It's back to architecture for a little while, and the next series of posts will all be on the same overarching theme -- coziness. It will start from the small scale and work up progressively toward an entire city plan.
We'll be visited yet again by some of our favorite recurring characters here -- America and Japan exhibiting the cultural traits of the Dark Ages in Eurasia, re-examining the Dark Ages in Eurasia itself with a mind toward how they cycle with Humanist / Enlightenment cultures over the course of a 2000-year cycle, the place of architecture in American ethnogenesis (and how we invented so-called Modernism), specifically Frank Lloyd Wright pioneering just about every family of building style that makes us us (and most of it coming from ground zero of American ethnogenesis -- Chicago), the utter cluelessness of most architectural and other critics when they try to figure out American culture, and so on and so forth.
Along the way we'll explore an aspect of architecture that has received shockingly little critical attention, including in books that are devoted to formal spatial / geometric analysis. E.g., The Dynamics of Architectural Form by Rudolf Arnheim (1977), a formal critical book that I happen to have a handy copy of -- but I figure there's little discussion elsewhere, or else he would've included it in his citations and footnotes.
And that aspect is... CONCAVITY, as opposed to the far more common convexity. There is a very tiny amount about this aspect regarding interior spaces or individual elements like a column or vault, but we'll be taking a far larger view of the entire building and its grounds, and of entire neighborhood and city plans.
Everyone just assumes that when you talk about "shapes" of buildings, they have to have a convex perimeter -- where every vertex of an angle joining two walls, is pushed outward from inside the building. For example, a rectangle or pentagon or hexagon or octagon or in the limit a circle / ellipse.
We're going to see just how concave you can make a building's exterior -- where some of those corners between two walls have been pulled inward toward the center of the building. For example, a U shape, a "spokes stemming from a hub" shape, etc.
But we can't cover that topic until we start with a smaller scale, and examine how cozy Americans prefer their buildings to be, how Dark Age and defensive and fortress-like we like them, how we assume the central state is weak and nomads / bandits / feuding factions are unchecked, etc. Only then will it make sense why America pioneered concave building shapes, and how early we invented them.
And then the usual corollary -- that the Euros were at least a generation behind us (sometimes longer), copying us, and just slapping a different Bauhaus-y branding on top of our popular styles that almost always trace back to Frank Lloyd Wright.
It cannot be otherwise -- he was born in 1867 and was churning out pioneering works in the 1890s. Walter Gropius, the earliest Euro modernist, was born in 1883, and was not churning out his distinctive works until the 1920s -- a full generation delayed from the grandfather of American -- and therefore Modern -- architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright himself.
But we will give the Euros their due -- their Dark Age due, that is. And the Saharo-Arabians of the Dark Ages as well. I haven't looked too far into East Asian examples, other than to confirm that Japan is on a different timeline and is currently Dark Age like we are.
If you're sick and tired of cathedrals and chateaus, and want to see CASTLES for a change...
If you'll just puke seeing another grid layout for a city's streets, and want to see eccentric arterial meanderings and cul-de-sacs everywhere...
If you'd rather not set foot in the city to begin with, but retreat to pastoral hamlets...
We're going to see just how fucking awesome Eurasia used to be -- during the Dark Ages.
Mainly, though, the focus will be on American ethnogenesis, and the model is one of convergent evolution -- similar environments selecting for similar adaptations, not like we consciously revived the Dark Age castle complex in America. They just turned out similarly due to America having a weak central state, just like Eurasian societies did back then.
I'll put together the first post as soon as I can, but in the meantime, let this programming note cleanse your brain of whatever dIsCouRsE-sludge has been flung against it lately, and get it re-acquainted with some of the major recurring themes here, before we take off on the journey. ^_^
Why don't I share the list of books I'm consulting, aside from rummaging through online sources. I scored all of them VERY cheap in thrift stores or used bookstores, they're by no means rare or expensive, and any one would be a great start if you're curious about architecture.
ReplyDeleteJust for the picture quality alone! Or the line drawing quality. Nothing on the internet is as good as the professionally shot and printed photographs from the good ol' days.
