Year: 2010

links for 2010-12-29

every geek destroys the thing ze loves

I don’t buy all of this, but it’s a satisfying read:

Waiting for the next issue, movie, or album gave you time to reread, rewatch, reabsorb whatever you loved, so you brought your own idiosyncratic love of that thing to your thought-palace. People who were obsessed with Star Trek or the Ender’s Game books were all obsessed with the same object, but its light shone differently on each person. Everyone had to create in their mind unanswered questions or what-ifs. What if Leia, not Luke, had become a Jedi? What happens after Rorschach’s journal is found at the end of Watchmen? What the hell was The Prisoner about?

None of that’s necessary anymore. When everyone has easy access to their favorite diversions and every diversion comes with a rabbit hole’s worth of extra features and deleted scenes and hidden hacks to tumble down and never emerge from, then we’re all just adding to an ever-swelling, soon-to-erupt volcano of trivia, re-contextualized and forever rebooted. We’re on the brink of Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever.

Patton Oswalt: Wake Up Geek Culture, Time to Die

sumitsays: wall street. okay, so we got stuck with "greed is good" for a quarter century. but, boy, we sure dodged a bullet on the interior design

@sumitsays: wall street. okay, so we got stuck with “greed is good” for a quarter century. but, boy, we sure dodged a bullet on the interior design

The home decor is quite extraordinary: Charlie Sheen’s apartment, in particular, looks as though someone has tried to assemble a walkthrough version of a Max Ernst painting using only the contents of a household recycling bin.

To make the effect more bizarre still, all the characters have very earnest big-business conversations amid these surreal environments without exhibiting the slightest flicker of awareness that they appear to be trapped in an ultra-low-budget theme park attraction.

I’m not sure if Oliver Stone intended the ridiculousness of the art and interior decoration to make a satirical point or not. But given that “Greed is Good” ended up being taken seriously as a mantra by go-getting Eighties moneymen, I’m glad that their counterparts in the world of interiors proved less impressionable. At least in my experience. The very rich are different, I suppose…

fuckyeahghosttowns: United Artists Theater in Detroit,…

fuckyeahghosttowns:

United Artists Theater in Detroit, Michigan.
(via Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre)

The United Artists Theatre, designed in a Spanish-Gothic design, sat 2,070 people, and after closing served from 1978 to 1983 as the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s recording theater. After the theater closed, the office block, in which the theatre is situated, struggled as tenants moved to suburbs. It finally closed in 1984.