Films

 My New York Year (meh)

Baby Driver (good action fun)

Suburbicon (written by Coen brothers)

The Paper Tigers (three old guys pick up their kung-fu fighting, so so)

Marion Zimmer - "The Mists of Avalon"

While at some point it felt repetitive and characters less realistic, there were some great parts in the book. Particularly the slow retreat of Avalon, the change that is happening upon the world because man believes in different things, is wonderful.

Olga Tokarczuk - "Primeval and other times"

Intriguing fantasy (?) read. 

Flaubert quotes

Books aren't made in the way that babies are born, they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed on top of one another, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time-consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

As you get older, the heart sheds its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms which break off several branches at one go. And while nature's greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.

He also felt, in the last year of his life, that he was 'liquifying like an old Camembert'.

Epic's certificate and overload issue

 https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/expiration-date-4-6-2021

The Saga of Cannibal Ants in a Soviet Nuclear Bunker

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cannibal-ants-soviet-nuclear-bunker

On top of a ventilation pipe that juts out from the mostly underground facility, there is big, mound-like nest of wood ants. It is a perfectly normal place for wood ants to live. They feast on the sweet honeydew secreted by aphids dwelling in nearby pine trees, and soak up the rays of post-Soviet sun.

But within the bunker, in a small room at the bottom of that shaft, there was a second colony of ants. These ants had no sun, no warmth, no light, and no honeydew. So they survived on the flesh of their fellow ants. Their colony was the wretched result of individuals falling from the healthier colony above, and with no way to climb out of the bunker, they could never return. It feels like a mirror-horror that could have come straight out of the mind of Jordan Peele, except that instead of a commentary on race and class in America, it’s a testament to one population’s sheer will to survive. “It is a peculiar colony” says István Maák, a zoologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. “They are doing the best they can, surrounded by dying.”

This is actually not an uncommon behavior for wood ants. The species is known to engage in battles among colonies, particularly in spring, when they extend their ranges in search of food. Maák calls this time of year the “wood ant wars.” After a battle, the victors feast on the bodies of the defeated. Down in the bunker there were no alternative sources of food—not enough bat guano or passing mites, for example—so instinct kicked in.

Ant Colony Two’s drive to survive resulted in an extraordinarily meticulous ant necropolis that lined the walls of the small room and spilled through the doorway. “They were organizing their corpses in waste piles, putting neatly in the corners, and transporting it away,” Maák says. There were approximately two million corpses, many of which displayed bores from bites and fret holes—signs that their contents had been consumed, he says.

How John Gray's philosophy helped me understand my war experience

 https://aeon.co/essays/how-john-grays-philosophy-helped-me-understand-my-war-experience

 

 

 

 

Speaking at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2008, Gray highlighted an important caveat to the phrase ‘You can’t have an omelette without breaking eggs,’ which is sometimes used, callously, to justify extreme means to high-value ends. Gray’s caveat was: ‘You can break millions of eggs and still not have a single omelette.’

 

 

 But it was only through Gray that I saw the similarities between the doctrines of Stalinism, Nazi fascism, Al-Qaeda’s paradoxical medieval, technophile fundamentalism, and Bush’s ‘war on terror’. Gray showed that they are all various forms (however incompatible) of utopian thinking that have at their heart the teleological notion of progress from unenlightened times to a future utopia, and a belief that violence is justified to achieve it (indeed, from the Jacobins onwards, violence has had a pedagogical function in this process)

 

 

Gray points to the re-introduction of torture by the world’s premier liberal democracy during the war on terror as an example of the reversibility of progress

 

 

Gray acknowledges the theories of the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, outlined in his book The Denial of Death (1973). Becker believed that human activity is largely driven by unconscious efforts to deny the inevitability of our demise. We invest in activities, institutions and belief systems that we think will allow us to transcend our brief time in the world. Becker wrote: ‘We build character and culture in order to shield ourselves from the devastating awareness of underlying helplessness and terror of our inevitable death.’ The stories we create give us a sense that we’re part of something greater than ourselves, which will continue after we die

Why people love Nier so much

 https://www.pcgamer.com/why-people-love-nier-so-damn-much/

 

Yoko Taro

producer Yōsuke Saitō

This all started with Drakengard, Yoko Taro's first game that was released on the PlayStation 2 in 2003. If Nier is merely strange, Drakengard is fully batshit. It's hard to explain it without going into intense detail about the lore, but what sets Drakengard apart from other RPGs is just how bone-chillingly dark and twisted it is.

Do you want some examples? Okay, you asked for it:

    What's key about Taro is that, even if his intentions seem impossible to divine, there always some kind of logic to it.

    One of the main characters is named Leonard and he joins the party shortly after his three kid brothers were butchered by soldiers while Leonard was off in the forest masturbating to the thought of little kids. Yup, he's a pedophile and is very torn up about it. He tries to kill himself but a fairy shows up and manipulates him into forming a magical pact with her in exchange for his eyeballs.
    Another main character is an elven mother driven insane by the death of her child. She slaughters and eats children because she thinks she'll be able to "protect" them inside of her womb. In one of Drakengard's many different endings, she is eaten by a horde of giant celestial babies. Now that's poetic justice!
    In one alternate ending, the main character's sister commits suicide because it's revealed that she harbors incestuous feelings for him. It's not clear if he reciprocates, but I doubt it because he's clearly in love with his pet dragon that also stole his ability to speak.
    In Drakengard 3, the main character was sold into prostitution as a child but is also a divine songstress on a mission to slaughter her five sisters and bring about the end of the world. She also has a flower growing out of her eyeball and rides a dragon with the voice of a child. Each time she kills one of her sisters, she forces their disciples to become her sex slaves. There's a cutscene where she explicitly tells one to prepare for sex by washing "front and rear," so you know she means business.

Evangelion - all four films

1.01

2.02

3.33

...?

Anyway, did enjoy the story telling. Perhaps better than the series objectively but I always will love the series.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman - "The Yellow Wallpaper"

One of the first female-perspective horror books... and while I had my usual trouble feeling the real thriller/horror part, it was a nice read.

Fatboy Slim mix XFM

https://www.mixcloud.com/FatboySlim/fatboy-slim-on-the-road-to-big-beach-bootique-xfm-show-1-310312/

 

Hellbound

"Next big South Korean hit"

Amusing enough, about people getting told they will die and go to hell. It seems to make little concessions, killing people off etc. Not as captivating as Squid Game at all, but still OK

B. Catling - "Earwig"

Strange but wonderful story of a girl with frozen saliva teeth, a man to look after her, a bar in Belgium... it's hard to describe this story, but highly recommend, although the moment where he tries to kill the cat but fails is haunting.

When God gave the first human consciousness, as they shivered their way out of Eden, he whispered advice under his celestial breath: 'obscure thyselves.' Every tribe of the sons of Adam and every half-simian with ingenuity has since learnt to brew or distil fluids, vapours and powders in order to relieve themselves of the intolerable jabber of thought occasionally; to numb their senses just enough to sensually smugde judement and nerve. A good bar is a sanctum to this need. Au Metro was a cathedral.

The catch found her fingers and the cage opened and she put her hands inside to touch something entirely new, like an unfound cleft or ripple in her own body. The cat moved into her hands, and a shape bigger than that brought on by the boy filled her from her toes to her optic nerves. She brought it out and held it to her once bony chest. It squirmed in against her warmth and a tiny part of her leaked out. The cat purred, and the change in its sound astonished her. There was only one thing to do, so she did, and purred back. This was the beginning of a profound an irrational friendship. She quickly took the little beast to her room and curled up on her bed with it tucked close to her chest. It did something extraordinary, and again Mia felt arousal. It gently pummelled her belly with its stuff, hard little paws, and pushed its scrawny head into the scrawny parts of her body. This odd person showed love in a physical and direct way, as if it wanted to burrow inside her and become one. The delight she felt was overwhelming.

Akram Khan Company - "Outwitting the Devil" (part of Carnival of Shadows)

Seen at Sadler's Wells

Great dance, particularly with the repeated "slow" moving bits. Music was quite captivating at times.

Robert Plant, Alison Krauss, Savina Yannatou

Savina Yannatou - Sumiglia – sad, doleful, style of Death Can Dance, just her voice and a violin

Latest album by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - "Raise the roof"

Particularly "Last Kind Words Blues"

Julia Armfield - "Salt Slow"

Amazing magic realism / fantasy stories.
Beautiful way of phrasing things, juxtaposing feelings and impressions. (I've been using the wrong page numbers, of another book, for the first quotes and did not notice anything amiss.

To her eyes, there is nothing obviously wrong with any of them; they all wear logo T-shirts, like to pose next to barbecues, all seem partially blinded by the sun. Her friends, however, tap their screens to zoom in on throats and the corners of eyelids, reminding her that to love a man is to watch him buckle.

Later on, she goes back to the kitchen to wash up. Looking out into the shared garden, she sees Mrs Lumis making a shuffling tour of the lawn in the first of the snow. A strange sight, spectral. Like death walking in the morning, looking for its lost cat.