You're lucky if one of their descendants took a nice picture and uploaded it to Flickr in 2008. Otherwise you'll get the same exact image, repeated a zillion times, from an image search. And they won't have multiple views, good lighting, composition, or anything like that. The only good images on the internet are digitally preserved scans / copies of a photograph that someone shot and printed several decades ago.
* * *
The Dynamics of Architectural Form, by Rudolf Arnheim
Dimensions: Space, Shape & Scale in Architecture, by Charles Moore and Gerald Allen
Encyclopedia of American Architecture, by William Dudley Hunt (1980 edition, chock full of Midcentury Modern and Brutalist examples to illustrate everything)
American Architecture since 1780: A Guide to the Styles, by Marcus Whiffen
Buildings for Commerce and Industry, by Charles King Hoyt
Frank Lloyd Wright: The Masterworks, by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer
Romanza: The California Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, by David Gebhard
Landmarks of Los Angeles, by Patrick McGrew
Columbus, Indiana: A Look at Architecture, by Columbus Area Visitors Center (1984 edition)
Castles, by Charles W.C. Oman
Romanesque Art in Italy, by Hans Decker
It is worth noting that the kind of medieval castle that we contemporaries are familiar with in terms of image first became widespread with the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle
Convexity vs. concavity comes up also in the grid vs. arterial layout! Grids being convex (exposed, isolating), arterials being concave (cozy, bonding).
ReplyDeleteAnd "transit" layouts also apply on the smallest scale, within a room like a classroom!
This is why I procrastinate on some of these topics, cuz they keep turning up more and more connections and insights... but at a certain point, they'll have to be addenda that go in the comment thread, and the foundation has to be laid in a standalone post.
The first facet I'll look at doesn't involve convexity vs. concavity very much, more like the scale of spaces, but it'll touch on geometric complexity as well.
It's not so much about the collapse of the Frankish Empire, but the rise of nomadic empires that were getting a foothold in Europe, or nomadic raiders who fell short of an empire but were still a harassing presence. That coincided more or less with the stagnant and collapsing stage of the Frankish Empire.
ReplyDeleteNamely the Vikings (empire), Moors (empire), and Magyars (regular raiders). They were not Christian, they were nomadic, and two of them (Moors and Magyars) were foreigners who didn't speak an Indo-Euro language. So they were meta-ethnic nemeses within Europe.
The castle-building empires were spawned in reaction to these (seemingly) permanent nomadic mega-armies / empires. The Franks didn't build castles cuz they arose in reaction to the Roman Empire, a sedentary civilization.
Why didn't the Byzantine Empire build castles, since they were spawned by the frontier with various nomadic groups like the Alans, Huns, early Goths, etc.? Perhaps due to these groups being here today, gone tomorrow kind of nomads -- coming in waves every several generations, but not being a regular raiding group, or setting up their own nomadic empire nearby.
There needed to be imperial-level asabiya to build castles cuz they're very expensive and long-term oriented, meaning the nobles / elites must be willing to sacrifice a decent amount of their wealth in order to build something that will last for centuries, redounding to the benefit of the community / society at large, not just their own narrow bloodlines, not just for the next couple generations.
At first they were made of earth and timber -- not so expensive, not very long-lasting. But better than nothing. Soon they were made from stone, more expensive and long-lasting.
I reject the view that they arose *primarily* due to internal feuding among noble factions -- they had plenty of that in the Frankish Empire, like their integrative civil war involving rival factions led by queens Brunhild and Fredegund. Or jockeying for position between the various components of the empire, like Austrasia vs. Neustria.
Yet the Franks were not extensive castle-builders (either the earth-and-timber type or the stone type). They had tons of wealth, they were highly cohesive -- but they didn't arise in response to nomadic nemeses.
If anything, they were more nomadic than their nemesis -- starting out as part of the Germanic volkerwanderung, reacting against the sedentary civilized Roman Empire. Likewise, the Vikings were not castle-builders -- they were nomads themselves, arising in response to the (by that time) sedentary civilized Frankish Empire.
It remained for the French, British, and Spanish empires to become castle-builders (at home and abroad, e.g. in Italy and Sicily).
