Month: July 2024

Tool time!

Apparently I have not even alluded to Tim Pool (or as I like to call him, Grim Fool) on here before. One of the Right’s more loathsome commentators for multiple reasons, I see him crop up a lot on RM Brown’s channel (because I refuse to watch his bullshit directly, obviously), and I’ve seen various other videos taking him down, but this new one from Some More News has a bunch of stuff I haven’t seen before, including one jaw-droppingly hilarious moment that I’m sure has been seen in dozens of other videos but I hadn’t seen it before and it filled me with joy: there’s a bit at some public event where someone comes up behind him and steals his trademark beanie off his head, exposing the abundant acreage of baldness under it, and Tim loses his shit and says something about how he wears the beanie to… not be recognisable.

The beanie that he wears in all his videos—his music videos as well, not just his alleged “journalism”—and in pretty much every photo I’ve ever seen of him (his facial hair may come and go but the beanie is apparently forever).

The beanie that is his defining characteristic.

The beanie that… doesn’t cover his face.

The face that he shows in all his videos. The face that appears on camera all the time. The face that is not a secret in any way to anyone.

JESUS FUCK, Tim, if you don’t want to be recognised, and that’s not an unreasonable desire, then maybe actually make yourself unrecognisable. Honestly, what a meritless cunt you are.

And the actual 1928 version…

This, incidentally, is the magazine cover I said in the previous post that I thought I’d posted but apparently hadn’t:

Radio News, November 1928, Hugo Gernsback (the man behind Experimenter Publishing, father of “scientifiction” and cheap bastard—though I do suspect Lovecraft’s antipathy for him was not just down to the tightness of his fists) sits watching one of his TV’s station’s broadcasts. Quite interesting looking at this after the one we were just looking at; the previous picture is like a fantasy of what television might be like, whereas this is the reality of it by the end of 1928. What strikes me most obviously is the smallness of the screen on this thing compared to the size of the overall unit… I know that early TV screens were miniscule because the limitations of mechanical TV meant it could only produce very small pictures, and I actually have my own photo of a 1930 Baird Televisor from York Castle Museum, but I don’t have that scanned that I know of so I’ll make do with this photo of JLB with his own set:

You may observe just how small the screen on that thing is, which was the thing that struck me that time I got to see one in the flesh. What strikes me, though, about the illustrated one above is that the screen looks even smaller in proportion to the overall unit… also that the latter is noticeably undecorated otherwise, all it has is the screen and the bits I gather you plugged into the radio, and otherwise it’s just this… brown block. I’m assuming the box is as big as it is to accommodate the scanning disc, but it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing bit of tech, is it? The Baird model’s quite nice by comparison.

The wonderful world of television

I could’ve sworn that, some time ago, I posted an old 1920s magazine cover about television that I found quite interesting, but it appears I have done nothing of the sort and I can only assume I did this on my old Tumblr. Anyway, never mind that cos here’s another one I’ve found via Pulp Librarian:

I am, obviously, somewhat struck by the shape of the screen on this thing; apart from being a bit ovoid, it’s also notably somewhat widescreen. I find this quite remarkable, given this wasn’t even really a thing in cinema yet; there’d been experiments with wider images than the 1.33:1 standard going back to the Corbett & Fitzsimmons fight in 1897, and the year this was apparently published (1927) Abel Gance had just unleashed Polyvision, and in the couple of years following there would be a handful of other attempts. But it was hardly a common industry practice, so I’m not sure why our cover artist here was envisaging wider-screen TV… I mean, when Hollywood started going widescreen in the 50s it was in competition with the rising popularity of TV, whereas in 1927 it wasn’t trying to do anything of the sort. The sort of thing that only puzzles me, I’m sure, but there you go.

