Gus's Top 100 Bootlickin' Nonce Anthems
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- absolute cringe ari grass you up basic boy scout ted bundy coachella 2024 at the nonce hotel cum cult dad was a casual whistler fit mom! gandalf had to sell the home grandad was a cuck gus lord of darkness high school shooter memoires joanna newsom come to butthead jordan petersons gremlin child let the wrong 'un in no theory at the merch table! nonce upon a time pete doherty qpr plod pizarro was fastidiously kept in a bolivian tomb power bottom thems the rules spatial cathexis spots like pitchfork superstitious middle aged italian woman neurosis the deplorable product of craner's infamous fling these boots are made for lickin' undercover plod
Mozart is an aesthetic reactionary. Beethoven is exemplary tho.
shiels
_
Shall I tell you about my life Owen?
Love the forehead smashing rewind on this one
sus
Moderator
(14/100) Fiona Apple, "Across The Universe"
When I was 14 I bought an iPod Nano with lawn mowing money, just the 8gb version. The size of a matchbox, a little scroll wheel, a built-in music trivia game that asked you about album years and artist names. I loved that thing—it was an object of visual and spatial cathexis while dissociating to audio; it was my portal into this other world of music, far from my little provincial beach town, these messages from other times and other places. You could put a limited number of videos on it too, and I did—this Fiona Apple music video, Beirut playing "Nantes" in Paris, some other Take Away Shows. The Nantes track, and the 164GB iPod Classic I saved up for junior year of high school, I'll punt to a future post.
I got my first laptop for Christmas around this time, a night-sky blue Dell Inspiron. I played Runescape and browsed /b/ late into the night on that thing. Parents would come by the room late at night, check in, I'd have to be quick to shut it, tuck it under covers. They'd feel whether it was warm, listen for whether the fan was running. Eventually I had to start checking in my laptop each night before bed, it'd be locked away in a cabinet in my parents' bedroom. I was hanging out on mixed-age IRC channels at this point—as you'd predict, there was plenty of adult content posted—and one night my parents, after locking it up, went through all my browsing history, dug through the chatrooms. I forget the fallout, but they weren't happy. Their suburban sensibilities were a bit shocked I think.
Set up iTunes, hadn't yet discovered torrenting but ripped mp3s from YouTube instead. I remember when I just had two or three songs on it. One of them was Fiona Apple's "Across The Universe" cover. The songs that really hit me as a teenager weren't aggressive or rebellious; I was never in the mood for metal or hard rock or punk; I liked beautiful songs, that moved me, that made me feel something profound. But there was always this defiance or stubbornness that came through them, in the lyrics, in the repetition of certain phrases. "Nothing's gonna change my world, nothing's gonna change my world" Fiona sings as the guys take baseball bats to the storefront, the beautiful shop display and windows. The whole world rotating upside down and she's calm, collected, looking you straight in the eye, singing defiance. A few years later I'd see the same attitude in Owen Pallet's "Owen Takes Off His Shirt," whose refrain chants, mantra-like, "I'm never gonna give it to you."
When I was 14 I bought an iPod Nano with lawn mowing money, just the 8gb version. The size of a matchbox, a little scroll wheel, a built-in music trivia game that asked you about album years and artist names. I loved that thing—it was an object of visual and spatial cathexis while dissociating to audio; it was my portal into this other world of music, far from my little provincial beach town, these messages from other times and other places. You could put a limited number of videos on it too, and I did—this Fiona Apple music video, Beirut playing "Nantes" in Paris, some other Take Away Shows. The Nantes track, and the 164GB iPod Classic I saved up for junior year of high school, I'll punt to a future post.
I got my first laptop for Christmas around this time, a night-sky blue Dell Inspiron. I played Runescape and browsed /b/ late into the night on that thing. Parents would come by the room late at night, check in, I'd have to be quick to shut it, tuck it under covers. They'd feel whether it was warm, listen for whether the fan was running. Eventually I had to start checking in my laptop each night before bed, it'd be locked away in a cabinet in my parents' bedroom. I was hanging out on mixed-age IRC channels at this point—as you'd predict, there was plenty of adult content posted—and one night my parents, after locking it up, went through all my browsing history, dug through the chatrooms. I forget the fallout, but they weren't happy. Their suburban sensibilities were a bit shocked I think.
