MrHoatzin

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by MrHoatzin


  1. It confuses me a little that the emerging consensus in this thread is that structural problems at play here would all disappear if only police were trained a shade better—like the military!—with its sterling record of legitimate use of force. What is legitimate use of force, when you've been shipped somewhere out there to trample all over some other state's sovereignty? I'll grant you that trying not to piss off people unnecessarily is an effective way to maintain control, but should we really draw parallels between an occupation and policing? Also US Government is a quasi-non-colonial rigid vertical hierarchy, why does the buck always stop at the point where the bureaucracy touches the shit (i.e. police, bureaucrats with guns—or individual soldiers, or sometimes the cia when it fucks up really badly, or whatever)?

     

    The point of the war on drugs and war on crime is to demonize uppity poor people, mostly minorities, to keep them in their place. It was invented after the civil rights movement proved to be effective, as a kind of plausibly-deniable, color-blind apartheid which can easily be exported. That is it. As actual statistics on crime have shown it to be dropping since the '70s, the whole structure of power that thumps wars on drugs and crime as a reason for inflating police departments is culpable. Stay tough on that crime, America!

     

    With the privatization of prisons, there is now a hefty prison industrial complex that is lobbying like crazy for more punitive criminal laws and rounding up of illegal immigrants because it is good for business. Here's a heart-warming story of a PA judge who sentenced CHILDREN to harsher sentences for kickbacks from the private prison industry. Cash-strapped municipalities across the nation are super happy when a new prison opens in their hood (or casinos, a similarly parasitic industry) because that means jobs and extra revenue, with a bunch of black kids (or with casinos, schmucks with poor understanding of probability) getting to play the role of collateral damage in balancing that budget. US imprisons more of its people than any other place on earth, and prisoners are disproportionately minorities because the system works!

     

    Nothing WRONG happened in Ferguson if you look at the situation from the perspective of the bureaucracy. Obscene use of force against black people is just par for the course. MAYBE a lone bad egg fucked up—but that is really not conceivable at this point because the police always retains the right to define a situation and the situation has been well defined. Conceding that the public is able to question how police define situations is a legal/power shitstorm never worth entertaining. The REAL problem in Ferguson is that people are angry and getting angrier. So let's put all this government-issue mustard gas to some use!

     

    War on drugs and crime is a very good war—much better than, say, war on poverty, which is a spiritual issue—because proliferation of drugs, property theft, kidnapping-for-ransom and such come very much from within the capitalist worldview. They are perfectly rational business ventures that can only exist due to the impersonal nature of money, which is enforced by the state. If states were serious about solving the problem of crazy psychopaths turning chunks of South and Central America, Afghanistan, LA or whatever into fiefdoms ruled by violence and terror, they would eliminate impersonal money and the incentives to hustle to survive—they don't because that would crumble the states' own hegemony over people and their labor. States themselves are essentially no different than these petty warlords, they've just gone to great lengths to shroud themselves in legitimacy with compelling origin stories and by providing services. All property is theft of the commons. Some theft just happened long ago and has since been sanctified.

     

    Drugs scare people and criminals are bad, so a manichean middle class electorate supports arming police to deal with drugs, spending public money on the private arms industrial complex. US has a spectacularly vast arms industry and guns flow south like no one's business. The more drug unrest, the more of a market for guns on both sides. And the people buying said guns are good wholesome capitalists so there is no chance of some populist uprising getting a voice through those arms—and after you throw that gasoline on the fire, you can manufacture more better gasoline to fight it with. Capitalism is so super efficient at producing things, it needs to get rid of the old shit to sell the new, and weapons that explode and bullets that get used up are a great commodity.

     

    The whole thing is corrupted from the ground up. Or really, from the top down. So many things are so thoroughly fucked and intertwined with everything else on this gay earth that patchwork reform in the margins is time-consuming and futile. Liberalism has failed to deliver us a benevolent state. Managerial classes need to be gutted and the reigning ideology of market capitalism revisited. It's almost easier to go that route. And when the plebs start getting angry about everything everywhere, as they have been, that is when darth-vaderized police will come in handy for the powers that be. There is no way in hell the state would willingly demilitarize the police, especially after OWS was so effective in shifting the global discourse from balancing budgets and more austerity to wealth inequality.


