The Cranberries

Missed quite a few albums and songs (some posthumously Doloress O'Riordan) 

* Such a Shame - a very happy "arrogant! ignorant! arrogant! ignorant! you're you're ... // I think ... you're awful / I think... you're horrible!"

Ontregelende Nederlandstalige Nederbeat

https://onzetaal.nl/tijdschrift/nov-dec-2022/artikel/een-lange-boon-op-duizend-poten

The Fallouts - "De Vlieg"

Aart Brouwer and Johnny & the Cellar Rockers - "Vies"

Ruud Knolraap and The Sweet Vegetable - "Nieuwe Sperziebonen"

God of War: Ragnarok and Horizon - Forbidden West

Great stories, and breathtaking visas in Horizon again.

GoW:R feels a bit of a grind, but still enjoyable.

Alice in Borderlands s2

Quite enjoyed it, particularly the very last episode. Still not sure whether I do like the ending (ignoring the silly joker cliffhanger) but it was a proper finishing of the story anyway.

The part where the Queen of Hearts confuses them about the games (is it real, virtual reality, are you insane) reminded me of the best part of Neverwhere.

Moondog Jr (not Zita Swoon, not the Tom Barman version) - "Shall I let this good man in"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1H0gZ7n8uU

met Sarah Bettens!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biSX8YtIjRo

Dark mode versus light mode

https://kevquirk.com/is-dark-mode-such-a-good-idea/

Gershon Kingsley - "Popcorn"

https://djmag.com/news/synth-pioneer-and-maker-%E2%80%98popcorn%E2%80%99-gershon-kingsley-dies-age-97

Museum dedicated to mistranslated Japanese phrases

https://www.spoon-tamago.com/2022/12/06/museum-of-wonky-english/

Nicoletta Cecolli drawings of twins &etc

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=nicoletta%20cecolli&tbs=imgo%3A1

Geeshie Wiley - "Last Kind Word Blues"

No, Really, mRNA Vaccines Are Not Going To Affect Your DNA

https://www.deplatformdisease.com/blog/no-really-mrna-vaccines-are-not-going-to-affect-your-dna

The other relevant compartment would be the mitochondrion. Mitochondria are actually vestigial bacteria with their own genomes, and it’s thought that billions of years ago an ancient cell (probably an archaean- the cousins of bacteria) tried to consume the ancestor of the mitochondria but lacked the machinery to actually do the digesting and the two established a symbiotic relationship. Since that instance, the mitochondria have been an essential feature of our cell’s biologies. This allowed the mitochondria to develop an extremely reduced genome containing only 37 genes (most of the genes relevant to mitochondrial function are still in the nucleus). Mitochondria have their own ribosomes and even their own genetic code (sort of). There is also a specialized process for the clearance of diseased mitochondria called mitophagy, which is the subject of many excellent reviews e.g. this, this, and this.

Retroviruses are viruses who have an RNA genome, from which they create a DNA copy through reverse transcription that then integrates into the cell of the host (by which I mean, literally inserts itself into the host cell’s genome and becomes a permanent part of it, in the form of a sequence called a provirus). The proviral sequence itself can then be transcribed in the host cell to produce viral proteins and particles that can go on to spread to the next cell. The most famous retrovirus is HIV-1.

How the body and mind talk to one another to understand the world

 https://aeon.co/ideas/how-the-body-and-mind-talk-to-one-another-to-understand-the-world

Contemporary experiments demonstrate the neural and mental representation of internal bodily sensations as integral for the experience of emotions; those individuals with heightened interoception tend to experience emotions with greater intensity. The anterior insula is a key brain area, processing both emotions and internal visceral signals, supporting the idea that this area is key in processing internal bodily sensations as a means to inform emotional experience. Individuals with enhanced interoception also have greater activation of the insula during interoceptive processing and enhanced grey-matter density of this area.

Parasite gives wolves what it takes to be pack leaders

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03836-9

The parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, makes its hosts bold — a mechanism that increases its survival. To reproduce sexually, T. gondii must reach the body of a cat, usually when its host is eaten by one. That becomes much more likely if the parasite alters the host’s behaviour, making it foolhardy. Research results are mixed, but in rodents, infection generally correlates with decreased fear of cats and increased exploratory behaviour.

... infected wolves were 11 times more likely than uninfected ones to leave their birth family to start a new pack, and 46 times more likely to become pack leaders — often the only wolves in the pack that breed.

The Devil's Hour

Great mini series with Peter Capaldi as someone reliving their live over and over, slowly "improving" it by learning who to kill.

Immortality

Interesting enough game where you basically watch video clips to figure out what happened to an actress.

Has a good mechanism to jump between clips and the rewind function shows some interesting stuff at some point

The Menu

Fun film with Ralph Fienns and the one from A Queen's Gambit.

Meta stuff since the film is basically about film sabout cooking and culinary stuff.

"S'mores:

sugar, graham crackers, chocolate,
customers, staff, restaurant"

The Peripheral

Interesting scifi about playing a VR game that actually controls real people or droids somewhere? Haven't seen much yet.

Darryl Cooper ("the Martyrmade podcast") & Daniele Bolelli ("History on Fire") - #10 - Anything That Moves - the My Lai Massacre

Not dissimilar from Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History"

Good stuff.

Ann-Sophie Barwich - "Why might it be easier to fool your eyes than your nose?"

https://aeon.co/essays/why-might-it-be-easier-to-fool-your-eyes-than-your-nose

Why do we generally trust our eyes? Visual object recognition seems intuitively more objective than odour perception since it builds on perspective invariance. Regardless of the angle from which you approach an object, you can recognise it as being the same thing and of the same category. A ball doesn't usually transform suddenly into a square or triangle when you approach it from the left rather than the right side. It will likewise continue to look like a ball if you paint it in another colour or spritz an odour at it. The same cannot necessarily be said about olfactory images in their ephemeral and fluctuating appearance. Contextual cues (such as a word or an image) can profoundly alter the conceptual content of an odour image in an instant - for example, from Parmesan to vomit, and back again. With visual imagery, it is usually only in the case of optical illusions of puzzle pictures such as the duck-rabbit that such radical shifts of perception occur.

By comparison, it is much harder to trick your nose. Certainly, olfaction is much more variable in its perceptual expression than vision. But this variation doesn't mean that the nose has been misled. Olfaction simply does not work analogously to the visual system. Crucially, feature coding in smell is not viewpoint-invariant. On the contrary, the causal principles of the olfactory system facilitate a cue-dependent interpretation in the computational integration of its neural signals. This inherent variability is of greater advantage when it comes to judging a contextually highly promiscuous and often unpredictable distal stimulus. The same odorant in different chemical environments can change its meaning also because you never smell chemicals on their own.

Phil Jaekl - "Can humans navigate by sensing the Earth's magnetic field?"

https://aeon.co/essays/can-humans-navigate-by-sensing-the-earths-magnetic-field

They examined the mineral content of pulverised bees and pigeon heads using specially adapted geological testing equipment. In each, they discovered about 100 million particles of magnetite. This opened the possibility that Earth's magnetic force could somehow affect the nervous system by the raw movement of these millions of tiny compasses, perhaps facilitating neural communication to signal North and South.

The idea is that, when someone isn't doing anything but resting, the brain's activity level peaks and troughs rhythmically in waves at a specific frequency rate - in this case, within what is known as the 'alpha frequency' band. Then, if they hear, see or sense something, these cycles become less regular, marking a decrease in alpha activity.

Bert Hubert - Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 vaccine

 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/

Using Ψ (1-mythyl-3'-pseudouridylyl) instead of U helps evade our immune system, so the mRNA stays around long enough so we can actually help train the immune system.

Many people have asked, could viruses also use the Ψ technique to beat our immune systems? In short, this is extremely unlikely. Life simply does not have the machinery to build 1-methyl-3'-pseudouridylyl nucleotides. Viruses rely on the machinery of life to reproduce themselves, and this facility is simply not there. The mRNA vaccines quickly degrade in the human body, and there is no possibility of the Ψ-modified RNA replicating with the Ψ still in there.

“No, Really, mRNA Vaccines Are Not Going To Affect Your DNA” is also a good read.

Alex Pheby - "Malarkoi"

The second in what is supposed to become a trilogy. It does not yet capture me as much as "Mordew" did.

Was that a sensible idea, to put it in the heart of his domain, in the room where he kept his most puissant things? Time is one thing - it can make things change... it is, in fact, change distilled - but other things can have effects too. Magic can cause all sorts of mayhem. A weft- manipulator is familiar with his manipulations, knows how things interreact, but add an unknown factor? That was a recipe for disaster.

Edmund de Waal - "The white road - a journey into obsession"

About author's search for the history and story of porcelain.

