Nice -- a new art book examines American locations in real life that look like the "hallucinating AI horror" series #Backrooms.
https://www.lensculture.com/articles/orejarena-and-stein-american-glitch
Jason Pettus :blobnom:
Freelance book editor and rare book collector based out of Chicago. This is a migration from another account I've had since 2019. I do the middle-aged dad version of shitposting, whatever that's called. Mastolikes: Discordia, transgression, cyberpunk, intl travel, absurdism as lifestyle, breadmaking. Mastodislikes: Toxic positivity (aka "You Got This! Syndrome"), radicals on either side of the political divide, sports, popular music, and many more. #StopTalkingAboutLinux.
Yet more jokes from 1982's "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche" that make no sense anymore:
Real men don't play tennis
Real men don't watch sitcoms
Real men don't quote "Saturday Night Live"
The only vegetable real men eat is peas (???)
Real men don't eat eggs for breakfast
Real men say "spaghetti," not "pasta"
Real men don't eat asparagus (???)
Real men hate the Beatles
Real men don't wear jockeys
More items from 1982's "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche" that seemed like well-known silly stereotypes then (I distinctly remember laughing a lot from this book at thirteen), but that barely make sense now:
Real men don't drive Jeeps
Real men don't work at nonprofits
Real men don't wear cologne
Real men don't play tabletop board games
Real men don't throw Frisbees
Real men don't scuba dive
Real men don't play blackjack
Real men don't watch the Olympics
Found out the 1982 joke book "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche" is at the Internet Archive, and it's a legitimately shocking reminder of how many things we take for granted now were considered exotic nonsense in my teens.
Real men don't eat brunch
Real men don't use credit cards
Real men don't use remote controls
Real men don't have special shoes just to run
Real men don't use hair gel
Real men don't use dating services
Real men don't read tabloids
Real men don't diet
Thinking about my earlier post on the hugely popular '80s joke book "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche," and laughing about how back then, quiche seemed like this exotic dish that only weird bougies ate. It's hard to impress just how small the eating choices were in the American Midwest when I was growing up; one of my younger housemates was shocked, for example, when I told them I had never even heard of the concept of bagels until well into my twenties.
Whenever I drink a Perrier, I still feel slightly guilty, because during my teens in the early '80s, this was the very first brand of carbonated water to become popular with the public, and it was used as a symbol among conservatives for wasteful bougie spending (basically the Reagan version of avocado toast -- see also "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche"). I love that my thirty-year-younger housemates here at the co-op don't have the SLIGHTEST idea what I'm talking about.
Jason Pettus :blobnom: boosted:
Batteries are so cheap, solar doesn’t sleep. Thanks to plummeting prices, analysts say that solar plus batteries can now provide round-the-clock power in the sunniest parts of the world, undercutting fossil gas and reshaping grid planning. Cities like Muscat, Oman, and Las Vegas can already hit that steady power mark for up to 99% of the hours in a year, while Hyderabad, Madrid, and Buenos Aires can get 80-95% of the way there using the same setup. Ember https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-every-hour-of-every-day-is-here-and-it-changes-everything/
#ShareGoodNewsToo
Jason Pettus :blobnom: boosted:
healthy crop of bathtubs this year
The hottest take you'll read this week: Greta Thunberg's embarrassingly simplistic rhetoric worked fine when she was 15 and could be held up by the media as a delightful gimmick, but has now worn out to the breaking point now that she's an adult. I didn't write it!
https://quillette.com/2025/06/28/greta-thunbergs-fifteen-minutes/
Just for shits and giggles while high tonight, I thought I'd see if I could get an AI bot to render a Chris Van Allsburg illustration without ever saying the words "Chris Van Allsburg." The results are...oh, okay, I suppose.
Jason Pettus :blobnom: boosted:
A new approach and new start for Tales From Progress City.
