The Land of Pure Imagination
It's the free one!
We all saw the story about the weird A.I.-generated Wonka-themed event in Glasgow. But we also think it’s a harbinger of other things to come re: the only things that make it endearing at all are the difficult-despite-it-all attempts to work with terrible material—attempts that humans have to make!—when the computer says to do something stupid. We also talk about Johnny Mercer’s strange quantum state of admitting to knowledge of but also refusing to disclose information about UK military war crimes in Afghanistan. Also we talk about November’s predictions for 2024: King dead; Saudi economic collapse.
Comments (51)
I’m in bed with a migraine and November triggered a Proustian reverie that my completely irreligious parents took me to what was advertised a Banana in Pyjamas themed event (Aotearoa NZ in the late 90s) as a child that was just a church play by a very culty denomination with no bananas or pyjamas to be found and they have photos of me in my 90s girl clothes getup being King David’s sword bearer. Anyway I’m a Jewish man in my thirties now so they really got my ass. Would have loved to experience biblical bananas in pyjamas though.
November Springs
JUST GIVE US THE LIFT EPISODE
The original backdrops for the Wonka experience are being auctioned for Palestine by Mono https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/176275065677
That’s good at least! I hope the AI grifter guy stays far away from the profits there.
Where is the woke joker bit? Can't find it, was it a fever dream?
Previous patreon episode
I may have missed a few layers of irony, but I suspect Ben Freeman of the Quincy Institute isn't the person Trash Future seems to think he is...
Just to add to the archetypal Britishness of the whole thing Glasgow Wonka was exposed by his ex-girlfriend for being a groomer who started dating a 16 year old who attended the drama school he taught at and proceeded to date her for five years
I legit didn't know the unknown was connected to the Willy Wonka thing. I just thought that was a pro wrestler or something.
everyone in the entertainment scene knows that if you're a standup comic, people come to you trying to rope you into tired old scams, such as, podcasts,
oh hey, I can finally share my experience reading a Golf Digest article from a couple of years ago. bear with me: I ended up there because I was curious if anyone was trying to tackle environmental issues in the sport, and halfway through skimming an article about the future of golf developments in general, I saw a sentence that stopped me dead in my tracks: “Several designers reluctantly admit to seeking work in Saudi Arabia (despite human-rights issues) and Vietnam (despite the distant vet indelible pain of American deaths in the Vietnam War.)” pros and cons, ya know.
"distant vet indelible pain..." is a beautiful typo
I love how nerdy Riley is.
Love that November sounds like she's calling in from a field assignment
Is there a consolidated list of all the startups that Riley has done?
Americans who care about the monarchy are everywhere and it is so fucking weird. Celebrity culture gone absolutely mad.
Milo must live forever.
Do special forces really even do much anymore or do they just exist for prestige, propaganda, money burning, and getting caught doing war crimes
Kinda. Officially, they train the trainers. Drop them in an area and they can train an insurgency. Unofficially, they conduct counter-insurgency: arson, assassination, massacres, et cetera... to terrorise the target population. Stuff that regular soldiers get really squeamish about Super unofficially, SF units quarantine the overly aggressive from the regular soldiers. "Operators" can be good at killing people but tend to be terrible for morale and discipline.
I hate going to the store and trying to find the right two-stroke oil for my suitcase
I really wish ChatGPT was less energy and e-waste intensive--if it wasn't, I'd be able to say things like "at least it's good for Paranoia" or "at least it makes the scams funnier" and move on instead of being so pissed off.
Does it take a lot energy to even run? Because that shit was bad enough with crypto.
Juggling the lathe again with wild abandon.
Definitely don’t give the lathe to the Juggalos.
“A small community beset by an incoherent but deeply perturbing MacGuffin comes together to save the day” is also literally every M. Night Shyamalan movie ever.
Wilnae Wonka
I mean The Unkown is actually a sixteen-year-old Black Scottish girl: https://www.tiktok.com/@felicia.wishes/video/7342153285249305889
Hallucinogenic machine events, profits walking backwards, non-euclidian deepstates, Bob Sternfulls, Rich Lessers & a Husqvarna travel range. I'm not even halfway through & the RAM leak in my brain is approaching critical levels. This is why I listen to TrashFuture.
Chocolate Experience and the Hot Dog Flavored Water
YOU ARE MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ (IRONICALLY) - Venice Biennale, 2024
https://youtu.be/wMjovG2PqZM
White people Get Out is kind of redundant given the plot
RE Royal watching as a U.S. person: inscrutable phenomenon, especially out west where they never even had an (anglophone) gentry.
Who exactly do you think Leland Stanford was, then?
The Romans had their year of 4 emperors, and the British will soon experience the year of 3 Civil Service letterheads. (Better get that King Charles passport while you still can.)
If anyone's curious, The Unknown has actually done an unmasking (Sorry for popcrave link couldn't find the original) https://twitter.com/PopCrave/status/1764314141966078241
They should interview her on 10k Posts: https://www.tiktok.com/@felicia.wishes/video/7342153285249305889
38:03 you know it's weird, I don't want to give credit to Carl Jung but this is incredible how all of this amounts to investors either thinking that people want or pushing on people an ideal of being perfectly confined to your comfort zone and it reminds me a lot of the whole "shadow" thing. You don't need to grow as a person, what you need is more content that we assessed you're already predisposed to like and never, ever look past that. We're just going to give you what you already like, but more. more content. more. more. more.
Every day that passes living in this country it feels like being trapped in a padded room that is getting smaller and smaller, and being gradually filled with more and more circus clowns
The good news is that no matter how small it gets you'll be able to fit a LOT of clowns in there.
Hmm, yes. The impossible stage directions of Willy Wonka AI script call to mind the 'Circe' section of Joyce's Ulysses, in which the setting of Night Town strains against the theatric--*GUNSHOT*
If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then you are already dead, and hell is other people.
Giles Cloo-ren tells you which restaurant has neuro-aesthetics
We live in the age of the Sludge Internet! We use obviously incorrect AI content, we trust fake reviews and we chat endlessly about lunch and bedtime with chatbots that would very much like to connect on Signal. I think we're all just going to accept it in the end. The Internet will be like an old game with some online capabilities but a very small user base. But you'll have your AI fembot boigurlfriend, so that's pretty cool I guess...
What you are describing is called “dreamshit” and is a major plot point in the China Miéville novel Perdido Street Station.
I have to correct November. The first proper meme of 2024 were the tunnel Jews.
white people when you tell them there will be Catgacating and Cartchy tuns at the function
To be fair, the Glasgow Wonka thing was a pure embodiment of the line "You get NOTHING, you LOSE! Good DAY, SIR!"
You're in his DMs, I'm in his walls (I am The Unknown (evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls))
Good thing you're not in the ceiling, because you would fall down suddenly (RAAC) Edit: spelling is hard