Warning: Sculpted Genitalia
I don’t play kickstarter much, but I occasionally dabble. Mostly, I see it as an interesting alternative way of funding art; I’m not a big fan of The Gallery System and I like to see a way creative people can get something done, publicized, and out there.
Warning: War, Death
Administrative note: I made an error attributing the movie and confused a different movie with a release of the same film under a different name. Explanation is [here] – in order to reduce confusion, I have done an edit-pass. If you see comments about how I am talking about the wrong movie, they are correct with respect to the initial version of this posting. Sorry about the confusion!
I don’t know if I have the necessary skill to convey how upsetting this topic is. I wish I could borrow the skills of Orpheus from somewhere, and get other people to watch it, get angry and scared, and – do something. I don’t even know what we can do, trapped as we are in the reality of nationalism and out-of-control militarism.
Threads is about the horrible deaths our political leaders have prepared for us.
If you don’t like spoilers, don’t read any further. But there’s really nothing to spoil. You already know roughly what happens.
It’s pretty out here.
The false prophet who announced the end of the world for September 23 has observed that he made a mistake.
The Guardian’s subtitle captures the whole story: T-shirt by film-maker Roger Young polarises online commenters, with some praising gesture and others defending colonialism. [guard]
Whenever we read an account of the beginning of WWI it’s necessary for the historian to first lay out the landscape of interlocking defense treaties that turned Europe into a sort of Venn diagram of fantasy militarism. To me, it’s a reminder of the great Avalon Hill game Diplomacy which we played in my high school Military History Club (AKA: D&D club) – everyone secretly negotiating with everyone else against everyone else. For Europe, the results were grim, and I needn’t go into them.
When I started to realize I’d been fed a diet of lies, I began trying to pick things apart and re-assess most of what I had ingested. Howard Zinn was a huge help, for me, not because I think he’s right about everything, but because he offers a different perspective on established history. We’re left to our own devices with so much, otherwise – the “is this racist?” or “is this offensive?” conversation – it has to happen as an inevitable consequence of re-assessing the constructed history of a time. I’ve had discussions about this in some strange places, about some strange times; probably my favorite was “why isn’t there a lot of Vietnam War reenactment?” (My answer to that: “because bombers are too expensive to reenact.”)
Here’s more stuff from my closet.
It seems like everyone’s got a solution for North Korea. Naturally, I like my own the best: diplomacy. But that doesn’t work for authoritarians.
The CIA regularly deals with nasty people. Probably, it’s got something to do with the fact that they are nasty people, too.