FiveHourMarathon's profile

FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 2hr ago

But I'm not cool with the idea that destroying the commons is okay when I do it in a classy way but not when those shlups do it in a low class way.

Ah, there's the problem, I am cool with that idea.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 2hr ago

I have been surprised by the longevity of this incident in the news cycle. I mostly consider it a boring incident.

I think you're underestimating the impact of racism, sexism, tribalism, and profiling in the perception of this incident as compared to others.

Renee Good was a 37 year old white mother of three. I haven't looked into her background, but just judging from the car not being a complete heap I don't think she was impoverished, we can probably label her middle class. There's virtually no chance, with just that data, that she was out there engaged in a suicide terrorist mission. She might literally have to be the first middle aged white woman in all of American history to do something like that. I asked both ChatGPT and Grok, neither could bring me a single documented case of a white woman between the ages of 30-50 killing an on-duty police officer in the history of the United States. If we included "middle class," "mother of three," and "not visibly disordered" it would cut those odds even more. When I asked for 30-50 year old white female terrorists period (not just anti-cop), the closest I got was Shawna Forde who murdered two illegal immigrants as part of some cockamamie border militia thing, and maybe some left wing bank robbers from the 70s but those were getaway drivers. If anyone else can find me examples of 30-50 year old white women killing on-duty cops, let me know!

Liberals might decry racial profiling, but they believe in it, because it is obviously true. A male suspect is vastly more likely to be dangerous than a female, an old suspect less dangerous than a young one, a black suspect more dangerous than a white one. A middle aged white woman is just vastly unlikely to be a domestic terrorist engaged in an anti-cop suicide mission.

The white middle class might dislike what ICE is doing or we might not particularly care, but we pretty much assume that whatever happens it won't touch us. This is one of us getting shot. Not some immigrant getting sent to a foreign torture prison in Cuba or El Salvador, not some black kid in baggie pants getting killed, this is a middle aged woman who looks like my sister, my coworkers, my grad school classmates. I might roll my eyes when they lib out, that doesn't mean I'm comfortable with a world where they might get shot. A middle class liberal might decry his privilege, but he still believed in it, that as a middle class white person he was protected, that bad things wouldn't happen to him. This pierced that privilege. And that's hard to deal with.

The reason this is hanging around is because Renee Good doesn't fit the profile of the kind of person who gets killed by the cops. Turbolibs love to quote Wilholt's law: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." And they believed that, they believed they were in the group that the law protected but did not bind. Every accusation is an admission. White liberals believed that their privilege would protect them. It turns out it will not.

And that means you have to make a decision. Because when the gun turns against your tribe, the nature of war is that you don't get a choice of which tribe you are part of. If we decide that killing middle aged women for being turbolibs is ok, I can't decide that I'm not part of the tribe, my family and my friends decide that for me. I can only decide whether I'm ok with their deaths or not.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 2hr ago

It's very clear that the British viewed the Afrikaaners as colonial ethnics in the same way they viewed the Zulu, maybe a step above the blacks but fundamentally a primitive group to be managed through conflict with other such groups.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 3hr ago

Picture this. It's 2011, you're nineteen or twenty. Your fraternity has booked a party bus to take everybody to formal. Everybody is pregamed, dancing in the aisle of the bus. You grab the overhead handrail, and realize you can do a pull up on it, then realize you can flip over and loop your legs over the rail and hang upside down. So of course you grab your girlfriend and you kiss her upside down and your fraternity brothers and their dates yell WHOOOOOO SPIDERMAN

So anytime you're drunk with your friends and you see a handrail or a pull up bar or an appropriately sized tree branch you can swing your legs over, you do the same thing. And everyone saw that movie ten years ago and cheers. It's the college equivalent of the middle school practice of jumping to touch the top of doorways.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 3hr ago

-- Is there anything more American than finding something new, civilizing it for the masses, only to lament and resent that the newly civilized space has no place for you? It's the plot of John Wayne's McClintock, where the old cowboy who killed the Indians and built the town regrets that both the daughter of his body and the son of his spirit can't experience pioneering the way he did, and the musical Rent where the hipsters who made the Village cool bitch that New York is cool now and they might have to pay money to live there. The pioneer tames the wilderness and makes it safe for civilization, only to find that civilization has no place for the pioneer, and that he can never step in the same wild river twice, that he isn't the same man and it isn't the same river.

