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It’s funny how if you scroll back enough on this blog you’ll see all this experimentation with different art and humor where I try to play a character that slowly fades into being a personal blog where I see MTBA stuff and Immediately Neuron Activate

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These are on the T!

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Absolutely the fuck not

tumblr can you please let me post

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so either stories can't save us, or 100 years of The Landlord and The Businessman and The Corporation and The Man being the villains in contemporary western folklore has saved us and this (gestures at everything) is us having been saved

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Two of the most optimistic books I read this year (What we owe the future by William McAskill and Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty) share a story that goes against the grain of popular history in a way that I found deeply moving.

They argue that Slavery didn’t end because “the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice” as Dr. King said in his I have a dream speech. It ended because a bunch of people, mostly a combination of current and former slaves and Quakers, worked very hard over two centuries to end it. If they had not done so, we might still have chattel slavery in the United States.

In every major european country and America. slaves and their allies fought in bloody revolts but also told stories about the horrors of slavery. They shamed slavers in public. They burned businesses that sold slave-made products, but, just as importantly, they convinced people that it was moral and just for them to do so in newspapers. By telling stories. By the time Haiti revolted in 1793, anti-slavery sentiment in England and France had turned deadly worldwide. If nobody had been telling stories about the heroism of the resistance of slaves, who were legally murderers, England and France might have felt they merely needed to end a rebellion, not take a moral stance. Obviously the morality of indemnifying slaveholders instead of slaves for the end of slavery, which England and France both did, undercut the sincerity of the gesture. But can you imagine if people had not believed in ending it? If there had been no Frederick Douglass or Toussaint l’overture or Harriet Tubman? No storytellers to remind people that the slaves were fighting a bloody fight for freedom? It’s easy to believe that things today are nothing like the 1830s, when it was very much up in the air whether or not slavery would end worldwide, but in a lot of ways we still live in that same world.

Ending slavery probably felt as impossible as ending church censorship in schools, private ownership of housing, State persecution of religious minorities, private ownership of companies, or government by kings. Some of those things didn’t happen. But some of them did, because people worked hard and won. Stories were a crucial part of that. You can look at the world and see how it could be better and maybe one day it will, even if it doesn’t fix everything

so either stories can't save us, or 100 years of The Landlord and The Businessman and The Corporation and The Man being the villains in contemporary western folklore has saved us and this (gestures at everything) is us having been saved

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Update! The turkey has been found safe due to the heroic actions of community members who direct messaged me to say it was just in for repairs. As always, we must continue to remain vigilant and immediately jump to the conclusion that Josh Kraft is responsible for whatever distress is caused by the unexpected disappearance of our iconic landmarks. Special thanks to all who provided local beat reporting for this story

breaking news: brookline fag turkey disappeared

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I have already sent a linkedin DM to Brookline News Editor Sam Mintz and will keep the community updated.

the turkey statue at the washington square T station, pictured above, was removed some time in the last week for reasons unknown. suspects include Mike Pence, Josh Kraft, and brookline high school students rejected by women for listening to andrew tate

breaking news: brookline fag turkey disappeared

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breaking news: brookline fag turkey disappeared

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Everything I learn about tarot cards is against my will. Today I learned that the heirophant does not in fact mean that you are going to have secrets revealed to you. Apparently there are like 5 other cards that mean that and the heirophant, instead, is the "keeper of traditions" and means stuff about like, staying true to your roots or whatever.

The heirophant was the guy in the mystery cult who would reveal the mysteries of the cult to you. Like if you're in scientology and you give them a william dollar and get to the william dollar scientologist tier and they have a whole ritual to teach you about the secrets of xenu or whatever, that guy is the heirophant. The term is originally from the eleusinian mystery cult where the heirophant was the leader but the whole point is that if you are in a mystery cult the person who brings you into the presence of the divine and reveals the truth of the cult to you, that guy is the heirophant.

Apparently, instead, the heirophant in tarot is the pope. and like. you have a whole magic tradition around divination with the cards. And if someone is about to, you know, have deeper truths be revealed to them, you'd think, wouldn't you, that the heirophant might maybe be the one who would do that, becuse you know that's what the actual job description is. Nope. Instead you have the sun, and the moon, and the high priestess, and probably some other fuckin thing, which all mean to reveal the secrets and bring you closer to the divine truth. Not the heirophant though. He does. Other things.

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Oh no!👀 I hope 🙏 there isn’t something ❓hanging 🏄down ⬇️ below the caternary 😹. Wouldn’t want something 🚃🚃🚃🚃🚃 catching in my pantygraph😈

You want to hear real Boston accents and not the fake ones that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon put on? Here ya go.

