Friday Ephemera

“The speech has its own Wikipedia article”
Thank you! Much appreciated.
“(final and clinching proof that Wikipedia has disappaeared up its own nerdy arse”
And yet the Wikipedia editors deleted the page about The People’s Cube on the pretense that it was of too little interest.

Moderately amusing T-shirts of note:
https://twitter.com/ThatEricAlper/status/1010598421986766848

Film that deserves all the love: The Princess Bride. Obvs.
As much as I loved it as an adolescent, with adult eyes I’ve come to realize it’s cut from the same cloth as Starship Troopers: a butchery of the far superior original work so inept it ends up inverting the message. One could say the same thing about Man of La Mancha, I suppose.

What strikes (and saddens) me is that Glenn and his merry band [at the execrably phoned-in Instapundit] are not exactly banner-waving Trumppalos. Half the noise from the howler monkeys over there is just the same droolers throwing the same insults at the co-bloggers on every single post.
Most of the other half, as Spiny Normal alludes, is Reynold’s fans violently protesting anything that deviates from their “Libertarian” neocon sensibilities and snorting at their high school jokes. Pocket protectors and Coke bottle lenses are credentials.
Speaking of co-bloggers, someone’s got to keep all that Republicanism flowing.
In between the selfie-sticking and groin references it’s baffling that the place hasn’t developed one functional political philosophy in a decade, although that said, spaceships – Faster, Please! – will make the New America settlement on an airless, irradiated Mars a utopia of something something argle bargle etc.
So yeah, rightism. It’s in good hands.

The Matrix was probably the most complete, prescient allegory for emerging dystopia yet written
Don’t know if I’d go that far but agree that there was something there. I’ve used “the Matrix” for years now to describe what is now more commonly referred to as “Teh Narrative”. But much as Valarie states on the next thread:

It couldn’t be more BBC. It’s as BBC as Blue Peter presenters telling the kiddies to be careful with the scissors. Be careful, kiddies, that you don’t cut yourselves on the sharp edge of your own pristine virtue, but the real danger to watch out for is that you and/or most of your friends will be Thatcherites by the age of 30.

I kinda see The Matrix that way. A bit of a prophylactic against thinking/seeing. Plus the bullet dodging drama combined with the duster coats, Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss (ugh), and the Mr. Smith thing just felt too pre-hipsterish/soy-boy/somethingorother.

the bullet dodging drama combined with the duster coats, Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss (ugh), and the Mr. Smith thing just felt too pre-hipsterish/soy-boy/somethingorother.
It’s adolescent power fantasy, of the type popularized by the Columbine killer narrative.
This is going to sound weird, but for an excellent example of the phenomenon rent the Chuck Norris film Sidekicks. It’s a deconstruction of teenage revenge fantasy films like The Karate Kid. There’s a scene where a 16-year-old Jonathan Brandis (playing a twelve-year-old) dresses up like one of Norris’ characters, complete with a child-sized duster, miniature sawed-off shotgun, and clip-on mullet (no, I am not making that part up). He looks ridiculous, and that highlights how ridiculous the original character is.
Fortunately, the whole point of the movie is that yes, this is ridiculous, and disaffected teenagers would be better off improving themselves and finding a positive focus rather than embracing silly fantasies.

It’s adolescent power fantasy, of the type popularized by the Columbine killer narrative.

I pegged it as a geek power fantasy rather than an adolescent one, but yes. A programmer/hacker becomes ‘woke’ (literally) and runs around kicking ass and defying ‘the Man’ in order to save humanity. Consideration of how, exactly, humanity would survive if suddenly decanted en masse from their life pods didn’t seem to be factored into their Noble Cause, but whatevs. Saving the world, bro!
Maybe that was addressed in the later movies, but I barely made it through the first. The ridiculously contrived premise was almost painful. Not sure which was stupider, the notion of blocking out the power source for the entire biosphere in hopes of shutting down solar-powered robots, or the robots themselves building a generator out of a bunch of human potatoes instead of, say, a nuclear reactor.