-- On a more culture-war and less FFT basis, I can argue there's a difference between what my wife did and the modern scene. I was at the library book sale over the summer, and among the old ladies and college students there was two or three immigrant women with little barcode scanners attached to their phones. And methodically, mechanically, they would scan each and every bar code on each and every book, one at a time, not even glancing at the cover or the title, and picking up one book out of every fifty or so which the phone told them was valuable enough to resell. That's what modern reselling looks like: poor immigrants sucking every cent of value out of stuff they don't even care about. I'm generally averse to critiquing the poor for trying to keep body and soul together, but their presence eliminates the opportunity for a down-on-their-luck hobbyist to hustle a bit of money on the side using their knowledge and skill. This is one less way that an ordinary person can make a little money without debasing themselves. And there's a certain romance to a young middle class woman leveraging her knowledge and enthusiasm to arbitrage, that just isn't there for a drone who doesn't care about the stuff involved, that I think makes the former acceptable in a way the latter is not.

-- As part of the above, the level of stuff involved is different. Mrs FiveHour would find the odd piece of Gucci or Prada and buy it for $10 and sell it for $300. Nowadays it's Banana Republic and Abercrombie getting sold at Goodwill for $20-25 and then resold marked up to $30-40. It used to be I'd spend all day hunting for vintage Scottish cashmere, and get it for $8, but on the way I'd see a thousand Banana Republic sweaters and any day I wanted I could go over and buy a cheap sweater. Now the juice isn't worth the squeeze for the cheap stuff, I think you're better off waiting for a sale on it new at that price point. Nobody needs cheap Gucci, but it used to be nice being able to get functional nice looking stuff for cheap.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 6hr ago

I enjoyed the various tweets about how cyclists will be thrilled to find out what you're allowed to do to a driver that bumps into you with their car.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 7hr ago

If it's applied evenly I don't object in principle. What worries me (hugboxing) is applying it on the basis of what inflammatory language inflames. "Kidnap" upsets ICE's fans, much as "Negro" or "being a pussy" inflames wokescolds. If the tendency is to discipline against language that upsets the audience, then the restrictions start to mirror the audience's preferences, creating a comfortable environment for the existing members at the cost of openness and accuracy.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 7hr ago

My wife was just complaining about how second hand shopping has changed from when we were in college.

Time was, Goodwill priced everything the same: a men's suit was $12.99, a women's dress was $8.99. Didn't matter if it was cashmere from Saks or polyester from Sears, for the most part they just priced everything the same. As a result, in the sea of junk, you could find gold, and cheap. My wife and I were inveterate thrifters through our undergrad years, I still have a lot of really nice stuff I bought that way. My friends and family members often commented at the time, something like "FiveHour, Goodwill is for poor people who need it, you can afford to buy new clothing." Inevitably, when they came with me, they realized that there was essentially no demand from poor people for camel hair sportcoats, and that my consumption was orthogonal to the charity aspect of the store, and they started looking for the half-off items.

Over time, the stigma of "used clothes" broke down from people like us shopping there for fashion, and resale sites like Ebay and Poshmark became more prominent. Mrs. FiveHour, when between jobs, made tens of thousands of dollars buying at Goodwill or Poshmark and arbitraging to Ebay or TheRealReal. More and more people got comfortable with used stuff, and Goodwill noticed everyone else making money off of their work, and they started raising prices on good stuff to capture some of the value. With demand up as more people bought used, and the reputation appearing that you could get a great deal, people came in and paid higher prices.

