By David Futrelle
“Van Life,” as I understand it, is a growing trend in which young and often quite photogenic people, er, live in vans — hence the name — and post a lot of arty pictures to Instagram documenting their travels.
Over on the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit today some of the regulars are discussing the trend, which many of them see as very amenable to the MGTOW philosophy.
But some worry that the trend has gotten popular with the very women these guys say they’re going their own way from. So what’s the appeal to these women?
Cock, of course. Just listen to Beavis and Butthead here:
Those sneaky, sneaky ladies!
But not all MGTOWs are opposed to the idea of “bitches” driving from city to city in an endless quest for geographically diverse dick. Even if the owners of said dick have to pay a little to get, er toured.
Dude, I feel fairly safe in asserting that no one, not even one of those horny nomadic van ladies, wants to touch your gross MGTOW dick. Regardless of whether the van is in a state of motion or not, don’t go knockin’.
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Sv3ridge and Frankie have like 50-70,000 followers on Youtube. Patreons etc. They won’t be stopping anytime soon. Sadly. And there are plenty more smaller carnie channels about.
(although Sv3ridge is a big dirty cheat, he juices mangoes to ward off scurvy, so he’s a massive fucking hypocrite).
@Naglfar
It’s technically fermented, that’s why they seal it up in jars. It’s a similar principle to Hákarl. It’s perfectly edible, though beyond me why anyone would want to.
@Dalillama
That makes more sense. I had a mental image of a rotting steak in a jar rather than fermentation. I know about Hákarl, but it still seems like something I would never eat even if I wasn’t a vegetarian. IIRC Anthony Bourdain said it was the most disgusting thing he ever ate.
Another terrible thing I saw was Frankie boy making chicken “noodles”. He put a bunch of raw chicken in a blender and made it into a paste. Then put the paste in a piping bag and squeezed it out into a pan of boiling water so the chicken instantly cooked and made noodles.
I mean points for creativity I guess, but just eat some fucking pasta!
Snort!
Re:Books
I never did read the Dragonrider series, I occasionally wonder if that was a mistake. I did read her Crystal Singer series and I love it!
@Jesalin,
Depends on how you look at it. The Pern books have held up fairly well, I think, but be warned that McCaffrey did use some toxic romance tropes in there, especially early in the series. And that she had some odd ideas about gays, but they are treated as sympathetic characters too, with their own stories. So I guess…fairly progressive for it’s time (60-70’s), maybe?
I like dragons and fantasy, so I like the books. There’s an interesting world there, at least in my opinion, so I’m willing to put up with its faults. So far as I’m concerned the faults aren’t baked into the worldbuilding, so a good reform movement or two can change things for the better. Ymmv, ‘natch.
As far as films go remakes have been around forever. The Chuck Heston version of The Ten Commandments could be called a remake. Not only did Cecil B. DeMille direct both the 1923 and 1956 versions the 1956 version includes scenes that are near shot for shot duplicates of scenes in the 1923 version, and featured set pieces that duplicate those used in the original.
What we think of as franchises aren’t new either. Charlie Chan is a classic example, starting out as a character in a book series, spawning a success movie series, comic books, cartoons, radio, and TV series.
It’s been years since I read them, but I always thought of Call of the Wild and White Fang as companion novels: Buck goes from domestic dog back to the life of his ancestors, and WF moves from the wild to domesticity.
I don’t normally think like a literary critic, but this thought has been with me since reading a paperback containing both when I was about 12.
I enjoyed the pern books, and I really liked some of her other books like Sassinak. Admittedly, it did suffer a little from the lack of dragons.
I started with the Dragonsinger trilogy back in middle school, which was a pretty decent place to jump in. Shorter books that set up the premise well without being beat over the head with the world building, which might happen if some poor soul decided to start with Threadfall or the Wyrs of Pern.
I finally started cataloging my bookshelves. Anne McCaffery, Mercedes Lackey, and R.A. Salvatore kind of take up a disproportionate number of titles…
(Books are more fun to talk about than constipation, so forgive the book “HEY I KNOW THAT AUTHOR” arglebargling)
@contrapangloss
yeah the Haperhall books a more gentler way to enter the pern series then the original ones. I think I started with Dragonsdawn myself.
Re : Pern
I read the first trilogy when it came out. I liked two things : the dragons, and a heroine who was busty.
Then I stopped being as interested in Pern.
Re : Call of the wild
My father read us a lot of Ernest Thompson Seton as well as Jack London. Seton opens with “Every wild animal biography is a tragedy.” All his wild animal stories end miserably.
As a kid, I didn’t know animal stories were supposed to be cheerful.