And it is in Venice that object and name come together and start this long history of desire for porcelain. The name of this grandest of commodities, this white gold, the cause of the bankruptcy of princes, of Porzellankrankheit - porcelain sickness - comes from eye-stretching Venetian slang, the vulgar wolf-whistle after a pretty girl. Porcellini, or little pigs, is the nickname for cowrie shells, which feel as smooth as porcelain. Cowrie shells lead, obviously, to Venetian lads, to a vulva. 

You can get away with unevenness with other kinds of clay, but it is chancy with porcelain. Your errors, your slapdash decisions, are revealed.

It needs to be fired to the ridiculous temperatures above 1,300 degrees Celsius to achieve the whiteness, the hardness and the translucency, the beautiful resonance when you gently tap the rim of a bowl, that constitute proper porcelain. And this is where it gets intriguing. You cannot put a spade into the ground and dig up white porcelain clay, soft and clean and ready, however wonderful this idea might be.

Porcelain is made of two kinds of mineral.

The first element is petunse or what is known as porcelain stone. In the vivid imagery used here in Jingdezhen it provides the flesh of the porcelain. It gives translucency and supplies the hardness of the body. The second element is kaolin or porcelain clay and it is the bones. It gives plasticity. Together petunse and kaolin fuse at great heat to create a form of glass that is vitrified: at a molecule level the spaces are filled up with glass, making the vessel non-porous.

A carp rising from amongst the twisting weeds towards the air at the top of the open bowl. The word carp, li, he explains to me, is a homophone for li, profit, and this suddenly makes sense of the ubiquity of these bowls with their strenuous fish, unstoppable in their need to swim higher.

[cobalt] is toxic. If you are exposed to cobalt as dust as you grind it into a paste, if you lick the end of your brush to recover its shape before you dip it again into the blue-black liquid to paint another willow branch, you will absorb a little. You might feel nausea. You might feel breathless. It builds, it reaches deep into you.

The repetition of a previous reign's achievements is noble in itself.

Sets are a way of controlling the world.

White is the colour of mourning in China. To wear white is to express your loss to those around you, keep the world away.

Which makes me happy. I'm finally on my way to the airport and I've seen his Tea Set at last. It is perfect imperial porcelain from Jingdezhen. And I smile over the sealing up of the seam of kaolin, an action that was historicist and scholarly, and utterly lacking in utilitarian purpose.

Did they do anything else? This is a real question. The imperative to write was central to a Jesuit's mission. Wherever you were - stuck in some remote part of a country or across the city - you would write letters and reports on every aspect of your spiritual and temporal life to your superior with regularity. Writing was an act of self-reflection, a catechising of yourself before God. You write and you send. And you wait.

There is a silk handscroll portrait of Lang sitting on a rock over a ravine in a pale blue robe that bunches up over his impressive paunch, leaning on one hand, the other nonchalant on a knee, and he radiates capaciousness. You look at him and think conversation. You look again and you see his astuteness. He knows the drop to his left.

And the glaze named 'drunken beauty' in China, or 'peach bloom' by a Western scholar, softens the form even more. I don't want to think of the late-night glowing pallor of a drunk, so think of a peach. Really think of it, how the colour changes from yellow to pinks, blooms as imperceptibly as dawn, how the fruit gives slightly under your thumb. This glaze, too, is ludicrously difficult to achieve. Copper-lime pigment has to be sprayed through a long bamboo tube with a fine silk covering at the end on to a layer of transparent glaze, on to which you then put another layer of transparent glaze, before you fire it.
These effects are perfect for an emperor.

Kangxi is late porcelain. It is clever and it knows it. It is, I realize, an idea of porcelain.

And Primo Levi, my hero, wrote in The Wrench of 'the advantage of being able to test yourself, not depending on others in the test, reflecting yourself in your work. On the pleasure of seeing your creature grow, beam after beam, bolt after bolt, necessary, symmetrical, suited to its purpose.'
    By which Primo Levi, a chemist who spent his working life analysing the chemical composition of paint as well as being a writer, means that method is interesting. Be very careful when you describe how something is made, how it comes into shape, as process is not to be skated over. The manner of what we make defines us. 

Kakiemon. This is the Japanese porcelain that is being imported through the Dutch, who since the 1630s, have the only concessions to trade with the Japanese.

I realise that they are all scared about money. Each of them feels poor. They have every right to feel worried too, as money isn't simple at court. I had imagined that the court functioned with the king paying wages or salaries, but it is more fragile than that, a series of binding ad hoc agreements, throwaway remarks and whimsy backed up by threat.

How can there have been so many documents from these weeks, 300 years ago? Reading Stasiland, Anna Funder's exploration of the culture of informing and information in the GDR, it is striking how fear drives the compulsion to keep records. If you know that everyone around you is recording what you have said, who you said it to, then self-protection lies in the completeness of your notes, the reach for a pen as automatic as the tapping of a cigarette from a packet, lighting it, inhaling.

And there is a constant about alchemists. They seem to be aware of their solitary nature while making a big deal of the handing on of knowledge, the choosing of who to pass it on to, adopting initiates. This idea of the transmission from Albertus Magnus to Thomas Aquinas to Paracelsus and on, is compelling. A writer at the start of the seventeenth century notes that 'you will find [the alchemist's] primary transmutation to be of himself: a goldsmith becomes a goldmaker, an apothecary a chemical physician, a barber a Paracelsian, one who wastes his own patrimony turns into one who spends the gold and goods of others.

Tschirnhaus comes to understand haptic knowledge, the ways in which it is possible to know something complex without having the need, or the means, to articulate it in language, 'a person can perform intellectual and other operations without knowing how they actually work.'
Tschirnhaus frequently gives the example of the way in which we use our hands without any knowledge of their physiological structure. Thus we can admire the manual ability and skill of a watchmaker who does not know anything at all about the way in which his hands function, but is still creating an object of true complexity.

John Ironmonger - "De dag dat de walvis kwam"

Enjoyable enough, but again the language feels off. The original in English, this is the Dutch translation. Is it me just being picky again?

games: Deathloop, Aragami, Celeste, Norco

 Deathloop: enjoyable, although it's a bit of a struggle to keep my interesst

Aragami: enjoyable enough stealth game, anime style, where your revengeful spirit throws shadows and hides in them

Celeste: amazing retro style mountain climb 2D platformer. Fun levels, good characters, great music

Norco: interesting enough point and click adventure game

House of the Dragon

Next game of thrones.  Yeah, it's alright. I'm not really invested.

The Old Man

Great series with Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow about a former CIA agent whose past (and family) is catching up with him. Bridges' character's daughter is officially dead, but working for the CIA, while Lithgow warns him to hide otherwise he has to kill him.

Good stuff so far.

rando music

 * American McGee's Alice - that crazy soundtrack

* Linkin Park - "Session" - that amazing stereo image

La Femme - *

Wonderfully weird music in all kind of genres!

"From Tchernobyl With Love"

"Tu t'en lasses" - spacey synths

"Witch Dub" - theremin?

Cold Pursuit

Rather weird jumpy film with Liam Neeson as father-revenging-his-son's-death.

Probably a critique of such films, considering the terrible arche-types, but I don't get it.

shot by shot remake of the Norwegian "Kraftidioten" (In Order of Disappearance)

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Very meta about Nicolas Cage playing Nicolas Cage.

Okay, not sure I was in the right frame of mind.

Polar

Mads Mikkelsen, as almost retired assassin, needs to take revenge when his previous boss tries to take him out. Entertaining.

Thor: Love and Thunder

Usual Marvel MCU drivel.

Lex Fridman interviews John Carmack

good stuff, although I'm not a fan of Fridman's interview style (and the number of times he said "you're the greatest programmer in the world" became silly at some point)

Elizabeth Fraser - "Underwater"

Weird song that came up after playing The Smile a lot.  Slow vocals and bubbly sound.

From Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, worked with Massive Attack, Yann Tiersen, Craig Armstrong...!

Band of Cloud - "This is Tomorrow"

The Capture

Good, Black Mirror alike, series of a near future Britain where deep fakes, the Correction programme, are used by the government to "create evidence"

Marieke Lucas Rijnveld - "De avond is ongemak"

Niet mijn soort boek/stijl. Vooral het taalgebruik werd de hemel in geprezen, maar ik vond de constante vergelijking met eten niet heel prettig om te lezen. Liet wel op een goede manier delen van het verhaal weg die je zelf aanvoelde.

 

 

 

Ik kende deze blik niet van hem, al wist ik dat hij een hekel had aan wachten, want dan moest hij te lang stilstaan bij zichzelf en daarvan ging hij meer roken. Niemand in het dorp stond lang stil bij zichzelf, het kon dan zomaar gebueren dat de oogst verpieterde, en wij kenden alleen de oogst van het land, niet die in onszelf.

Mensen hebben nu eenmaal kleine problemen nodig om zich groter te voelen.