Mrs. FiveHour whines that the used market isn't what it used to be, that it's no longer worth the effort. I'm an optimist, and pointed out that we had the best part of the wave: we got the low prices for designer goods when we were broke, and now that we're well-employed (and more set in our fashion ways) we have the money to buy what we want from the stores we like. And anyway, I've accumulated too many goodyear welted shoes and vintage cashmere sweaters anyway, I don't need to go buy more of them at any price. Though I will admit, I miss it as a fun date with my wife, I do think part of the reduction in fun comes from higher standards on my part rather than changing prices.

But if I were a broke college student today, I couldn't walk into a thrift store, invest three hours of my time, and walk out with gorgeous vintage designer clothes. It used to be that if you had the knowledge of clothing brands and construction, fashion taste and discernment, and time you could go to thrift stores and look fantastic without spending a lot of money. Now, that's a much tougher thing to do. Efficiency wins at all levels: Goodwill makes more money, or original purchasers on Poshmark get back some money, but for young or broke fashionistas the opportunity and creativity isn't there.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 7hr ago

I'm making a concerted effort to read the books I picked up at the Library used book sale last summer, which have been sitting in a nice row on my china cabinet for too long. So I've been diving into Nelson Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. Thoughts so far (his ANC activism has just started):

-- Mandela is an excellent writer. His account of coming out of primitivism and poverty to lawyer and activist is compelling and personal, he manages to balance good humor and honest accounts of oppression. I'd compare it to Angela's Ashes though obviously a bit more serious, where you have accounts of bad experiences that focus on the personal and the human.

-- Mandela's account of his youth reveals a modernizing tension. He grows up in a traditional tribal society, or at least the British-Empire-Sponsored Disneyland version of such, his father was a close courtier of the tribe's chief and when his father died Nelson was raised as a ward of the chief. Then the chief tried to marry Nelson off to another prominent family, in a way that would aid the chief in tribal politics, and Nelson didn't want to marry her so he ran away to Johannesburg. When he got to Joburg he prevailed upon his co-tribals and friends of the chief for hospitality and help getting jobs and connections, though some turned him away or reduced their aid when the chief got in touch others continued to help him. Later on he lost another housing situation when he started dating a girl from another ethnic group, and complained of the prejudice between tribes. This is both philosophically inconsistent, and very sympathetic and human: Nelson admires the close ties of tribal life, and takes advantage of them; but he shirks the obedience to the chief and insular xenophobia that creates those ties.

-- I never realized how late Apartheid was introduced. The 1948 South African elections brought the Nationalist party to power, and only then was the system formalized. While obviously the prior colonial regimes were far from woke and equal, the post-1948 system was a very real reduction in rights for blacks and an even larger reduction in optimism for future rights. Nelson's account before 1948 maps to the British belief that their colonial possessions would slowly assume independence as they assumed civilization: the British would create a civilized local black elite which would assist in ruling over the black majority and slowly assume rights, black rights would expand over time as more blacks were civilized until equality was reached. Then the Afrikaner nationalists took power and took back rights blacks had already been granted, while making clear that blacks would never achieve equality with whites. I wonder to what degree this change reflected the Afrikaner history and ideology of themselves as the oppressed minority conquered by the British? I always thought that Apartheid developed naturally from earlier systems, I didn't realize it was a late-created and harsher system than what came before.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 23hr ago

it's a less precise word so i'd probably (perhaps due to my legal-adjacent background) be more permissive around it

Invasion is a precise word within numerous federal laws which regulate the ability of the government to suspend civil rights or use military forces domestically. Which I think is precisely what people who use the term "invasion" to refer to migrant labor are advocating. Does that change your feelings about how the use of the term "invasion" should be regulated?

I think once we start regulating aggressive use of terms it either ends in stilted language as we regulate ordinary speech out of existence, or it ends in one side getting hugboxed to avoid hurting their feelings.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 1d ago

Would you say that the word "invasion" and its derivations should be modded similarly?

