fm emulators, gif databases, and wwiii

link lunchbox 2

howdy partner, my oh my have i got some links here in my bag for you that might amuse you… beguile you, even.

hey what’s that noise outside? what’s that feeling in the air? why, hey! it’s the summer again! and this happens occasionally, you know… i just wish my apartment had air conditioning... 

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poolsuite (fm emulation website)

there's a handful of online FM radio emulators that i truly adore (radiooooo.com is one, for instance) and i think it’s a fascinating little hauntological curio to have radio emulation floating around on the internet after music streaming has so fully eclipsed physical music sales and even radio play outside of whatever selena gomez is up to.

the reaction to this online, and it's been mostly a small reaction, has been a steady uptick of alternative routes for music discovery: new music without the traditional "gatekeepers" of what makes it to our ears, such as legacy labels and legacy platforms — on this note: increasingly we ought to accept that spotify, apple music, and soundcloud might become "legacy" in their own right — and new ways to consume sound that might work better, in certain capacities, than the drag-and-drop playlist model of a platform where you and I listen to most of our music through the act of collecting.

anyways, i’ve been listening all day to poolsuite’s little radio emulator (link in the heading), exploring the corners of the site here and there, admiring the design, switching between stations, etc. etc. the site has some mixtapes on hand too, and a newsletter (these things are everything now!) of photography and brief writings on internet aesthetics. it’s a cool project and well worth a couple moments' distraction – let’s not forget that distraction is a wonderful feeling when not being hijacked towards a never-ending scroll. 

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the (um) Situation (dropsite news)

I would (personally) rather not be drafted into a war against iran. So i get that there's not much of a concern in being drafted in 2025, per se. I can't imagine any way for the federal government, or as pure a populist as the president is, to ever reinstitute something that would be so overwhelmingly unpopular — stranger things have happened, sure, but i have my doubts — and this contingency, after all, has been factored into the equation since the draft was ended in 73. It's partially the reason the american empire has spent hundreds of millions on drone technology; with the automation of the U.S. armed forces, we can follow the lede our corporations have left behind, leading towards an idealized, nearly frictionless and wholly anorexic  bureaucratic system of cooption and destruction intent on becoming thinner and thinner until they're almost entirely inhuman and mostly fantasmic, a system which can both rain down destruction on neighborhoods in gaza through our proxies or offshore production for a well-selling consumer product to the cheapest sweatshops in the global south. both processes can be automated, be that through computer systems or through the already automated systems of international weapons trade. marco rubio slipped up in his interview with carlson on wednesday and said "we" are at war with iran before clarifying it was just israel. but israel, as we all know, is the united states's proxy — we may as well already be at war.

the goal of the u.s. armed forces, like the goal of a fully automated economy, the triumphant spirit animal of this country, is to recreate almost the forces of raw nature in the favor of its owners. but in general, it's a scary prospect to have such a thing as the american military aimed towards one's general direction; but that's the pitch the u.s. military has made to the rest of the world since the end of the second world war, something we use as a blunt force weapon for ourselves and our strategic allies (i.e. israel) and so far it's been a ravishingly successful marketing ploy outside of a handful of incidents in south east asia and the middle east. iran, since their '79 revolution, has never quite bowed down the united states and has held that the state of israel is an aggressive expansionist regieme intent on further destabilizing the region and, well, are they wrong? 

this is all part of what drove me so insane on thursday: as the bombs began to rain down on tehran, killing 224 iranians, the legacy news's livestreams on the "breaking news event" consisted entirely of sweaty correspondents repeating the claim that iran had been less than a week out from developing nuclear weapons and we would all be dead in months if they did ever developed nuclear weapons. a classic case of manufacturing consent. and when iran launched a counterattack, killing 24 israelis, the entire western media jumped and pointed, see, see look what they did to poor, innocent israel as if israel hasn't killed likely over 100,000 people in palestine.

there’s certainly no comparing the value of lives; any calculations will fall into terrible calculations of destruction in the end, but there’s a certain sad irony for a country which has been genociding an entire people over the course of two-and-a-half years, now being bombed, a handful of their own being hurt and killed, and now they're broadcasting themselves as the victims to an unlimited, endless evil, a seemingly unprompted attack by iran despite the attack being very much prompted. 