TLDR: I’m officially inviting artists of all media to begin creating stories and making work (via my Creative Commons license) within my fictional universe known as Progress City, a fake US Midwestern metropolis with a funhouse-mirror version of Chicago’s history
https://write.as/tales-from-progress-city/a-new-approach-and-new-start-for-tales-from-progress-city
SOMEONE HELP ME
I CANNOT STOP WATCHING #BACKROOMS VIDEOS
MY BROTHER MADE FUN OF ME WHEN I TOLD HIM
"THAT SHIT'S THREE YEARS OLD, PETTUS!!!!"
I CANNOT HEEELLLP IIIIITTT
⛧ s̵͔͚̥̟̙͂͛ô̷̤̐̽̈́̚m̷̥̩͈͗e̸͔̻͗͛͌̓̈́o̶̗̟̺͍͚̿͑n̷̠̎͂̈́e̴̫͋̉͌ ̶̢͔͓̂̀ͅḣ̵̢̢͙̯ê̵̼l̴̲͍̠̹̃̏p̷̨̨̛͆̈́̐͜͝ͅ ̶͖̙́m̶̢̜̝̭̣͛̓ĕ̶̜͇̺̳̀̔ę̶̮̮̱͎̃̈è̴͕̟̞͎̪͑̕ę̶͖̈́e̸͚̮͊ͅê̵̪̺̯̓̑e̶͖͑͂̃ė̷̜̜͑͝ ψ
Yep, I'm back to obsessively watching #Backrooms videos tonight! (See previous posts on my profile page for a whole lot more.) This particular video makes me realize how indebted these horror shorts are to the original "Blair Witch Project," in that 99% of the running time is devoted just to establishing a creepy vibe, then with something truly horrific only in the last 60 seconds to send you on your way legitimately terrified.
I'm editing a cultural travel guide to Romania this week, and I'm tempted to make fun of their various bizarre linguistic traditions (such as the habit of mothers to refer to their newborn baby also as "mommy," while fathers call them "daddy"); but then I remembered that we Americans are the grand bull moose winners of bizarre, nonsensical linguistic bullshit traditions.
That said, now that I'm thinking about it, my grandparents were obsessed with not going outside with wet hair in a way that also now seems superstitious and antiquated, and I bet that's from European immigrants bringing this phobia of breezes over to the US with them in the 1800s. I also laughed today at the memory of my grandmother always expressing this fear with the specific phrase, "YOU'LL CATCH YOUR DEATH!"
One of my regular clients as a freelance book editor is a well-known publisher of travel guides, and I learn such fascinating things by working on them. Like, I'm editing a guide to Romania this week, where I have learned that there is a hugely widespread superstitious phobia about moving air in that country, and that breezes are often cited as the cause of major diseases even among the highly educated. I'd love to hear more about this from locals!
Every time I see Tony Gilroy mentioned during articles on "Rogue One" or "Andor," I think, "Isn't that that dude who got all full of himself in the '90s because of directing some popular music videos, then made 'American History X' and spectacularly destroyed his own career over it, including bringing a priest and rabbi to a notes meeting with the studio, then suing his own union because they refused to change his credit to 'Humpty Dumpty?'" No, that was Tony Kaye!
Okay, last thought about Kane Parson's horror series #Backrooms, that I think why they've touched such a nerve (he's a bored teen who's nonetheless gotten 200 million views) is that they express our collective dread over AI right now, how it kind of gets reality right by being based on bits of reality, but puts the bits together so nonsensically that it creates existential repulsion. This video especially feels like if we were living inside a faulty AI bot.
I take back what I said earlier (see previous posts for more), about how Kane Parson's #Backrooms horror videos are "kind of" inspired by Mark Danielewski's Generation-X experimental classic "House of Leaves;" this video is basically a shot-for-shot ripoff of the novel, but with his own creepypasta spin on it all. (Don't feel bad for Danielewski; after all, he himself was just ripping off "Poltergeist.")
Still deep into my rabbit hole today of the collective horror mythos known as #Backrooms (see previous posts for more). What makes the videos so effective by the first person to make them, teen filmmaker Kane Parsons, is that he steals heavily from Mark Danielewski's experimental classic "House of Leaves" as far as setting a vibe, but then adds an edge that is sometimes legitimately terrifying. Here's the best one yet I've seen at his channel when it comes to all that.
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