ALT

people are always asking me, “what’s a flowchart for your process?” and i am always saying “Thhhank yoou foorr heellppinngg… I neeedd 2 moorree ffoodss… 1 hour and 59 minutes. Please hurry! Ghostkersandwich and Almost Gummy Rat (Lime)”

i don’t think luca guadagnino is a good director… it was set designer, preexisting story, and actors that carried suspiria. changed ending was not an improvement. he doesn’t have anything in his toolkit but a brass plaque engraved with the word “edgy.” i have opinions about the other films too but they’re meaner. as much as i want to defend the right to gay mediocrity i can’t do that in good conscience when it’s so unqueer. i just don’t really want to watch movies by someone who resigned from the communist party over an argument with a newspaper editor. that’s weak. have a conviction for god’s sake, it’ll make your work so much less aimless. but i suppose that’s the only way he could find success in this econ–(pursued by dogs)

em português do brasil não se diz “casa de folhas” mas sim “que porra é essa” e eu acho isso um pouco mais vívido

one thing none of the boeing starliner articles are mentioning is that they do have a backup return vehicle. probably two of them. the soyuz capsules

this cannot be admitted because it would somehow be even more embarrassing for boeing than admitting they knew about retaliation against dead whistleblowers in a congressional hearing, to have to fall back on a 60yo soviet-designed technology, because privatizing the space program is clearly not working

i don’t really know how many astronauts or soyuz capsules are currently at the ISS but i would guess two capsules, three-seat capacity, and seven astronauts (this is bog standard but usually the incoming launch vehicle doesn’t fail), so, they are short one seat unless the starliner suddenly becomes functional (or if they launch a replacement return vehicle, which seems likeliest). which is a huge problem in case of emergency evacuation, an ever-lingering possibility given that a russian module has been sealed off due to undiagnosed and unresolved air leaks. probably the same module they’d have to go through to get to the soyuz capsules, but again, that’s a guess on my part

this would all seem to imply something about capitalist economy as terror management. the US jingoist contingent is personally, existentially invested in capitalism’s eternal supremacy, which i would call a laughably misplaced error in judgment and lack of foresight

i would hate to be among the doe-eyed coterie of NASA outreach scientists right now, phrasing any of this optimistically is beyond me (“incredible opportunity” for “invaluable data” and so on, according to boeing program VP… how monstrous, to say that while juggling people’s lives and dropping the ball)

oh cool they’ve made schoolgirl figure by wendy macleod for men

girlies at the bar last night roasting me for my flawless 1950s chic and inadvertently revealing they’ve never heard the word “rockabilly”

another thing that’s been sticking to the roof of my mouth lately is like “why are toothpaste tubes so poorly designed” “surely we as a society can do better than paper flour bags” well besties. i hate to say it. but they are simply not designed for us! they’re designed to be the cheapest good-enough option for industrial production and warehousing. end-user experience is a piddling consideration at best, maybe considered in a quarter when profits are down if you’re lucky, and forget it if it conflicts with being shelf-stable and stackable, or if it makes the production line more difficult to automate. like the superficial observation that we as a society could do better is correct but unfortunately you have to dig deeper (have we tried another economic model yet? oh, right – it got operation condored)

ruminating on the confluence of features that prevent people from getting into new music… people do rely on trusted friends to tell them what’s cool instead of figuring it out for themselves. most people rely on hearing it from multiple people at once and calling it “buzz,” and that’s not so much a result of influencer marketing as the original cause of it, but it’s nevertheless incredibly susceptible to covert marketing manipulation. labels benefit from recycling old music that they still hold one of the copyrights to. monopolizing the industry with a few huge names collimates profits towards the most amenable contracts (again, for the label) and of course i do understand why swarming toward bigger names is more fun, because there are more people there

radio frequency allocation has long since been chopped up and sold off to uh, several churches (who mostly hold AM talk radio, so that’s irrelevant) and a handful of radio station holding companies, so it’s trivial to buy airplay for payola when you can book the whole country in one perfunctory email, to a company your label established a relationship with long ago because it’s been the only game in town (and who even still listens to radio anyway, besides the workforce where devices aren’t allowed, arguably a larger portion of the music-listening public than streaming subscribers)

and just down at the base of it, liking music is made out of familiarity. you like what you’ve spent time with, so it’s simply more difficult to find likeable new music instead of putting the same old favored tracks on repeat. i just did this with jill scott’s debut album, had it playing in my car for solidly six weeks until i got a new kali uchis cd (who i already know and like). because fundamentally it was unobjectionable, relatable, and easy to listen to (unlike, i hate to say it, miseducation of lauryn hill, which was an extremely difficult listen that i could only stomach about twice because she was trying to play israel/palestine bothsidesism long before anybody else). and that’s part of the problem too – nobody wants to get into an artist of their own volition only to be slapped with an unacceptable controversy

on top of that, most of the time it’s a slog through a neverending stream of mediocrity to find something good, overlooking mediocre lyrics to focus on good production or vice versa. even at best, your local “music guy” is always getting there from the “similar artists” feature on any number of services. and even beyond that, when you really get down to brass tacks and follow a bunch of music publications on RSS, you spend a lot of time scrolling past an unappealing headline and thumbnail going “ugh, who?” until somebody gets two articles published about them and thus seems familiar. and even still, knowing all this, i’m going “WHAT do i have to do to cultivate a following willing to be the first like on a soundcloud link” and trying to sidestep the problem by reblogging somebody else’s post of the same link, thus gifting it the illusion of review by two separate parties, which still doesn’t work because nobody comes to the infinite scroll website to stop scrolling and listen. extremely dismal state of affairs for the information superhighway and i haven’t even touched on the death of piracy