Knew herself for what she was: a great failure at solitude. Sluicing through her twenties illuminated only by the glow of terrestrial television, finding much to her dismay at the age of twenty-nine that she longed to amuse and to be longed for. A faint life. Eating apricots and growing bony and forgetting how to talk to people Loneliness like a taste on the skin.

Mornings have been the hardest things to adapt to; company after three decades of waking up alone. She has always considered herself the kind of person seen to best effect at four p.m., once the day has burnt away and softened up her difficulties. Having someone with her from the outset gives her no rehearsal space, no time to sink down into some more pliable version of the creature she is to begin with.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Forgot how good the soundtrack of this film is. Lots of postrock tracks, done by Jim Jarmusch' own band, Sqürl

books, films, series ,games

 *James Roose-Evans - "Ergens en de grote beer" - zware spellingfouten maar ik zie hoe ik het ooit een mooi boek vond

* Julia Armfield - "Salt Slow" - bloody weird, short stories, think Kelly Link but different, just how I like it. Amazing suggestion from...?

* Ava

* Free Guy - ok, bit simplistic but very funny, good jokes about things burning in the background

* Another Round - Mads Mikkelson (?) him from Hannibal, about four teachers trying out the theory that man is born with 0.05% too little promillage. Beautiful and funny and asd

* Judas and the black Messias - about FBI infiltration into black panthers. never knew about this

* Squid Game - *the* Netflix hit, good, enjoyable

* Kevin can go fuck himself - her (Alice?) of Schitt's Creek, in this somewhat sitcom but then darker parts series, where sitcom scenes and more serious stuff, different lighting etc, follow each other as she tries to find her own life. Interesting as a concept but slow. The sitcom bits were too good. They irritated the fuck out of me. Fast forwarded most of it.

* Saint Maud - Did I watch this before? Young girl, recently turned towards Christianity, helps an elderly lady, a dancer. Burns herself at the end. Good film.

* To the lake - Russian series about pandemic that is more about the people than the scary bits. Good

* Venineth - game, marble, abstract, found via Jacob Geller and Errant Signal. Good, although I'm too stupid for its puzzles

* Dark Souls - Because Marcelo and Zoltan forced me. Jesus Christ it's hard.

* No Time To Die - final Daniel Craig bond.. Good! Loved it. Not too long. Loved every bit.

Harrie Nilsson - "Mr Tinker"

Natalie Merchant - "Butterfly"

Olga Ravn - "The Employees"

Intriguing book about a starship sent from Earth, orbiting a strange planet, where the story, or rather the setting, is told via interviews with employees; both humans and human-alike androids.

I know the smell of oakmoss because you've planted it inside me, just as you've planted the idea that I should love one man only, be loyal to one man only, and that I should allow myself to be courted. All of us here are condemned to a dream of romantic love, eventhough no one I know loves in that way, or lives that kind of life. Yet these are the dreams you've given us. I know the smell of oakmoss, but I don't know what it feels like to the touch. Still, my hand bears the faint perception of me standing at the edge of a wood and staring out at the sea as my palm smoothes this moss on the trunk of the oak. Tell me, did you plant this perception in me? Is it a part of the programme? Or did the image come up from inside me, of its own accord?

Sayaka Murata - "Convenience Store Woman"

For me, a typical Japanese book, where I feel I miss a lot of its emotions and swirling feelings because I don't understand the culture well enough.

Curious book, about a woman unable to understand human emotion, who completely identifies with the proper working of a convenience store.  Meets a terrible guy who always complains and mentions the Stone Age. 

Nothing really happens. But a lot does, under the surface.

Gordon Corera - "Secret Pigeon Service"

Bought at Bletchley Park, wonderful book about the pigeons "serving" in WWII. There are pigeon prisoners of war!

MI14(d) was running operation Colomba.

The [BBC] broadcasts encoured them to defy the invaders and parodied the propaganda spouted by the Germans. For that reason, the Nazis hated the BBC for its subversive influence. Almost every member of the population listened. A German officer given the accurate time by a little girl on the streets asked how it was possible she knew it was a quarter past seven when she had no watch. She replied, 'Don't you see? There is no one on the street. They are all listening to the English radio."

... a British intelligence officer would ring up the BBC and identify himself with a codename - rather bizarrely, for Belgium this was Napoleon Bonaparte and for the Netherlands Bing Crosby. He would then ask for a specific phrase to be broadcast, such as 'here is a message for Adolphe - the wine is warm' - which was meaningless to everyone else but acted as a coded signal for a particular group.

This special crack team was called the Falcon Destruction Unit, and could be sent to a particular area at the request of any government service. The 007 of the bird world, it had a license to kill. [...] MI5 sprang into action with its counter-pigeon team - section B3c - led by the dedicated Richard Melville Walker, the security service's counter-pigeon expert.

film,series

•  "Wrong Turn" - wonderful night of terror style horror film
• "Sex Education" - third season, still good. Nice soundtrack as well
• "Get Out!" - Jordan Peele's amazing horror. Noting in case I missed doing that with the original
  

stuff - films, posters, series, games

* "The White Lotus" - dark comedy series, though more painful than funny which made it good, about a fancy Hawaii resort and various fucked up guests visiting; the moron guy on his honeymoon stabbing the manager, the woman scattering her mother's ashes.... music reminded me of Utopia and turned out it was the same composer: Cristobal Tapia de Veer

* Control - game, fun, amazing, levitation, good storytelling, amazing X-Files, 80/s feeling

* Neon Evangelion 1.01, 2.02, 3.33, 3.01+1.01 - all four good, yeah maybe better than the series, although the series introduced me to something I never knew before

Pen Vogler - "Scoff"

Nice read on food and class and how they intertwine and impact each other in Britain, although some paragraphs, pages and chapters are a bit enumerative... long long lists.

Things I learned: Aga is a household brand for kitchen stoves, parkin is a kind of cake, posset some sort of drink with hot milk and something alcoholic.

Dinner parties moved back and forth in time. First a sign of wealth, then something to eschew because too bourgeouis.

It is a linguistic tick that survives to this day. Southerners and posh northeners have 'lunch' and 'dinner'. Northeners, particularly the working classes, still have 'dinner' between noon and 2 p.m. and 'tea' in the early evening (and perhaps a 'supper at night). For a long time, children had 'dinner'. In a Victorian house of a few servants the mistress might eat her 'luncheon' while the children and servants had their dinner. It might be the same food or, more likely, a rehashing of the employers' beef or mutton from the previous night or weekend, served with milk to drink and a solid pudding.

High tea keeps to an early evening time of 5 or 6 o'clock; and everybody sits up at the table – the adjective 'high (probably) distinguishes it from low drawing room armchairs. Although high tea is associated with the North of England and Scotland, here not all teas are 'high'; it is likely that whatever is on the table is your 'tea' (even without the drink); and that the meal you have had in the middle of the day is called 'dinner', just as it would for our medieval ancestors.

Compared with the lionized British beefy dinner, supper was always a lighter and more sophisticated meal. 

Pete Matthew - "The Meaningful Money Handbook"

 

 

Make sure there's an amount and a timescale. This is important because it will help you determine how to invest your money to reach your goals.

meaningfulmoney.tv/myrisktolerance

a bond is an IOU. In return for your money, you receive an IOU, which states the amount you have lent Marks & Spencer, the interest rate, called the coupon, which Marks & Spencer will pay you while they have your money, and the date at which Marks & Spencer will pay you back.
... 
These bonds are traded
...
Pension trustees approach you and offer you £1100 for your bond. You just made £100 profit, because you paid £1000 for it. In 2025, when Marks and Spencer pay back the money on the bond, now owned by the pension trustees, they will only pay back £1000, so the pension fund has lost £100 on the deal. That is the price they pay for securing that income of £30 per year until it is bought off.

It's a little simplistic to say that bonds are lower risk than shares, though historically they have been less volatile and their returns a little smoother than shares. It is more accurate to say that bonds behave differently to shares, and that's why it's usually a good idea to hold some of each in any portfolio, to benefit from the return of both kinds of investment.
When companies issue bonds they are called corporate bonds. When governments want to raise money, they can also issue bonds. In the UK, government-issued bonds are called giltz, in the US Treasury Bills.
...
Finaly you may hear bonds as an asset class called fixed interest or fixed income investments.

A share is a tinye slice of a company. Shares are often called equities. Returns come in two forms. Firstly, if the company makes a profit, a dividend may be issues, which is a distribution of the profit to the shareholders.
Secondly, the price of the share itself will rise and fall depending primarily on sentiment.

Private equity: involves companies which buy up other companies
Hedge funds: they make money when stock markets are falling.

A fund offers similar benefits to investors who want to buy shares, bonds, or other assets. If you invest on your own, you will probably buy a handful of different shares before it becomes too much work. Get your friends involved and you have a larger pot of money to invest with. Scale this up so that now there are hundreds of thousands of joint-owners.

