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RIP Kurt Cobain, you would have loved Genshin Impact
Imagine if 2pac was alive to play Fortnite.
Its really sad Ea Nasir died before he could post to linkedin about b2b sales
😔
this is honestly truly incredible clickbait and I respect the hustle
who doesn’t instantly want to know more about such an inscrutable quote?! why was she talking about either subject (Kurt Cobain or GPS) at all, let alone together??
whoever decided to post that quote really knocked it out of the park with this one
IRL Clickhole bit
What I love about GPS is that it’s so pervasive that maps have basically vanished overnight. And in 1000 years there will be no physical evidence of it.
The only thing future archaeologists would be able to tell is that one day, we stopped making maps, and suddenly we started listening to the stars.
The only thing future archaeologists would be able to tell is that one day, we stopped making maps, and suddenly we started listening to the stars.
We got another candidate for the “beautiful sentence you’d think comes from a fancy book, but it’s actually just an internet comment” collection
Gps satellites are in geostationary orbit so they won’t deorbit for thousands of years.
Don’t worry Boeing and Elon will take care of that
You’re right, they’ll just become deities because their motion is regular and visible.
Then when they do de-orbit, a great schism will occur and the resulting wars will end in the re-industrialization of society and they’ll be replaced
Anyone reading this should pick up a road atlas and stick it in your car
You will probably never need it… Probably.
Those gps sats are never coming down they’ll still be there in 10k years
That’s even cooler, would be pretty spooky if modern historical records and knowledge got lost and then all that was left was a gap in written information and several hundred large man made objects that can be seen with basic optics or even the human eye under the right conditions.
They’d have to invent astro-archarology.
It is wild that the longest living manmade structures have already been built. Satellites and space debris in stable orbits will be around for millions of years, way longer than anything could ever survive on earth
The oldest known human footprints are 117,000 years old. The footprints on the moon from the Apollo missions should easily outlast that.
Alright this just struck me as so
on so many levels. Like, not just the randomness of GPS being the specific thing that is the singular modern miracle, not just that new-fangled technology existing that people who are now dead didn’t get to experience is the reason why it’s sad they’re dead, but even why it is noteworthy that Helen Mirren has these thoughts, and why was she saying this of Kurt Cobain of all people?I figured there had to be more context, and there is, but nowhere near enough to adequately answer my questions. Apparently though, this isn’t a one-off. She is known for talking about Kurt Cobain and how modern technology relates to his death.
Of course, the comment came amid a broader point she was making about aging. “If you’re lucky, you get to be older,” she continued. “And then there you are. Oh my God, I’m 79! I never thought I’d be 79. And then you say, OK, well this is it. This is what 79 is. And it’s kind of OK. It’s not brilliant, but it was not that brilliant to be 25 either.”
Mirren has referenced Cobain numerous times in the past when discussing the nature of aging. In 2014, she told Oprah Winfrey, “Look at Kurt Cobain — he hardly even saw a computer! The digital stuff that’s going on is so exciting. I’m just so curious about what happens next.”
A year later, she told Cosmopolitan, “I was thinking about Kurt Cobain the other day and he died without knowing the internet, and I’m totally blown away by that.” And, in 2016, she said to the Daily Mail, “If I’d died at 27, the age that Kurt Cobain [of rock band Nirvana] died in 1994, I’d never have even known there was an internet! Incredible things are happening all the time and I can’t wait to see what comes next.”
I suppose it’s mildly (very mildly) interesting to know that some celebrity I have a vague notion of (Mirren) is an unlikely fan of another celebrity who I was once a huge fan of. And I guess everyone has their own unique ways of contemplating their mortality.
If you want a singular miracle tech then GPS would be a fine candidate
I agree that GPS has had a significant even profound effect on us as a global society and as individuals, I just think that it’s far from the only technology that has. But fair enough on it being one of the better examples.