Catherine Graindorge ft Iggy Pop - "The Dictator"

great parlando, slightly less so when he starts to sing. Still fun.s

Kärlek och anarki / Love and Anarchy

OK series about a woman and IT guy who start challenging each other, of course the challenges bring about serious changes in their lives... not breathtaking but was enjoyable so far

John Mauceri - "For the Love of Music - A Conductor's Guide to the Art of Listening"

ok to read, although he makes some strange claims about how (classical) music is unique in ways other arts and senses are not. Does not always make sense to me. I wonder how critical his editor was, or whether this suffered from fanboy issues.

 

 

Since historians can choose where to begin and where to end their stories, Hayden White invented the word "emplotment" – meaning the imprint of dramatic structure onto what he saw as the randomness of events.

 

What Wagner did was create a set of short musical motifs that are presented at important moments in the drama and seem to represent those moments, characters, objects, and emotions. The brain links the melody with a visually and dramatically memorable moment. This procedure mysteriously creates a permanent relationship between the music and the object. From that moment onward, each time the melody is heard in the unfolding drama brings us back to its first iteration, and since the Ring takes place over generations, the sense of time and nostalgia become ever more emotive.

The Chantays - "Pipeline"

great surf rock

Amal El-Mohar & Max Gladstone - "This Is How You Lose the Time War"

wonderful original story about Red and Blue, agents of opposing forces Agency (cyborgs?) and Garden (organic), who fight each other through strands of time and leave letters.

    

A rush of wind splits the earth, a roar in darkness. Red clutches the petrified trunk closer than a lover. The wind peaks, screams, tosses bones about. A new note rises above the ossuary clatter, woken by the cavern's wind whistling over precise fluted pits in the bones Red has hung. The note grows, shifts, and swells into a voice.

So I go. I travel farther and faster and harder than most, and I read, and I write, and I love cities. To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.
    But never again like this.
    I am so sorry. If I had been stronger. Faster. Smarter. Better. If I had been worth you. If–
    You would not want me to curse myself this way.
    You'll have to burn this. I hope you can keep it. I keep the memory. I imagine your hands on the paper. I imagine your fire.
    I wish I could hold you.
    I love you.

R.

Kleo

Fun series about a former GBR (DDR) Stasi assassin who takes vengeance upon those who betrayed her after she is freed when the wall falls.

Good music at times.

We Own This City

Gripping account, fictional but based on real events, of corrupt cops in Baltimore.

Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/

• The CAP to make sure the RNA looks like regular mRNA
• A known successful and optimized 5' untranslated region (UTR)
• A codon optimized signal peptide to send the Spike protein to the right place (amino acids copied 100% from the original virus)
• A codon optimized version of the original spike, with two ‘Proline’ substitutions to make sure the protein appears in the right form
• A known successful and optimized 3' untranslated region
• A poly-A tail with a ‘linker’ in there

 

If we look closely, we see that the majority of the changes happen in the third codon position, noted with a ‘3’ above. And if we check the universal codon table, we see that this third position indeed often does not matter for which amino acid is produced.

So, the changes are synonymous, but then why are they there? Looking closely, we see that all changes except one lead to more C and Gs.

So why would you do that? As noted above, our immune system takes a very dim view of ‘exogenous’ RNA, RNA code coming from outside the cell. To evade detection, the ‘U’ in the RNA was already replaced by a Ψ.

However, it turns out that RNA with a higher amount of Gs and Cs is also converted more efficiently into proteins,

And this has been achieved in the vaccine RNA by replacing many characters with Gs and Cs wherever this was possible.

This is one of the exceptionally clever bits about the vaccine. Our body runs a powerful antivirus system (“the original one”). For this reason, cells are extremely unenthusiastic about foreign RNA and try very hard to destroy it before it does anything.

This is somewhat of a problem for our vaccine - it needs to sneak past our immune system. Over many years of experimentation, it was found that if the U in RNA is replaced by a slightly modified molecule, our immune system loses interest. For real.

So in the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, every U has been replaced by 1-methyl-3'-pseudouridylyl, denoted by Ψ. The really clever bit is that although this replacement Ψ placates (calms) our immune system, it is accepted as a normal U by relevant parts of the cell.

Many people have asked, could viruses also use the Ψ technique to beat our immune systems? In short, this is extremely unlikely. Life simply does not have the machinery to build 1-methyl-3'-pseudouridylyl nucleotides. Viruses rely on the machinery of life to reproduce themselves, and this facility is simply not there. The mRNA vaccines quickly degrade in the human body, and there is no possibility of the Ψ-modified RNA replicating with the Ψ still in there. “No, Really, mRNA Vaccines Are Not Going To Affect Your DNA” is also a good read.

Lauren Groff - "Matrix"

"Matrix" for the Latin for Mother.

One of those exceptional books that tell the whole lifetime of a character and you actually believe it. Marie de France, unknown who she was according to wikipedia, but so influential in the 12th century....

But Goda needs to punish someone, and so the grave is dug in the unconsecrated ground outside the churchyard, without ceremony, Avice is lowered into it in her shroud facedown with her babe at her feet, so that in the Revelations her bones will never be able to rise to the hands of the Angels of the Resurrection. Such pitilessness, Marie thinks, for a sin of flesh.

At last, she shees a clump of darkness on a rise that, when Marie nears, revels the sheep saved, nuns running into the sodden fields waist deep to save more. Palenesses floating in the dark are drowned sheep. Marie wades out into the icy water to her waist, to her ribs. Cold sezies her and the wet habit grasps at her legs. She finds a ewe standing upon a dead sister, paddling with its front legs in panic, and though the beast is twice the size of an ordinary child and thashes in her frenzy, Marie picks her up in her arms and carriers her to the rise.

And her smell was strong, the soap of lemon balm and lavender at the heart of her braid, skin with honey and wild onions and leaf rot in it.

So hungry, the nun's faces are skulls skinned of flesh in the dark dortoir. There are soups in which meat is boiled and removed to save for future soups. Fingernails the cold blue of sky.

Tom Mueller - "Extra Virginity: the Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil"

Nice little book about olive oil and particularly all the ways it gets adulterated and messed with. You don't dare to buy the stuff anymore after reading this book.

Finally, on November 13, 1960, the European Parliament passed a groundbreaking law on olive oil quality, which created several new oil grades. The highest of these had an odd-sounding name, with overtones of science and religious mystery: extra virgin. The law stipulated that extra virgin oil be made solely by mechanical methods, without chemical treatment, and set a number of chemical requirements, including a maximum of 1 percent free acidity.

In olive oil fraud, an EU investigator told me, "profits were comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks." Widespread adulteration and huge supplies of refined olive oil fueled a price war, which forced even the largest oil companies like Unilever and Nestle to seek ever cheaper sources of oil, with the risk of purchasing and reselling, knowingly or not, adulterated products themselves. While the quality of estate olive oils soared, supermarket extra virgins plummeted.

Nobody knows which cultivars the Spanish monks of New Norcia brought over from their homeland. Many trees died during the ocean journey, and as Gordon Smyth says, those which survived the salt air of the voyage "were as tough as old boots by the time they got here." Over the last 150 years, in the antipodean sunshine and the breezes off the Indian Ocean, these trees have grown apart from their Mediterranean ancestors and are now considered a separate cultivar, the West Australian mission olive.

The first olive oil importers to the New World were the conquistadors, for whom, as for their contemporaries in Spain, olive oil was a crucial food, fuel for lamps and engines, and active ingredient in medicine and religious rites. Spanish explorers packed quantities of olive oil, together with wine, salt pork, sardines, raisins, sandals and weapons, in each ship they sailed to the Americas. As in Roman times, when the legions planted olives wherever they were stationed, olive trees grew in the furrows of the conquistadors' swords, becoming a vivid symbol of conquest.

Congressional hearings on margarine began in the early 1880s and continued through 1950. In 1886, Congress enacted a Margarine Act, slapping stuff taxes and restrictions on margarines; when he signed the act into law, President Grover Cleveland remarked that one of its main benefits was "the defense accorded the consumer against the fraudulent substitution and sale of an imitation of the genuine article of food of very general use. I venture to say that hardly a pound of oleomargarine ever entered a poor man's home under its real name and in its real character." Around the turn of the century, the Supreme Court heard several cases concerning margarine. "We need insistent recognition of the fact of the interdependence of the human animal upon his cattle," Herbert Hoover intoned. "The white race can not survive without its dairy products and no child can be developed on short or bad milk supply." The world wars and butter rationing boosted teh margarine industry, but strong limits remained on the way the product could be marketed and sold: through the 1950s, federal taxes remained in effect on the product, and in many states margarine could only be sold as a white block, with a pellet of yellow coloring that the consumer had to knead in. In Wisconsin it was still illegal to sell yellow margarine until 1968, and in Quebec, the substance was only legalized in 2008, after Unilever brought suit against the provincial government.