The most common type of fund in the UK is an open-ended investment company, called an OEIC. The open-ended part of the name means that i more people want to invest, the fund can create more shares in the fund for those people. 
Unit trusts work similarly to OEICs but have one key difference in the form of something called a bid-offer spread. This means there is a difference between the price at which you buy units (offer price) and the price at which you sell them (bid price).  Most investors do well to avoid unit trusts.
Investment trust are closed-ended companies. Finite number of shares; you have to find someone willing to sell. This reduces the liquidity compared with open-ended cousins, OEICs

Exchange Trade Funds, ETFs, low-cost funds to track a particular share market. ETFs are still funds which hold underlying investments, but rather than the fund holding assets chosen by a fund manager, they aim to track a given asset price, like gold, or an index, like the FTSE 100. TAKE CARE. Two types. PHYSICAL EFTS actually hold underlying shares. SYNTHETIC ETF uses complex algorithms. Should avoid.

Active investment requires research and insight, skill, experience and luck; will have a very well-paid fund manager backed by a team of analysts.
Passive investing simply requires fund manager to match the fund's investment with the market as a whole each day; can be done largely by computer algorithms; often known as index funds, tracker funds, or just trackers.
Active investors try to beat the market. Passive investors aim to track or match the market.

I believe most ordinary investors are best served by opting for a passive investment strategy. Keeps your cost down and reduces the amount of research.

you invest into assets by buying funds to get benefits of economies of scale. wrappers are the next level up. key thing that distinguish one wrapper from another are tax treatments and access.

General investment account (GIA) - basic form. no special tax advantages or access limitations. use only if you exceed the amounts you can put into other wrappers

Individual savings account (ISA) - these accounts are entirely free of both income and capital gains taxes. Form the backbone of your wealth building process.

Pension - save money until you retire. you pay tax when you take money out eventually.

Investment bond - technically contracts of life insurance. fallen out of favour. some benefits particularly when used within trusts.

Venture capital trust (VCT) - wrappers in which you hold investments in small companies. in return for boosting economy, government gives very beneficial tax breaks. Risky and money is locked in.

Enterprise investment schemes (EIS) - similar to VCTs but w/ slightly different limits and tax breaks. minimum term of three years. designed to be invested into specific assets which can be less liquid and more volatile.

[wrapper chapter] Decide on the split between pensions and ISAs. Depends on your life stage.

Best place for non-financial advisers to research platform marketis the lang cat.

[tax chapter] majority of people will never be in a position to save full ISA allowance and full pension allowance in one year. saving into ISA and pension is the best way to avoid income and capital gains taxes

Choose a multi-asset portfolio fund: spread your money across different kinds of assets, and across the whole world in one convenient off-the-shelf package.
Four investment sectors, as divided by the Investment Association. All funds in a given sector will have a similar approach, idea is by grouping them you can easily compare similar funds.
1. mixed investment 0-35% shares
2. mixed investment 20-60% shares
3. mixed investment 40-85% shares
4 flexible investment

Films and series

* Breaking Bad, starting at season 4

* Thor:Ragnarok, directed by Taika Waitit, him of Jo Jo Rabbit. Funny enough, almost slapstick

* Black Panter: enjoyable but some twisted "logic"

* Loki: series, watched about three episodes. Quite nice.

Nobody

Innocent soul whose past caught up with him and now he's going berserk.

Bob Odenkirk is amazing.  And with "Doc Brown" Christopher Lloyd!

Great film

bbc6 - Iggy Pop - 2021-07-23

Fatima Al Qadiri - Hip Hop Spa

Reminds me of that Alice in Wonderland game.
Instrumental though with wordless vocals.

Somi & Common - When Rivers Cry

She reminds me of Wende.  The rap is nothing amazing, but okay

Big Jade - Dem Girlz (feat. Erica Banks & BeatKing)

Strangely I like it. Very dance-ish. 

Sophia Kennedy - Orange Tic Tac

Strange mix of an almost Amy Winehouse voice with, again, dance-ish lyrics/rap.

Above & Beyond - "Back room boy" (live at the hollywood bowl)

Jacob Geller - youtube channel

Amazing episodes on games and philosophy.  Learning a lot.

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History

Intense telling of historic events. Only listened to half an episode... most are 5-6 hours long

Schitt's Creek

Series really grew on me.  First season is so-so, but there's a wonderful progression.

Mad Decent - "Blood Bros - First Blood"

https://soundcloud.com/maddecent/blood-bros-first-blood

Amazing work out mix, Rocky, quotes, boxing, kungfu

Rival Consoles - Pulses of Information

Electronic.  Nice.

Luca

pixar, "sea monster" boys learn to befriend humans.

Nice, good one, though not the likes of Inside

film - Mission Impossible

 * Mission Impossible - Ghost 

* Mission Impossible - that one in between

* Mission Impossible - Fallout

What Remains of Edith Finch

Beautiful story of a (pregnant! just look down! that belly is too big) girl going back to her family home and slowly discovering its history.

A bit linear, there's clearly things you can and cannot do.  But at the same time most of the time you feel you are really discovering the story, *you* are making the choices.  You're not, but it feels like it.

Love the way the text is projected on the screen. Most of all since a few times it was actually reflected in the scenery, like when she found the railway after Walter's room. The yellow text showed up as blips of yellow on the tracks.

Trial of the Chicago 7 - Matrix 3 - Rurouni Kenshin: the final - Appleseed

 Trial: good

Matrix: still enjoyable

Rurouni Kenshin: the final - enjoyable

Appleseed - strange mix of old and new

McCabe and mrs miller

wonderful western from 1971

ignore the fake snow!!

Good stuff.

Army of the Dead

Ok horror zombie.  nothing too special.

Made me think a lot about spec ops: the line, because of the visuals.  

James Hamblin - Scientific case for two spaces after the period

 https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/two-spaces-after-a-period/559304/

Kirsty MacColl - "England 2 Columbia 0"

Can't say I'm thrilled by the idea of a euro 2020 inspired playlist, but this song is good.

(her of the duet of "Fairytales of New York")

So we went to a pub in Belsize Park!!

Cormac McCarthy - "Outer Dark"

Better just copy the blurb on the dust jacket: set in an unspecified place in Appalachia sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; the brother leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong towards an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.

Beautiful but difficult.  The kind of book you have to read out loud at times to fully understand.  Seems a sibling of Nick Cave's "And the ass saw the angel".

    We don't get somebody directly we might ort to have a fire.

    I doubt they be much dry wood about.

    Well, maybe somebody be along directly.

    Yes.

    If it was Saturday, they'd be here. It's a sight in the world the traffic I get on a Saturday.

    What day is it? Holme said.

    I don't know, the ferryman said. It ain't Saturday.

    They sat in the grass and watched the river run in the dark as if something were expected there. Yes, said the ferryman. She is risin.

    Aye, said the blind man. It might be we'll meet again sometime.

    Holme raised a hand in inane farewell and set off down the road again. The blind man's cane softly tapping faded behind him. He went on, soundless with his naked feet, shambling, gracelorn, down out of the peaceful mazy fields, his toed tracks soft in the dust among the cratered shapes of horse and mule hoofs and before him under the high afternoon sun his shadow be-wandered in a dark parody of his progress. The road went on through a shadeless burn and for miles there were only the charred shapes of trees in a dead land where nothing moved save windy rifts of ash that rose dolorous and died again down the blackened corridors.

    Late in the day the road brought him into a swamp. And that was all. Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reared only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in a landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of the dead that tended away to the earth's curve. He tried his foot in the mire before him and rose in a vulvate welt claggy and sucking. He stepped back. A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh reeds and black ferns among which he stood clashed softly like things chained. He wondered why a road should come to such a place.

    Going back the way by which he came he met again the blind man tapping through the dusk. He waited very still by the side of the road, but the blind man passing turned his head and smiled upon him his blind smile. Hole watched him out of sight. He wondered where the blind man was going and did he know how the road ended. Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.

Doug Bierend - "In Search of Mycotopia"

All things mushroomy. Wonderful read about fungi and the people who love them.

Scientists have found that only 43 percent of the cells that make up our corporeal form are actually human; the majority of what counts as "us" comprises bacteria, fungi, and other microbes. For every human gene in our bodies, there are 360 microbial genes.

Fossils in Quebec and elsewhere paint the picture of a 400-million-year-old world in which the largest things living on land were the prototaxites, twenty-five-foot-tall spires of what appear to have been a kind of lichen – themselves entanglements of fungi and photosynthesizing algae – that loomed over Ordovician landscapes like blind watchtowers.

Many [spores] are saprobes, which means they make meals of dead and decaying organic matter, often leaf litter or dead and dying trees.

Amanita muscaria, also called the fly agaric, is uniquely charged with spiritual and cultural association. [...] Anyone who came of age in the 1980s or later may well think of Super Mario Bros., and the power-up that embiggens the pixelated plumber with a satisfying chiptune thrill. The emoji symbol for mushrooms is modeled on the muscaria.