I completely agree. I don’t think there’s any one single technology that can really get that spot, but if you for some reason were going to give it out, I’d say it’s a decent candidate. People’s usual go tos are thing like penicillin or vaccines and I just wanted to broaden the horizon and yap about an interest
I just wanted to broaden the horizon and yap about an interest
It was an excellent comment, I learned from it and have an even deeper appreciation for GPS now.
It’s actually really sad that Gilgamesh died before podcasting. He would’ve had the best stories
I really feel like we missed out on his segment where, once every episode, he and Enkidu riff on a rapid-fire series of Ur-Mama jokes.
Ur-Mama so fat that they had to widen the gates of Uruk to let him pass
Reported for misgendering the former king of Lagash.
Or not. Ur-Mama was so incompetent that his rule eventually led to Sargon of Akkad’s shitty YouTube channel.
Furthermore, Ur-Mama’s public health policies were so lax that a dog walked into a tavern and said, “I can’t see a thing, I’ll open this one.”
Reported for misgendering the former king of Lagash.
This is the type of thing actors should be thinking about. We’re hurting them by asking them to think about politics.
Compiling a list of things Kurt Cobain died before they got invented.
Bet he would have hated the sixaxis controller
sad that the god king Genghis Khan isn’t alive today to experience the miracles of a bidet. I think he really would have enjoyed a nice, clean asshole as he was conquering and pillaging villges
I mean… You’re not wrong. My fart box is being caressed by a lovely stream as I type this.
If he’d just lived for another 10 years, he would’ve seen the apex of Western culture, Burnout 3
No that makes sense. It’s crazy how much GPS has changed day to day life, and in such rapid speed and to such an extent we just don’t even think about it.
One of my favourite things these days is to just jump in the car with my wife and just go for a drive in the countryside. I’ll avoid main roads wherever possible, and just pootle along country lanes looking for wildlife and interesting things. And the best part is that I literally can’t get lost, because at the point when I want to go home, I just hit the ‘Home’ icon on the screen in the car and it automatically calculates the quickest route for me.
Sure, my grandparents could have done similar, but they’d have had to bust out the maps and figure out where they were and how to get home. All I do is press a button.
It really is very cool.
This statement confuses me somewhat, is it a bit? The “crazy” difference in my life without GPS would be: I’d have spent some more hours of my life looking at maps to work out where I am. That’s what we did when I was a child and it really didn’t take long.
That’s honestly it.
It’s not a bit. GPS has fundamentally changed several aspects of our lives.
Instantly knowing where you are on a map has fundamentally changed several aspects of our lives? I really disagree.
I could well be the weirdo but it’s fundamentally changed no aspects of my life. I would love to know how it has others.
You are never lost in any place on the globe. You can always make your way home. Just the safety radiating from that. The way people suddenly feel/are more able to leave their local area is in itself a massive change in our lives. Finding way to any other place has now become nothing but a question of entering an address in a phone.
That is unironically a superpower. The fact that saying “I always have up to date information about most of the world, I always know where I am, I am able to find my way to any place, anywhere, at any time. I always know of changes to routes and roadblocks. I am never lost” would be considered a trivial statement, is testament to just how integrated GPS is in our lives.
Your maps are always up to date with all information you could ever need.
This has severely facilitated individual navigation, removing one of the main advantages of public transport (in the perspective of the individual user. I wrote part of my bachelors thesis about this) making it so more people are perceiving the car as the most effective medium of transport.I cannot overstate how much of a simplification “I look less at maps” is. Actually think of the many times you are in a new place. Think of the times your friends have suddenly changed the address for your meet-up. Think of the value the knowledge “I always know where I am” has.
This is what I mean when I say it has happened so fast and in such an all-encompassing way that we don’t even perceive it.
“I look less at maps.” You don’t have accurate maps of every place you visit. Those maps are not up to date. Those maps will not contain the amount of information a GPS contains. If they do, then you have allocated a significant amount of resources towards the goal of always having up to date maps (and more than one type for each place) of every place, everywhere you might ever go.