The Byzantine Empire was also spawned by pressure from the Persian meta-ethnic nemesis (the Sasanians, at that point), from the eastern direction. And the Sasanians were another sedentary civilized Persian empire, not nomadic raiders from Central Asia or Arabia, as would show up only beginning in the 7th C, centuries after the Byzantine Empire was born.
ReplyDeleteGoob is returning to her fantastical sea-home, having cheered up the spirits of the land-lubbers when they needed it most. Another Manic Pixie Dream Girl from the 2020-'24 restless phase concluding that her crazy carnival tour has done its job, and now it's time to focus more on her own needs and duties.
ReplyDeleteOff the PC...
Wish I could be...
In the real world...
That's from a longer fragment I wrote a couple years ago, but didn't DARE post it, for fear of jinxing her graduation. But now that she's given notice, I should finish it up as a final tribute song. ^_^ A hopeful send-off, capturing how restless she must feel as an online superstar who wants to break out of the palace and be free.
ReplyDeleteCuz like Moom, I don't think she's reincarnating, not as a streamer anyway.
I have a bad track record jinxing graduations -- everyone I wrote a tribute song for has graduated, albeit with quite a delay. Fauna, Mumei, and Gura, all graduating this year. Others graduated without me writing a song for them (Sana and Ame), so they still might've left even if I hadn't, but still -- not a good record of what effects my fan-songs have had.
ReplyDeleteThat's why, as much as I've written a fragment here or there in my drafts file, I'd NEVER post a song for Irys. She's the last one who I regularly watched that's still streaming in Hololive, and the day I post something for her like that, it'll start the countdown to the final Manic Pixie Dream Girl of Holo EN taking flight for good.
Obviously I don't blame myself for this bad correlation, it's more like my tribute songs were representative of a broader fan outpouring and desire for connection with the talent. And for a little while, the talents felt the same way toward us, collectively.
But over time, that got to overwhelming for them, leading them to want to unplug the online spotlight and lead "normal" lives -- still terminally online, given them being Millennials and Zoomers, but without being in a global spotlight, as much of a rush as that was at first.
I, and I assume the other fans, don't have any regrets about our outpouring of fan-art, fan-songs, etc., toward the talents. And I assume the talents have no regrets about reciprocating for as long as they did. But that mutually parasocial connection has run its course, and if anything the talents probably feel like they've plunged into a hangover after a rush-filled high, and need to de-tox and recover for awhile.
The streamers who never got that intimately parasocial with their fandom, will not be plunging into a hangover -- cuz they never took off on the rush-filled bonding high to begin with. They've been more even-steven the whole time, not on a rollercoaster.
So, as sad-girl as she may be, Kronii has outlasted 3 of her 4 gen-mates. She didn't chase the high, so she won't get plunged into the hangover and feel like quitting cold turkey and checking into a detox resort.
I don't have an addictive personality or anything, but I'd still say the hangover was worth the high in the case of the (non-Japanese) vtuber fandom.
The Japanese streamers aren't quite so parasocial, or their fans aren't so parasocial, it's more of a traditional "performer and spectator" relationship, only in a new medium. They do interact back-and-forth, but it's not as intense and intimate as it was for streamers and their audiences outside of Japan, during the early 2020s.
Anyway, no regrets. ^_^
Also we're soon moving from the MPDG era to the manic era of the 15 year cycles so they would be moving on anyways.
DeleteOn an upbeat note, Bae + Irys are going to play a retro-tastic arcade game from the '90s (slightly remade for the Switch), Snow Bros. 2!
ReplyDeleteIt looks a lot like Bubble Bobble, so I assumed it was by Taito, but it's actually by Toaplan. Imitation is the best form of flattery. ^_^
I already wrote before about co-op games being dominant from the late '70s through the mid-'90s, during the harmonious phase of the 50-year civil discord cycle. And sure enough, this game is from 1994.
After that year, it was mainly player-vs.-player or team-vs.-team -- whereas the classic co-op games were purely players-vs.-computer. People wanted to get along and cooperate with each other, not turn everything into a competition. If a video game needed a competitor, it had to be the computer itself, not another person.
Maybe Bae has settled into Glorious Nippon for long enough that the desire to honor the classics has started to take her over, as is natural for the Japanese streamers -- many of whom are still playing old school Pokemon games, or Chrono Trigger like Koyori, or Dino Crisis like the Koronator, or Ocarina of Time like Sora.
