#caltech

This is #Caltech #space culture by the way. As I've said, from what I saw, the California Institute of Technology only makes scientists by accident because their chief pursuit is cranking out engineers and managers for #aerospace and the military-industrial complex. Caltech is practically a wing of the military all to itself, and so the mainstream Caltech culture is dominated by an unholy, wholly horrifying disdain for the intellect. You don't need an intellect to punch numbers into computers, and having an intellect gets in the way of remaining emotionally stunted and frozen in a ghastly parody of childhood. (cont'd)

We had a whole complex of curious insights yesterday, partly from the inspiration of watching Macross for the first time. A curious aspect of the Pnictogen Wing's lengthy relationship with Daria is how we fall on either side of a great transformation in U.S. pop culture: the great victory of #anime over the American animation. I knew anime already--from exactly two examples, Akira and the film of Ghost in the Shell that I only saw a piece of. #Caltech had an anime club and it was like three or four people; they could all fit into a small entertainment room anyway, and I was not interested. Knowing Caltech...it's probably just as well I never interacted with those people. The "Caltech Coffeehouse" in the basement of the South Houses had a few manga titles and I got to read maybe two volumes of the Akira manga. But the lion's share of their comics collection was U.S. superhero stuff. (cont'd)

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@lcamtuf/116954391589445535 Not that I thought so at the time, and it's not like I'm GLAD that Blacker Hovse students assaulted me during my short years at #Caltech, but the resultant burnout was a blessing in disguise: at just about the right time, right when I was on the cusp of being indoctrinated by Caltech nerdbro culture AND becoming acquainted with the Internet for the first time, disaster struck and sent me flying totally off course, and suddenly all that nerdbro "rationalist" shit seemed repulsive and intellectually lacking, and mirabile dictu I took a renewed interest in the humanities, feeling guilty about going hardcore science nerd in high school. "Rationalist" is, as this blog post points out, ultimately a marketing term. "You don't want to be against rational thought do you??" In a similar spirit does J. K. Rowling act as though criticizing her bıgotry means that you hate women. ~Chara of Pnictogen