  2. Justice is a spiritual question. Pragmatism & politeness never pass judgements on fairness of systems. Capitalism is fundamentally antagonistic to justice. Its rational agent acting on self-interest is rewarded handsomely for psychopathy. Such grade-A rational agents, from atop the pyramid, heartened by the holy glow of their own self-righteousness, have reshaped the public realm in their own image.

     

    War is such good money. Every single federal jurisdiction in the US has a stake in the military industrial complex. The industry is dispersed like that on purpose. There is no incentive for any representative or senator to not take part in war profiteering. Even if they speak out against a war, they make sure to claw each others eyes out around earmark season to bring some of that bacon to their constituents. All other industry in the country is fucked, in some places war is the only big game in town. And once the money starts rolling and the toys are always super new and improved (or really just shiny and freshly pooped out by the graft machine, creating pretense for the excess value to be siphoned out of the earth and blood and into the coffers of the owners) room needs to be made, and secondary market gets flooded. America spends as much as the rest of the world combined on its military. Lots and lots of toys... same toys that spill into the secondary black market and turn whole chunks of Mexico into erzats warring states (Mexico all-around is a great case study for the last half millennium of capitalism).

     

    Militarized occupation-force-styled police is totally in the interest of the owners and not an accidental whoa-how-did-this-happen oopsie. From the right perspective there is no difference between the US agents waging an urban war of suppression in Afghanistan and municipal bureaucrats firing water cannons at black people in Missouri. Drug war, likewise, is an international conspiracy to keep (usually color-coded) underclasses everywhere well-fucked. It was the drug war that provided the excuse to get municipal cops everywhere into ninja SWAT gear to begin with.

     

    Poor people here, poor people there, same continuum. There ain't no party but the class war party cause the class war party don't stop.

     

    So anyway, justice is a spiritual question. We need to get religion on all this. Irrational, frenzied.


  3. Just saw Boyhood and—boy!—does it have some portrayals of camping in need of critiquing!
     

    Not carrying water or hats while hiking in Texas is suicide. I have yet to take enough water on a hike. No primitive camping ground anywhere permits ground fires. My guess is Linklater wants to murder all out-of-state tourists who are charmed by the nature scenes and jump into it without properly preparing.

     

    I liked the movie quite a lot! It has that classic Linklater low burning awesomeness.


  4. Basically an entire day of the trip was spent on what amounted to a 12-mile hike that involved more vertical footage than I have ever covered with my own feet in one continuous streak. The only thing the video covers is the part when we were just goofing around eating and unwinding at the end of the nature-filled days, because those were the only bits where we had a video camera out and in frequent usage.

     

    Yes! I was sure those other things happened too, and I just wished I had more of a view of that part of it from where I'm sitting here in the audience, an eager consumer of your documentary and promotional material. I'm sorry if I came off as judging your camping experience. I'm just offering stupid unsolicited critique about this as if it were a personal thing, when it is in fact not. I've just been thinking about this sort of thing a lot and it was on my mind polluting my thoughts. The video has nothing to do with me, I didn't mean for it to become a thing, my intention was not to call anyone a nature hater, and I'm sorry.


  5. I am probably a complete camping pansy with my host of 20th century materials, devices and chemicals that ease my stay among prickly pears. I have never camped more than a dozen miles from where I parked. So I am not damning them for their choice not to weekend-hike the Appalachian trail like real mans do or whatever. They can bring board games, whatever, it is all moot! I wasn't there and my opinion as to what was done wrong has no bearing whatsoever on the success of their camping trip.

     

    Still, I'm with Nels, Yosemite Netrunner is kinda gross. Why drive for hours into the boonies, if you're gonna take your man cave with you? Nature is badass on its own. It is fantastic. Any nature anywhere is. You had super limited time, why not commune with it more? You can play board games wherever. We live such sterile lives in the west, we're just not required to even notice the real world around us for our survival. When you go to a sanctuary where the real world is not thoroughly overfucked by man's hand, why ignore it? Just personally, I would've been all the more FNA about all of these Firewatch-tangential investigative chatterings and videos if they featured a little more awe in the face of nature, which I took to be the point of exploring real outdoors for the game in the first place. To make it real.

