WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR dot COM

cleopatrachampagne:

whiskey-women-guns-deactivated2:

charnel-grounds:

Gianluigi Coppola - Nosferatu, c. 1970s

gameraboy2:

1978 Atari 2600 ad

gameraboy2:

1984 Sony Betamax ad

monologuerhead:

Radiohead public library

The idea of the archive is a romantic one: in the age of information technology who can resist the pull of a centralized archive? Not any who has ever followed a trail of hyperlinks through the channels and nooks of Wikipedia. I find myself pulled into the romance of the archive drawn by the hint of knowledge that is just out of reach. The archive is just one way to make sense of the themes that have dominated the 20th century onwards*; cycles of repression, isolation, and capital make themselves clear almost immediately with any sort of sifting into the history of information technology (which is tied inextricably to the history of the archive), but in ways that are difficult to categorize and quantify.

This interest lead me to look into the radiohead public library. In its thoroughness (and their rare willingness to include an archive of their own websites, in the memory hole!) I have been pleasantly surprised to find a reflection of the original memex proposed by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 essay “As We May Think”, a labyrinth of articles linked by the paths of those who have read them before, and open to further linkages as the reader proceeds on. The memex could be seen as the prototype for any website stitched together by hyperlinks, a la wikipedia or the encyclopedia britannica, or more obscurely certain sections of the museum of jurassic technology’s website, and it is through the memex’s associative potential that a nonlinear (even networked) model of the world can be studied for its array of information, displayed for casual consideration, or even used to hypnotize the pursuant into a fictionalized version of events (for example, I still have yet to figure out how close to consensus reality the history of the museum of jurassic tech that is featured on its website. Clicking through the site itself is a trippy experience).

The mind fills the gaps between dream imagery with narrative and the cuts between movie scenes with implication— could the same be true for the spaces between hyperlinks, or even the silence between one tiktok video and the next? What is the meaning that links one thing to another? The Dewey Decimal System incorporates within its classification incredible bias against marginalized groups (thankfully, bias that is, albeit slowly, being addressed) simply in the way that information in the form of published books is sorted into one group or another. Through this sorting information of a slippery kind is introduced into the unwary unconscious. A connection between ‘x marginalized group’ and ‘abnormal psychology’ (DDC 301(dot)4157), has been made in the mind of the pursuant irrationally, and without any supported evidence, anecdotes, or even necessarily logic.

This is an important distinction between these hyperlinked archives and the Borgesian ‘total archive’ introduced in the short story The Library of Babel. The Library of Babel simply presents information at its rawest and most indigestible- disregarding all meaning, all truth, and all direction, the pages of its books contain more or less entire nonsense unless one is willing to use the website to find a specific hex that will repeat to you the phrase that you have asked for. Sure, it contains the summation of all human knowledge (within the english alphabet), but only at infinitesimal odds does one stumble upon meaning within its halls. It is perhaps better (or at least more sensical) if the map is smaller than the territory.

I wonder if in the present day the algorithm is at odds with the old system of hyperlinks. The algorithm approaches with a seemingly benign offer of information and media— arranged on a plate you hardly have to make the connections yourself. It’s far more coherent than the Babelian library, but its system of organization is just as dense and nonsensical (at least to the user, I have no idea what’s going on in the back end. Ping pong tables and swanky apartments in Brooklyn?). The threat within the algorithm is that the connections themselves are unstable and irrational, based and reinforced on the patterns that people already move within, but also directing their movement towards undemocratically controllable goals (I was about to simply say uncontrollable goals, but I realized that yes, there are people behind the algorithm directing it to hit certain metrics of responses or views or emotions or whatever). Being irrational, they’re difficult to rationalize, understand, and either follow further, outside of any given algorithm, or deprogram from the pursuant themself. I’m reminded of Burrough’s cut-up technique that he uses for The Soft Machine and the kind of magical terrorism that he inflicts upon his least favorite cafe. Information will resolve into meaning and meaning will condense into (re)action whether consciously or unconsciously. Even the space within paragraphs, even sentences, requires a willingness to find associative potential.