I hear that the Japanese government requires a certain quota of hours playing retro JP video games, before they will give kaigai-niki a permanent resident card or citizenship. But it's not a chore -- it's fun! ^_^
Pekora was playing Kirby's Adventure for the NES last week, too! A game that's over 30 years old is better than the new ones today.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I finally found a clue about whether she is a boob-girl or a butt-girl -- I think she's a butt-girl!
In the Mario Party collab today with Marine, Shion, and Korone, both Pekora and Marine excelled at the rhythm mini-game.
I checked old clips to confirm that this was not a fluke -- she has very good rhythm skills.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPSZlgYsyos
Rhythm goes with dancing, and dancing is corporeal, not cerebral. Butt people are corporeal, boob people are cerebral.
Marine is famous for her buns and her dancing skills, and it only makes sense that she's good at rhythm games.
So, Pekora being equally good at rhythm games means she probably has the same nature as Marine -- being a butt-girl rather than a boob-girl.
I don't know if she's mentioned anything more direct and specific about her body type, but if she's so skilled at rhythm games, she just *has to* be a butt-girl!
Much like the Goobinator, on the EN side. Shark energy is stored in the tail. ^_^
Sidebar on how broken Google's search engine is: the clip linked above, titled "Pekora is the rhythm master", does not appear when you enter that title into Google's main engine, or its video search engine. You can put it all in quote marks, you can instruct it to look specifically within youtube.com -- nothing.
ReplyDeleteHowever, YouTube's in-site search engine turns up the correct video when you enter the title into the search bar, without quote marks even.
This is further confirmation that Google's search engine is fundamentally broken -- and likely, irrevocably broken at this point. It's been butchered too much by the QE era of giving all the strivers "projects" to work on, to rationalize their fake free infinite dollar-funded salaries.
These fake-work / make-work projects are not merely innocuous. Innocuous would be telling the Central Bank to direct deposit the six-figure salary into the striver's bank account, without having them do anything whatsoever. They voted Democrat, they're from the preferred tribe or caste within India for whom the hiring manager is a corrupt bag-man in America, etc. So, give them the money.
But that isn't enough -- they want to feel like they've earned it, so they need these projects to produce a tangible outcome.
Whether the outcome deserves a six-figure salary or not, isn't the question -- of course they do not deserve that much money, they're BREAKING the entire goddamn architecture that they're working on!
But they don't want to hear that -- they want to hear how, not only are they getting tons of money, they *deserve* that money due to their merits, not due to corrupt ethnic patronage networks.
Nobody, Indian or American, wants to look in the mirror every day and think, "I'm making six figures only cuz I have social connections to the hiring manager, and what I actually produce is not only mediocre, it actively harms and destroys and degrades the sector of society that I'm supposed to be contributing to. But I secured the bag, I'm on that grindset, so sucks to the rest of you!"
No, they want to be told how meritorious their work is, over and over. They're not just a one-hit wonder -- every single quarter of the fiscal year, they're doing quality work that deserves six-figure compensation. Wow, I really am something special -- and that (deluded, coping) feeling of self-respect is more important than the big fat material salary itself.
Austrian School economists see half the picture, calling these kinds of funding boondoggles "malinvestments" during a bubble. But that misses the other half of the picture -- it's not just that free money during a bubble makes people think there's no costs to anything, so the money goes into dead ends.
It does go into dead ends -- but that is largely due to the demand for self-respect and self-esteem among the teeming hordes of strivers greedily grasping for those free-flowing funds.
Adam Smith made this point in The Theory of Moral Sentiments -- man not only wants to be loved, he wants to be lovely, i.e. to be worthy of that love, like he is being loved cuz he deserves it. Otherwise it could be pity-love, which feels rotten.
That doesn't mean he will actually behave in a way that deserves to be loved by others -- he may just cook up a rationalization for why he's so love-worthy, while acting in a rephrehensible way, rather than behave in a genuinely love-worthy way.
Anyway, the point being for now -- don't bother with Google's search engine, if some site has its own in-site search engine.