This suggests another fundamental difference between wine and oil. Grapes contain not wine but grape juice, which must be transformed by the vintner's art. Oil is already there in the olive, if we can only coax it free. Wine in the final analysis is man-made, while oil is made by nature, through the medium of the strange tree-mysterious, because it comes from something greater than ourselves. Wine in a meal is the soloist, set apart in its gleaming glass, while oil permeates the food, losing itself but subtly changing everything. Wine's effects on us are vivid and swift, while oil works on the body in hidden ways, slow and lingering in the cells and in the mind, like myths. Wine is merry Dionysus; oil is Athena, solemn, wise, and unknowable.

Charlie Jane Anders - "The city in the middle of the night"

Amazing sci-fi about the planet January where a human spaceship arrived generations ago. Tidal locked, one side of the planet is always blazing, one in eternal dark.

Various people, Mouth, and Sophie, struggling between the two cities (Xiophant, strict rules, strict times) and Argelo (party, freedom, no responsibility) and the Citizens (Mouth is the only survivor) as well as the Resourceful Couriers, "crocodiles" or Gelet that Sophie can speak with...

Amazing stuff.

Alix E. Harrow - "A Spindle Splintered"

Modern retelling of Sleeping Beauty, where multiverse-beauties break out of their fate.

okay, but could not get used to the "gen-z" ish word and language, the continuous need to sound snappy and sharp. Tiresome.

Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/mouse-heaven-or-mouse-hell

Eventually other deviant behavior emerged. Mice who had been raised improperly or kicked out of the nest early often failed to develop healthy social bonds, and therefore struggled in adulthood with social interactions. Maladjusted females began isolating themselves like hermits in empty apartments - unusual behavior among mice. Maladjusted males, meanwhile, took to grooming all day-preening and licking themselves hour after hour. Calhoun called them "the beautiful ones." And yet, even while obsessing over their appearance, these males had zero interest in courting females, zero interest in sex.

Intriguingly, Calhoun had noticed in earlier utopias that such maladjusted behavior could spread like a contagion from mouse to mouse. He dubbed this phenomenon "the behavioral sink."

Between the lack of sex, which lowered the birth rate, and inability to raise pups properly, which sharply increased infant mortality, the population of Universe 25 began to plummet. By the 21st month, newborn pups rarely survived more than a few days. Soon, new births stopped altogether. Older mice lingered for a while-hiding like hermits or grooming all day-but eventually they died out as well. By spring 1973, less than five years after the experiment started, the population had crashed from 2,200 to 0. Mouse heaven had gone extinct.

Recently, however, human birth rates have dropped sharply in many developed countries-often below replacement levels- and young people in those places have reportedly lost interest in sex. The parallels to Universe 25 seem spooky.

The Sandman

Enjoyable enough, but a bit too much the overwhelming CGI action we all expect these days.

The "24/7" diner episode is great, although the separate episodes with their sub plots work less in a series than in the graphic novel.

The Humans

Slightly disturbing film of a family coming together for Thanksgiving in a dilapidated New York City apartment. Each family member, particularly the dad, has their problems and fixations.

Carter (2021)

Crazy action film, semi-one shot, Korean, of a guy protecting his family, with a bomb in his mouth and has forgotten his memory.

Crazy stuff, quite enjoyable.

The Northman

Impressive Viking tale of revenge. Music reminded me of "Once Upon A Time in the West" with its quickly vibrating hook.

Aurora

Norwegian folky synthpop, child voice.

The Innocents (De uskyldige)

Nice Scandi horror about a few children getting supernatural powers and battling each other while parents are unaware

Westworld s4

not sure where it's going, slow start, but might get interesting

The Boys s3

Wild rollercoaster ride. Fun stuff. Good (better?) character development than earlier seasons, maybe.

Mad God

If Harlan Ellison's "I have no mouth yet I must scream" was a trilogy, this was the fourth part written while on LSD.

Amazing stop motion. Not sure I'm getting the whole story yet. Babel. Rebirth. Circle. Empty gestures, empty living...

Kate

Fun action film where protagonist knows she will die and tries to take revenge on the yakuza.

The Gray Man

Enjoyable full-fight action film with Ryan Gosling as CIA "gray" man, full on action like John Wick etc.

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger

Enjoyable enough western shootout game.

Stray

Truly beautiful game where you play a soft-mewing stray cat trying to escape the post apocalyptic underground city.

Sophia Kennedy - misc

Good stuff. Some in German.

"People treat their problem as pet / feed it while it's hungry / mourn it when it's dead"

quote - Japanese game

 "To teach is to learn
Please make space for me,"

Petrichor - words

petrichor

The distinctive scent which accompanies the first rain after a long warm dry spell.

The yellow organicoil that yields this scent.

Stray

Fun, beautiful. Particularly the first scene.

Loved how initially it is "just being". You don't read text - weird script - you just walk around.

Things get different when meeting B-12, the little robot. Let's hope things don't get too explainy.

Spiderman: No Way Home

meh.

Roadrunner: A Film about Anthony Bourdain

Nice but sad documentary about the famous cook, his work, his travels, his fighting with mental issues.

Controversially, they used three deep-fake voice-overs of him with identifying them (well, one of them).

This will become more and more common and it's weird.

the Imitation Game

Great film about Alan Turing and his work (and sad end) on the Enigma and the bombas.

Wonderful acting from Benedict Cumberbatch as per usual.

Remember Me

Enjoyable enough game where in cyberpunk Paris you need to fight using certain patterns for maximum impact to get your memories back. 

Sometimes you need to go into someone's mind and adjust their memory. Fun concept. 

Quite cinematic in its story telling and cut scenes. Nothing super great but enjoyable stuff.

Writing this while still playing (and not doing the game justice, I'm not reading all the background stuff), it seems a serious attempt at a Matrix meets Tombraider (without the puzzles, without the bullet time). It's not bad. The story telling, while not spectacular, is okay, considering the audience and time it came out.

Doctor Strange and the multiverse of madness

Yeah, well, one of those Marvel things in the MCU.

The "madness"? It wasn't really there.

It was alright. I do remember liking the first one a lot, this one... glad I did not pay a cinema ticket.

Outer Range

Intriguing series over a Wyoming farmer who finds a huge hole into nothingness in his land.

A lot left unexplained, there's a danger of Lost-approach here, but intriguing nonetheless.

Very nice soundtrack.

To check

* Kris Kristofferson - "Casey's Last Ride"

Stranger Things - s4

Enjoyed it more than s3, well, it's still ongoing. 

Long episodes, each easily spanning an hour.

Good stuff!!

Some amazing moments, "I piggybacked via a pizza dough freezer" and the Metallica "master of disaster" concert given in the Upside Down.

Picard - s2

With John DeLancie's Q! And borg!!

Good so far.

Umbrella Academy - s3

Usually silly fun.

Nice how they incorporated the transition of the actor Elliot Page. 

Some good songs, as well, really liked "My Silver Lining" by First Aid Kit.

Shining Girls

Interesting series with her from The Lake about a vicious attack that leaves her switching times and places, and trying to trace her attacker.

Was a bit confused by the ending.

W.G. Snuffy Walden - "On The Road To Kansas"

From "The Stand" (1994) score.

Slightly reminiscent of the Last of Us in its guitar use.

Not all songs are great. 

the Lazarus Project

ok time-loopy series where Earth has a checkpoint day - 1st of July - and a secret organization can reset in case of total annihilation...

but things become tricky when personal issues (death, giving birth again and again) start to seep into the mix

The Saga of the Cannibal Ants in a Soviet Nuclear Bunker

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

Somewhere near Międzyrzecz in western Poland, there is an abandoned Soviet nuclear installation. Patches of pine and spruce, which had been planted as camouflage, are still doing their job. Vegetation entirely envelopes the concrete entrance, which is blocked off but accessible to bats and determined, rule-breaking humans. 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. 

[...]

To understand the bizarre nature of this colony, one must understand the layout of the bunker. Somewhere inside its reinforced concrete walls, which are over three feet thick, there is a small, closet-like room, cryptically numbered 12. The aesthetic of its walls screams “abandoned Soviet nuclear bunker,” with peeling paint and swelling limewash. The floor, once terra-cotta, is now a pile of rubble and soil. In the ceiling is a hole that holds the ventilation pipe, which is approximately a foot wide and connects the chamber to the outside world, about 16 feet above. Ant Colony One, which rejoices in the light and imbibes sweet honeydew, lives right on top of the pipe’s opening. “These ants are mostly eating aphid [honeydew],” Maák says. But when an unlucky ant takes one wrong step, it can tumble down the perilous chute, where it becomes a member of Ant Colony Two. No light, no aphids, no escape. “These ants are eating corpses,” he says.

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.

Dreams are a precious resource. Don't let advertisers hack them

 

In his book 50 secrets of Magic Craftmanship (1948), Salvador Dali documented a technique that he called 'slumber with a key'. Sitting in a chair with one arm on the armrest, holding a heavy key over an upside-down plate, he would bring to mind a problem he was working on and allow himself to drift off to sleep. With the onset of sleep, his hand muscles would relax, the key would fall and hit the plate, waking him up, often with a solution to his problem.