     

    But what do I know? I know nothing! It's just a random slim video and a few stray comments pertaining to a complex creative endeavor the nature and themes of which are still largely vague.

     

    Dude on the internet doesn't get content he thought he would. Has an emo. Spends words.


  6. Breaks my heart to hear Jake badmouth shitty nature a while back (it's just in nature's nature to burn down sometimes, it's fine, shh) and then see this camping thing with tables and chairs and board games... Lately, surrendering to nature is the closest thing I've had to a reliably fulfilling religious experience. I should really go on a lengthier road trip through state and national parks one of these days.

     

    All that said, game looks orgasmic.


  7. Great stuff! I like the kid in the Lobo outfit, and did I see a Finn hat as well? I was wondering if the snooty kid all in black was a reference to something... Also, is the sculptor in part 5 a self-portrait?

     

    Thanks! Yes. No. Yes!

     

    Twelve of the 28 kids are references to other things. Three more are arguable as they started that way but I changed them up slightly or reinterpreted them to where they are not really. And there is also the Max plushie. The kid in black is just some snooty kid in black tho. In addition to the self-portrait on page 5, on page 2 Lobo is casting busts of my head.

     

    tumblr_n9lhqpRdAj1r61ugko2_500.jpg

     

    I posted this rendering of the little fan dude on my Tumblr earlier, wonder if I can just embed it off there.


  8. Oh wow, I read this ages ago when Scott McCloud highlighted it but I haven't gone back to it since. I really like this, just the way you have it all coherently fitting the innate style of it. It's not that hard to make a comic that's scrolling and reactive (...I think? Maybe I'm way wrong on that) but actually designing it in a way that flows with the narrative itself and really contributes to the feel is what made me love this back when I first found it. Now to read back over it again.

     

    TANKS! There is quite a bit of infrastructure in place to make it all look effortless—but yeah, personally, I'm more proud of the design and composition and art than the technical bits that make it all jive.

     

    Looking back at what the comic was when Scott McCloud pointed it out to peeps makes me cringe a little. It got infinitely better thereafter. I keep wanting to redraw parts of those first two pages. I know it is expected for web comics to start out kinda crappy-looking and get better, but now that I have more of an understanding of what compositions work, what looks busy and busted, etc, it won't be too much work to go in and tighten things here and there... One one hand, I suspect web comic community would collectively slap me for thinking about going there—on the other, I really only figured out what Lobo looks like on the fourth page and really should synch up the earlier Lobos...


  9. I keep meaning not to be the dude who comes into this forum for this thread once a year to plug a shit (usually the same shit)*... buuuut the new page of Hobo Lobo is quite a treat, it took for fucking ever to put together, and now that it's done I want ever more eyeballs on it stat. GIVE ME EYEBALLS! It's not a huge investment of time on the reading end and it's well worth it! Show it to cool people! Put it in your RSS reader for later! NOTE: Link will play music at you.
     
    :stan:HOBO LOBO page 7!!

     

    * To my defense I lurk a bit, just don't post much


  10. Aw, Nachimir, that sucks. I've been wondering lately at length about how good audiences are made and my wandering has gone absolutely nowhere.


  11. I think there's really only one good chapter-by-chapter dismantling of a novel, and that's Fred Clark's evisceration of Left Behind and its sequels. By stepping through, section by section, he highlights not just where the story is badly written, but explains the philosophy and theology behind it, and how that theology affects American political discourse. He calls them the World's Worst Books, and has spent several years going into detail about how that's not hyperbole. It turns out there is a lot to know about the minutiae behind the John Birch Society's insane rewriting of the Bible.

     

    I remember this, would make for a pretty baller podcast/audiobook.


  12. What's damning about most of these examples (and also likely to be used as a knee-jerk defense) is that these developers are largely to blame for thoughtless implementation of emergence. Maybe they didn't want you to beat up semi naked women, just so happens that their gritty M-rated story called for a brothel or whatever and they can't very well count on the player of a murder simulator to restrain from psychoing out more than is polite... but you DO get extra points if you DON'T kill the innocents!—in the whore level, the innocents just so happen to include pole dancers...