Navigating by way of map in unfamiliar environments isn’t just a quick look and you’re done. The very basic way you drive has changed. When was the last time you slowed down at every street looking at roadsigns? When was the last time you pulled over to re read the map? When did you last have to rely on local knowledge? Reducing this to “I look less at maps” is a massive trivialisation of an impressive reduction in the labour and resources required for individual wayfinding.
If you want a fun visualization of this: Beverly Hills Cop had the protagonist get some fancy sci-fi tech. That sci-fi tech was GPS.
Even if it actually would be true that all it would mean to you really just is “less map” think of the world you exist in. Do you know how airplanes navigated before GPS or proto-GPS? Ships? I’ve done old school navigation and it is tiresome. You have to constantly recalibrate your compass. Mark your way. How do you know how fast you’re moving when you can’t reliably know where you are? The water moves your ship just as your engine does, but how do you know how much and in what direction accurately?
Lord help you if you’re in shallow waters with sandbanks.90% of all cargo is transported on ships. The modern system of JIT-delivery would not be feasible without GPS.
Same goes for trucks. Any transport of goods has been made significantly easier reducing in large part the time it takes, the level of uncertainty and the amount of labor involved.
These things impact you.
Warfare has been changed by GPS as well. The fact that all soldiers can accurately know where they are, where their destination is and what route would be best. At all times. And this information can easily and effectively be communicated up thru the chain of command.
This is a drastic change of the world we live in.An entire experience of being in a place you do not know, no longer exists. You are (practically) never lost. I really cannot describe how big a deal it is that people are not lost as long as they have connection and power.
Edit: Read the article linked by @aStonedSanta@lemm.ee it details lots of stuff I didn’t cover. It’s got some fearmongering, but the GPS stuff is good.
And the guided munitions
Yeah actually how did missiles work before GPS?
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This is actually becoming a significant problem in some contexts. I train people in some wilderness first aid skills and also train the Burning Man community mediators / first responder volunteers. We’re starting to get folks who volunteer for us, but are staggeringly bad at knowing how to navigate the world when GPS is unavailable or unreliable. Burning Man’s Black Rock City is laid out like a clock face, with radial streets named for times on the clock and other streets running perpendicular to those named after letters (so an address would be something like “5:45 and G street”). In the last few years, we’ve been increasingly seeing people who want to volunteer to help folks, but struggle to navigate this very, very basic city grid even with the benefit of a map. It’s not so much that they can’t use a paper map–that is a problem, but very few people have ever been any good at orienteering without training–but rather that they’re fundamentally just not used to the idea that you have to pay attention to where you are. GPS exists out there, but without specialized gear, it’s not precise enough to really locate you on the city grid, and since the city shifts location in the Black Rock Desert every year, it’s difficult to hard-code something like that with a specialized app or piece of tech. Map use is a trainable skill that we’re used to incorporating into the curriculum, but the idea that you have to actually look at street signs and dedicate a portion of your brain to remembering your location, trajectory, and relative position has turned out to be extremely difficult to impart to people who have never had to do it. We’ve had to turn away otherwise very good volunteers because “paying attention to your position in space” turns out to be a skill that’s very hard to train for in a limited time frame.
Yeah. Forbes. Lol fearmongering expected
It’s funny when it’s a genuinely interesting article and it’s just shoehorned in like that
Yeah. I got to that part and laughed pretty hard. I will say I have no clue on the security of GPS though. 😆
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Damn I spent all this time typing this out for you and turns out you’re just being a fecetious debatebro. Sad to have wasted my time.
I’m really not, but aight, just assume bad faith I guess.