Mother Earth Mother Board

 https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

So the second library is some holes in a wall, and the first is an intersection. Holes and intersections are both absences, empty places, disappointing to tourists of both the regular and the hacker variety. But one can argue that the intersection's continued presence is arguably more interesting than some old pile that has been walled off and embalmed by a historical society. How can an intersection remain in one place for 2,500 years? Simply, both the roads that run through it must remain open and active. The intersection will cease to exist if sand drifts across it because it's never used, of it someone puts up a building there. In Egypt, where yesterday's wonders of the world are today's building materials, nothing is more obvious than that people have been avidly putting up buildings everywhere they possibly can for 5,000 years, so it is remarkable that no such thing has happened here. It means that every time some opportunist has gone out and tried to dig up the street or to start putting up a wall, he has been flattened by traffic, arrested by cops, chased away by outraged donkey-cart drivers, or otherwise put out of action. The existence of this intersection is proof that a certain pattern of human activity has endured in this exact place for 2,500 years.

Formerly, cable was plowed into the bottom in water shallower than 1,000 meters, which kept it away from the trawlers. Because of recent changes in fishing practices, the figure has been boosted to 2,000 meters.

The Museum of Submarine Telegraphy in Porthcurno, England, has a display of wrecked cables bracketed to a slab of wood. Each is labeled with its cause of failure, some of which sounds dramatic, some cryptic, some both: trawler maul, spewed core, intermittent disconnection, strained core, teredo worms, crab's nest, perished core, fish bite, even "spliced by Italians". The teredo worm is like a science fiction creature, a bivalve with a rasp-edged shell that it uses like a buzz saw to cut through wood - or through submarine cables. Cable companies learned the hard way, early on, that it likes to eat gutta-percha, and subsequent cables received a helical wrapping of copper tape to stop it.

How to pray to a dead God

 https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-fulfil-the-need-for-transcendence-after-the-death-of-god

Even Darwin would write that the 'view now held by most physicists, namely, that the Sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life ... is an intolerable thought.' Such an impasse was a difficulty for those convinced by science but unable to find meaning in its theories. For many, purpose wasn't an attribute of the physical world, but rather something that humanity could construct.

In Germany, the Reformed theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher rejected both Enlightenment rationalism and orthodox Christianity, positing that an aesthetic sense defined faith, while still concluding in a 1799 address that 'belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion.' Like Arnold, Schleiermacher saw 'God' as an allegorical device for introspection, understanding worship as being 'pure contemplation of the Universe'. Such a position was influential throughout the 19th century, particularly among American Transcendentalists such as Henry Ward Beecher and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Those who practise apophatic theology - 2nd-century Clement of Alexandria, 4th-century Gregory of Nyssa, and 6th-century Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite - promulgated a method that has come to be known as the via negativa. According to this approach, nothing positive can be said about God that is true, not even that He exists. 'We do not know what God is,' the 9th-century Irish theologian John Scotus Eriugena wrote. 'God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not.'
    How these apophatic theologians approached the transcendent in the centuries before Nietzsche's infamous theocide was to understand that God is found not in descriptions, dogmas, creeds, theologies or anything else. Even belief in God tells us nothing about God, this abyss, this void, this being beyond all comprehension. Far from being simple atheists, the apophatic theologians had God at the forefront of their thoughts, in a place closer than their hearts even if unutterable. This is the answer of how to pray to a 'dead God': by understanding that neither the word 'dead' nor 'God' means anything at all.

Made to measure - why we can't stop quantifying our lives

bhttps://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/may/26/measurement-why-we-cant-stop-quantifying-our-lives

Standard reference materials, or SRMs, created by NIST [...] others seem like ingredients lifted from God's pantry: ingots of purified elements and pressurised canisters of gases, available in finely graded blends and mixtures. Some are just whimsical, as if they were the creation of an overly zealous bureaucracy determined to standardise even the most peculiar substances. Think: domestic sludge, whale blubber and powdered radioactive human lung, available as SRMs 2781, 1945, and 4351.
    Each has a purpose, however. Domestic sludge, for example, is used as a reference by environmental agencies to check pollutant levels in factories. Standardised whale blubber helps scientists track the buildup of chemical contaminants in the ocean. Powdered lung, meanwhile, is used as a benchmark for human exposure to radioactive materials.

10,000 steps. It’s often cited as an ideal daily target for activity, and built into countless tracking apps and fitness programmes. Walk 10,000 steps a day, we’re told, and health and happiness awaits.

    This number is presented with such authority and ubiquity you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the result of scientific enquiry, the distilled wisdom of numerous tests and trials. But no. Its origins are in a marketing campaign by a Japanese company called Yamasa Clock. In 1965, the company was promoting a then-novel gadget, a digital pedometer, and needed a snappy name for their new product. They settled on manpo-kei, or “10,000-steps meter”. But why was this number chosen? Because the kanji for 10,000 – and hence the first character in the product’s Japanese name, 万歩計 – looks like a figure striding forward with confidence. There was no science to justify 10,000 steps, it seems – just a visual pun.

Last Night In Soho

Nice story of a country girl coming to London to design clothes where she finds she can travel back in time to her favourite period, the '60s, to learn that it's not all that it seems. Not exactly a twist, but nice.

28 Days Later

Again an amazing film. That opening scene of him walking through an empty London with "East Hastings" from GY!BE is thrilling.

Strangely bad quality video+audio, done intently by Danny Boyle with DV cameras, much faster than old fashioned 35mm

Late Shift

Fun enough "Game" where you play through a heist in London regarding old Chinese pottery. I both admire and hate the fact they make you sit through every scene again and again.

Bambi was more gruesome than I'd realized

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/24/bambi-is-even-bleaker-than-you-thought

Amazing article about the original book about Bambi, how it was harsh. How its author, Felix Salten, is better known for writing basically child pornography. It's about trusting no one, being independent and that's all there is to life.

The book is at its best when it revels in rather than pretends to resolve the mystery of existence. At one point, Bambi passes by some midges who are discussing a June bug. "How long will he live?" the young ones ask. "Forever, almost," their elders answer. "They see the sun thirty or forty times." Elsewhere, a brief chapter records the final conversation of a pair of oak leaves clinging to a branch at the end of autumn. They gripe about the wind and the cold, mourn their fallen peers, and try to understand what is about to happen to them. "Why must we fall?" one asks. The other doesn't now, but has questions of its own: "Do we feel anything, do we know anything about ourselves when we're down there?" The conversation tacks back and forth from the intimate to the existential. The two leaves worry about which of them will fall first; one of them, gone "yellow and ugly," reassures the other that is has barely changed at all. The response, just before the inevitable end, is startlingly moving: "You've always been so kind to me. I'm just beginning to understand how kind you are." That is the opposite of a paean to individualism: a belated but tender recognition of how much we mean to one another

Perhaps the most telling exchange in the book occurs, during that difficult winter, between Bambi's mother and his aunt. "It's hard to believe that it will ever be better," his mother says. His aunt responds, "It's hard to believe that it was ever any better."

Zjef Vanuytsel -- "De Zotte Morgen"

Kwam tevoorschijn via bloody spotify nadat ik Wim Sonneveld e.d. had geluisterd.

Is goed. Moet ik vaker luisteren.

Soft Cell - "Happiness Not Included"

New Soft Cell album! So far, sounds like their original stuff. So, that's nice.

Pachinko

Cool series about a Korean family, from the 1910 Japanese occupation to the "now" in 1989.

Different colours for Japanese and Korean subtitling, which is cool.

Anatomy of a Scandal

interesting enough, particularly with the current Tory fuckups, of a scandal in west minster.

Röyksopp - "Profound Mysteries"

New album. Quite nice.

Really like "If You Want Me" with Susanne Sundfør. 

Also, "Impossible" was with Alison Goldfrapp.

Cynan Jones - "Stilicide"

Strange, near-poem like story. Chapters of different people, slowly interweaving, of a world without enough clean water. The Water Train, the iceberg being towed to London. Amazing how the chapters wrap into each other.

Originally broadcast by the bbc, one chapter at a time?

Reminds me of Paul Auster's "In the country of last things", Denis Johnson's "Train Dreams" and Daisy Jones' "February" (?? I can't find this!), as in short, strange books that leave you bewildered and confused.

Focus, John.

The hospital behind him.

The scene below an object now. A coin through a jeweller's loupe.

Watch the bridge, he coached himself. Focus on the bridge.

The protest now was filtering. The crowd seeming to pour.

Something microscopic in the fact the smallest tap could send a hundred-and-seventy-grain bullet three-quarters of a mile.

Move your finger just a millimetre and you could end a life; but you cannot save one. Her. Not with the strength of your whole body.

Branner felt himself sliding again, away from the wider world. Into the big hole in his ground, the time ahead without her.

Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind

Watched straight after finishing Severance. Still beautiful, still sad, still amazing.

