
Long-dead BYTE Magazine gained some exposure this time last year when some of its gorgeous retro-futurist cover art - of Robert Tinney’s hand - circulated about Tumblr and Pinterest. It is fucking beautiful, yes, but I was then quite disappointed to find little in the way of the publication’s actual content available on the web.
Last week, I was elated to find this exceptional archive on archive.org with its exceptionally-scanned, ultra-high res PDFs of every issue, created by the archivist Jason Scott. The notables of its legacy are fairly well-documented - and it’s still occasionally cited by the likes of Wired and TIME, but its story and mission have been ashamedly disregarded as infeasible relics; the naivete of the originator.
In Vol. 1, Issue 1 for September 1975, Carl Helmers’ first editorial - “What is BYTE?” - is a charming introduction, full of techno-idealism and the quaint jargon of the then-obscure computing niche. The Home Brew Computing Triology is an ingenius summation of the technological conversation: HARDWARE, SOFTWARE, and APPLICATIONS - the “interrelated themes.” Helmers notes that the publication was founded to bridge the divide between the respective hardware and software cultures and get them talking about applications. Later in the issue, publisher Wayne Green explains how his encounters with the community amidst a journey to modernize 73 - his amateur radio magazine - led to this prompt.
“I discovered an interesting thing - few of the hardware chaps could talk software - and vice versa.”
A sensical and exciting pitch, to be sure, but disappointing when one considers the remaining vastness of this gulf over 40 years later. The successors to BYTE - when compared to any of its trade magazine contemporaries - aren’t technology news at all. Mastheads like The Verge, Engadget, and CNET have become something else, entirely in the pursuit of the end user click, and a good lot of them simply look like shit. Reading up on tech hasn’t been a respectful or aesthetically-pleasant endeavor for as long as I’ve been literate, and BYTE’s experience would suggest that it’s been without much worthy cause, whatsoever.
Typographically, its pages are a bit dense, but it’s in an otherworldy mysticism regarding the pioneers of digital that one longs to reanimate, somehow.
Glass Profile Ingestion
As much as I genuinely enjoyed my free trial + then some paid time using Glass, I’m just not able/interested in image capture right now to continue paying $6.99 a month for it. I was pretty excited, then, to discover that micro.blog’s macOS app offers support for importing the .zip profile export files Glass creates, and to report that I have imported 18 images from my profile to this blog successfully.
Two YouTube Favorites of "My" Era
The Tangerine Knight
...some men just want a tangerine.
Slick’s 2009 Airventure Comp
Road Rage of The Deep
Champion's Online Review (GameTrack)
I’ve been trying GameTrack's premium tier for the past month and thought I should at least have one go at the review function… This isn’t actually substantial or useful in any way. You’re welcome.
SO you want me to review Champion’s Online, virtually unprompted, in 2024, eh?
Well, I loved and was very invested in Cryptic Studios at the time (see: Star Trek Online and Champions was already regarded - in a very misty-eyed, not very practical sense - reverently as very much their baby by the time I arrived in 2009.
I think it was 2011 or so that I decided to commit to Champions - despite how thoroughly uninteresting and unintelligible I found the whole idea of comic book superheroes. In contemporary language, yes it was absolutely super cringe, but I remember admiring how well-established (in a very practical sense) the identity of this title was compared to the product they were building on the same platform with identical tooling that was Star Trek Online at the time.
The Drywall Whiteboard
Last known capture of the Drywall Media/Extratone whiteboard, December 14 (Titanic Day,) 2016.
He Carries His
His - KOPN
rimes Ninh Him
DIE
ANTWOORD
-Paper Shredder
ORSTERENCE
ADSENSE
BoxeR Children
Ding
RiOw
what cao s
NELLY -GRILLZ=arl.
1,ong9
Brave Litte
Tuaste i
Pimp my Ride
- Весоте
cultured
MONSANTO
Auplicitous
For God's Sake, Just Sit Down to Piss
“Apathy Misconceived”
* <b>You do not <i>actually</i> want to attain a state of true apathy</b>, trust me.
* Chris Cuomo exists.
* Z-Ro
* Apathy is even argued for in the Christian Bible. (The opinion of other people does not matter, only God's.)
* <a href="https://blog.bible/bible-blog/entry/3-bible-verses-for-when-you-feel-judged-by-others">3 Bible Verses for When You Feel Judged By Others</a> | <i>Bible Blog</i>
Galatians 1:10: "Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ."