     

    At the end of the day, the biggest sin of games is that they're made by really lazy unimaginative dude-bros. The bigger an art project (an entertainment, a spectacle, a narrative, A MEDIUM) is, the bigger chances some parts of it will just be running on auto pilot... plug in your society's soul here...

     

    What is most curious to me is WHY it was such an obvious thing to try to sell the earliest, most abstract video games via boobs, exclusively to boys? Video games are such a stupid all-addictive distraction from everything that is real in the world, why is it that only boys get to be devoured by them? Is it just because technology tinkerers have traditionally been dudes? Is that in turn because lately (last few hundred years) men have been encouraged to participate in manufacture of sellables (engineering being modern marketplace's cornucopia) while women are relegated to "support role" of creating, nurturing, maintaining humans—and thus ought to have some other, more appropriate preparatory toys to play with? 'Cause that is one pretty extreme runaway train of bullshit... and with Tropes we're focusing on the aspects of the issue closest to the surface...

     

    There is so much emergent gunk in the wiring of our civilizations, not just our video games. Lately I can't look at one thing and not see it as a symptom of a much larger sedimentation of kruft that goes much deeper down our conception of the world—and is basically usurped by the bourgeoisie in the support of the existing class system—with patriarchy as the keystone—and feminism as a sledgehammer.

     

    Ugh... I am such a damn dirty optimist/utopian... Is it even fucking healthy for a wee individual to look at the world like this, with an eye towards molding crazy emergent systems that have been in place for millennia?

     

    Fake-it-till-you-make-it is how a stupid superstition becomes a powerful church, maybe the way to deal with the structure is to break it at the point where our imaginations meet the world. Maybe the exact thing we need more of is responsible popular fiction, as a revolutionary act, as a surface erosion that slowly washes the castle away. Might still take a couple of generations, especially considering how the science of marketing eagerly undermines the realignment of the basest parts of our nature, and the business of entertainment is not in the business of making waves...


  13. Hey I'm getting married Saturday, but it's at a beachhouse we rented in Galveston (from Austin), so I have to leave in five hours to prep there later this afternoon. I'm super nervous and also exhausted as I've been juggling preparations and school projects for the last two weeks.

     

    Then I get back and it's time to keep looking for a part time job!

     

    Wish my luck guys so I don't screw up all the lines I have to say. I hate speaking in public, especially personal things. Assuming I don't tell anyone, is it okay for me to take a drink before I go on?

     

    Haha, I guess I am late to this party. Just drove up from Port Aransas and can confirm it's a pretty sweet weekend to Gulf. Have some belated fun! As for alcohol, I think I was the first one at my wedding to start drinking. It worked, no complaints but then again I get friendlier when I am drunk, others' mileage may vary.


  14. San Antonio drivers are dicks towards bikers prolly because they don't know bikes are allowed on regular roads, so it is not impossible to get driven off the road by belligerent pickup truck... that said, year after year referendums in town have expressed desire for more bike-friendliness and more green space investment, and the government has indeed built a lot of explicit bike lanes. Nowhere near as bike-friendly as Austin, but a holy fantasy land compared to what bikers in Houston or Dallas have to deal with.


  15. I don't hold dumbbells, barbells and the like in same contempt I reserve for stationary machines with levers, pulley systems and rotating resistance. I also kinda dig rowing machines (I have one in my dining room, facing out at the jungle beyond my front porch; it's a pretty zen place to row). And no doubt people with experience and understanding of exercise are invaluable partners when doing it. There just has to be a more holistic way to exercise than the gym machine model (I wish holistic wasn't such a compromised word). It's just as dreary as sitting in a cubicle, or alone in traffic, or staring at always churning internet feeds, a pig in a cage on antibiotics—them sort of feels. :violin: Biking in comparison feels like fucking freedom. The buzz of the chain, the roll of pebbles, the whiff of semi-crispy-still-sorta-lush grasses and flowers, critters and joggers ducking out of your way—with only a parabolic trajectory between your face and the pavement—maaaan!


  16. I dunno about heroes. Hero is such a loaded word, too heavy, lofty and kinda by definition impossible to truly relate to on a direct, human level. I meet a lot of people who I'd like to be like when I grow up—old punks and salty cowboy artists—but it happens in bits and pieces and there is no one person who embodies entirety of my aspirations comprehensively.

