Mission Mission

Former local blogger (turned NYC-based blogger) Ramona (not pictured) tells us all about it:

Breaking up is so embarrassing now. Instead of the person just dying at 30 like they did on the Oregon Trail, they stay alive until like 70-plus, and you’re forced to know all about it because you are physically incapable of not looking at their and their friends’ and their coworkers’ social media accounts.

[...]

One night you have 16 glasses of sparkling wine and check his Instagram page online. What better time to maybe run across a picture of him laughing in front of a sunset than when you’re already overdosed on depressants? There is nothing you love more after a breakup than trying to make yourself feel great! You see that he spent at least part of his weekend at a beach. This seems wrong somehow, that he should still be alive. But when you double check the date stamp, it would appear that he is in fact still alive. Somehow, and you don’t think it’s just the Walden filter, his beach looks cooler and more intellectual than the one you yourself were at last weekend. The kind of place where everyone has seen the latest series at BAM and would never ask a guy who worked at The Paris Review how much he loved living in Paris. Well maybe it shouldn’t be called The Paris Review then! Maybe it should be called The New York Review?!

Read on for lots more, particularly Ramona’s profound conclusion.

[Stock 'gram by Rice Paper Scissors]

[via Stokemonster]

Lower Haight-based blog anadromy relates a tale:

I live in an historically African-American neighborhood. Unfortunately, the “historically” part of that phrase is becoming more and more the reality but it is still one of the last predominantly black neighborhoods in central San Francisco and to my chagrin I just walked by some motherfucker in an NYPD sweatshirt. It’s a nice day and I was in a really good mood coming back from the gym listening to cumbia music on my iPod and enjoying the sunshine so it didn’t register at first but as I passed this clueless dweeb I got pretty angry and stared at him with naked disapproval.

Maybe it was an NYPD Pizza sweatshirt?

Read on for the dramatic conclusion.

:/

[via Emma]

This post by my esteemed colleague Andrew Sarkarati was the first I’ve heard of it:

I’m not really buying it. (Sick comeback though, Sark!)

Now let’s boogie:

Cool shirt! (Not quite as cool as that arugula shirt, but pretty cool.)

[via Sky]

Click through to this post by Sexpigeon for the full story.

Capp Street Crap is a wonderful blog, all about the Mission. (I link to it all the time, but I’ve been a little off the grid lately, so you should just follow it yourself.) In addition to charming posts about junk in the gutter on Capp Street, they do some killer in-depth reporting (like well more in-depth than anything we do). Here are some examples from recent weeks:

Officer-involved shooting at SFPD’s Mission Station

High-tech new trashcans at 16th and Mission

Difficulties reopening Capp Street theater/venue the Lost Church

Get to work!

“…a piece of shit,” says my esteemed colleague Vic Wong, taker of this lovely ‘gram:

And he’s absolutely right. All the pretty stairs in SF — we should all be getting our fill!

This is a portion of an academic work called “The Californian Ideology” by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in 1995, which was 20 years ago:

This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, tv programmes, Web sites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich. Not surprisingly, this optimistic vision of the future has been enthusiastically embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, innovative capitalists, social activists, trendy academics, futurist bureaucrats and opportunistic politicians across the USA. As usual, Europeans have not been slow in copying the latest fad from America. While a recent EU Commission report recommends following the Californian ‘free market’ model for building the ‘information superhighway’, cutting-edge artists and academics eagerly imitate the ‘post-human’ philosophers of the West Coast’s Extropian cult. With no obvious rivals, the triumph of the Californian Ideology appears to be complete.

Read on for lots more prescient stuff, and stuff about Reagan, Vietnam, the myth of the free market, immortality — and how it all relates to the Californian Ideology.

[via Jenny Odell]

[Image by Jenny Odell]