Set up iTunes, hadn't yet discovered torrenting but ripped mp3s from YouTube instead. I remember when I just had two or three songs on it. One of them was Fiona Apple's "Across The Universe" cover. The songs that really hit me as a teenager weren't aggressive or rebellious; I was never in the mood for metal or hard rock or punk; I liked beautiful songs, that moved me, that made me feel something profound. But there was always this defiance or stubbornness that came through them, in the lyrics, in the repetition of certain phrases. "Nothing's gonna change my world, nothing's gonna change my world" Fiona sings as the guys take baseball bats to the storefront, the beautiful shop display and windows. The whole world rotating upside down and she's calm, collected, looking you straight in the eye, singing defiance. A few years later I'd see the same attitude in Owen Pallet's "Owen Takes Off His Shirt," whose refrain chants, mantra-like, "I'm never gonna give it to you."
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sus
Moderator
(15 / 100) Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto #1
This is coming a bit late in the sequence—really it should have been with the classical above—but I've never been able to get over this movement. It has this towering, awe-inspiring grandeur and scale and drama, the cascading, bell-like piano chords, the way they climb and fall and tumble. At 14, when I was more romantic and more earnest I would've said something about the triumph of the human spirit. That sounds a bit like nonsense now, and I probably got it from reading Ayn Rand's Fountainhead. Everyone I hung out with, all my family, took liberalism and (what I'd now call, via Nietzsche) slave morality for granted—the idea that being good was about helping others, that the ultimate good was sacrificing your own happiness and well-being for others. I got obsessed with Rand for about a year of middle school, compelled by her vision of master morality and the asocial pursuit of excellence for its own sake. (In contrast, say, with the kind of un-reflexive mimesis of the masses—all of which of course fed, and was fed by, my own social alienation in those years.) Fifteen years out, I do think reading Rand was good for me as a stage in a long, galaxy-brain dialectic. Nowadays, a lot of the same ideas have gotten laundered through concepts like self-advocacy, self-care, and self-improvement. Those ideas aren't an unbridled good, but I've seen plenty of folks burn themselves into the ground with the idea that anything short of constant self-sacrifice, any modicum of selfishness, makes them a bad person.
This is coming a bit late in the sequence—really it should have been with the classical above—but I've never been able to get over this movement. It has this towering, awe-inspiring grandeur and scale and drama, the cascading, bell-like piano chords, the way they climb and fall and tumble. At 14, when I was more romantic and more earnest I would've said something about the triumph of the human spirit. That sounds a bit like nonsense now, and I probably got it from reading Ayn Rand's Fountainhead. Everyone I hung out with, all my family, took liberalism and (what I'd now call, via Nietzsche) slave morality for granted—the idea that being good was about helping others, that the ultimate good was sacrificing your own happiness and well-being for others. I got obsessed with Rand for about a year of middle school, compelled by her vision of master morality and the asocial pursuit of excellence for its own sake. (In contrast, say, with the kind of un-reflexive mimesis of the masses—all of which of course fed, and was fed by, my own social alienation in those years.) Fifteen years out, I do think reading Rand was good for me as a stage in a long, galaxy-brain dialectic. Nowadays, a lot of the same ideas have gotten laundered through concepts like self-advocacy, self-care, and self-improvement. Those ideas aren't an unbridled good, but I've seen plenty of folks burn themselves into the ground with the idea that anything short of constant self-sacrifice, any modicum of selfishness, makes them a bad person.
entertainment
Well-known member
what the fuck is going on here
sus
Moderator
(16/100) Cat Stevens, "How Can I Tell You"
If you've been reading, you'll remember me mentioning I changed friend groups at the start of high school! Drifted away from the geeks and started hanging out with upperclassman swimmers, and then soon after the stoners and skater.
The high school I went to was exactly like in the high schools you get on television—a classic American hierarchy, with football and cheerleaders on the top, and band/choir geeks, emo/goths, at the bottom. All the guys on the football team, and all the gals on the cheerleading squad, lived in the same gated community country club, so class was deep-baked into the social structure. Where you sat at lunch—not indoor cafeteria tables, but outside, on a large grassy quad—mapped directly on to your social status. Groups didn't interact, and dating pools were pretty incestuous. All the football players dated all the cheerleaders, in every possible coupling arrangement. Very very Breakfast Club.
Which apparently is a little weird, to be so stereotypically "normal"—I've met very few people, even public school kids, who went to this sort of classic American high school. My dad still teaches government & economics there, so I hear relays—they've changed prom "kings" and "queens" to gender-neutral terms, and recently elected a trans gal class president, so times are a-changin. I noticed this generational shift even with the classes below me, which were way more gender-fluid, way more fluid in terms of social structure, and didn't have the same kind of hierarchical stratification—weirdo stoner music kids were friendly with class presidents and basketball stars, which would never have happened my year.