Palm Springs

(seem to have missed logging this)

great time-loop movie, quite enjoyable. Don't bother with the set-up because they assume the audience is familiar with the premise, which is good.

Severance

Wonderful series about a company Lumon that "severs" work and private lives of people in their mind. When you go in, you don't remember your personal life, when you leave, you don't remember work.

Amazing absurdism. Great by role by Christopher Walken.

Story kept entertaining. Quite interesting to see the "innies vs outies", how people basically fight themselves (their outies want them to stay inside).  Good visuals of long maze-like corridors, bright and white, no mirrors, strange dialogues. Computer terminals without the escape key.

Quite a bit of Philip K Dick / Black Mirror feel to it.

Ten Percent

ok series – based on the French "Call my agent" series" – about a London based actor agency and all their troubles. Interesting how a fair amount of actors and actresses play themselves. Bit too silly / contrived at times.

Aliens & Alien: Covenant

Aliens was still good. Nothing like Alien, but a good action film. 

Alien: Covenant, where android David, who betrayed humans before in Prometheus, wants to create (and does so) "perfect life".

Similar to Mother and Father in Raised by Wolves.

Raised By Wolves (s2)

Still as whacko as s1 was.  Both Mother and Father feel the need to create, Mother has given birth to Number Seven, Father has resurrected a millenia old android called Grandmother, who turns out to fix the equation "make humans happy" by intentionally degenerating them into "simple" aquatic humans.

Lots of ancient references to Christianity and other faiths. Plot and story writing wise a bit easy, people just randomly find new artefacts or relics that do amazing things.  But that's kinda the idea.

Turns out that this, according to some, is setting up the stage for Prometheus (and then Alien: Covenant) as androids want to create biological life. Also, learned that Alien and Bladerunner are expected to share the same universe, where the Tyrell corporation and the Wendyll Corporation in their corporate fights have created evolved androids.

Aniara

Swedish scifi film where a trip to Mars gets thrown off course and spends years in the blackness of space. Slowly people deteriorate.

Good film

Lewis Carroll - "The Hunting of the Snark"

Amazing version with drawings from Quentin Blake!  Found in Fosters Books in Chiswick.

Jon McGregor - "Lean Fall Stand"

An expedition in Antartica goes wrong. One man dies, the general assistant has a stroke and needs to learn how to speak. Gripping in its short repetitive sentences at times. At first I was a bit bummed there was not more taking place in the Antartic, but the other two third were actually still great to read, albeit not happy stuff.

We'll be anomalous, she told Bridget. Anomalous? Yes. So, essentially, you're going to marry him on the basis that he won't be around much? Yes, Bridget, that's correct. What? Anna, you are fucking perfect. You are my hero. I should marry you myself. Well, I don't think that's possible.

Sara had the same questions. She hadn't been home for a while. She'd been busy at work and said it was difficult to get away. But she'd also admitted that she found it hard to see Robert like this: hesitant and stumbling, repeating the same few phrases. The anger that flashed across his face when she didn't understand what he was trying to say. The way he kept turning impatiently away from people. Anna said she hadn't noticed him doing this, exactly, and Sara had said that no, she didn't imagine she had.

Claire-Louise Bennet - "Pond"

short stories, very dry and deadpan.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

So so martial arts "suddenly I realised I'm warrior descendant" type.

Can't remember it making much of an impact.f

Adaptation

Still as good as it was the first time.

The Sparks Brothers

Amazing documentary of this duo I never knew. How could I have missed them?!

I did hear their collaboration with Franz Ferdinand, but still... Amazing stuff.

The Many Saints of Newark

Prequal to the Sopranos series.

It couldn't really grab me. I don't know the series, it felt like chaotic story telling. I didn't get the importance of the ice cream shop as the last shot (also final shot of the final series?)

Just didn't care.

A Profound Waste of Time

magazine on game-related stuff.  Not Jacob Geller depth though, bit disappointing.

B. Catling - "The Vorrh" / "Erstwhile" / "The Cloven"

Strange but good story about a mythical forest (where Adam still roams, less and less human like?) that takes people's memories.

The cyclops Ishmael, who is raised by the Kin (unknown what's behind this) and then escapes.

Tsungali, a hunter and killer.

Ghertrude Tulp, originally Ishmael's carer of sorts, and Cyrena, who got her sight back after spending a night with Ishmael.

The Bowman, oneofthewilliams, who made a bow out of (Irrinep)este. The Erstwhile that hunt them. He has forgotten his original travel through the Vorrh and encountered a letter written by himself.

This is only book one of three....

Reminds me a bit of Ægypt by John Crowley in how it uses real people, the photographer Muybridge, the Winchester heiress and her strange Winchester Mystery House...

There are so many things I learned about my world from this book yet it is fiction. Authors should be applauded for that.

-- The Vorrh ---

"It's from the Highlands. The fleyber is the spirit of one that died in childbirth; they say its soul wanders the moors as a ghost light, a will-o'-the-wisp."

"These are beyond my wildest hopes. You are obviously a man of significant talents."
    Emotion swept over her again, and the elder touched her sleeve. She rose and turned to leave the room, the prints pressed hard against her bosom. Muybridge rose with her, watching as she tottered slightly, robustly supported by the anxious elder. At the door, she turned to look at Muybridge once more, to thank him silently before leaving him alone in the cavernous space of her departure.
    He stood awkwardly in the odd room at the centre of the winding, empty mansion, in a state of total bewilderment, awash with flows of contradiction. He glowed at her words but turned to ash at their meaning.

 

 --- The Erstwhile ---

 

He was unfazed by it, until he realised that it was its binding agent that was so different. The gooey charm that held all of Nicholas's contradictions together had saturated into the very meaning of each. So that held all of Nicholas's contradictions together had saturated into the very meaning of each. So that the hard kernels of consequence and implication had been dissolved like teeth insyrup. But there were hard gums driving his words and Hector had the ghastly image of Nicholas sitting with the older patients, chewing at the pale stringy parts of their being, while they winsomely rambled and drifted away, unaware of his purposeful gnashing.

Ghertrude fainted in a slurred S, as if her string had been cut.

   "What was her message?" asked Cyrena calmly. Ishmael was a rat in a wheel, running hard in the spinning cage of lies.

    The guillotine had existed in mainland Europe and the British Isles for centuries. The sharpened head axe or crushing weight had scuttled downd between its very long verticals to messily separate life in all manner of different forms and variations. Its distictive profiel reached into many dark and gloomy skies long before it obtained the lasting nomenclature of the good Dr. Guillotine, who, seeking a fast and humane method of dispatch, unwittingly signed his name in blood forever to laws allowing the use of an instrument of fearsome horror. Its dramatic simplicity came to represent the revolution's repetitive slaughter, turning it into the dripping icon of the Terror. Germany had a part in the French prototype -a highly skilled harpsichord makernamed Tobias Schmidt crafted the pencilled designs into fundamental reality. Some say the gleaming, oblique, forty-five-degree angle of the blade was his own personal refinement. The speed and efficiency of the new "gin" or engine was infamous. With its endless supply o clients, a new manner of operation was needed. An almost industrial, conveyor belt mentality that kept it overstocked. These earnest labours of the rational matter-opf-fact instigated evengreated performances of bizarre fact and elaborate fiction to dance around the djuddering leaky basket, which Duymas tells us had to be changed or mended every three days because the wicker bottom would be chewed out by tghe growing number of furiously chattering heads that thrashed in their narrow contgainment. Better documented but equally weird accounts tell of numerous  experiments carried out to ascertain the consciousness of the severed minds. The most elaborate being conducted by two young doctors who waited at the foot of the engine, ready to receive the falling head. Once grabbed it was rushed to their nearby carriage and attached via its arteries and gutta-percha pipes to a pump that, in turn, was connected via more tubes to a living dog, strapped to the carriage floor.  The horses were geared up and sped towards their laboratory, the cobbled streets sending loud shock waves through the passengers, who swayed  and steadied themselves while frantically hand-pumping the dog's hot blood into the flushing head. All the while shouting the victim's name aloud and slapping his cheeks over the deafening noise of the hard wheels and the whimpering dog. Some success was recorded, a partial opening of the eyes, a shudder of the lips. Even "some slight agitation" one hour and a fresh dog later, when the head was decanted to an attic laboratory.

 

    "Sometimes you are very childish," said an infuriated Ghertrude.
    "A condition that we have never ourselves experienced," said Luluwa.
    Gertrude listened for sarcasm in the clicking rattle of her speech but realised that none existed.