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 1d ago

Huh, interesting. I don't really think of it like that. When I think of the backrooms kind of genre, I think of being a small child and seeing the boiler room at my elementary school. Being six years old, the boiler looked enormous, loud, dangerous and fascinating and hidden. When I think of endless dream spaces, I think of occupied spaces, or of forests.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 1d ago

I own a rental house that's on a back road between two gorges tucked in the far corner of our town. So five minutes away in the same zip code you're in solid suburbia, but at this house you're dead alone for a few hundred acres in every direction except for the coyotes.

And it's interesting because when I look for tenants, a large number of people will tell me that they can't live there because it isn't safe, no one is around. Where my reflex is that it's very safe because no one is around. I would have figured that it would be gendered, because I would think it very effeminate to worry about, but a lot of men say so too, expressed as concern about property or women.

It's just fascinating because such fears must be primal, as they are clearly irrational. There's much more to worry about in a city than in the middle of nowhere.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 1d ago

Nobody totally fails at biglaw. The nature of the job is that you have to succeed quite a bit before you even get the chance to fail. Your work product will initially be so far from anything that travels outside of the firm that if you bomb right out of the gate, your work will never be seen by anyone, and no matter how bad you are the firm will probably still give you a month or so to keep your title while you look for another job, and nobody will really know you failed just that you're leaving, which a lot of people do.

People commonly go in house at various corporations or go into government work. But really over time they'll end up anywhere.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 2d ago

That spider man movie is iconic for me just for the upside down kiss scene, which I've tried to imitate with every gf I've ever had at every opportunity and it's a good trick that goes well every time. What other movie has that?

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 2d ago

It's like the marketing is meant to tell you: hit defect, everyone around you is about to become fake and gay, you might as well defect early and reap some measly social prestige benefits quickly before this kind of thing becomes so well known that all meaning is destroyed forever.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 2d ago

Why are advertisements for AI so bad?

There's one running during football games where a coach is, I think, supposed to be picking players for the draft. And he starts asking the AI to give him the linebackers with various traits, then asks for the ones with "strong leadership abilities." And that is OBVIOUSLY A TERRIBLE QUESTION to ask AI! All an LLM could maybe do is search news articles to see if any have been called out for it, but in all honesty I'd expect it to tell me "yeah no can do boss." Like there's probably a lot of useful things an LLM can do for NFL draft prep, but asking it to assess intangibles is not one of them!

And there have been others just the same. Apple ran a series of ads where employees used AI to just not do their jobs. Like a producer using it to summarize a script that she then agrees to buy (the benefit being that she didn't get caught not reading it). Or using it to pretend to participate in a meeting you aren't prepared for, or reply to emails. And the impression I get out of it is that as an employer I would not want my employees using AI to make it harder to see if they're doing their jobs.

It just seems like they're giving terrible examples of awful and irresponsible ways to use LLMs which will almost certainly lead to disappointment and disillusionment.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 2d ago

The ufc white house event is a good barometer of whether the ufc is a legit league or if it's gone full WWE: if all the Americans win, it's cooked.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 3d ago

It's all part of the same supernatural tradition, right? The same thin places can lead to a kid eaten by monsters or a kid being gifted magical treasure by fairies in two different legends. The liminal Shitbird Geography of every suburban town provides both the overlooks and reservoirs and abandoned camps and empty barns where teenagers make out or smoke weed, and the same places where every serial killer story is set when the slasher gets at the horny teenagers.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 3d ago

This post is so riddled with errors (it's obviously not a bodycam and he doesn't go down) that I think it might be a troll and it's probably a bad idea to engage.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 3d ago

Liminal horror is in many ways the modern manifestation of the "horror of the gaps," that horror exists just at the edge of civilization, just at the edge of what we have normal knowledge of, and as that line has shifted so has the location of horror. In the same way that we talk about the God of the Gaps shrinking to exist in the spaces between human scientific knowledge, supernatural horror has shrunk over the years to fit into the spaces where civilization does not adhere.