I wonder, too, if our artist was envisaging sound as part of the package, which would’ve been REALLY forward-looking. In 1927, of course, sound was yet to become the film industry revolution it soon would be—like widescreen, it had only really been limited and experimental—so I’m wondering if the artist envisaged that thing at the top of the screen as a speaker. As it happens, Experimenter Publishing, who published this thing, also had a radio station which, in 1928, started doing experimental TV broadcasts as well using their radio frequency, but they broadcast silent TV, so if that is supposed to be a speaker it was way ahead of the publisher’s own reality (TV with sound would be a thing not long after, apparently). Anyway, just found that kind of pleasing on a sort of retro-futurist level; I suppose just showing a TV of any sort was kind of futuristic in 1927…

Biden’s decision: bad for small business…

Well, one line of small business, anyway:

I always found the “Let’s Go Brandon” thing a bit baffling, but, thanks to someone on Bluesky, I’ve since discovered that stores like this, actual brick and mortar stores, exist(ed) to sell LGB merchandise. And, well, now that Biden’s withdrawn from the presidential race, he’s kind of… well, wiped out all the value of that stuff, hasn’t he? I mean, it wouldn’t have had much of a shelf life anyway cos it was obviously dependent on Biden’s own shelf life, but I’m quite amused by the idea that he himself was the one who killed it…

This had better work

After weeks of Biden being told (mostly by the media) to stand down after the debate debacle, and after weeks of refusing to do so… well. Yeah, the election has taken an interesting turn that I’m not sure it really needed, it’s already sufficiently interesting… still, when the donors are threatening to withhold the cash if you don’t fall on your sword, I don’t suppose that leaves you with many options, does it.

Anyway, we now have the prospect of President Kamala Harris in November (not yet set in stone, the convention still has to make it official and there may be other contenders), which, if nothing else, is going to force the New York Times to change its recent tack, which has largely consisted of opinion pieces trying to suck up to Trump by going on about Biden being too old and out of it (as if Trump is neither of those things); now that the evident Democrat contender is nearly two decades younger than the other guy (who is now the oldest presidential candidate ever), they can’t talk about her age in the way they did about Biden’s. Just her gender and her ethnicity (not only is she mixed-race, she’s part Jamaican part Indian! She’s not even part white! How will Nick Fuentes ever cope?), which I’m sure will be enough for the Right once they get over the initial “shit, we have to attack her now instead of the old prick”…

Why do I feel like Will’s mother wishes she could say the same thing about herself? Also, the stepchildren she inherited from her husband don’t exist, apparently? Are kids not real if you didn’t give birth to them? But, frankly, I’m more worried by the Left’s response…

…cos I can see that happening too. I mean, I’m absolutely not a Biden fan and the US’ support for Israel in recent times has been obviously abhorrent, but… the alternative is Trump. People know this. And they’d still vote against Biden. The idea that it might be more important to get the Democrats back in first and THEN hammer them about things like Israel once we’re secure against the cult threat doesn’t seem to occur to them. Trump gets in, things just escalate, and the cult won’t give a fuck about your moral outrage. STOP IT.

Anyway—for better or worse they’ve finally shat and got off the pot, so maybe, just maybe, the Democrats can start putting an effort into actually winning this election. I just hope this is the trick that does it for them after all the discourse…

The pen is mightier, etc

I’d never heard of Conway Stewart until today, but I’ve certainly heard of them now for the worst possible reason…

Um… promoting your super-expensive fountain pen with an inspiring quote from DAVID IRVING about how HITLER was the greatest thing to ever happen to THE FUCKING JEWS? In fairness to the company, they were as horrified as they should’ve been when it was pointed out to them:

And immediately threw this “agency” under the bus rather than, you know, take responsibility for posting a quote by HOLOCAUST DENIER DAVID IRVING. I mean, clearly no one at the company itself is paying attention to this shit; if they didn’t know who Irving was, you’d think they might have seen the name “Hitler” and considered that a red (and white and black) flag…

Step on the gas!

One of the greatest things I’ve discovered lately is that the Norwegian word for “speed” is “fart”:

And this was the obvious consequence for this film on its Norwegian release. This is one of the best things I’ve learned in a foreign language since I discovered the original vocalist for Gorgoroth was called “Hat”. Which is Norwegian for “hate”, but obviously rather different connotations in English…