(Although TBH that’s kind of what I’m hoping to do here. Beautiful things from a non-left perspective.)
Sometimes on Youtube I play the game of “who is secretly right-wing?” But really, most of them are not even close. Maybe PewDiePie but he’s not a beauty guru…and the jokes write themselves at this point.
I mean, the media says he’s the next Hitler, so it must be true.
Lauren Southern, on the other hand….
Well, let’s just say I’ll be waiting for her “Top 10 Bestest Highlighters of All Time” video.
At any given point throughout my life, I’ve been unable to eat various types of foods. That has not, however, stopped me from enjoying food vicariously through others, in the forms of photography, magazines, and cookbooks. I spent hours as a teen reading Jeffrey Steingarten’s food essays (especially The Man Who Ate Everything, which extends to the cover design through a clever cutout on the book jacket) and Cook’s Illustrated magazine, creating the tastes and textures of each recipe in my mind.
You’d think it would make me feel deprived (I would too, from the outside looking in), but in fact quite the opposite: during the times when eating essentially amounted to torture I could still enjoy food, if only in my imagination.
Even as I’m trying zero carb, I find it gratifying to watch high-quality cooking videos (low-quality ones like Tasty I find to be much like consuming junk food–cringey and ultimately unsatisfying) like this one documenting the creation of an Earl Grey-Grapefruit cake. The color palette of the cake is especially delightful, along with the promise of earl grey + grapefruit + cream.
I must confess, however, that I skipped to the cake assembly segment of the vid. AMSR-style videos tend to make me a might twitchy.
Two things got me thinking. A common thread between totally different genres.
One
Yesterday on Twitter, Lauren Southern got awfully close to trying to use /pol/ as her personal army (anonymous hates that) and NotPaxDickinson laid out a plan for fighting Antifa through lawfare (as opposed to warfare). Which also involves /pol/ and assumes that polacks will remain interested in doing this sort of work.
We have a world class distributed video analysis division in this movement, give them what they need and they will produce arrests. /FIN
— Not Pax Dickinson (@NotPaxDickinson) June 10, 2017
(The whole thread, and strategy, is quite interesting so I do recommend reading, but the underlying assumption of “oh anon will do it they love that sort of stuff” rankles me a bit. I love Pax tho.)
Two
Then, today as I fed my Crippling Youtube Addiction, I watched a bunch of “making of” videos for French haute couture collections. The big fashion houses have an interesting setup, because the Brand is king (each has its own “house” style and ideal woman), but then there’s typically a lead designer (many of whom have a cult of personality surrounding them, such as Lagerfeld at Chanel), and under that designer is a small army of sub-divided categories (couture, ready to wear, men’s, accessories, fragrance, cosmetics, etc.), and then under all of those categories are the artisans who actually do the work. Who are, to all of us on the outside, completely anonymous.
And as much as the lead designer will provide sketches and specs for each collection, those are just IDEAS. The execution is left to the individual person crafting each garment or stitching each piece of embroidery. The idea/vibe/theme comes from the Named person, but the actual creation of the garment, the placement of each embellishment, are done by anons.
Unlike the anons on /pol/, these people are paid for their work, but I find it quite interesting that the two are very similar. Painstaking, detail-oriented work that can’t be shortcut. Identifying Eric Clanton took a lot of sifting through photos, identifying details, and matching up to the photo of him at the rally. Creating a couture gown involves sifting through materials, paying close attention to detailed stitches, and matching up the final product to the sketch of the designer.
The work done on /pol/ won’t be attributed to any one person–they pretty much got the credit, if only as an aggregate entity–but the anons who did the work aren’t paid (although that is not to say that the only work worth doing is for pay; it’s absolutely not but that’s a post for another day).
The work done by the atelier anons will never be credited to them (except maybe internally), but they do get paid. Perhaps part of the unspoken agreement with work-for-pay is that your individual contribution gets subsumed into the larger entity for which you get paid.
No, scratch that–there is no “perhaps.” If someone else pays you to do work for them, they get to decide who gets the credit.
At the end of the day, though, it’s the anons who do the work.
As someone who recently changed her diet to 100% animal products (with the exception of coffee), I’m curious to see how Trishank Karthik‘s vegan vs. carnivore experiment goes. I’ve had enough personal problems with eating vegetable matter that I’m not willing to try an exclusively plant-based diet for even a month.
They say that, these days, one shouldn’t try to start a niche blog. Instead, one should optimize each page, each article, each thought. I’ve never figured out how to make all of my various interests work together, much less for one audience, but I suppose they all do have one uniting thread: me.
So I’m late to the blogging game, after many false starts. I’ve tried to set up niche sites, but can never keep up the interest. But each day my brain is full of thoughts and ideas that I’d like to jot down.
I think a lot about:
K-pop and the architecture of aural and visual aesthetics
My recent conversion to #zerocarb and what it means to be a carnivore
Gut health and habits, and what those means for life
The broken, dysfunctional modern health system
The alt-right, modern politics, and how people think
See also: memes, both visual and mental
Wanting to try out old forms of aesthetic production like prayer books and Elizabethan blackwork (a style of needlepoint)
Clothes, and what they say rhetorically
Personality types and persuasion
Organizational structure, and the structure of power/unseen forces
One thing I’ve learned in my diet adventures is that sometimes it takes a number of false starts before that moment when everything clicks into place and you suddenly don’t have to think about it anymore.
Now that I think about it, that same pattern happened when I trained myself to floss every night. (Sidenote: I’ve been somewhat more lax about flossing since I stopped eating plants, as there’s very little that gets stuck between my teeth anymore. I must not let myself get lazy.)
I envision Batfort ultimately as a place where I talk about “deeper” interests. I fancy myself someone who can talk about philosophy, and who can build a deep appreciation of aesthetics and Truth. But I’m not there yet (not nearly).
At the same time, I also realize that it takes time to build the discipline and the knowledge and the experience to become Wise. So perhaps it’s better that I view this as a sketchbook, a notebook to chronicle my development into the woman that I want to be.
I’ve always loved the writings of graphic-designers-who-think. During my time in formal education, I learned to value the opinions of real-world artisans in my visual communication design classes over the untethered academics in the English department. At the same time, I’m always deeply disappointed at the lack of intellectual diversity from the design folks; as of today I’ve encountered precisely one right-leaning design commentator (maybe two, now that I think about it).
They say if you can’t find what you want to read, you should write it.
I want to escape into a misty forest at dawn and run toward the light that spills through the trees. I want to cloak myself in velvet and swim into a glittering nebula. I want to discover the truth of God and the universe.
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