In ancient and medieval horror stories, the spirits exist just at the edge of the village. The forest is dark and full of terrors. You might meet the devil at any crossroads at night. Only God sees what goes on in the mountains or the deserts, and who can possibly say what might be on the other side? Hansel and Gretel can run into a witch just on the edge of town, the Black Forest has everything from dwarven kingdoms to the gates of hell depending on the story, the Irish bogs are full of fairy lights and changelings.

Then the Enlightenment happens in England, science happens, exploration happens, the world is connected, the forests that aren't cut down are well mapped, the deserts and mountains have good roads through them. We know there aren't witches in the woods. So then you have Bram Stoker, who projects that horror across the English Channel, to Transylvania, a gap in modernity, a place where horror can still exist without modernity knowing about it. Then a few more decades pass, and modernity is pretty well hit in Transylvania, so Lovecraft has to fit his cosmic horror into smaller gaps: Antarctica, the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, a strange cult on an Island or among the negroes and Portuguese down at the docks. Then you have the "highway horror" of mid-century America: Children of the Corn or Deliverance or Silent Hill, the idea that if you take the wrong turn off the highway traveling between civilized towns you can end up in horror. This is a very real experience any Pennsylvanian has had: driving your nice comfortable car on a nice modern highway between metropoles of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, you can end up at a gas station that time forgot very easily. Hell, driving from NYC to Syracuse, you briefly find yourself in towns where all the signs are in Hebrew and the locals make it very clear that the uncircumcised are unwelcome. Then the world became a little more connected, and a little more documented, and highway horror started to lose its credibility, because those towns have high speed internet and cell phone service and cameras and everything. In the 1970s, Deliverance just barely works, today banjo kid would be watching videos on TikTok just like any other kid.

So horror has had the retreat again, and having nowhere left to go geographically (the forests are parks, transylvania and silent hill both have high speed internet, Antarctica has been mapped and the pacific islands are mostly resorts), horror has to retreat into the interior. The liminal spaces are a new wilderness, created by humans but over time taking on a life of their own. This is just the latest gap that horror has shrunk to inhabit. The backrooms and hallways are a reflection of internet horror, the horror that is hidden in recursive chatrooms and forums and groups. That infrastructure created for one thing can be used for others. The same horror around homeless people living in subway tunnels. Some of it is a sense of living in the ruins and margins of a great civilization that has retreated. As a kid living in the exurban-rural rust belt, realistically there was no wilderness, but there was the abandoned. There was an abandoned construction company building we used to "explore" each year on a certain camping trip in the boy scouts, the "House of Nine Inch Nails" because of graffiti made years before I arrived. Places like this became part of the "shitbird geography" that forms a big part of teenage suburban life, the places you can go in town to smoke or drink or make out with a girlfriend: dead ends where bridges are out, abandoned industrial buildings, access roads built for projects that were never completed, old churches that have been empty for years, school buildings still used only for storage, reservoirs with long access roads and no traffic at night. Of course, cheap chinese surveillance cameras have probably disrupted this activity for today's kids anyway. But there's still some space, somewhere, that remains abandoned, wrong, uncanny, still existing but eternally empty.

This fits into the book I read last week: House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski.

It was a really good horror book for me, probably the best horror literary experience I have ever had, primarily in that a friend gave it to me for Christmas and I had heard of the book but knew nothing about it. It was often mentioned as a book in the "confusing metafiction" space, but if you had asked me in advance what a book called "House of Leaves" was about, I would have said that it was a domestic drama about a Japanese lady and the passage of time, or something like that. So I'll say right now, if you want to read House of Leaves the way I did, STOP READING THIS COMMENT.