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I want these men to do unspeakable things to me

You want to hear real Boston accents and not the fake ones that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon put on? Here ya go.

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That jest sure do be infinite

The further I get into Infinite Jest the more I'm like okay this might actually be genius. It does not need to be this long though.

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RIP Richard Serra. You made so many people so so so mad

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girl tell me about it

So like I have feelings about urbanist youtubers

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I'll admit that I did a little polemic myself in this post, and have been chasing certain inaccuracies in the architectural history here since.

From Chapter 1 of Reyner Banham's The New Brutalism comes the discussion of the name that I was talking about, which attributes "the new humanism" to an english group of architects working for the London City Council who were inspired by the work of chief Soviet Propagandist Andrei Zhdanov and his architectural projects. "There was also a conscious attempt, by architects committed to the communist line, to create an English equivalent of the Socialist-Realist architecture propounded in Russia by Zhdanov's architectural supporters" (p.11, The New Brutalism, Banham, Reyner 1966) For wealthy or well connected urban Russians, the spoils of the revolution and the second world war meant placement in the soviet's luxurious upper tier of apartment, the kinds of buildings that Zhdanov put on postcards to propagandize the victory of socialism to the world. These are the famous Stalinkas that are still around today. As you rightly point out, many people would not have had access to such apartments, and lots of cheaper housing was built to much lower standards and then progressively replaced under later premierships.

These LCC designers primarily did not want to follow the practical designs of Zhadanov, and were more inspired by historical english socialists like William Morris. Their aesthetic sensibilities were, as a result of an obsession with "proletarianism" and british historical aesthetics via Morris and his arts and crafts movement, rather conservative. They were also, at the time when Brutalism was emerging as a style, widely seen as political losers. the labor government was out in 51, and in 52 Stalin was dead as well.

"This hardening of the architectural line by the Communists occupying the middle ranks of the LCC architectural hierarchy stemmed partly from a genuine conviction that something related to English nineteenth century Brick building was the correct approach, (for which they produced William Morris's Red House by philip webb as justification) and partly from a defensive response to their own worsening situation." (p.11, The New Brutalism, Banham, Reyner 1966)

In response to the aesthetically conservative and thoroughly academic arguments about the right way to rebuild the parts of England flattened by the Blitz, Brutalism found life in part by mocking that old guard. The LCC was building buildings designed based on the precepts of Zhdanov, whose primary job was to convince people like the LCC that the Soviet Union was an advanced modern economy capable of building public housing people wanted to live in. The urban Russians living in Zhdanov's buildings were primarily of the same social class as the academic architects getting in fights about William Morris vs Mies Van Der Rohe, eg. not the poorest of the poor who were most desperate for a social housing project capable of easing their material conditions. Those people would occupy the Shitty Commie Blocks of the 60s and 70s as they were built, and give Brutalism its current reputation.

It's fair to say that the LCC communists bought in to the soviet propaganda of the day, and honestly also that I equivocated about it more than I should in the original post. Public housing is never easy and often fails to make anyone happy as it comes in overbudget and unaffordable or unfinished and unliveable, or occasionally both. Having said that, peeling back the layers of historical propaganda also serves my point about public art (including architecture) in the first place. Architecture is one of the most visible statements of a society's values. Housing, how it's built, and who it excludes, mark the physical barriers societies place on participation for in and out groups. Just as Historical Reenactment reflects the beliefs and values of the present (independent of the educational mission of an organization set on educating about the past) Architecture organizes work, leisure, and belonging in society in stark ways.

Leave it to a guy being a grump about the ren faire to almost make me log in to my defunct reddit account.

For someone concerned about "historical accuracy" you would think they would know that rennaisance faires were started by the Rennaisance Pleasure Faire of Southern California in 1962 by blacklisted Hollywood fags and commies. If you didn't want to dance around with fairies in the woods you should have joined your local civil war reenactors

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Salem politicians desperately trying to assert that they're the "Peace City" because the name Salem comes from Hebrew, while surrounded by "I got stoned in Salem" t-shirt shops and multiple wax museums specializing in mass murder

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for the card pull: i am asking for guidance on reviewing for a chemistry credit exam this fall (transferring sucks). what should i expect for my future in this regard

Expect to be separated by vast gulfs from the security of the shore. The movement of monsters in your midst may not be visible until it is too late. Invest in insurance: you only want it when you don’t have it