--------------------------

"The Cloven"

Behind each moment of acute sensing lay solidification, each blind nuzzle dying back into the terse density of colourless fibre, the water squeezed through the now-inert roots and passing upwards. If the mass of the forest that lived in light was alien to humans, then the mass that lived in night was positively hostile in its indifference. Even the burrowing Erstwhile would not be tolerated. Even though their supposed purpose was a form of protecting the forest. When they dug down they never snapped or cut a root. The simply pushed them aside and squirmed in between their languid violence. But as the sleepers hid, the roots turned, often trapping them in fearful embraces. Or sent out more tendril extensions of themselves to penetrate the mothlike bodies, digging into heir ribs and hooking through their faces. Those that eventually awoke often bore the scars of these intrusions, looking like ill-formed knotted arteries wandering under their jaws, cheeks, and eyes. Some no longer had eyes. Teh tips of the roots had found their moisture and sucked it into all the others, sugars to sprite the distant, frivolous leaves that jiggled and danced in the warm sunlit air.

    "This is really difficult for me to understand. Is Blake saying that all of humanity was a mistake?"
    "Not God's mistake in making it. The mistake was that it escaped from the garden and grew abnormal in one direction. Those clever thumbs were given for the tending of plants, not making cities, machines, and endless ideas of how things work, most of which are wrong."

Then, before the cyclops had time to scream of beat him, the beetles arrived. The first heavy black dot landed on Seth's face like an uncertain inkblot; then the air darkened in a clicking dry thunder of them.

Arthur C. Clarke - "How the world was one"

Inspired by the long read by Neal Stephenson, "Mother Earth Mother Board" (https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/)

The ICI scientists took the cheap and common gas ethylene - C2H4 - and compressed it under more than 1000 atmospheres. This is a pressure greater than that found at the bottom of the deepest ocean, and the result was startling. The invisible gas turned into a waxy solid, and when the pressure was released it remained a solid. This new substance, which had never existed in the world before, was christened polyethylene - a name which was itself rapidly compressed to polythene.

one Captain Selwyn, RN, wanted to avoid paying out cable from tanks inside the ship (with the attendant risk of kinks and breakages) by having it wound on a large floating drum which would be towed behind a steamer. The drum would revolve in the water as the cable uncoiled, but the committee remarked, "We have great doubts as to the practicability of this plan." As far as the open Atlantic was concerned, the committee was quite correct. However, in 1944 just such floating drums were used to lay the underwater pipeline PLUTO (Pipe Line Under The Ocean) through which fuel was pumped across the English Channel to power the invasion in Europe in 1944.

what is so often called a 'crash programme': 'at first one goes nearly mad with vexation at the delays, but one soon finds that they are the rule, and then it becomes necessary to feign a rage one does not feel... I look upon it as the natural order of things that if I give an order it will not be carried out; or if by accident it is carried out, it will be carried out wrongly.

(1850) Electrical tests showed that it had broken somewhere near the French coast, and it was subsequently discovered that a fisherman had fouled the line with his anchor. As the line was so light he was able to haul it aboard, and he was immensely puzzled by this new kind of seaweed with a metal core. Thinking that it might be gold, he cut out a section to show his friends, and thus started the long war between the cable companies and the other users of the sea that has lasted to this day. More damage has been done to submarine cables by dragged anchors or trawls than by any other cause, and the annoyance is often mutual. A small boat that hooks its anchor around a modern armoured cable is as likely to lose its anchor as to damage the cable.

(1851) After the initial failure and the complete scepticism of all but a few enthusiasts, the establishment of this cross-Channel link - the world's first efficient submarine cable - created a great impression. With typically Victorian optimism, this new miracle of communications was hailed as a triumph for peace, which would undoubtedly improve understanding and co-operation between nations. Today we are sadly aware that though civilisation cannot function without such links, it by no means follows that they automatically bring peace. As the mathematicians would say, they are necessary- but not sufficient.

(1856) ... though among the private subscribers it is interesting to note the names of Lady Byron and William Makepeace Thackeray. These literary figures were obviously keener on progress than their contemporary Thoreau, who had written in Walden two years before; 
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping-cough...

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was not the greatest scientist of the nineteenth century; on any reasonable list, he must come below Darwin and Maxwell [...] Thomson was a unique bridge between the laboratory and the world of industry [...] It would not be unfair to say that if one took half the talents of Einstein, and half the talents of Edison, and succeeded in fusing such incompatible gifts into a single person, the result would be rather like William Thomson. What his contemporaries thought of him is shown by the fact that he was the first scientist ever to be raised to the peerage.

During the development of the atomic bomb, it was necessary to construct the largest electromagnet ever built in order to separate the isotopes of uranium. The magnet was over a hundred feet across, and providing copper for such a monster would have created a serious drain on the United States' supplies of this vital material. Some genius therefore proposed using the silver which was lying in the Treasury vaults, pointing out that it would be at least as safe inside the closely guarded confines of Oak Ridge. So the US Treasury handed over 15,000 tons of the precious metal to go into the magnet windings; it got over 99.9 per cent of it back when the isotope separator was dismantled and its coils melted down again.

Gutta-percha is a substance much more familiar to our grandparents than it is to us, for it has now been largely replaced by the many synthetic plastics that modern science has produced. The gum of a tree found in the jungles of Malaya, Borneo and Sumatra, it was introduced into Europe in 1843, and its remarkable properties were at once recognised. Indeed, it was the first natural thermoplastic ever to come into general use. Unlike rubber, it is not elastic, being hard and solid at room temperatures. However, in hot water it becomes as malleable as putty, reverting to its original hardness when cold again.

In his researches into the very foundations of physics, Heaviside became aware that mass and energy were equivalent long before this was generally realised by the scientific world. By 1890 he had already arrived at a rigorous proof of the famous relationship E=rac2, thus anticipating Einstein's more general formulation of this law by some fifteen years. This is perhaps his most astonishing - and least-known - achievement.

Forty years before my invitation to The Hague, I was on the other side of the North Sea, scanning the coast of Nazi-occupied Holland with the newly invented microwave radar, and wearing an RAF officer's uniform that was even newer. The heart of our three-gigahertz transmitter was the most important secret of the war - the cavity magnetron, invented in 1940 by Boot and Randall at Birmingham University. This generated centimetre-length radio waves of unprecedented power, and so made possible the airborne radar sets which won the vital Battle of the Atlantic.
    When Britain's chief scientific adviser Sir Henry Tizard carried the first experimental magnetron to America, the face of war was changed over a weekend (that of 28-30 September 1940), at a meeting which established the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's famous Radiation Laboratory. Sir Henry's unprepossessing block of copper was later called the most valuable cargo ever to reach the shores of the United States: although the atomic bomb ended the war, without the magnetron it might well have been lost before the Manhattan Project could have got under way.
    Yet - and this is one of history's biggest if's - Japanese scientists had made and tested an identical device a year before the British. If they had followed up their invention, we would not be living in a very different world.

Elden Ring

The Lost Daughter

Okayish film with Olivia Colman as a bereaved mother who is confronted with her past - leaving her daughters behind - while on a working holiday in Greece.

Death on the Nile

Latest adaptation of this Poirot story. It's never explained how he comes to his conclusions, just that he does?

So-so.

The Woman in Black

Nice adaptation of the novel (the play is also an adaptation) with Daniel Radcliffe. Good ending as well, the train, finally reunited with his wife.

The Godfather

Restored! In the cinema!

Fresh

Bit of a silly "comedy horror" about a guy abducting a girl to cut flesh from her and sell it to "the one percent of the one percent".

80s soundtrack. Big holes in the plot. So-so.

Horace Andy - "Midnight Rocker"

One of Massive Attack's voices, does a cover of "Safe from harm". 

Nice reggae.

Scarlett Thomas - "The seed collectors"

Got to half way and decided to stop reading. The story is ambling along too slowly, the seed pods only sometimes referred to, while instead multiple chapters or at least parts describe the same people, eg the sad and drunk Brony, being sad and drunk, without providing more clues about their character.

Fleur thinks about the story of the two celibate monks who come to a flooded piece of road. There is a beautiful woman there, and so one of the monks lifts her and carries her past the flood, The other one can't believe he has done this, and sulks for miles. Eventually, he confronts his friend and asks him why he did it. His friend simply replied, 'I put her down several miles ago but you, my brother, seem still to be carrying her.'

Imagine that one day you decide that you need to multitask more, and therefore while doing something boring like cleaning your teeth you will add some other boring thing like doing your daily calf raises, where you stand up on your toes first on one leg and then on the other for say 25 reps on each side x2. This you think of as a good use of time. In fact, for these two minutes of every morning it eels as if you have enslaved time, you have got one over on it. You are winning the war against it. In fact, you get so used to doing your calf raises while cleaning your teeth that you now can't clean your teeth without automatically going up onto first one leg, then another. The mere buzz of your electric toothbrush gets your calf muscles quivering. You are Pavlov's dog. But this is a good thing, because you are cheating time. Or so you think. Imagine that the act of cleaning your teeth while doing your calf raises becomes so automatic and unconscious that you can now do a third thing as well, further demonstrating your mastery over time. Perhaps, as well as doing your teeth and your calf raises you imagine what you'd do if you won a million pound on the Lottery. Perhaps you write a To Do list in your head. A letter to someone from long ago... How aware are you now of the calf raises? How many have you done? Does it matter that this action, like so much else in your life, has now become so unconscious you don't even know you are doing it? What other things did you begin doing long ago, long before the calf raises, that you do not feel or even know about any more? Who were you, before you forgot?

