I got my paper “Algorithmic Pattern” accepted for the mighty @NIME2020! The conference will be online only, which is great - hopefully that’ll set a trend beyond pandemic. Here’s the submitted draft, feedback welcome. https://t.co/O9elX1Lu74
Speechless every time someone says that this was totally unexpected & nobody saw this coming. See chapter 3: ‘Preparing for the Worst: A Rapidly Spreading, Lethal Respiratory Pathogen’ published by the @WHO Sept 2019. https://t.co/23qTrz7dN9
Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki passed away today at the age of 86. His ‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’ was used in Part 8 of Twin Peaks. pic.twitter.com/UwKOPko9lc
“La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati.”
–
Antonio Gramsci (1930)
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” A loose translation, commonly attributed to Gramsci by Slavoj Žižek. Presumably formulation by Žižek. Presumably a translation from a loose French translation by Gustave Massiah, strict English with cognate terms and glosses:
"Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres”
“The old world is dying, the new world tardy (slow) to appear and in this chiaroscuro (light-dark) surge (emerge) monsters.”
“…I became conscious that in all acousmatic musics, at each level of the composition there are four basic types of articulation: montage or collage, mixing, the transformation of one sonic characteristic into another, which, in order to be perceptible, also needs the temporal factor; and silence. The indispensable empty time.”
— Ferreyra, Beatriz. “Perceive, Feel, Hear.” In Composer L’écoute / Composing Listening, edited by François Bonnet and Bartolomé Sanson. 33-38. Rennes: Shelter Press, 2019.
Empty Cities around the World during the Quarantine
The New York Times has just released a series of breathtaking photographs of the world’s largest cities during this heavy quarantine period. “The void proliferates like the virus” chants the newspaper, illustrating confinement around the world. More and more countries are indeed finding themselves obliged to adopt more or less harsh exit restrictions in order to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
The best Zoom alternative is fewer virtual meetings and more considered, long-form write-ups. It won’t replace them all, but if your remote day is nothing but a long series of Zoom meetings with small breaks in between, you’re probably doing it wrong.
All this and no in-home quarantine units. No pandemic isolation shed. More desks just means packing more potentially ill people into a house, working to exhaustion. https://t.co/appzAwlsn0
“It is when the machine begins to break down that you begin to see how it works. Likewise it is when authority is challenged that you begin to see the otherwise concealed workings of the power structure. This we could call… *preemptively apocalyptic knowledge*…” -Mick Taussig
I’ve said “I hate this” so many times on this website, and never actually meant it, because “I hate this” is just shorthand for ‘this is an example of a meme given a twist I wasn’t expecting with intent to surprise’. Which is, in of itself, a meme on this site. God damn it.
But this… This is something else.
The rapidity of a meme’s introduction to its zenith to its decline is so rapid that in ten years, you’ll need a damn twenty-page manual to explain this. It’ll be as unfunny and hard to explain as jokes in Shakespeare plays, except
even more inexplicable because
fuck, at least Shakespeare’s jokes are usually about anal or fucking your mother, good wholesome sex jokes we can all get behind.
For the love of fuck, how do you explain loss.jpg?
How do you explain gun?
….I THOUGHT THIS WAS A YMCA REFERENCE
it is a YMCA reference - that’s one of the 6 memes being represented here
ok let me see if i can break this down easily. YMCA is the easiest place to start - the song itself has become a meme over time with people changing the lyrics to reference other pop cultural events. so YMCA is meme one (1)
this first lyric replacement (”take the breadsticks and run”) is a reference to the tumblr meme ‘stuffing breadsticks into my purse’. i think everyone remembers that one so i wont bother to explain it. that’s meme two (2)
“man door hand hook car door” is a meme of its own, a creepypasta from i dont remember when. it was a terrible stupid retelling of the generic ‘stuck in a car while hook handed man tries to kill us’ story so the stupid title caught on for memorability. that in and of itself is meme three (3)
‘gun’ is… yeah i dont know how to explain gun. long story short you add gun to the end of a phrase instead of what you expect the last word to be. its shock funny. its everywhere but its popular to add to “man door hand hook car door” for.. some reason? gun is meme four (4)
and the thing is, this four meme combo is something thats gone around before. meme combos are, itself, a meme. which means taking this meme combo and mixing in another meme
actually becomes meme five (5)
which leaves us at loss.jpg. loss.jpg was a terrible bad comic supposed to be about some tragic event, but it was presented so poorly literally no one takes it seriously, and for some reason recreating the four-panel setup has become popular. so thats meme six (6)
(but i need to add that this is the greatest version of loss.jpg i think i’ve ever seen. the initial ‘young man’ lines up with the guy bursting through the door, and the shock meme ‘gun’ matches the shock scene of the woman in the hospital and idk if OP even thought about that but it makes this just
so much better)
I wasn’t going to reblog this, but @pagesofkenna‘s comprehensive meme-by-meme annotation is a thing of beauty and should be shared.
average tumblr post contains one meme, this post, which contains six, is an outlier and should not be counted
it might also just be a coincidence due to loss.jpg’s format but the whole white minimalist four-panel setup is also suspiciously reminiscent of those early 2000’s rage comics
I was getting a political compass vibe too
tag urself im man door hand hook car gun
This works better than I thought it would.
This was in my senior project
I’m not sorry.