It's not as if Google cannot return search results from YouTube -- it absolutely can. It's not like there's a firewall around YouTube that Google can't see inside of. It's just that Google's search engine has been thoroughly corrupted by fake-work / make-work pRoJeCtS.
It's not political censorship either, although they did that as well during Obama's 2nd term onward. There are no geopolitical implications about a Japanese anime bunny-girl streamer being a master at rhythm games. Google just plain and simply DOES NOT WORK anymore.
Imagine thinking you could ever achieve immortality by uploading your mind to a computer, when something as simple as a search engine -- and yet, the global flagship of its kind -- has been thoroughly corrupted and lies a decomposing abandoned mess, within your fairly brief life so far.
ReplyDeleteBoomers and some Gen X-ers may be more delusional about this, cuz the progress line for "computers" has gone up so much over their lifetimes -- they remember when there were no computers, no internet, no cell phones whatsoever.
But Millennials and Zoomers were basically born online, and the things they took for granted as the baseline -- NOT as the most recent pinnacle of ever-skyward progress, but simply the most pathetic default baseline -- have utterly broken down and lie in ruins, before they've even turned 40.
Tech-tards had better find a more clueless demo to sell their slopaganda to, and that's precisely why they target their sales pitches to literal Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers, who couldn't know any better from their lived experiences.
Millennials and Zoomers would intuitively known from their own lived experiences, yeah no, uploading your mind to Google means that your digi-mind will be totally broken and unusable in 10 years or less.
Uploading your mind to Amazon World Services cloud means that when Trump or Vance start a self-shooting tariff war, and China deprives us of rare earth metals, the AWS servers downstream of that change will no longer function optimally, and cuts will have to be made -- and that cinching of the online belt is going to squeeze your puny little digi-mind into pieces.
Uploading your mind to Netflix means your digi-mind will be de-listed and unaccessible for use when their contract window expires, just like those movies that you can only watch during a 6-month period.
Physical media last close to forever -- even the most basic mom & pop video rental store had longer-lasting windows of usability / accessibility for their "data archive" (i.e., the casette tapes).
And even after those stores closed down 20 years ago, or at least threw out their VHS library -- those tapes are still circulating out there, or are being preserved in private collections. I still own and proudly display 3 VHS tapes that I rented, and by the time I went to return them, the store literally closed up with no notice, so I kept them, and have hung onto them ever since. ^_^
Arabesque, The Desperate Hours, and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Still in their distinctive video rental store clamshell cases, too. ^_^
Just another timely reminder of how pointless, fake, actively-harmful the AI boondoggle has been, and will always ever be. Anyone churning out slopaganda on behalf of AI is literally on the take by these transhumanist billionaire dum-dums who can't even observe what a ruined state the computer / online landscape lies in, just one generation after the bursting of the original Dot-Com bubble.
I put aside the moral arguments for/against AI, uploading your brain, etc. Those are too open-ended and debatable -- the purely empirical and scientific angle of attack is totally undefended. Just imagine trying to sell this digi-brain bullshit, when Google's search engine lies in ruins, when Netflix suffered a Library of Alexandria-level wipeout of its archive when it transitioned from physical media to online streaming services, and the whole rest of the pathetic state of "tech" these days...
And so we're
ReplyDeleteSpamming uwu till we get banned
Getting stored in one another's RAM
Gotta deactivate, off-a the site
And then you draw some art about me
And we find our alt accounts
And then we say:
I think we're anon now
No TOS to tell us what is not allowed
I think we're anon now
The sharing of our screens is the only crowd...
* * *
Another fragment from a couple years ago, when the audience and the talents were both on the high, not the hangover. Hehe. To the tune of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Q3mHyzn78
I've tried not to be a noob
ReplyDeleteBut when I'm gaming with Moom
I can't let up the chase
Cuz you make my kart race
Blocked me off of the site
You're my malware file
You keep bricking PC's
Yeah, blue screen and can't tweet
Something's feeling cringe now
Cuz I'm drawing my fursona with wings
If I could fly right through the screen now...
Cuz you've got that owl thing
So log off, log off, log off of my thread
And follow back my alt instead
I don't, I don't, don't know what it is
But I need that owl thing
You've got that owl thing