“i just walked to my neighbors apartment, knocked down the door, threw my neighbor down the stairs, raided his fridge, strangled their toddler, and pissed on their rug — i think they're mad. please, pray for me.”

in terms of what’s happened so far, or what happened last week, fellow substacker Jade Hurley puts it into a solid perspective in her post from Monday, based on the reporting on the event in legacy newspapers and media, “it appears an Iranian is only worth 1/9 of an Israeli.” And this ratio will likely only get worse if this situation does truly spirals into WWIII. And if this situation does spiral into WWIII — it’s not hard to imagine at this point — we’ll all likely end up being 1/8,000,000,000 of an Israeli. 

the united kingdom is reportedly preparing for war, as is france, and, as i write this email to you, marco rubio is currently bouncing in the corner of the white house like a toddler, about to be given a cookie. the iran war hawks have been waiting patiently for this moment, and the american war-mongers haven’t had a moment like this since iraq, maybe. the “weapons of mass destruction” excuse has been pulled out of the drawer, dusted off within minutes of the bombs falling on tehran. 

here's a pertinent quote from Amal Saad, a lecturer at Cardiff University, that's been making the rounds:

“Nothing I have ever studied or taught has prepared me for this phase. When a sitting US president publicly threatens a civilian capital with annihilation on social media, turning genocidal language into official communication. This isn’t strategy — it’s theatre on the brink of mass death, an intent to destroy not just a state but a nation.”

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unhappy hour (slate)

many of the corner stones of a modern irl social life, and especially a work/life balance, have disappeared since the pandemic. the "happy hour" tradition for workplaces, going to get drinks with coworkers after shift or after class, for instance, has never quite bounded back from two years of lockdown and this could be a conflation of The Pandemic — and what culturally isn't a consequence of the pandemic in the 2020s?— and a recently developed moralism that demands more rigidly sectioned spaces, at least for younger millenials and gen z workers. 

This latter point isn’t as terrible a thing as the article writer seems to think, at least imo. While the social sphere post-pandemic does seem to be a hollow shell of its former self — and I can’t speak to what it was like before the pandemic, I was only 19 without a fake ID — the current restructuring of priorities excluding the workplace from needing to be "social" isn’t necessarily a bad thing when most of corporate america has been gouged out by venture capital firms demanding that all employees, be they writers for online magazines or warehouse workers, become automatic machines with just limited enough social time so as to discourage unionization efforts.

Therefore any efforts to bring about a "culture of fun" or whatever in the workplace, while doubtlessly good intentioned attempts at bringing back coworker comraderie, falls completely flat. The work/life balance of the past is gone, sure, but it's not the workers fault. The issue isn’t necessarily Gen-Z (though certainly a too-online social life can lead to social isolation that extends to the workplace) or the pandemic (same as above), but rather it was the final domination of tech-finance that the pandemic allowed to happen. The fading of the American corporate happy hour is a consequence of this: american workers are realizing in real time that their corporations have become evil, vampiric empires, hollow as an empty aluminum can, that increasingly want nothing to do with them and will offload them if given the chance. And the once protectionary processes of unionization and worker's protections are equally degrading at a rapid rate. I'm reminded vaguely of the Philip K. Dick book Ubik where a small group of space-travellers return to Earth to find everything they knew rapidly regressing, as if the decades and centuries were spinning back. To what? Where are we going? God I could probably use a drink. Time to start a Briffin Glue Happy Hour? 

As usual, Ryan Broderick hits the nail on the head in his quote for the piece: “the venture capital money in digital media and its adjacent spaces all went bust around 2014. The happy hours curdled as they turned more into layoff drinks.” It’s not a matter of the newer generations of employees hating work, per se, but rather it’s the workplaces themselves that have begun, gradually from the top down, hating their employees for being human and for not being automatons.

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gifcities (internet archive)

here’s a wonderful little database of gifs from the neocities era of the internet. i had a blast browsing through it all afternoon yesterday…

for the cover image for this post, i threw a cheeky little paul mccartney because i thought it was fun and he’s lookin hella cute in his little suit, playing his little bass, singing his little songs. so yeah, i might start overusing GifCities in the near future for these posts…possibly to a nauseating extent… just, be warned!

scraps and love songs revisited (album by Porches)

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this publication, the briffin glue huffer, is what i would describe as a product of a “three coffees no lunch” process. this is either a really great thing or a really terrible and annoying thing, depending mostly on how well you liked the above.

if you like what you’ve read and want more, feel free to throw $5 my way and you’ll get more of these words every week in your inbox. with a certain amount of these $5 subscriptions i can both convince my family that this is a real job and put more time into these post every week. that’s a win-win, i think. 

also, you’ll get access to whatever lurk underneaths the paywall below. it’s good stuff, usually.

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below the paywall: chatbots & extreme surgeries! texas police officers being evil in a new and terrible way! centrists having a crisis! antimemes! and an earthy orchestra…