The sclerotia formed by Claviaceps purpurea, a rye ergot, causes trembling and sweating when consumed, along with intense hallucinations, such as the strong feeling of being covered in insects (a phenomenon called formication) a scourge known in the middle-ages as Saint Anthony's fire. Ergotism has also been convincingly linked to the mad behavior reported in the Massachusetts witch trials.

"A lot of fungi living in soil are prone to being attacked or eaten in some way by other microbes, or worms or nematodes, and copper is like an insecticide," said Stevenson, clearly enamored with the sheer cleverness of these fungi. "They actually glom it on, they 'paint' themselves with the copper as a form of shielding, making themselves toxic to possible predators."

Should a pine tree's nitrogen start running low, its associated Laccaria bicolor fungus will release a toxin that kills and springtails unlucky enough to be nearby, conscripting them into the role of emergency fertilizer.

Every part of a fungus, mushroom and mycelium alike, is made of hyphae, which are "totipotent." That means every single cell can start a whole new organism, multiplying into mycelia that ultimately produce mushrooms.

remember the taxonomic ranks of domains, kingdoms, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species with the mnemonic: Don't Kick Puffballs 'Cause Other Fungi Get Suspicious.

S. cerevisiae is the workhorse species of brewers (and bakers) the world over, responsible for the "clean" flavor of porters and IPAs (the sharp flavor of which comes from the hops); S. pastorianus are the lower temperature "bugs" (the industry term for yeast) used for lagers. On the other end of the flavor spectrum are the Brettanomyces, or "bretts," widely considered a contaminant in brewing for the "horse blanket" notes they produce. However, the "off" flavors generated by bretts can be exciting for those with adventurous palettes, showing up in Belgian lambics for reasons we'll get into.

the trend in beer had been swinging away from "funky" and toward "clean," the quality most associated with lagers. A variety of fast-acting, very clean strains of Norwegian yeasts called kveik were gaining popularity. Genetically distinct from the traditional brewer's varieties, kveik yeast was traditionally stored on a "kveik ring", a wooden assemblage that resembled a spine folded into a circle buried for safekeeping in stable subterranean temperature, or soaked into a cloth and then dried.

Cordyceps (cordies or cheetos, to those in the know) are subjects of intense passion for a growing number of young mycophiles across North America. They're at the center of a growing community of indepedent, tinkering cultivators. [...]
    Another reason for the rising profile of these fungi is the shocking lifestyle they've evolved. Cordyceps are entomopathogenic, meaning they kill insects. But they don't just kill them. One of the scenarios most often recounted plays out like a scene from The Body Snatchers. It starts when the spores of a certain species of Cordyceps take root in the carapace of an ant–different species target different insects. Hyphae then thread throughout the insect's tiny body, eventually seizing control of its nervous system. The ant becomes, in effect, a living zombie, unwittingly stumbling up a nearby branch, inevitably one that sits directly over the path most used by its hive mates. Then, its final, irresistible impulse, is to latch its jaws upon the twig, dying as the mycelium finally consumes all of the insect's innards. After that comes the unsettling coda; out of the back of the ant's tiny neck slithers a slender "stroma," its surface bristling and primed to rain spores down upon the next group of unfortunate ants below.

Triops–they're similar to sea monkeys in that their eggs can be dried up and reanimated.

There are more than four hundred species of Cordyceps, each associated with a specific insect: spiders, grasshoppers, wasps, to name a few. In Tibet, Ophiocordyceps sinensis and its host moth larvae are methodically plucked from the foothills of the Himalayas. Locally known as yarza g"unbu, or "winter worm, summer grass," it is regarded as a potent aphrodisiac, often fetching a higher price than gold, always with the insect still attached.
    In North America, alongside mushrooms like lion's mane, maitake, turkey tail, and Chaga, Cordyceps has emerged at the center of a fast-growing domestic market for medicinal fungi, representing an industry that is expected to exceed $50 billion by 2025.
    The medicinal benefits of Cordyceps are largely credited to a special compound it produces, called cordycepin. The compound has been associated with anti-cancer, anti-fatigue, anti-inflammatory, immune and sexual function-boosting properties, among other benefits, elevating it to the realm of fungal superfood, complete with the full range of branding and value-added products that term implies.

The main wood-rotting fungi are called white rot, brown rot, and soft rot, so named for the appearance of the digested lumber they leave behind. White rotters are among the few living things that can break down lignin, a durable, water-repellent polymer that's essential to circulation in trees and other vascular plants. What these fungi leave behind is pale cellulose, hence the name white rotter. Brown rot fungi, on the other hand, eat cellulose and leave behind lignin, often in regular cubic chunks. When your newspaper turns yellow, it's because of a reaction between sunlight and the lignin lingering in the underrefined pulp. Soft rot fungi are similar to brown rot, and the two are often confused, although soft rot typically prefer higher moisture and lower lignin content, and create unique patterns of decay.

Slime molds are easy to picture even if you've never seen one. Physarum polycelphalum, a particularly well-studied species, takes the form of a gelatinous, bronze-colored goo. This is the plasmodium, a slithering slime that moves in glacially slow, searching waves comprised of pulsing, veinlike masses. To witness their movements requires use of microscopes, or time-lapse video, in which they look and behave exactly like the Blob. Usually just a few inches wide, but sometimes as large as two feet in diameter, they're commonly found in foamy splotches on the trunks of trees, with an appearance that is often aptly compared to dog vomit.
    Despite such inauspicious associations, the more you interrogate a plasmodial slime mold, the more you understand why they've become subjects of intense interes in recent decades. Mathematicians, city planners, game designers, astrophysicists, computer engineers, researchers in all manner of fields have found deep insights and mysteries alike in slime molds. Why? For one, they are living examples of emergence, collections of simple individual parts that together exhibit complex behavior.

They are quite distinct from fungi. For one thing, they move. Rather than reaching into and absorbing their food, as fungal hyphae do, slime molds seek out and enshroud their meals within a sort of improvised stomach. Their proper name reflects a somewhat ambiguous nature: Myxomycota, or Mycetozoa, which translates literally to "fungus animal." The word polycephalum translates to "many heads," a nod to the organism's decentralized nature, and suggestive of its ability to optimize, decide, and even remember.
    Plasmodial slime molds are actually a single-celled amoeba, composed of free-floating nuclei. Yet the plasmodium can also decide to reorganize itself into millions of individual cells–from an individual to a multitude.

Dussutour and her colleagues used a similar arrangement, only this time with a somewhat less distressing substance: salt. Test Physarum were "trained" on salt, once again developing an indifference toward the tainted bridges. But this time, instead of being given a chance to rest, they were cut into thousands of little pieces. (Don't worry, the slime mold can split and merge quite freely, given a few hours to rebuild their vasculature.) The trained fragments were then combined with the "naïve" slime molds, which had not been exposed to salt. The results showed that, when the trained and the naïve slime molds were combined into a single organism, the resulting blob retained the "learned" behavior of its trained portion.

It turns out you can teach a mindless blob new tricks. Build a maze with food at the other end, and after a bit of slithering exploration, the Physarum reliably and quickly finds the shortest possible route to its meal. In one of the best-known experiments, a team of Japanese and English researchers, led by Toshiyuki Nakagaki at Hokkaido University, laid out a miniature map of Tokyo and thirty-six surrounding towns inside a petri dish. Slime molds aren't much interested in tourism, so the scientists represented the cities with oat flakes of various sizes. A Physarum was then unleashed from the center, which began stretching out to explore its surroundings in its perpetual quest for food.
    At first, it expanded like a web, with large arterial channels supporting its many slender exploratory fingers. As it found its oats and noted dead ends–marking them with pheromones, a sort of ani-breadcrumb trail–the least-utilized channels collapsed, leaving behind only those that could best direct the newfound nutrients throughout its body. The overall networks gradually compressed from slender and wide-reaching webs into refined pathways. Over the course of about a day, it had found all the flakes within the boundary of the dish, paring itself down to a lean network that looked remarkably like the Tokyo subway system, taking mere hours to mimic an optimized system of distribution that had taken human engineers years to design.

Throughout the 1970s and '80s, [Keller and Segel] developed mathematical models and experimental evidence showing how the cyclic AMP flows that ran through the Dictyostelium and correlated with a phase shift could be triggered by any combination of individual cells, responding to their local conditions and forming into clusters of activity that then spread out and triggered a totalizing change throughout the organism. These principles could account for the apparent ability of a decentralized, brainless mass of cells to "decide" to disaggregate, no special cells required. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a professor of forestry at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse, and member of the Great Plains Potawatomi Nation, notes a Potawatomi word that won't be found in a biology textbook: puhpowee, which can mean "the force that causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight." In Braiding Sweetgrass, her book about the relationships between science and Indigenous ways of knowing, Kimmerer notes the Potawatomi's animist language, and the difference it makes in the speaker's perception of the world around them.