And so here I am back to my romantic archive, (let’s pretend wikipedia) where I can pretend to see within the spaces between a kind of orderly, genteel meaning, where I the pursuant can follow my own heart down the isles, tracing my own steps in a trail of purple hyperlinks. Or if I’m in the depths of the past twenty-five years of archived radiohead websites, I can find a surreal landscape where I can only partially direct my path through lyrics and images both familiar and unfamiliar; things that pertain to the year that the site was archived and things that did not reappear until much, much later (burn the witch). Still, despite all its surrealism, meaning surfaces like the white whale, and the ship goes down with its hunt.

Anyway, I wrote this all on a whim. I like to pretend to be 45 years old. I like radiohead.

*I’d be very open to extending this date further back but unfortunately I haven’t found a whole lot of material that goes further than that— or maybe I’m just not that interested in anything much older

Came across this older Reddit comment this morning:

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”

And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”

And i was like, ohok and he continues.

“you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said "yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”

And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.

defiantsuggestions:

compassionatereminders:

If you have a big, emotional, self hating meltdown every time someone tells you that you hurt them or crossed a boundary of theirs, then that means you’re not a safe person to say no to - and that’s something you need to work on. Even if you’re genuinely just really upset that you hurt someone, if every attempt at communicating a boundary to you results in the person you hurt having to repeatedly reassure you that you’re not actually a bad person, then you need to work on controlling yourself and taking constructive criticism.

Here’s the thing you need to remember, the most important part of someone coming to you to let you know you hurt them is that it isn’t a personal attack. It is an attempt at comunication. Generally, because you are their friend.

They are telling you this so that you will know to avoid doing the thing that hurt them in the future.

Imagine if it hurt them and they didn’t tell you. Then you’d just keep doing it, over and over, because you’d have no way of knowing it was hurting them unless they told you.

It isn’t better for your friends to suffer in silence. It isn’t better for them to start avoiding you because they’re being hurt and they don’t want to tell you. You don’t want your friends to be in pain.

They don’t want you in pain either!

They don’t want you to lash out at yourself, they don’t want you to hate yourself, they don’t want to watch you drag yourself through the mud. It hurts to see your friends suffer, which means it hurts them when you do that to yourself.

Putting them in the position of having to comfort you when they’re trying to communicate something that will improve your relationship is just going to make them not want to communicate when you do something that hurts them.

And you don’t want that. You want your friends to tell you when you hurt them, because the alternative is that they don’t.

Yes, it sucks to feel guilt and self directed anger when you make a mistake, but you can’t turn on yourself like that. It affects other people, and it’s not healthy for you, either.

Accidentally hurting someone doesn’t make you a bad person. It means you made a mistake, and you need to own that mistake. Apologize, and then work on not repeating it.

If you need to step away and collect yourself, that’s fine. If you need to have the conversation over text, there’s no harm in asking for that. Emotions are what they are, they get difficult to handle sometimes.

But you have to remember that someone telling you that you hurt them is doing so anticipating that you’ll acknowledge the harm done and seek to rectify it. They aren’t doing it because they want to hurt you. They don’t want you to feel like the worst person ever, and if they do want you to feel like the worst person ever then they probably aren’t your friend. Friends do not want you to hate yourself.

gameraboy2:

Spanish poster to The Lord of the Rings (1978)

punkieagainsttheworld:

Debbie Harry and Joey Ramone

archiemcphee:

Itty Bitty Bigfoot

A bag of eight 1-3/8" tall Bigfoot. Hide a tiny Bigfoot in a potted plant, and you’ve changed a philodendron into a mysterious fantasyland! These Itty Bitty Bigfoot have a tiny base, so you can stand them up on almost any flat surface. And yes, we realize his feet are tiny, but they’re big compared to other Itty Bitty missing links.

forever70s:

1978 interior

teamlynda-deactivated20240930:

honestly i was obsessed with LC for this (before my time as @teamlynda)

republicansaredomesticterrorists:

McCarthy is trash and he’s willing to make deals with #LargeMarge to become Speaker of the House.

lookcaitlin:

(Source: archive.org)