EIGHT MEME COMBO
FATALITY
We have officially created a new language
I just had to do it to em
THIS FUCKING THREAD I’M GONNA CRY
I LOST IT AND MAN DOOR HAND HOOK CAR GUN AND DIDN’T EXPECT MORE I’M SOBBING
M E M E T E N
OwO?
W o w
You know I had to
I hope you know this is the most cursed addition to my post, and I love it
THIRTEEN!?
SOMEONE EDIT THIS FROM THE ORIGINAL PHOTO SAYING “this one does not spark joy” TO THIS VERSION SAYING “this one sparks joy”
well i added my contribution : )
why—
IM SCREAMING
This is the most elaborate meme I have ever seen and damn am I concerned by how it makes sense.
“You’re in your 30s, but you still understand all this meme stuff?”
“Oh yeah, sure.”
“Can you explain it to me?”
“I absolutely fucking cannot.”
One does not simply explain this
Edit:
Another freaking layer!!!
16 motherfucking layers
In the future someone’s going to ask me to explain this and I’m going to be at a loss.jpg for words
if i ever get the virus one of you just inject this thread into my vein and i’ll be fine
*That is really quite interesting. It’s so recursive. It really is like the development of some ideogram-based language.
“It is time to acknowledge the limits of anthropocentric capitalism and embrace the burden of a world that is precarious and challenging. To use our deep resourcefulness and imagination to stay with the trouble, and keep the revolt alive.” @anabjainhttps://t.co/UBUc2177WPpic.twitter.com/GiVoy5zNBD
great! and yes very good question, didn’t quite expect the response… thinking maybe bunch of calls in smaller groups rather than one big one - feral futuring as a public service😬
Three centuries earlier Zhao Rukuo tells us of a Javanese vassal called “Dānróngwǔluō” (丹戎武囉), presumably a Chinese phonetic transliteration of Tanjungpura (Middle Chinese: “tan-nyuwng-mjuX-la”, ’Phags-pa [tan-ryuŋ-ʋu-lɔ]). He says the people there prefer piracy to trade.
‘We don’t want your reforms. We want to skip over the ruins of this society, play with the fire that will defeat all of your power, dance to the death of domesticated humanity”
—Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, Arthur Evans (1978)
‘We don’t want your reforms. We want to skip over the ruins of this society, play with the fire that will defeat all of your power, dance to the death of domesticated humanity”
—Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, Arthur Evans (1978)
‘We don’t want your reforms. We want to skip over the ruins of this society, play with the fire that will defeat all of your power, dance to the death of domesticated humanity”
—Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, Arthur Evans (1978)
A patrician describing the arguments against Florence’s general quarantine in 1630: “It was thought it would give the poor the opportunity to be lazy … others were astonished that it would be possible to feed an entire city daily” pic.twitter.com/vT0zQb8Bxr
A condensed remix of some our thinking around care and uncertainty. Dedicated to all the carers near and far. To all those providing essential services and all those in isolation or lockdown. To all who care. To all… https://t.co/e57RI2E7pIpic.twitter.com/TXvzyseoUj
Coronavirus pandemic, locusts in Africa and the Middle East, melting ice in Antarctica and the Arctic, warmest years and seasons ever, floods in the Midwestern US and many other places on Earth, and so on. When do we get to sing “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead?” I think in November of this year.
A short essay where I argue that we should commandeer the toolkit of surveillance advertising to create an invasive, nonconsensual public health tracking system to help us control this pandemic https://t.co/k9dETPhyLB
This is your free trial apocalypse. If you do not wish to renew your subscription at the end of the trial period, you must cancel your carbon emissions by 2030. Otherwise your apocalypse will automatically renew for the next million years.
“Okay, here’s the scenario. You are a crew member on a starship.”
“Cool.”
“Space travel is slow, you’ll be stuck with your crewmates a long time.”
“So we must get along.”
“Yes. Communicate, listen, share limited resources.”
“I can do that. What’s the starship called?”
“Earth.”
Beneath the dense noise of humanity, countless tiny critters. Intensifying densities and distances. “All is shadow mixed with dust, and there’s no voice but in the sounds made by what the wind lifts up or sweeps forward, nor silence except from what the wind abandons” —F. Pessoa https://t.co/7RLhzbX961
With so many museums, galleries & art centres gradually closing, or reducing activities, this feels like an important & opportune moment to revisit @_foam’s pioneering work on fallow periods.
As always, @deziluzija& @zzkt were 5 years ahead of everyone:https://t.co/opKFe8AM7r
For data scientists, quants, ML folks looking for ways to help with the pandemic:
- Wash your hands often with soap for at 20 seconds.
- Avoid touching your face.
- Do not go to where there will be lots of people.
- Encourage others to do the same.
I’m sorry to say this but boomer critical theorists from Italy questioning the “authoritarian biopolitics” of the corona lockdown are really just the academic equivalent of GOP Senators going to their packed ribs restaurant the night of the travel ban.
This is not unique to coronavirus, but it feels like the people who know the *most* about something often express more uncertainty and doubt than people who have some adjacent knowledge but fall short of being subject-matter experts.
My spouse pointed out, when I wondered whether Zoom could handle every university class in the country, that I could always switch to meeting my students within World of Warcraft, because the MMORPGs are definitely equipped to handle this kind of traffic.
Looking forward to two weeks’ time when everyone has self-quarantined and declared their home a micronation. Post your Declaration of Independence here!
