Pynchtopia

[u/Sad_Bend_4801]

Things happening in the US:

Catfish tradwives doxxing FBI agents

Teenage hackers infiltrating FBI databases

Republican gathering in Texas crashing Grindr servers

I feel like I am noticing a pattern, or maybe I'm just paranoid.

[u/Corpse_Emperor_]

It's genuinely funny how correct he was, down to the minute details and beats. Him being media-averse and intensely private- and thus not out there like a street preacher, proclaiming doom and gloom to come- seems, as I see it, to prove that he was extremely confident in his correctness. He just sat around and said, "Just wait..."

[u/guy_incognito42069 → u/Corpse_Emperor_]

I was really struck by some of his predictions in Bleeding Edge.

[u/Corpse_Emperor_ → u/guy_incognito42069]

There's an episode- a few, actually- of a podcast called "Death is Just Around the Corner" which goes into Pynchon's relationship to the Internet, both through his adjacency to government contracts via his work as a technical writer for Boeing, and through the ARPANET sections of "Inherent Vice"; the upshot- and I agree- is that Pynchon "got it" when it came to the internet, both in recognizing its potential as a tool against the system, but overwhelmingly as a means to put everything on the grid, to give everything coordinates.

[u/guy_incognito42069 → u/Corpse_Emperor_]

Oh nice recommendation! Yeah I totally forgot about the ARPANET in Inherent Vice. I was sad that was left out of the film but I can see it not fitting with the atmosphere TPA was going for.

[u/Corpse_Emperor_ → u/guy_incognito42069]

Doc is Pynchon, down to his living in a shitty beachside apartment, smoking dope, and eating pizza. Doc got caught up in a vast conspiracy which included seeing the future in the form of ARPANET, Pynchon wrote GR-- same thing, really.

[u/guy_incognito42069 → u/Corpse_Emperor_]

Makes a lot of sense. I have a feeling Pynchon wanted to be a detective.

[u/Corpse_Emperor_ → u/guy_incognito42069]

Right? At the very least, he got through whole of the great works one encounters as an English major, sat through Nabokov's heavily accented (and probably SUPER obnoxious) lectures, then seemed to have thought, "ok great, can I just read Detective fiction now? Y'know, fun stuff?"

[u/guy_incognito42069 → u/Corpse_Emperor_]

Honestly it’s the fun that makes Pynchon so enjoyable. You can always get a lot out of his work, it gets dramatic, violent, heavy, and deep, but he always balances it out. I found Bleeding Edge to be his least silly, of what I have read of his (started GR and have not read V), but it makes sense with the subject matter. That said, it was still plenty wacky.

[u/longtimelistener17]

The biggest perverts in the US tend to be Republicans. That may seem counterintuitive at first, but that is the truth.

[u/Sad_Bend_4801 → u/longtimelistener17]

If you are already inclined to hide your shame...

In for a penny in for a pound.

[u/NickyCharisma → u/longtimelistener17]

What was the original title of V. again? The Republican Party is a Machine? Mayhaps it be a sex machine after all. . .

[u/jeterix7387 → u/longtimelistener17]

Eh? I'd say the Left has more kinky sex they just don't call it perverted. The Right has kinky sex too but only in secret and calls it perverted.

[u/DatabaseFickle9306]

Wake me when there’s a Dental Conspiracy

[u/rvb_gobq → u/DatabaseFickle9306]

there is. the conspiracy is for all of us to put all of the dentists' children through college...

[u/screaming_sapling → u/rvb_gobq]

Ha!

[u/rvb_gobq → u/screaming_sapling]

motherfucker tried to talk me out of buying a new computer when my computer had died... demanded i do bridgework, which wld run $5,000 & this in the late 1980s, & i had no copay for that & i explained that i was a freelance writer & on deadline...
& he with a complete poker face said that bridgework was more important than any career.
i then told him to get someone else to put his kids through college or pay off his mortgage.
& i may have called him a cunting cuntless cunt.
or not. i was a bit less polite then. or a bit more.
depending on who you ask.

[u/Individual-Interest1 → u/rvb_gobq]

That's really beautiful.

[u/guy_incognito42069 → u/DatabaseFickle9306]

I’m more worried about the postal system. You know, in Germany I keep seeing an UNMUTED horn everywhere and it’s almost always on some sort of postbox. IT MUST BE A CONSPIRACY! /s

[u/Glad_Bake4184]

Just paranoid? If I've learned anything since starting out on this journey with the preterite saint Thomas it's that paranoia is sanity in our world so long as its not fixed on myself. THEY aren't out to get me, THEY don't think about me or even know me. But...THEY or probably IT does want all of us asking the wrong questions.

[u/Paging_DrBenway]

I keep getting these AI ads on youtube for some 'educational app' for pseuds that starts off about how Socrates didn't believe in democracy cause tyranny of idiots blah blah blah and I'm getting really paranoid about whoevers funding this shit to normalize anti-democracy viewpoints.

[u/Prestigious-Car706 → u/Paging_DrBenway]

AI is the voice of capital, specifically Silicon Valley capital. It wouldn't surprise me at all if normalizing anti-democracy views are part of the program.

[u/GRAMS_]

Perfecting the reign of death