Either you’re being obstinate or we’re just talking across purposes. I’mma out 'cause this conversation now sucks :(
Lmfao yes. Instantly knowing exactly where we are on a map has DRAMATICALLY and FUNDAMENTALLY changed our entire species. There are so many systems interwoven through GPS. I’m assuming you’re just being facetious but if not. https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianafurchtgott-roth/2023/09/26/gps-technology-that-truly-changed-the-world/
Yeah cool! This is a bunch of ways that GPS has meaningfully improved the way some things work. I totally agree with that.
It’s not that she said something this dumb, it’s that it was published by a journalist
“isn’t it a little bit anachronistic, judging him by 2022 standards, 2022 values?”
excerpts from “Kurt Cobain will have revenge on the straights [cw: discussion of dysphoria, transphobia, homophobia, eating disorders, and suicide]“
https://hexbear.net/post/920492
You know what he said to Melody Maker in 1991? “I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn’t identify with any of the guys at all.” That’s what he said.
Kurt Cobain wore a lot of dresses. Like, a lot, both onstage and off. On MTV in 1991, he said “It’s ‘Headbanger’s Ball’ so I thought I’d wear a gown.” He said in a 1993 interview, “I personally like to wear dresses. I wear them around the house sometimes.” This is not some shameful secret he kept hidden from the world. He was open about this. He was proud about this.
Listen to his lyrics. “Should have been a son”. “I’m a lady, can you save me?” “Everyone is gay.” The original lyrics to “All Apologies” from his journals – “Boys write songs for girls. Let me grow some breasts.”
“Courtney had a bag of lingerie with her for some reason and Kurt ended up modeling the contents.” And then they went to Kurt’s hotel room and they fucked.
The whole album. In Utero. The collage on the back cover, the one Cobain described as “Sex and woman and In Utero and vaginas and birth and death". The occult symbols surrounding it, taken from Barbara G. Walker’s The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects. There was something inside Kurt Cobain, something inside waiting to be born
When cis people interpret things, their conclusion is never “they were trans”. Never.
Ed Wood wasn’t a trans woman. He was just a transvestite. He was a man.
Pete Burns from Dead or Alive wasn’t a trans woman. Sure, he got all sorts of feminizing surgeries, but he never said he was a woman. Man.
Prince Nelson adopted a female persona, feminized his voice, and recorded a song about wanting to be a woman’s girlfriend, but he was also a Christian and believed that being queer was wicked and sinful, and that’s the identity of his we need to respect. Man.
Richard Wright, who wrote the Phish song “Halley’s Comet”, spent most of the 1980s telling everyone he knew he was a transsexual lesbian named Nancy, but after being consistently treated like shit changed his mind about that, so none of that counts for anything. Man.
Dave Carter was on HRT when he died, but he was just questioning. He didn’t tell anybody for sure that he was a woman. Man.
Quentin Crisp said just before he died that if he was younger, he absolutely would have transitioned, but wanting to transition isn’t the same as actually transitioning. Man.
All men. Always, always men, whatever they do, whatever they say.
And nothing can make him a girl. Because he’s dead.
If I was to go out there and say that Kurt Cobain was a cisgender man, would anybody say I was wrong? Would anybody object or complain? Even though my saying that is an anachronism, is meaningless. The word, the concept, it literally didn’t exist when Cobain died.
Kurt Cobain wrote, thought, talked, died like eggs do. I don’t care if he never said the magic fucking words.
To be queer is to be erased, to experience erasure. I still hear straight men arguing, as if they have any right to argue, as if they know, that Emily Dickinson was not a lesbian. Emily Dickinson! I’m supposed to listen to people who say this shit? I’m supposed to take them seriously when they say well, actually, calling Dickinson a “lesbian” is historically anachronistic, we can’t apply the standards of the present to the past, and Jesus fuck have you read her letters? She liked girls. She really liked girls. Kurt Cobain was a trans woman. Kurt Cobain was every bit as much a trans woman as Emily Dickinson was a lesbian. Refusing to say it isn’t “respect”. It’s perpetuating the crime perpetrated against Cobain