Weird Eddie : thinking back about it, I am a bit annoyed by you saying :
(dunno blockquote here)
aw, fuck it, folks, the original story was a one-dimensional gloss that read like it was written by a ten-year-old, the story was tired and had been done a hundred times just in the FILM era….
What made it popular was… well, first, THAT STORY IS STILL VERY POPULAR, and two, the special effects.
I have two issues here.
The first one is that I feel like that Star Wars wasn’t successful *just* by random luck. It was a gueningly well done movies, and the following two just as well done. That remind me of the critique at the time saying that it was a kiddie film because it’s sci-fi. It’s not because it’s a lighthearted, heroic saga that it’s easy to do or badly done.
The second one is that I feel that it also make criticism of all thoses films vastly harder, and have left some (other than you) people to say “well, they are all equally bad”. Which is not true.
If we are able to discuss and criticize work of the pasts who are arguably just as silly and nonsensical, like the Odysseus, I think we can give a bit more of a place to Star Wars. Even if George Lucas probably isn’t as good as Homer :p
@ Mrs Morley:
One of my great-grandfathers wrote adventure stories in the 1920s and ‘30s; one of his books was a pretty good collection of stories mostly from the PoV of various wild animals, while an arc about the foreman of a gang of CPR workers plays out in the background. One of the wolves comes to a not only tragic but extremely gruesome end; some of his hybrid offspring become a dogsled team.
@ Ohlmann:
Yeah, one of my pet peeves is people saying things like “Well what do you expect of a trashy action movie/romance/comedy,” etc. Those genres all arguably require more technical skill, clever writing and good acting than straightforward drama—it’s possible with a heavy drama to pass off boredom as profundity, but the audiences for comedies, action or romance come expecting to be entertained, and have no patience if they’re not made to laugh, gasp or cry.
@Moon Custafer:
That sounds like the sort of thing my parents would have read to my brother and me – and we’d have loved it.
If there’s a way to point me towards it that’s comfortable to you, I’d be very interested in reading his stuff now.
RE: That jar-fermented “high meat” crap: Eeeuuuuuurrrgh. Now I don’t mind forgetting my breakfast at home so much because this made me lose my appetite. And I say that as someone who enjoys a good raw carpaccio/tartar steak (and sushi) once in a while, as well as giblets/offal (I.E. organs; yummy yummy liver), and fermented food (sauerkraut, kimchi, yoghurt and sour cream, etc). Also, really you’d think that with all the digestive and other bodily/health problems their diets cause them, they’d wise up to how crap they are. In any case I’m pretty sure (no expert) that the keto diet IS useful for some things, but for a few years at most (in the case of young epilepsy sufferers IIRC at least), and that making it a whole lifestyle long-term is a terrible idea, except maybe if you’re an Inuit (not like they had a choice, and their bodies likely adapted over the centuries).
RE: Books: My earliest “adult” novel read was Lord of the Rings when I was ten, so nothing really mind-blowing/life-changing (I already was a huge fantasy fan then) though the ending was quite melancholic. Incidentally I became atheist at the same age, probably not something Tolkien would have approved of. In any case my current mindset was probably more influenced by the news than by my literary choices during my formative years; I was an adult by the time I tackled Orwell and Huxley, and was quite used to humans being bastards by then.
And I probably would enjoy Seton more than most animal story writers, as “happy” animal stories usually strike me as hollow, cheap and infantile pandering, and I’ve been like that since I was a wee tyke (I have a very special place of loathing in my heart for the “animal plays human sports real good” comedy subgenre; fuck Air Bud), the possibly sole exception being The Adventures of Milo and Otis, possibly due to not overly humanizing its animal characters (if you do that you better have a damn good reason to do it, and not just use it for positive traits/feel-good bullshit). I really enjoyed Antarctica (incidentally also a Japanese movie) for those same reasons, methinks. In a similar tack I really should read Watership Down and Plague Dogs sometime, although not when I feel depressed obviously.
@ Mrs Morley:
Unfortunately AFAIK all his stuff is long out of print, though you can keep a eye out for the name Samuel Alexander White in used bookstores, I guess.
The animal-story collection is rather hilariously titled Man Scent (some of his other titles include Flaming Furlands and The Wonder Strands). As usual, racial stereotypes common in the period are apt to crop up, etc
I just googled “Flaming Furlands” and Grandpa White apparently rates a mention in this article (scroll down to the bottom).
@Moon Custafer
This the right fellow?
That’s the one!
I also discovered recently he left an unpublished memoir called Wild Editors I Have Known.
Thank you @Moon Custafer and @Dalillama!
I recently was reading a comment thread where a carny was having a heated argument with a vegan and saying that vegetables and pretty much everything except meat was toxic and gut destroying, and describing their symptoms every time they contaminated their diet. Like, I dunno pal, sounds like you have some weird problems because that doesn’t happen to most people.