The girl in question was first-gen South American immigrant and the school valedictorian, olive skin and short plaid skirts and a strong cross-country runner who somehow managed to simultaneously take AP Latin and be popular. I had absolutely zero chance but was in love with her for the entirety of ninth grade, and some of tenth. I remember spending hours googling WikiHow tips for flirting. Then I'd try to roll the recommendations out—make eye contact from across the room, smile, talk to her between class periods—and she got creeped out and told her friends I was obsessed with her. This is the real shit I'm giving you!! No fronting!! A couple years later, when I had acquired more social capital on-campus and was dating a friend of hers, she apologized for the reputation damage campaign and we made up. (Not out, unfortunately—can't win em all.)
I listened to a lot of Cat Stevens around this time, it was one of the few CD my dad played that I'd burned to my iTunes and put on the Nano. This sappy love song was my 9th grade vision of a crush. There's a lot to be said for the way women inspire men to better versions of themselves, to become something admirable, or in my case, competent and able to have a normal conversation. That crush put me on a growth vector for the rest of high school, climbing (and dating) my way up the social ladder. For revenge? So she'd come to regret her snub? Or so I wouldn't miss a similar opportunity? Who knows. Last I checked she's an Instagram influencer now, who gives 15% product discounts if you buy cycling shorts using her promo code. "I saw the best minds of my generation..."
If you've been reading, you'll remember me mentioning I changed friend groups at the start of high school! Drifted away from the geeks and started hanging out with upperclassman swimmers, and then soon after the stoners and skater.
The high school I went to was exactly like in the high schools you get on television—a classic American hierarchy, with football and cheerleaders on the top, and band/choir geeks, emo/goths, at the bottom. All the guys on the football team, and all the gals on the cheerleading squad, lived in the same gated community country club, so class was deep-baked into the social structure. Where you sat at lunch—not indoor cafeteria tables, but outside, on a large grassy quad—mapped directly on to your social status. Groups didn't interact, and dating pools were pretty incestuous. All the football players dated all the cheerleaders, in every possible coupling arrangement. Very very Breakfast Club.
Which apparently is a little weird, to be so stereotypically "normal"—I've met very few people, even public school kids, who went to this sort of classic American high school. My dad still teaches government & economics there, so I hear relays—they've changed prom "kings" and "queens" to gender-neutral terms, and recently elected a trans gal class president, so times are a-changin. I noticed this generational shift even with the classes below me, which were way more gender-fluid, way more fluid in terms of social structure, and didn't have the same kind of hierarchical stratification—weirdo stoner music kids were friendly with class presidents and basketball stars, which would never have happened my year.
The girl in question was first-gen South American immigrant and the school valedictorian, olive skin and short plaid skirts and a strong cross-country runner who somehow managed to simultaneously take AP Latin and be popular. I had absolutely zero chance but was in love with her for the entirety of ninth grade, and some of tenth. I remember spending hours googling WikiHow tips for flirting. Then I'd try to roll the recommendations out—make eye contact from across the room, smile, talk to her between class periods—and she got creeped out and told her friends I was obsessed with her. This is the real shit I'm giving you!! No fronting!! A couple years later, when I had acquired more social capital on-campus and was dating a friend of hers, she apologized for the reputation damage campaign and we made up. (Not out, unfortunately—can't win em all.)
I listened to a lot of Cat Stevens around this time, it was one of the few CD my dad played that I'd burned to my iTunes and put on the Nano. This sappy love song was my 9th grade vision of a crush. There's a lot to be said for the way women inspire men to better versions of themselves, to become something admirable, or in my case, competent and able to have a normal conversation. That crush put me on a growth vector for the rest of high school, climbing (and dating) my way up the social ladder. For revenge? So she'd come to regret her snub? Or so I wouldn't miss a similar opportunity? Who knows. Last I checked she's an Instagram influencer now, who gives 15% product discounts if you buy cycling shorts using her promo code. "I saw the best minds of my generation..."
sus
Moderator
how's that for a female initiation @WashYourHands
sus
Moderator
I think I entered an Objectivism essay contest online in 7th grade. Read all her essay collections and all the books. I think liked Fountainhead way more than Atlas Shrugged.
About a year later (age 13?) I got really into that viral documentary Zeitgeist. It had all these conspiracies about the Federal Reserve, international banking, corporate involvement in US coup attempts in South America. My memories are vague but I think it was like, Noam Chomsky type truther narratives? Very different from, but also a precursor to, the Kony 2012 video that popped up a few years later. YouTube meant people were getting exposed to novel memetic viruses, alternate/truther narratives and political hoaxes; they hadn't developed an immune system to handle it yet.
