again: i don't play video games, and i never did. i've noticed that the language has been changing, but in my time you'd call people that liked video games and anime and card games geeks, whereas you'd call people into math homework and classical music nerds. there are always overlaps, but i was a nerd. i had friends that were geeks. i haven't seen or talked to them in years.

so, i don't understand gamer culture. at all.

but, this instagram killing is something out of a gibson or pynchon text. i guess that's another difference - nerds read books that win awards and get taught in schools, whereas geeks read comic books and serials for young adults with recurring characters....into their 40s. i don't know how many times i've read something like this in a novel; it's pretty surreal to see it in real life.

and, what kind of insight can i provide from reading all this cyberpunk, post-modern literature?

people can't separate between the images they're used to seeing, and the images of her dead body. the literary term is hyperreal. so, to the apparently tens or hundreds of thousands of people seeking out these photos (and i am not one of them), this is just another photo shoot - the blood and death and brutality isn't real, but just a corollary of good showmanship. so, have you seen her latest sets? but, it's also a finale, a climax, a grand ending - a final hurrah.

as twisted as this is, and as important as the conversation about patriarchy also is, i'd like to see a deeper discussion around this phenomenon of instagram users falling into this condition of blurry hyperrealism. if there's an "instagram story", it is this - the question of if we're all slowly collapsing into a collective schizophrenia, a shared dystopia defined by ubiquitous dysmorphism, where we simply don't know what is real and what isn't, any more, and may not particularly care to find out.

what the situation really draws attention to is the ubiquity of class structure, and the role-playing that dominates the existing capitalist paradigm. you see this written about abstractly. but, the bernie sanders campaign, whatever it's rhetoric, has an income source and a budget, and it has to be ruthless about minimizing expenditures in order to maximize profit, which in context means maximizing expenditures for campaign outreach expenses, like advertising. the campaign cannot escape capitalism; it exists within capitalism, and must abide by the rules of it. so, to speak of hypocrisy would be to reduce a systemic analysis to a moral judgment, which would be a conservative's way of approaching the situation. a leftist should be able to understand that you can't overpower capitalism with slogans and wishful thinking, and it's not possible to live suspended from it in an ether of self-righteousness.

to argue that he's not aware of the situation is just to demonstrate the point; you're essentially suggesting that he's the ceo, and so doesn't have time for entry-level employees - which is probably actually broadly true.

but, that demonstrates the impossibility of building a socialist political movement on top of a conservative social movement. the real lesson is one we already knew: the social revolution must come first.

everything else aside, it's hard to understand why the campaign would push back on this. again: who couldn't see this kind of press coming? and, what this series of events is doing is less drawing attention to sanders' hypocrisy, which i think is a questionable assertion in context, and more drawing attention to his judgement. we've seen this come up in a number of situations. and, you can like a candidates' policies, but be unsure about whether giving that candidate executive power is really a good idea or not.

the entire discourse around this is missing the obvious question: why didn't he foresee this kind of bad press?

i think bernie needs to clean house. the people he has around him aren't helping him, right now.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/19/we-work-for-bernie-here-are-our-demands/

it's a shame i don't use them, because here's a pick-up line.

"i'll bet you a drink that you don't want to talk to me."

or, for an old friend or partner.

"i'll bet you a coffee that you're still mad at me."

so, i did some thinking last night and i'm really itching to get back to the productive side of the pendulum. i've been edging here for a while, and whatever i needed to do is beginning to get to the end of running it's course.

i still don't want to waste the weekend. it might be the only one like this all year.

but, i need to get back to finishing rebuilding the liner notes and i need to get back to the next recording stage and i'm looking at monday as the day to pivot over.

it's just time; it feels right.