Adrian Barnes - "Nod"

Ok book about all people stopping to sleep.  Enjoyable as a quick read although I didn't care much for the style it was written in.  Just too smartly.

But it didn't.  I just endured.  And through enduring, I learned suffering's dirty little secret: the sufferer is always bigger than the pain.  You roll around on the floor like a baby.  You vomit up tears.  You shit your thoughts into a plastic bag and try to asphyxiate them.  I did all that  And still existence persisted.  From the ceaselessly beckoning no-time of my Dream to an empty classroom where time burned endlessly like a torture cell light bulb: through it all, pain remained something inside me – remained, therefore, something ultimately smaller than me.

Kentucky Route Zero

Amazing surrealistic or magic realism point-and-click game.  5 Dogwood Drive, will we ever get there?

It was amazing.  Made by cardboard computer, clearly a game designer to watch.

Also, some amazing music by Junebug and the Bedquilt Ramblers. Quite the Twin Peaks feel.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - "Children of Ruin" (The Children of Time series)

Second book where more lifeforms become as sentient as human beings. Not just portids, but celaphods (from Old Earth, using the same mutation-increasing virus) but also alien microbes.

More trouble getting through this. He put the bar high and I failed to be engrossed in the story. His attempt to describe the views of celaphods troubled me (their chaotic minds seem incapable of building things) but I like how he uses the idea of their actual bodies, where their "head" just "suggests" things and their arms figure out how, extrapolates.

Sinéad Stubbins - "In My Defence I have no defence

Dry account of how to live the perfect life as you seem to have to. Enjoyable quick read (for now)

Yōko Ogawa - "The Memory Police"

Beautiful fable about an island where objects are made to disappear, forcefully so by the Memory Police if need be. 

Seemed a fairy tale about Alzheimer to me at first, but maybe not. In any way, its estranged words and story are wonderful.

Leo Blokhuis - "Berlijn"

Prettig boek over de geschiedenis van cultuur en muziek in deze eponyische stad.

 

 

Het Warbo Fornant Orgel [samen met Christian Warnke] overleeft de oorlog niet, er zijn alleen tekeningen bewaard gebleven, maar na de oorlog kan [Harold] Bode door met zijn instrument, hij bouwt de Melochor. Laten we alle technische specificaties hier maar niet doornemen, maar het is relevant om te weten dat Bode uiteindelijk in de jaren vijftig in Amerika belandt, waar Robert Moog verder bouwt op zijn werk en via de enorme modulaire synthesizer de Moog (de eerste commerciële synth) in 1970 met de Minimoog komt. 

"Lili Marleen". Lale Andersen zingt het in de cabarets in Berlijn. Haar opname uit 1939 wordt razend populair onder de Duitse soldaten, nadat Soldatensender Belgrad het regelmatig gaat draaien. [Goebbels vindt het niks en verbiedt het, maar Rommel is een fan en dwingt zijn verbod terug te draaien] Opvallend genoeg zoeken ook de geallieerde soldaten de zender om tien uur op om Lale Andersen te horen zingen over dat meisje dat maar wacht onder die lantaarnpaal. Aanvankelijk is de geallieerde legerleiding daar absoluut niet van gecharmeerd, maar al snel komt er een Engelstalige versie van het lied. [...] Zo staat Marlene Dietrich in januari 1945 op een podium in Heerlen "Lili Marleen" te zingen. De Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst vraagt haar ondertussen ook een Duitstalige versie op te nemen. De rollen zijn inmiddels omgedraaid en een Duits verlies lijkt aanstaande, zo is de redenatie. Wellicht kan Dietrich met dit lied de weerstand verkleinen, die jongens willen meteen naar huis als ze haar horen zingen.

De Nieuw-Zeelandse filosofe Esther Harcourt promoveerde op de invloed van Bertold Brecht op Dylan en stelt dat Brecht de missing link is in de vaak gestelde vraag waarom Dylan de pure folkmuziek losliet. De meer persoonlijke, surreële stijl en de ironie zijn duidelijk Brecht.

Ann Vandermeer and Jeff Vandermeer - "The Weird: a Compendium of Strange and Daring

• Algernon Blackwood - "The Willows"
  

Fargo, season 4

Enjoyable though seems to have lost some of its eponymous quirkiness.

Godzilla vs Kong

Fun for the "Godzilla is killing people and we don't know why!" line.

But pretty much crap otherwise.

Gideon Coe - BBC6 - 2021-05-19

• Courtney Pine - Some amazing jazz.  Sacreal something? - must look up
• Ted Taylor Four - Cat's Eyes - amazing surf

Emily Herring on Henri Bergson; laughter is what keeps us elastic and free

https://aeon.co/essays/for-henri-bergson-laughter-is-what-keeps-us-elastic-and-free

Amazing essay on Henri Bergson and his philosophical ideas about laughter

Laughter, wrote Bergson, had 'a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation'.

E.B. White and Katherine S White: "Humour can be dissected, as a frgog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind"

Bergson: the comic does not exist outside of the strictly human. [...] It is possible to laugh at animals or vegetables but only on the condition that we are able to detect the human in them.

Bergson: laughter has no greater foe than emotion.  When the emotional stakes are too high they don't allow for the momentary anaestesia of the heart that laughter demands. 

Bergson: laughter appears to stand in need of an echo.  Social bonding.   Laughter plays an important part in our various social groups.

Bergson describes life as an ever-changing, creative (ie, producing entirely new and inpredictable forms) and spontaneous movement.  In this sense, life exhibits the opposite of the mechanical tendencies of inert matter characterised by rigidity, predictability and repetitiveness.  [...]. Society therefore needs its members to display 'the greatest possible degree of elasticity and sociability', and needs to guard itself against 'a certain rigidity of body, mind and character'.

A man walking down the street, he slips and falls. Hilarity ensues.  According to Bergson, it is the involuntary nature of the action that makes us laugh. Stumbles, gaffes, slipups, bloopers and general clumsiness indicate both a lack of versatility and of awareness; "where one would expect to find the wideawake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being", we find instead "a certain mechanical inelasticity".

Consider a scene from the classic film Modern Times (1936) in which Charlie Chaplin plays a factory worker subjected to the relentless cadence of an assembly line. Even outside the factory, he continues to erratically tighten imaginary bolts, stuck in the repetitive movement he has been executing all day. In Bergsonian terms, this is funny because we are seeing someone act out deeply engrained habits even though the circumstances demand otherwise. Both in the case of accidental blunders and in carefully choreographed slapstick comedy, we are laughing at figures who lack ‘elasticity’, who are mechanically following a predetermined trajectory and therefore fail to adapt to their surroundings.

Attack on the Block

Amusing enough scifi about aliens invading a British estate housing.  Nothing spectacular but well executed.

The Third Day

Strange psychological miniseries with Jude Law.   Visually and sound wise sometimes reminiscent of Utopia.

Gods of Snooker

Small three ep series on the snooker heroes of yore, mostly Alex Higgins, bits of Steve Davis, White,  et.

Heat

Finaly watched this 1995 classic.  Amazing work, acting, storyline... everything.

Possessor

 Brandon Cronenberg - son of - does a nice body horror job here.  One thing I struggled with was to understand *why* she starts to struggle from these mix of senses... it felt like we were thrown into the story late, before setting up the scene.

Might be just me.  Enjoyed it.

the Flight Attendant

fun series about a hard drinking girl waking up next to her dead one night stand (Michiel Huisman)

podcasts

* Team Deakins - amazing insight in the films they helped make

* Tom Read Wilson has words with - enjoyable enough

* Huberman Lab - why we need to sleep

* Darknet Diaries - a bit superficial and over the top, but fun stories about e.g. North Korean cybertronic bank heists

* I'm not a Monster - gripping mini series about an American girl moving to Syria to join ISIS with her radicalized husband. Her son was ten years old and famous for threatening the American president via a video message.

* In machines we trust

* I was There Too - chats with "second characters" of films, e.g. bus passengers of Speed, the girl in the pit from Silence of the Lambs.

Sisters with Transistors

Delia Derbyshire was instrumental in setting up the BBC Radiophonic workshop after ww II. Wrote the Dr Who theme!!

Daphne Oram set up her own sound studio.

Jo Hutton - musicologist.

Elaine Radigue worked closely with Pierre Henry.

 

Music of Bebe Barron (together with husband Louis) was described by Anaïs Nin: "a molecule had stubbed its toe". They did the sound for "Forbidden Planet"! Bebe Barron: "The monster was the most difficult thing. The dying of Morbius was the actual dying of the circuits". Some bigshots of the movie/msuic industry did not allow the soundtrack - first completely electronic soundtrack ever - to be called music, afraid for their jobs.  Thus they are credited as "electronic tonalities by Louis and Bebe Barron"

Pauline Oliveros used an accordeon?! "I used a bathbtub for reverberation".  She was a woman, gay and played avant garde music.  Every single one of those things would be difficult in the 1960's.  She had all three. 
Wrote a piece 'Don't call me a "Lady" composer'... which is a strange echo from the past reverberating my frustration with gay or female writers being asked "what being gay or female" meant to them.... while no man is ever asked what being male means to him or influenced his art! As it shouldn't! Don't ask them, as you don't ask him! They are writers, composers, artists. Like "him".  We should switch it around. Ask males "how/why" them being male influenced their work. ffs. Doesn't this species ever learn?
Pauline Oliveros - "Listening is the basis of creativity in culture"

Laurie Spiegel wrote "Music mouse" ... in the 80s?  Should really look into her.

