disconcision:

nostalgebraist:

disconcision

replied to your

post

:

Basically, it’s important to keep in mind that…

lurking MFA are we? i prepped you a techwear starter album imgur.com/a/2jiIb (with one bonus image)

A friend linked the quoted post on Facebook, to gripe about it.  I didn’t understand any of it but the quoted bit was especially incomprehensible which is why I quoted it

hmm do you find the appended images more or less inscrutable? i guess i’m slightly confused by your confusion. but strictly speaking there’s nothing to get. techwear and related trends are simply the latest reductio ad absurdum of online visual culture. they’ve basically democratized (or rather, distributed) the concept behind couture/runway clothing, while turning the mirrors entirely inwards; clothing that exists only for the purpose of taking pictures, to be posted to the online communities dedicated to such things. it’s like cosplay but with no referent. the fact that this particular trend is at least ostensibly based on practical fabrics (breathable, water resistant, ..) pushes it to rarefied ironic extremes. if tangible reality had a face, techwear would be the gore-tex boot stomping it - forever.

The images are less confusing, because I can get a fairly good sense of what aesthetic and associated values these people are going for from depictions of them sneering at people who don’t share them.

What was confusing about the reddit post wasn’t that I didn’t understand what “techwear” was (though I suppose I still don’t, exactly) – it was the fact that it seemed to be written in a subcultural lingo, and I literally didn’t understand the sense in which a lot of terms were being used.  Like, in the quote, I get the sense that “fringe” and “fuccboi” are subculture-specific terms (”fuccboi” also appears in the first of the images you linked) and I don’t know what either one means within the subculture.

(via disconcision)

disconcision

replied to your

post

:

Basically, it’s important to keep in mind that…

lurking MFA are we? i prepped you a techwear starter album imgur.com/a/2jiIb (with one bonus image)

A friend linked the quoted post on Facebook, to gripe about it.  I didn’t understand any of it but the quoted bit was especially incomprehensible which is why I quoted it

Whoa may I ask the context even though it defeats the purpose of having ooc quotes

It’s from the paper “Romantic love: A literary universal?”, which I was looking up because of talk on the dash about the cross-cultural history of love and marriage (although it turns out that I’d mis-remembered the paper and it wasn’t all that relevant)

mttheww replied to your post: This is the reason why the presence of cats…

is this from that lovecraft essay about cats

Better: it’s from Venus In Furs, and is part of the protagonist’s bizarre “explanation” of why he has a fetish for women wearing fur.  In full:

“Of course, I know, but why this great fondness for furs?”

“I was born with it,” I replied. “I already had it as a child. Furthermore furs have a stimulating effect on all highly organized natures. This is due both to general and natural laws. It is a physical stimulus which sets you tingling, and no one can wholly escape it. Science has recently shown a certain relationship between electricity and warmth; at any rate, their effects upon the human organism are related. The torrid zone produces more passionate characters, a heated atmosphere stimulation. Likewise with electricity. This is the reason why the presence of cats exercises such a magic influence upon highly-organized men of intellect. This is why these long-tailed Graces of the animal kingdom, these adorable, scintillating electric batteries have been the favorite animal of a Mahommed, Cardinal Richelieu, Crebillon, Rousseau, Wieland.”

“A woman wearing furs, then,” cried Wanda, “is nothing else than a large cat, an augmented electric battery?”

“Certainly,” I replied.  "That is my explanation of the symbolic meaning which fur has acquired as the attribute of power and beauty. Monarchs and the dominant higher nobility in former times used it in this sense for their costume, exclusively; great painters used it only for queenly beauty. The most beautiful frame, which Raphael could find for the divine forms of Fornarina and Titian for the roseate body of his beloved, was dark furs.“

prophecyformula:

nostalgebraist:

I think it’s better to talk about sex than about iodized salt.

i really want to know what this is from so i can fight the person who wrote it

everyone constantly talks about sex, nobody talks about iodized salt, even though salt iodization was probably one of the most impactful public health measures of the last century

In context it meant “better in this case,” not “better in general,” with the perspective that they were both worthy of being talked about in general

(via epistemic-horror)

Right before I went to sleep last night I remember I was reading something that had a great potential #quote in it, and I thought “I’ll post that in the morning,” but then this morning I quit Chrome for memory reasons, and it was in an incognito tab so it’s not in my history, and now I can’t remember what it was

Let us take a moment of silence for the #quote that never was

Okay, I have to ask the source on this one

Echopraxia by Peter Watts.  (Unfortunately, “Santa” is not actually Santa Claus – he’s just being provisionally referred to that way because the viewpoint character doesn’t know his name and he looks like Santa Claus)