The thing about the “white cube” style of art gallery display is that it’s actually not letting you appreciate the art in a vacuum. Art looks different in different displays, and I appreciate the attempt to solve that problem, but a blank white wall is itself an aesthetic, it has its own cultural connotations and background and associations. It is not devoid of extraneous meaning. A white cube is not a vacuum, it is a white cube. It looks sterile, empty, industrial. Not all art was meant to be displayed in a white cube. Leonardo Da Vinci never intended for the Mona Lisa to be displayed in a white cube. There is no such thing as a vacuum.
I don’t even have the resolve to consider mcr5 potentially being real and being released at some point in the near future. Like I genuinely have to keep that thought locked inside my mind to suppress the phoenix so my telekinesis doesn’t destroy the surrounding area
insane how much dark magic daniel seems to be capable of because what do you mean all his replacements failed, the car went to shit and suddenly his biggest opp, the man who gloated about him choosing to retire, gets fired on a random ass Wednesday? dark magic. deep dark magic daniel ricciardo
I do genuinely always think about the opening scene of the social network being Jessie Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg being openly rude, disrespectful, smarmy and misogynistic to Rooney Mara’s character and she responds with the now iconic line that he will very probably be very successful and will go through life thinking that people don’t like him because he’s a nerd but actually people don’t like him because he’s an asshole and that this interaction is how the movie is framed and even bookended, with Mark in the final scene trying to request her as a friend on Facebook but she as far as we know doesn’t accept. And everything in the movie only serves to prove her right, that he is successful and smart but ultimately an asshole who built his success on comparing women to farm animals out of spite for her. This is literally the opening sequence of the film, the main interaction it’s framed around and it baffles me that there are people who view The Social Network (2010) as some kind of lionisation of Facebook’s creation, and not one of the most prescient cautionary tales about misogyny and technocracy of our time. To this day, the only thing Zuckerberg actually disputes about the film is that actually he married a woman he met in college. Nothing else. He disputes nothing else. No movie has aged better than The Social Network (2010) and I do actually sincerely wish that wasn’t the case.
See, our first mistake was trying to have a civilization in northern Europe between October and February. The darkest three months of the year should be for staying home under the blankets, midwinter festivals, and getting blind drunk when the sun goes down at 4 pm like the bog gods intended.
boss calling me asking why I left work early, and I’m sitting in the peat bog with the slime up to my neck. no, I’m not coming in tomorrow, I say. the ghosts of my Paleolithic ancestors are whispering to me. fine, I say. yeah, I’ll get a doctor’s note. a skeletal hand erupts from the depths proffering a swamp-blackened chunk of birch bark. someone has scratched a perfectly filled out Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbescheinigung in an unknown pre-Indo-European language. it’s for a whole week off, which is nice. i pour a little of my whiskey out into the bog, as a token of appreciation.
i speak to the bog in halting proto-germanic bc it’s as close as i can get, but that’s like six thousand years too late for most of the bog gods, who haven’t been paying attention to mortal affairs since the Neolithic. the corpse of a dead Wendish prince translates for me. he’s spent a lot of time with other bog ghosts, and picked up a pretty stunning variety of languages. but sometimes he has to ask the others for help for tricky concepts like farming or the internet that the bog gods don’t have words for. O Gods of the Bog, i ask, what wisdom do you have for escaping the ennui of modern life?
there are distant ululations and strange misshapen figures stir in the mist. sacrifice your king to the bog, the reply comes. strangle him and throw his head into the mire, with offerings of iron and gold. i sigh. It’s no use trying to explain we don’t have a king anymore. That’s their answer to everything.