HoL is fun because it combines Borges style reality-bending metafiction with simple horror: there's an alternate dimension and a monster in it, a big monster that growls and has big claws and might want to kill you. Or it might not exist at all. There's absolutely no certainly about anything. The book is layered with at least three unreliable narrators: it presents itself as a found text of a found text of a review. The narrative of the book is a summary and review of a documentary, The Navidson Record, about a family that moves into a house in Virginia, only to find the house is bigger inside than outside, and that a mysterious door appears leading to an infinite hallway with more doors and staircases etc. But the summary and review is presented as the incomplete and damaged found papers and work of Zampano, an old blind man living by himself who died under mysterious circumstances, and put together by Johny Truant, our punk rock vulgarwave guide and narrator. Johny in turn inserts his own opinions and stories through footnotes to Zampano's review of Navidson. Then, on top of Truant, you have the "editor" who published Truant's mostly complete manuscript. So you have these layers of Event >>> Navidson's documentary >>> Zampano's review >>> Johny's editing and interpolations >>> the editor. There's additional sub layers, like when Navidson's wife cuts a trailer for the movie and the critics that Zampano either cites or invents, but there are always those layers to deal with.

In some ways, i think this is kind of a cheat code for Danielewski. No matter what mistake or inconsistency or bad writing HoL partakes of, it's impossible to pin it on Danielewski, it's always an error made "by" the unreliable narrator, revealing something about our knowledge or his character. If the parts of the story don’t fit together, that’s an unreliable narrator, or it’s a call out to some kind of symbolic happening, it’s meaningful that the error was made. Then you chase down that error and turn it into a new theory. The book is about the labyrinth but it also is the labyrinth. And you get lost in the book. In theories, in readings. Which of narrators and levels of narration are “real?” The obvious answer is none of them, but also some of them. Each level involves claims that don’t make any sense. Navidson claims there’s a giant labyrinth in his hallway, Zampano claims that there’s this movie and all this academic criticism of it, and Johny claims that despite being marginally employed as a tattoo apprentice despite having no tattoos he gets laid constantly. The latter is actually the least believable claim for me, to be honest. There’s theories that hold that all of them exist, that none of them exist and it’s all a mysterious other person, that one of them is the real writer and the rest are created fictions to cover up or represent parts of the psyche of the real author. And you can’t escape the labyrinth, there is no answer. Danielewski successfully creates a riddle with no answers. I had a lot of fun debating it with friends, and it’s a good atmospheric spooky book, but there is nothing real at the end of it. I highly recommend it, but my answer to the question is ultimately that we choose to enter or exit the labyrinth, as Davidson ultimately is retrieved from the House by his wife’s love, and that the real answer is the friends we make along the way.

Quick story - I got mildly lost in the suburbs once. The idea of suburbs as liminal spaces is probably not a new one, but it was interesting to encounter this in real life.

I experienced this same kind of thing when doing my eponymous marathon run. Most of the roads I planned to use are long and straight and grid-style, easy to navigate as long as you know which direction the sun or the ocean or the bay is in. But there are two patches of neighborhoods at the far ends of the Island that are that same kind of labyrinthine subdivision, with discontinuous road names that start and stop, curve around into cul-de-sacs, disconnect and then restart after an offset. And after 20 miles, buzzing on exhaustion and endorphins and caffeine, I couldn’t find my way out. I had my phone, I had it tracking my progress!, but I don’t want to sit there and stare at it, and somehow I kept making wrong turns and getting spun around. Partly I suppose I’d gotten comfortably with the open grid, where I had basically memorized the five or so turns I would make before leaving home in the morning, and now trying to remember directions was impossible. I didn’t want to walk it staring at my phone, both for pace and pride reasons, but I had to stop and look at the map multiple times, and still got turned around, because all the buildings look the same and all the roads have similar names of flowers or trees, and everything is so similar it’s hard to figure out. It starts to stress me out, out of a mix of shame and fear that I’m crashing out. And it’s creepy because it’s empty, it’s the off-season, and there are maybe two dozen people in a neighborhood with a hundred houses. I feel like an intruder, the silence is deafening. I found my way out eventually, but the gps map of my trip looked permanently stupid, with long lines up and down the boulevards and then a tangle of knots up at the north end of the island.

I think these kinds of liminal spaces are where we run into our limitations, no longer in reaching a space or conquering it, but in mapping or understanding it.