Wendy Carlos; her of "A Clockwork Orange" fame.

Playwriters were writing very surreal plays after the war.  They needed surreal sounds.

Arab Strap - "Fable of the Urban Fox"

Amazing parlando track.

Can - "Vitamin C"

 Somehow haunting song with that repeated "hey you! You're losing.. you're losing... you're losing your mind!"

Drum 'n base version: Adam Beyer & Bart Skils - Your Mind [Drumcode]

Mr Scruff - "Fish"

Also famous from the electro-swing alike "Get a move on"

Tim Birkhead - "The most perfect thing"

The final book about bird eggs!

Ingmar Heytze - "De veertig van Heytze"

Nogmaals aan het overlezen, nog altijd even goed.

Meander

Fun "cube" like film with ok plot

Seobok

Nice South Korean film about a clone who needs to be protected.  Has a wonderful balance between philosophy and action.

Vicious Fun

Does what it promises. Horror magazine journalists finds himself in an "AA meeting for serial killers"

Fried Barry

Crazy South African film about a drug user getting possessed by an alien, going on a strange surreal trip through the night. Includes having sex with a sex worker who gives birth immediately after. Crazy stuff.

In the Shadows

Great Turkish film of a dystopian future where men just live to serve the machine, but don't know why or what.

Caught in Time

Wonderful "Chinese version of Heat" with a cop and a robber endlessly chasing each other. Delightful watch.

Slate

Fun Korean fantasy film of a stunt double going to an alternative universe where she actually is the hero.

Sputnik

Enjoyable Russian horror film set in the 70s of one of the first astronauts returning with an alien in his head.  Enjoyed the setting and the plot.

Alien on Stage

An amazing documentary of a bunch of amateur theatre actors playing Alien, ending up in Leicester Square Theatre.

Fried Barry

Trippy South-African film about a guy who loves drugs being taken possession by an alien.

Labelled "already a cult classic"  is always problematic.

I liked it.  Drink a bottle of wine - preferably two - and it's a great film. There's a few wonderful moments, when his crazy asylum mate considers a "stok" for a gun. 

shorts

 Outsider shorts of the Imagine Film Festival

• Carrie's Doing Great - nice Stephord's Wifes 
• La Coeur D'Or - amazing stop motion about a woman slowly selling herself for her son's sake, turning into gold
• Uncario - enjoyable silent time traveling short

Vicious Fun

Crowdpleaser, meta slasher about a nobody who stumbles into an AAA meeting for serial killers.

Nothing spectacular but enjoyable.

Caught In Time

Quite enjoyed this Chinese "Heat" version... but that does not do it justice.  The balance between cop and robber, the action, the solo violin when violence is about to commence...

All of it; quite wonderful. Amazing film.

Harder to digest after reading about the genocide of uyghurs.

And still, I can't deny I enjoyed this.

In the shadows

Gripping dystopian film that could easily have been an 80s film - visually, probably not from an editing perspective - about workers in a factory where the protagonist slowly starts to rebel.

random

• stromae - "Papaoutai"
• $ono$ Cliq - "Kaassouflé"
• Bonnie Taylor - "I need a hero"
  

The Trouble With Being Born

Chilling and at times difficult to watch; an android is followed through two phases; one with her human daddy - this was most difficult to watch, as the film questions what sexy dolls mean and can be seen as. Makes for pondering, also how story was told. Slow. 

Lapsis

Fun film, "stoner version of Black Mirror" is a correct description, of cable layers for "Kwantum", ridiculing and criticing companies such as Uber by following a man who illegally gets a medallion to become a cabler and has to beat the auto-bots.

New Order

Chilling film about the lower class rising up to take what they consider their own during a wedding of the rich in Mexico. Chilling in its realism, particularly how of course it's still controlled by the elite.

Minor Premise

Scientist messes with his own mind and fractures his personality into ten different ones which each take over for about six minutes; with one of them being a bad guy, he has to fight himself.

Enjoyable, although I can't say I was blown away.

The Kik - "De Ware Jacob"

iggy @ bbc6 - 2021-04-02

* Lael Neale - "Acquainted with Night"
Very slow, no beat, female vocal and just a single instrument.

Meek's Cutoff

Harsh western about a group of people traveling west who are getting more and more desperate when they cannot find water.  Slow, hardly anything happens; still, good movie.

Tommy Wieringa - "Gedachten over onze tijd"

Otfried Preussler - "Krabat (Legend of the satanic mil)" ( Krabat / Meester van de Zwarte Molen)

Strange to read in English.  Sometimes the words and sentences sounded strange, like a bad translation.

Still an amazing story.

Taxi Driver

 1976!

Finally saw it.  Good.

Soulmates

Supposed to be – or that was just my impression – similar to Black Mirror, but utterly lacking the story telling.  The consequences of this soul particle are of no importance; these are just "thinking you (can) find true love" stories.

Didn't finish.

(char)lie, (char)lotte - amazing programming

 Wonderfully obfuscated C-code

https://nickdrozd.github.io/2021/03/30/signed-char-lotte.html

Huberman Lab podcast on sleep

 Amazing scientific podcast on sleep.

Mice and rats like to run so much: they've done a test where they put a wheel in a field and mice ran to it and started using it.  Seems they like the visual of the horizontal bars moving?!

[ep 5] Revisit! Talks about the three chemicals necessary for proper learning.

[ep 6] Error and frustration, while learning something, including motor skills like balancing, increase the plasticity of the brain.  Use this while learning? 

Also, the brain is quite adept at learning but that works better in small increments.

 

[ep 7] 

Errors while learning: embrace them. These errors signal to your brain that things need to change. Be intentional about learning (focus/tunnel vision) and be intentional about making mistakes: the more intentional and enjoyable your mistakes are, the more plasticity of your brain will improve.

Balance! Vestibular motor sensory relationship is key for heightened and/or accelerated plasticity: find things you're not good at, balance wise (yoga if you're not good at yoga). Almost falling, or actually falling, triggers your brain into very alert "need to change" mode, increasing plasticity.

 

Iraina Mancini - "Deep End"

Your Honor

 great series about a good judge trying to protect his son who did a hit-and-run of a mob's son.

Gaming read ups, from crazy heist stories to debugging

 EVE Online stuff, biggest battle, breaking of 

* https://www.pcgamer.com/eve-onlines-biggest-ever-battle-trillions-of-isk-in-damages-and-over-70-titans-lost/

* https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/the-bloodbath-of-b-r5rb

* https://www.pcgamer.com/inside-the-biggest-heist-in-eve-online-history/

* https://www.pcgamer.com/ccp-issue-final-battle-report-on-eve-onlines-most-destructive-battle-will-erect-permanent-memorial/

* Hard Knocks battle - https://www.pcgamer.com/the-impossible-year-long-plan-to-destroy-eve-onlines-deadliest-fortress/

Corrupted Blood in WoW

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident

GTA Online loading times cut by 70%

* https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/index.html

the greatest game - video games and philosophy

 interesting podcast by OK Beast about a very philosophical approach to video games.

all allowed places in the phase space are the horizon of action

but the horizon of intent is all the allowed actions you are familiar with

the intersection of horizon of action and horizon of intent is often what play is.

 

satisfaction: when desired outcomes are possible through your actions, rather, desirable location in the play phase is possible through action.

Western society - since Plato - tend to believe there's one truth behind everything.  "art is the shadow of a shadow". And people therefore walk into a museum and ask "what does it mean". But is this the right attitude?

The artist cannot guide the intentions and interpretations of the viewer, just like the game designer cannot guide the way the player plays the game.

Quote from the book he constantly refers to: "Material, by contrast, is what artists work with. It is the sum of all that is available to them, including words, colours, sounds, associations of every sort and every technique. To this extent, form too can become material. It is everything that artists encounter about which they need to make a decision."

game space

play space

phase

horizon

iggy pop 2021-03-05

• Beth Orton - "For Today I am a boy" (Goodnight songs for rebel girls)
  
• Jarvis Cocker - "I Never Said I was Deep"
• clipping - "say the name"
• Rufus Thomas - "Do the funky penguin" (funny)
  

Nat King Cole - "That's All"

 

Tell me your secrets

 Dark gothic series about the girlfrined of a mass murderer who gets caught up in the revenge of a mother of one of her victims, a less-than-clean shrink, and all in the gothic underbelly of America.

Some of the muted electronic score reminds me of the Utopia score.

