impractical-insanity-guide

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Apparently it's baseball playoffs time????

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people are always like "Oh a vampire wouldn't get horny while drinking someone's blood, that's like getting horny while eating a sandwich" and like man have you never had a really good fucking sandwich?

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A man in Stockholm really took that last bit to heart.

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currently maybe possibly single-handedly crashing whatever servers eton hosts its archived student newspapers on because me and a friend are getting obsessed with a single outspoken prefect from 1883

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Everyone is so proud of him too, as they should be

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“In 1963 a Dutch company called Philips developed the cassette tape. Tapes were originally used only in dictation machines, given the quality of the recordings was not very high. But by 1970 that changed, and they began to be used for music. These little things were portable, you could play them in cars, and they didn’t scratch or wear out as quickly as the more fragile LPs. Philips also decided to license the format royalty free, and as a result other companies adopted it without having to give a piece of their income to Philips. By the mid-seventies these pocket-sized plastic things were everywhere. Cassettes could hold a little more music than LPs, but more importantly, the machines that played them could record as well. The general public was now back in the recording business, just like it had been in the early days. (Home-style reel-to-reel recorders had been available previously, but they were bulky and expensive.) People began to make tapes of themselves singing for Grandma, they copied their favourite songs from their LP collections, they recorded radio programs and music that they played or composed themselves. With two machines (or the soon not-uncommon double-deck cassette machine), you could copy cassettes, one at a time, and give the duplicates to friends. Record companies tried to discourage “home taping,” as they called it. They worried that people would record hit singles off the radio and never have to buy their 45s again. They mounted a huge (and fairly ineffectual) propaganda campaign that mainly served to alienate the consumer and music fan from the companies that sold pre-recorded music. “Home Taping Is Killing Music” was the slogan. I myself occasionally bought pre-recorded audiocassettes, but mostly I still bought LPs. Like many of my friends, I’d make mixtapes that consisted of my favourite songs in various genres for myself and others. Rather than lending out precious, fragile, and bulky LPs, we’d exchange cassettes of our favouite songs, each tape focusing on a specific genre, theme, artist, or mood. There was a lot of nerdy musical categorising going on. Pocket-sized audio wonder cabinets. I found out about a lot of artists and whole styles of music through the cassettes given to me by my friends and I ended up buying more LPs as a result. The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness, anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsulated in the song selection. You mad mixtapes that corresponded to emotional states, and they’d be available to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace. Mixtapes were a form of potlatch - the Native American custom by which a gift given requires that a reciprocal gift be received in the future. I’d make you a mixtape of my favourite songs - presumably ones you would like and might not have or know about - and you’d be expected to make a similar tape for me of songs you think I’d like. The reciprocal giving wasn’t super time-sensitive, but you couldn’t forget. The gift of a mixtape was very personal. Often they were made for exactly one person, no one else. A radio program with one listener. Each song, carefully chosen, with love and humour, as if to say “This is who I am, and by this tape you will know me better.” The song choice and sequence allowed the giver to say what one might be too shy to say outright. The songs contained on a mixtape from a lover were scrutinised carefully for clues and metaphors that might reveal the nuances and deeper meanings secreted in the emotional cargo. Other people’s music - ordered and collected in infinitely imaginative ways - became a form of expression. Record companies wanted to take all that away from us. I taped songs off the radio, just as the record companies feared I would. I carried a boombox on my first trip to Brazil, and every time something amazing came on the radio I taped it. Later I’d ask who these singers or bands were, and then I’d begin a search and eventually buy their LPs. I even licensed some of them for release on a record label I had for a while. If I hadn’t been able to tape those radio programmes, I would never found out who those artists were. I also recorded other kinds of radio programmes on cassettes: gospel music, preachers, exorcists, radio talk-show hosts, and radio dramas. The piles of cassettes got a little out of control, but they were a constant source of inspiration and they became tools in my own music-making process.”

— David Byrne, How Music Works, 2012.

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You know, Google, I don't think that third one's really a pressing concern

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It belongs in a museum,I think

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logan howlett has always been THAT bitch

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Bro radfems are so funny what even is this lol

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Loving how as soon as electricity was like, a Thing, people just went "you can make toast with this" and started working on electric toasters but they didn't quite have the whole heating element thing down so there was a not insignificant chance of it just exploding

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sad they give tissue boxes plastic labia folds but no clitoris

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me.

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thinking about how old umbrellas are