* Chapter 2: "Music Taste Through Generations"
"Boomers' Destructive Generational Tastemaking Disaster"
* Quote From <a href="https://bilge.world/bandcamp-streaming-music">the Bandcamp Essay</a>
* It's bewildering how content we are to abruptly abandon the substance music had to our teenage selves out of misconstrued justifications for our classic fainéance – actively choosing to subject our public ambiance to thousands of replays of “the best” records in favor of dipping even the most cowardly toe into unfamiliar waters, even when the opportunity cost is inherently halved – only to then have the audacity to evangelize our dilapidated conceptions of “good music” to our children as we demonize the music of their generation, depriving them of a very essential rite of their cognitive development.<b><u> I can think of little more reductive, repugnant, reckless, or racist crusades as a model figure than indoctrinating your child with an inherent distaste for their own culture</u></b>, and nothing more deeply alarming to hear from the mouth of someone born in the 21st century than shit like “Queen was better than any rapper will ever be,” or “real musicianship will die forever with Eric Clapton.” It’s unfair and unnatural: imagine if your high school classmates had consistently turned up their scrunched nose at the living whole of rock & roll, declaring Scott Joplin to be the last musician they could stand.
* Consider if the industry-wide customer experience standard for the musical ambiance in 1970s American eating and drinking establishments was entirely comprised of works by John Phillip Souza, and the most prevalent cultural revolution manifested itself something like the following: In countless popular films set in the time (and the stories told today by your parents of their youths that informs them,) a group of popular high school boys – generally three longtime childhood friends and a single addition from the previous summer with an Army Dad and a moderate bad boy aura that’s made him one of the school’s notoriously attractive students and the somewhat-abusive leader in the pack. After spending some time trying to convince the other three (the crucial moment for his case being the bad kid’s rare moment of sincerity trope) of its guaranteed social, sexual and financial ROI, they seal their agreement to start a band with a four-way saliva slap. Imagine if in the progression of this exhausted old tale, it remained entirely classic (and boring) when it faded to a “THREE MONTHS LATER...” ceiling shot of the four the in full, gleaming, performance-spec get-up of the presidential marching band in their garage, and it was revealed that they’d they practiced “The Star Spangled Banner” every night just to make the girls swoon in the film’s resolution with an encore of “America the Beautiful” at an unsanctioned (and very patriotic!) house party. Would you have made out on your first date with someone in your 80s high school Chemistry class after they’d was about but suffice it to say that it’s absolutely fucking bonkers how often I encounter “Sweet Home Alabama” (and other tunes I’ve already heard hundreds of times throughout the first third of my existence, conservatively) dripping down from the overhead speakers in all manner of big retail stores, where it’s inappropriate and unwelcome. Even from the generous assumption that every single one of them is an objective masterwork of composition, the amount of affection the American music listening audience has for the same 500 singles is on par with our rampant gun violence in terms of our unanimous tolerance for ridiculously illogical habits. I’ve been sitting in a cute, moderately trendy coffee shop on the corner of the major avenue of access to my cute, moderately trendy Portland neighborhood for an hour now, and I’ve recognized every single one of the tracks played just a bit too loudly on the stereo. I’ve been sick of them all since Middle School. That one Bow Bow Chicka Chicka thing… How very charming. <i>“The 70s, the 80s… the one-hit wonder channel!”</i>
* Contrary to the popular hipster narrative we’ve just defeated, it’s not the popularity of the lineup that makes these experiences so distasteful, but their <b><i>regularity</i></b>. It doesn’t take a doctor of psychology to observe that tireless exposure to any given work of art inevitably erodes its value, yet we continue to expend resources saturating most mundane spaces in our society with an unyielding regurgitation of the same brackish pop culture symbols as if we’re trying to either induce a canonical vomit, intentionally obliterate the Yelp! reviews for a distant future museum’s “North America Enters the 21st Century” exhibit, or <i>both</i>.
* This issue is not unique to American society nor to men, really, but is entirely the sickness of white boomers and gen Xers. It is an anomaly that has genuinely and profoundly perturbed me for virtually the entirety of my existence as a culturally literate entity - certainly longer than any of the other disturbances addressed in this volume.
* The process of jazz becoming mainstream (which I think it had definitely by the 1940s.)
* "<a href="https://medium.com/extratone/boomers-tastemaking-disaster-bb66330d2f29">Boomers' Destructive Generational Tastemaking Disaster</a>"
* Catcalling
* Clothes
* Stuff we should <b>keep to ourselves</b>
* Credits
* "I'm laughing at you and the best part is you won't truly understand why, in any deep and meaningful way, for another 20 years." - <a href="https://mastodon.online/@JustSomeGuy/104689299479520224">JustSomeGuy on Mastodon</a>