Walter M. Miller Jr - "A Canticle for Leibowitz"

bbc6 stuff

• the Coral - "Faceless Angel"

ambergris

ambergris - "hardened whale feces"

petrichor - the sublime scent emitted when rain hits rock or pavement

Cat Power in concert

.... is what Gideon Coe's show is playing.  Nice.  Must look into their stuff.

Lauren Groff - "The Wind"

Amazing and chilling story of marital abuse told from the view of the daughter, or rather from her daughter as she told it to her, every night, the same details, omitting the same truth.

Mark Forsyth - "A Short History of Drunkenness"

Lovely book about the history of drinking.  Many memorable facts.

Prohibition was started by feminism! It was not against drinking, but against men drinking in the saloons which were no-go areas for women. Who knew.

When the Ancient Persians had a big political decision to make they would debate the matter twice: once drunk, and once sober. If they came to the same conclusion both times, they acted.

What happens when you give a whole colony of rats a free bat?
    Actually, they're rather civilized. Though not for the first few days. For the first few days they go a bit crazy, but then most of them settle down to two drinks a day; one just before feeding (which the scientists refer to as the cocktail hour) and one just before bedtime (the nightcap). Every three or four days there's a spike in alcohol consumption as lll the rats get together for little rat parties. It all sounds rather idyllic, and you'd be forgiven for wishing you had been born a rat. But you must remember two things: first, not all rats are lucky enough to be experimented upon in a labortory; second, there is a dark side to murine drunkenness. Rat colonies usually have one dominant male, the King Rat. the King Rat is a teetotaller. Alcohol consumption is highest among the males with the lowest social status. They drink so calm their nerves, they drink to forget their worries, they drink, it seems, because they're failures.

But if drinking was so very, very illegal, how did it have such a central place in Aztec culture? And it did. They had gods of drinking. Several of them. Mayahuel, who was the goddess of the agave plant, was said to have married Patecatl, who was the god of fermentation. Mayahuel had 400 breasts, which was probably fun for pattecatl, but was also useful because she gave birth to 400 divine little rabbits, the Centzon Totochtin.

Pete Seeger- "Rye whiskey" (if the ocean was whiskey...)

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFSAc3E1hWc

If the ocean was whiskey
and I was a duck
I would dive to the bottom
and never come up

Staged

Short series with David Tennent and Michael Sheen - fun covid-based meta-play where they discuss preparing for a series or theatre play.

Barry

Great show with Bill Hades as a hitman-cum-theatre man. Interesting pacing, particularly in the last episode of the first season.

radio.garden - radio stations across the world

 http://radio.garden

random iggy pop songs

• SoKo - "Let Me Adore You"
  slow weaving female vocals

Mark Forsyth - "The Etymologicon"

An amazing book linking words and their history together.  Almost too many examples to quote.

Every weakness of human nature comes out in the history of etymology. Probably the most damning word is probably. Two thousand years ago the Romans had the word probablis. If something probablis then it could be proved by experiment, because the two words come from the same root: probare.
    But probablis got overused. People are always more certain of things than they really should be, and that applied to the Romans just as much as to us. Roman lawyers would claim that their case probabilis, when it wasn't. Roman astrologers would say that their predictions were probabilis when they weren't. And absolutely any sane Roman would tell you that it was probabilis that the Sun went round the Earth. So by the time poor probably first turned up in English in 1387 it was already a poor, exhausted word whose best days were behind it, and only meant likely.

Sausages make taste lovely, but it's usually best not to ask what's actually in them. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body. In nineteenth-century America, the belief that sausages were usually made out of dog meat was so widespread that they started to be called hotdogs.

The funny thing about archery is that you don't usually aim at the target. Gravity decrees that if you aim straight at the blank your arrow will hit somewhere below. So you point the arrow somewhere above the blank, and hope that this cancels out the effects of Newton's troublesome invention. That's why aim high is another archer's term; it doesn't mean that you'll end up high, or it's not meant to. You aim high and hit on the level.

The Oxford Dictionary admits that 'In Middle English it is often doubtful whether blac, blak, blacke, means "black, dark" or "pale, colourless, wan, livid". [...] There are two good explanations. Unfortunately nobody is quite sure which one is true. [...]
    Once upon a time, there was an old Germanic word for burnt, which was black, or as close to black as makes no differnce. The confusion arose because the old Germanics couldn't decide between black and white as to which colour burning was. Some old Germans said that when things were burning they were bright and shiny, and other old Germans said that when things were burnt they turned black.
    The result was a hopeless monochrome confusion, until everyone got bored and rode off to sack Rome. The English were left holding black, which could mean either pale or dark, but slowly settled on one usage. The French also imported this useless black word. They then put an N in it and later sold it on to the English as blank, leaving us with black and blank as opposites.
    The other theory (which is rather less likely, but still good fun) is that there was an old German word black which meant bare, void, and empty. What do you have if you don't have any colours?
    Well, it's hard to say really. If you close your eyes you see nothing, which is black, but a blank piece of paper is, usually, white. Under this theory, blankness is the original sense and the two colours – black and white – are simply different interpretations of what blank means.
    And, just to prove the point even more irritatingly, bleach comes from the same root and can mean to make pale, or any substance used for making things black. Moreover, bleak is probably just a variant of bleach and once meant white.

 

The Old English word for bread was hlaf, from which we get loaf; and the Old English division of labour was that women made bread and men guarded it. The woman was therefore the hlaf-dige and the man was the hlaf-ward.

Hlafward and Hlafdige
Hlaford and Hlafdi
Lavord and Lavedi
Lord and Lady

 

In 1898 a German pharmaceutical company called Bayer decided to develop an alternative to [addictive morphine]. [...] and worked out a new chemical: diacetylmorphone, which they marketed as a 'non-addictive morphine substitute'. [...]
   Bayer's marketing chaps set to work. They asked the people who had taken diacetylmorphine how it made them feel, and the response was unanimous: it made you feel great. Like a hero. So the marketing chaps decided to call their new product heroin. Heroin remained a Bayer trademark until the First World War.

Anacreon's poems (anacreontics) are all about getting drunk. [...] In the eighteenth century an English gentleman's club was founded in Anacreon's memory. Two members wrote a society drinking song called 'To Anacreon in Heav'n'; a good song with a catchy tune. Because it was hard to sing, it became an ad hoc test of drunkenness used by the police in the eighteenth century.
    Francis Scott Key was an American lawyer. During the war of 1812, he was sent to negotiate with the British fleet for the releaes of certain prisoners. He dined aboard HMS Tonnant, but when the time came for him to leave, the British got worried. Key was not familiar with the British battleships; if he went ashore he could and would pass all this information on to the American forces. They insisted he remained on board and he was forced to watch the bombardment from the wrong side. The American flag at Baltimore remained high and visible amid the smoke. Key decided to write a song about it. He stole the tune from the Anacreontic Society, but wrote new words that went:
    O, say can you see by the dawn's early light...

 

Alcohol comes from [Arabic] al (the) kuhul, which was a kind of make-up. Indeed, some ladies still use kohl to line their eyes.
    As kohl is an extract and a dye, alcohol started to mean the pure essence of anything (there's a 1661 reference to the alcohol of an ass's spleen), but it wasn't until 1672 that somebody at the Royal Society had the brgiht idea of finding the pure essence of wine. What was it in wine that made you drunk? What was the alcohol of wine? Soon wine-alcohol (or essence of wine) became the only alcohol anybody could remember.

= is an equal sign because the two lines are of equal length.

There's a small dot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean whose natives called their home Coconut Island, or Pikini, which was mangled into English as Bikini Atoll.
    Bikini Atoll was put on the map by America in 1946 when they tested their new atomic bombs there. Atom is Greek for unsplittable, but the Americans had discovered that by breaking the laws of etymology, they were able to create vast explosions, and vast explosions were the best way of impressing the Soviets and winning the Cold War.
    In 1954 the Americans tested their new hydrogen bomb. It turned out to be an awful lot more powerful and ended up accidentally irradiating the crew of a Japanese fishing boat. Japanese public opinion was outraged.  Protests were made, hackles were raised, and a film was made about an irresponsible nuclear test that awoke a sea monster called Gorilla-whale or Gojira. The film was rushed through production and came out later in the same year. Gojira was, allegedly, simply the nickname of a particularly burly member of the film crew. Gojira was anglicised to Godzilla.
    [...]
    But where the Japanese saw a threatening monster, the French saw what the French always see: sex. A fashion designer called Jacques Heim had just come up with a design for a two-piece bathing costume that he believed would be the world's smallest swimsuit. He took it to a lingerie shop in Paris where the owner, Louis Réard, proved with a pair of scissors that it could be even more scandalously immodest. The result, Réard calimed, would cause an explosion of lust in the loins of every Frenchman so powerful that it could only be compared to the tests at Bikini Atoll, so he called the new swimwear the bikini.