About a year before (age 10?) I had been trying to make logos in MS Paint, and add Wikipedia page for, a religion I had invented which I called "Earthism." Its symbol was a triangle that united the three core tenets, vegetarianism, environmentalism... and something else. I was a pretty radical vegetarian at that age, chilled out quite a bit as I got older. (Got my IP banned from Wikipedia for an escalating back-and-forth DM with a UK moderator who kept deleting my Earthism page.... He used UK spellings of words in his messages, and I just thought he was an idiot who didn't know how to spell "encyclopedia," and I told him as much.)
These ideologies can seem dissonant together, but the versions of them that I invested in all squared perfectly logically in my mind at the time. A big part of what I saw in Rand was about autonomy, and respect for autonomy, and vegetarianism was a way of extending that to all forms of life. (A couple years later I found Ralph Waldo Emerson's self-reliance, and it for sure struck a chord.) And the idea that the US government could be this corrupt, overstepping, meddling bureaucracy that should be shrunken to Jeffersonian days, well, that made a lot of sense to me then too.
I didn't trust official narratives; I was suspicious of the ideological and cultural pressures leveled against me by seemingly oblivious and script-following adults; and every part of me fought against the possibility of turning into one of them.
I know it's a hard sell arguing that the combination of Ayn Rand, Fiona Apple, Earthism, and Zeitgeist: The Movie constellated to a punk worldview. But I think that's probably more accurate than not.
About a year later (age 13?) I got really into that viral documentary Zeitgeist. It had all these conspiracies about the Federal Reserve, international banking, corporate involvement in US coup attempts in South America. My memories are vague but I think it was like, Noam Chomsky type truther narratives? Very different from, but also a precursor to, the Kony 2012 video that popped up a few years later. YouTube meant people were getting exposed to novel memetic viruses, alternate/truther narratives and political hoaxes; they hadn't developed an immune system to handle it yet.
About a year before (age 10?) I had been trying to make logos in MS Paint, and add Wikipedia page for, a religion I had invented which I called "Earthism." Its symbol was a triangle that united the three core tenets, vegetarianism, environmentalism... and something else. I was a pretty radical vegetarian at that age, chilled out quite a bit as I got older. (Got my IP banned from Wikipedia for an escalating back-and-forth DM with a UK moderator who kept deleting my Earthism page.... He used UK spellings of words in his messages, and I just thought he was an idiot who didn't know how to spell "encyclopedia," and I told him as much.)
These ideologies can seem dissonant together, but the versions of them that I invested in all squared perfectly logically in my mind at the time. A big part of what I saw in Rand was about autonomy, and respect for autonomy, and vegetarianism was a way of extending that to all forms of life. (A couple years later I found Ralph Waldo Emerson's self-reliance, and it for sure struck a chord.) And the idea that the US government could be this corrupt, overstepping, meddling bureaucracy that should be shrunken to Jeffersonian days, well, that made a lot of sense to me then too.
I didn't trust official narratives; I was suspicious of the ideological and cultural pressures leveled against me by seemingly oblivious and script-following adults; and every part of me fought against the possibility of turning into one of them.
I know it's a hard sell arguing that the combination of Ayn Rand, Fiona Apple, Earthism, and Zeitgeist: The Movie constellated to a punk worldview. But I think that's probably more accurate than not.
no, that is entirely accurate. punk is archetypically petit-bourgeois, after all. Rand did not understand true, centralised capitalism. Stan is much more solid than her in this respect. multinational corporations are an objective historical good, especially if it means they raise more of their grave diggers.
All Rand's politics end up resulting is the paradoxical effect of disengaging from politics stricto sensu. big capital requires big joint stock companies, consequently big government, and big politics.
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mvuent
Void Dweller
best entry yet. really weird yet with clear thematic foreshadowing. about the same i only used the internet to access a Bionicle forum. looking at people’s original Bionicle creations, reading Bionicle fan fiction, etc.
entertainment
Well-known member
that's a good bit
shakahislop
Well-known member
this is a big cultural thread at the moment isn't it. everyone is drunk off of ideas they've read on the internet. not saying that it didn't happen before with books and chatting to people. but it seems to have happened to almost everyone at some point or another. coz who hasn't spent an evening on the internet by this point. so much of it is grand ideas about the world as well. i can't hack it anymore, or at least i can't hack the internet end of it anymore.
sus
Moderator
It's the New Pangea. Local memetic variations of different bizarre religious views and conspiracies def existed before. But they couldn't hit population critical levels. You were less often exposed to other province's memes. You lived more in your bubbles. I think the filter bubble narrative of online is all wrong. People already lived in bubbles and the internet made them realize because it gave them the voyeuristic ability to glimpse into other people's bubbles. by stumbling on forums just like this one