    I tend to have a lot of pop idols. The barrier to entry is lower and it can fit a lot of people I'm infatuated with, usually those who make things or can cook up a good jeremiad. Like, Ursula Le Guin, RuPaul, David Graeber, Slavoj Žižek, Sarah Kenzior, Ken Layne, Andrew Hussie, Evan Dahm, Tim Schafer, etc... ¬¬¬

    It is interesting that I don't have the same tic to put on a pedestal your regular, garden variety kind, virtuous people like most of you do. I dunno what that tells about me. It's not that I don't value or respect them, I just don't find myself readily adopting their priorities on the MY HERO level? I dunno. Maybe I should try getting less enamored by cleverness.


  17. I can't abide exercise with super-specialized machines in sweaty stalls, staring at TVs, or my own lumbering reflection. It embodies all that bugs me about how modern western human sees the world—ie, to be a healthy animal you have to spend hours a week maxing your stats on some bullshit contraption engineered by experts to fix your woes—and god forbid you do anything without consuming media while you're at it. The Crossfit model is somewhat more appealing to me in this light—a Montessori gym!—but it fixes what's wrong about gyms in an extreme way, over-correcting in another bullshit direction. Plus it's more expensive than reasonable for a drill sergeant and some kettle bells in a dilapidated strip mall...

    Soooooo I bought a cheapo mountain bike at a Frankenbike, been cleaning it up (still need to get it to where the derailers don't arbitrarily throw the chain in the general direction of my shifting) and biking about 20 miles a day, Texas summer permitting. Haven't had a bike since I left my last one in Belgrade, in the '90s, when I left for the States. I feel amazing. Why did I ever stop biking? It is still a machine that I'm interacting with to get my enorphin fix, but at least I go on weird high-speed adventures through natureful chunks of San Antonio—and I feel less likely to destroy my knees and ankles than I would with just running (what with my not inconsiderable heft). Looking forward to dragging this bike (or riding it) to a state park for a proper hit of nature cycling.


  18. I'm reading a book called 1491 by Charles C. Mann. It's a collection of most recent best archeology+anthropology about the Americas before 'Peans brought their pet smallpox and passively murdered 90% of humanity already on the continent—before they even stepped deeper into the heartland to declare the continent empty, whereupon they could proceed to murder the widows and orphans of the pestilence... It goes into the invention of maize—I say invention because the engineering of corn from its ancestor plants is far more fantastic a feat of domestication than the paths taken by Old World grains, genetically and conceptually speaking. Really interesting book. Written about ten years ago.

    Also recently passed through my hands and eagerly recommended: Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. Ursula Le Guin edited a version of the book that is pretty fantastic (the copy I rented from the library had the audio book as well, read by her! :tup::owned:). She retains some of the ambiguities and subtleties in the language that translators historically translated with a more macho, "manual for princes" skew which she saw as somewhat distracting from the message.

    I've been devouring all kinds of books about alternate patterns of thinking and conception of the world at large, in preparation for the project to come after Hobo Lobo wraps up. Dune was p baller material in this regard.

     

    If anyone can point me in the direction of other fascinating works of anthropology, philosophy or speculative world-building fiction, I would greatly appreciate it!


  19. Blogger doesn't give you access to the metal the way WordPress does—because it is more of a goog service for luddites than a cms in a zip you install on your server—so I doubt there is as as lush an ecosystem of 3rd party e commerce plugins.


  20. The simplest way to go about it would be to just bake some PayPal buttons—wanting to support the relatively obscure iDeal dealio makes it more complicated. I would suggest looking into any WordPress store plugins. Most of those are not free, though some decent ones come in pretty cheap, and it is relatively trivial to set up a WP site.


  21. Oh man these are sooooo coooooooooool!!

     

    The other day I dug out my childhood LEGO and built this weird little weird little wobbly Boschian automata which I will probably expand and make properly cool as soon as I find time and inclination to do so. My LEGO is very much 80s and early 90s and I have little inclination to buy new sets, but who knows. The grand centerpiece of my collection—what'll allow me to make some really dope automata—is the fabled Technic plotter, set 8094, and its motherlode of gears. Last time I looked at new Technic sets a few years back, very few of them seemed to be mechanically oriented which was a huge bummer.