 

 

Traders in North America: the native Americans didn't care for money.  They used sea shells.  At some point, traders started using tobacco, but it was large and cumbersome.  They gave up on that, and started to use deerskin. Buckskins soon bcame the common barter of North America and a standard barter basically is money.  So money became "bucks".

 

M. John Harrison - "The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again"

This took me way too long to get through. Although the writing is nice, and the feeling of creeping despair and desolation nice, it always bothers me if not much happens. And not much happens here, which is probably the point.

Victoria and Shaw, two lost people, one in London, one in a small town. Hints about strange creatures. But never something concrete. I'm not sure I get this.

People talked in loud voices all day outside the house.
    They bustled out of their cars, slammed the doors, greeted each other in unison an octave apart: 'Orright?' The subsequent exchange often took place under the auspices of saying goodbye. Over before it began, it nevertheless seemed difficult to complete. No one was anxious to let anyone go.
    'Well, cheers, love, see you Saturday. Is he? No, no, he's not coming. Not on the Monday anyway...'
    Twenty minutes later they were still there, still accepting but psotponing a drink, still repeating everything twice, still reminding one another at intervals that they mustn't stop because were off to the Top Time Hotel, or over to Chirk to deliver a door; or because they were casting the summer performance of The Tempest in the leisure centre down at Pale Meadows, the usual story of incompetence and under-commitment on all sides. Every time a conversation wound down, it began again. When there was no one else to talk to, they shouted into their phones.

'I'm at that stage where you're still in love but you aren't quite sure what with. Reality begins to dawn.'
  And then: 'Lots of room for improvement here but no money.'

Leaves off the willow, berries on the hawthorn. Victoria kept away from the fields. She kept everything at a distance; drove the Fiat as far afield as Runcorn; forgot ther appointments. November, meanwhile, gave up on itself without warning, and suddenly the town had been dragged into the first week of December. The Christmas lights went up; someone towed Wee Ossie's Toyota out of the lay-by on Pale Meadows. One morning the rain turned briefly to snow.

Video Games (videogames)

 I've been playing so far

• Metal Gear Solid V - "The Phantom Pain"
• Horizon: Zero Dawn
• Death Stranding
• the Missing
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• The Witcher 3
• Portal & Portal 2
• Wreckfest
  
• Spec Ops: The Line
• Not For Broadcast
• Biohazard
• Cloudpunk
• Scanner
• Kentucky Route Zero
• Nier: Automata
• Little Nightmares III
• Observer: redux
• What Remains of Edith Finch
• Alan Wake
• Control (Ultimate Edition)
  
• 12 Minutes
• Dark Souls
• NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139
• Ghost of Tsushima - amazing history and good gameplay
• the Last of Us - great story telling and music
• the Last of Us part 2 - still good, sometimes a bit less story wise, but the part where Joel gets killed, or Ellie's birthday flashback are amazing
• Metal Gear Solid 4 - Guns of the Patriot
• Vennineth 
• Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
• The Stanley Paradox
  
• Disco Inferno
• Deus Ex - Human Evolution (Director's Cut) 
• Deus Ex - Mankind Divided
  
• Elden Ring
• Blind Drive
• Getting Over It
• Late Shift
  
• Soma
• Remember Me
• Stray
• Call of Juarez: Gunslinger
• Echo
• Deathloop
• Aragami
• Celeste
• Norco
• A Plague Tale: Innocence
• A Plague Tale: Requiem
• Immortality
  
• Silicon Dreams
• God of War
  
• God of War: Ragnarok
• Horizon II - Forbidden West
• Dead Space (2023 remake)
  
• Volumes (?) - 3D sneak game
• started 5min of "Wild West" (?)
• Dredge
• Close to the Sun
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
• White Shadows
• Vampire Survivor
• As Dusk Falls
• Firewatch -[way earlier,  had covid, before tLoU, close Kentucky Route Zero]
• Humanity - "lemmings game"
• Metal Hellsinger (hardly played, rhythm based metal music game)
• Armored Core IV - Fires of Rubicon
• Unpacking
• Somerville
• Life Is Strange 
• Beyond: Two Souls (disappointing narrative "scifi" game with Elliot Page)
• Trek To Yomi - beautiful samurai game in old 60's style movie style
  
• Tokyo:Ghostwire
• Bloodborne
• Where the Water Tastes like Wine 
• Baldur's Gate 3
• Lies of P
• Hi-Fi Rush
• The Talos Principle
• Returnal
• Dark Souls II - Son of the First Sin
• Themysia
• Pacific Drive
• Elden Ring - Shadow of the Erdtree DLC
• Nioh
• Dark Souls III
• 1000xResist
• Quantum Break
• Papers Please
• Mass Effect 1 (Legendary Edition)
• Mass Effect 2 (Legendary Edition)
• The Forbidden City
• Mass Effect 3 (Legendary Edition)
• Katana Zero
• Blue Prince (absolutely amazing)
• Clair Obscur 33
• Slay the princess (great)
• Arctic eggs (wonderfully weird, david lynchian)
• Black Myth: Wokong
• Shadow of the Colossus

random Iggy Pop confidential songs

2021-01-29

• Sun Ra Arkestra - "Sea of Darkness / Darkness"
  strange, nice
  
• John Hammond - "Evil"
  good jazz
• Beauty Pill - "Instant Night"
  curious female vocals
• Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids - "Rhapsody in Berlin (part 1 and 2)"
  crazy busy
• Clara Smith - "Black Cat Moan"
  amazing old record, starting with cat meows
• Teresa Salgueiro - "Lisboa"
• Mulatu Astatke - "Yegelle Tezeta"
  nice instrumental, swinging.
  

Flickering Lights

Film from director of "Adam's Æppler" and others, also with Mads Mikkelson. Four somewhat petty criminals find themselves in a derilict restaurant and slowly start building a real life there. 

Enjoyable enough, though not even close to his later work.

The Serpent

Interesting enough series about a serial killer who hated backpackers and killed them in Thailand. Has Jenna Coleman in it (previous Doctor compagnion)

The "dutch" of Billie Howle, main dude from the Dutch embassy, is terrible. I can't understand it.

Back

 "Back" with David Mitchell.  It's nice, dark humour and not the usual too-funny stuff he does with (Robert Webb?)

Gideon Coe music

 Things he played during his show

• Brother Ah - "The Sea"
• Tortoise - "I Set My Face to the Hillside"
  strangely wonderful instrumental music

random bbc6

 * Julia Jacklin - "Body"

* Loudon Wainwright III - "I'd Rather Be Lonely"

best James Bond themes that never were

 https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200218-the-best-james-bond-themes-that-never-made-it-to-the-screen

The Midnight Sky

Slow but good film with George Clooney who - after the apocolypse - tries to warn astronauts not to return. 

Michael Bungay Stanier - "The Coaching Habit"

 

An almsot fail-safe way to start a chat that quickly turns into a real conversation is the question, "What's on your mind?" It's something of a Goldilocks question, walking a fine line so it is neither too open and broad nor too narrow and confining.

"And What Else" - AWE question - with seemingly no effort, it creates more-more wisdom, mroe insights, more self-awareness, more possibilities-out of thin air.
    There are three reasons it has the impact that it does: more options can lead to better decisions; you rein yourself in; and you buy yourself time.

Paul Nutt found that decisions made from binary choices had a failure rate greater than 50 percent. [...] Having at least one more option lowered the failure rate by almost half, down to about 30 percent.

At some stage of the conversation, someone's going to say to you, "There is nothing else." [...] Reframe that reaction as success. "There is nothing else" is a response you should be seeking.

Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox Of Choice (he gives a good TED talk of the same name), brought to light a study of consumers in a grocery store. It was Jam Day, and one sample table had six varieties; the other, twenty-four. While the table with twenty-four types of jam was more popular, consumers sampling from the table of six flavours were ten times more likely to actually buy jam. The overwhelm of twenty-four flavours created decision-making paralysis.

a 1956 paper by George A. Miller whose title tells you exactly what its conclusion was: "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information." Science has whittled that number down over time, so now it's generally assumed that four is actually the ideal number at which we can chunk information.

Logan Lucky

 Fun lightweight heist film, including Adam Driver with one arm and Daniel Craig.

Blow the Man Down

 Fun crime thriller where two sisters in a small fishing village in Maine are caught up in the local intricacies of history and death when one of them kinda accidentally murders the pimp.

Fun chorus of "singing fishermen", commenting on what happens. turns out "Blow the man down" is an old sea shanty.f

Alice in Borderland

Korean series about three kids suddenly finding themselves in a dangerous life-or-death game. So far okay. Hints of "Cube", but that might just have been because of the first puzzle.

Soul

 Latest Pixar about a jazz musician dying and trying to get his soul back into his body.  Nice, though not nearly as captivating as Inside/Out.

Cillian Murphy / bbc6 / Monday / 2020-12-28

• Wendy Carlos - met Moog and it was a "perfect blend". She did the score of The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, and the original 1982 Tron.  Absolute synthesizer pioneer