Rome - "Secret Sons of Europe"

hints of Nick Cave, but also Blixa Bargeld, music driven forward by constant staccato chords

The Batman, Turning Red, Fast & Furious 9, the Legend of Vox Machina

The Batman - good, enjoyed the score a lot, Robert Patterson is OK

Turning Red, new Pixar. Enjoyable but it misses the magic I feel watching "Inside" or "Toy Story"

The Fast & Furious 9 - terrible

The Legend of Vox Machina - anime, as if made by fratboys, but still somewhat enjoyable

Siouxie and the Banshees - "Scream"

I could care less (xkcd)

https://xkcd.com/1576/

unrelated words (etymologically not related)

https://theweek.com/articles/541713/15-pairs-words-that-seem-etymologically-related-but-arent

The Legend of Vox Machina

A bit silly but fun anime about a troupe trying to defeat dragons and the such.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut

Definitely enjoyed this.

Loved how the cutscenes were still 10-yo blurry, and yet amazing lighting. 

The game has the common 2010's 3D lighting thing where eg people's teeth look really crazy.

But kept thinking about the game when not playing and figuring out how to do things.

Choices are not super wide, but there's a healthy variety available.

Some cutscenes are really good.  Good Bladerunner vibes.

Factorio - Sandstorm

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

amazing

Copshop

really enjoyable film about a police station under siege

throwback to 70s grime action gore. Need to find more done by Joe Carnahan, who is killed the next Quentin Tarantino (I probably fucked that quote up)

Ghostbusters:Afterlife

snored through bits, don't really care for it.

The Tourist

Series about a man waking up from a car crash in Australia and not remembering his past.

The Hunt

Nice bit-gory film about 12 "deplorables" being hunted by rich people

Nightmare Alley

Bradley Cooper, Guillermo del Toro

Good stuff.

mix between Jericho and ... some other dust-bowl film or book

Mechanique?

Annie Louisa Swynnerton - paintings

Painting when it wasn't really "done" for women to do so. 

Painted people honest

From Hollie McNish' book "Slug"; Annie was apparently one of only a few painters to paint real depictions of working-class wome looking genuinely pissed off and bored with their work and childcare chores, at a time when the majority of the art wold preferred rosy-cheeked romanticisations of back-broken labourors. Annie also beautifully emphasised women's wrinkles in almost all of the paintings, which wasn't very fashionable in the late nineteeth and early twentieth centuries in which she worked, especially in portraits of women

https://artuk.org/discover/stories/annie-swynnerton-artist-and-activist

Teake Zuidema - Pittsburgh, under a bridge

wonderful photos

https://www.teakezuidema.com/225470310/four-mile-run-pittsburgh

Marcus Hamblett - "Nocturne" (and others)

Intriguing instrumental guitar play, perhaps a bit nervous at times.

Bob Dylan - "False Prophet" – wonderful blues-y almost parlando

David Shrigley - "Don'ts"

A drier cousin of Baz Luhrman's "The Sunscreen song"

From BBC6's amazing Cillian Murphy.

Undercover

Nederlands-Vlaamse serie op Netflix over undercover agenten bij een van de grootste xtc labs in Belgie.

Soms moeilijk te verstaan!

Thom Yorke - "After the Gold Rush" (Neil Young cover)

His voice quite suits the song.

Metallica mashups

"Hip to be the sandman"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MRx4LpYbQ4

 

"You make me feel like dancing (Sad but true)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW3IbwEvR4I

 

Radiohead + Taylor Swift - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y4BcsDqr14

Slayer vs B-52s - "Raining Lobsters"

loan word (loanword, loan-word), calque, lexeme

In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components. e.g. "skyscraper"

Thus it creates a new lexeme in that language.

 

A lexeme is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection: run, runs, ran, running are forms of the same lexeme, which can be represented by RUN.

 

cognates, or lexical cognates, are words that have a common etymological origin. Cognates are often inherited from a shared parent language, but they may also involve borrowings from some other language. For example, the English words dish, disk and desk, the German word Tisch ("table"), and the Latin word discus ("disk") are cognates because they all come Ancient Greek δίσκος ("dískos", "disk") which relates to their flat surfaces. Cognates may have evolved similar, different or even opposite meanings.

Huberman Lab podcast #56 - stress

Stress is manifold, complex; it is bad (stressing people out) yet sometimes good as it helps your body build up and release healthy nutricients and hormones.

Drug vs placebo effect is confusing. Placebo effect has been proving, but the effect of the actual drug is the combined effect of the chemical drug PLUS the placebo effect.

You only stress about things you care about; own the stress, understand why you care.

Thinking you eat healthy while you eat something "average" nutricious is counter productive; your body will think it is still hungry; and ghrelin, the hunger hormone, will not go down as fast. It's better to believe you're eating something delicious and unhealthy when you *are* eating unhealthy, because your mindset will help spur your body into thinking it had enough.

Sinéad O'Connor - "Gloomy Sunday"

Wonderfully sad. Automatic followup after Cyndi Lauper's "If you go away"

Matthew Walker - "Why we sleep"

Slightly terrifying book showing me how my past and current habits fuck up my brain.

Amazing stuff.

misc Gideon Coe and Steve Lamacq

• Sprints - "Little Fix" – punky
• English Teacher - "A55" – regrets on the day after the night before?
• Nixer - "People Feel" – very 80s sound electronic angsty sound
  

mono no aware

mono no aware, literally "the pathos of things" and also translated as "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera", is a Japanese term for the awareness of impermanence, or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.

Dan Carlin - "Hardcore History: supernova in the East"

About Japan in wartime.

14-15th Century were the top of samurai *warfare*

Then, the country got united (the Edo period) from the 16th century to 1862 (?) and during that period, samurai, no longer allowed to fight, were converted into the bureaucracy. Strangely enough, this made them even more rigid and military in life and mindset.

Note that "you better do seppuku when captured" was a mindset Japanese farmers would find just as strange. "typically a Samurai thing"

Japan successfully fought and conquered China in 1985. Successfully attacked and sank the Russian navy in 1905. Got Taiwan as colony. Looked at other countries in the world to see what they did well and copied that. 

After conquering China, the three most powerful nations - France, Germany, Russia - prevented Japan from taking large concessions from China because they feared too much influence.

Japanese soldiers were trained on live people at times.

Guy Deutscher - "Through the language glass (why the world looks different in other languages)"

Amazing book so far about language and how / whether it shapes our perception.

Did we "discover" or learn to discern colour only in the last millenium, since Homer used so few colour words?

Healthy common sense suggests, therefore, that while languages can bestow labels entirely at whim, they cannot apply quite the same whimsy to the concepts behind the labels. Languages cannot group together arbitrary sets of objects, since it is birds of a feather that flock together under one label. Any language has to categorise the world in a way that brings together things that are similar in reality - or at least in our perception of reality. So it is natural for different types of birds to be named as one concept, but it is unnatural for a random set of birds and a random set of roses to be gathered together under one label.  [...]  have you ever heard a child saying, 'Mummy, is this a cat or dog?' Rack your brains and rummage through your memories as hard as you can, you are unlikely to recall a child asking, 'How can I tell if this is a bird or a rose?' While children always need to be taught the labels for such concepts in the particular language of their society, they don't need to be told how to distinguish between the concepts themselves.

Take pronouns such as 'I', 'you', or 'we'. Could anything be more elementary or more natural than these? Of course, no one who is aware of the existence of foreign languages would be under the illusion that the labels for such concepts are dictated by nature, but it seems unimaginable that any language would not have the actual concepts themselves. Suppose, for instance, you continue thumbing through the travelogue and come across the claim that Ziftish doesn't have a word that corresponds to English 'we'. Instead, the author alleges, Ziftish has three distinct pronouns: kita, which means 'just the two of us, me and you', tayo, which means 'me and you and someone else', and kami, which means 'me and someone else, but not you'. The author relates how tickled the Ziftians were to hear that for these three entirely different concepts English uses just one little word, a wee 'we'. You may dismiss the system our chimerical author has invented as a lame joke, but Tagalog speakers int he Philippines would disagree, because this is exactly how they speak.

No one could any longer just brush off their findings as the overreaction of overly literal philologists, and no one could dismiss the peculiarities in the colour descriptions of ancient texts as merely instances of poetic licence. For the deficiencies that Gladstone and Geiger had uncovered were replicated exactly in living languages from all over the world. The Nubians that Virchow and his colleagues probed in the Berlin Zoo had no word for 'blue' at all. When they were shown a blue skein of wool, some of them called it 'black' and others called it 'green'. Some of them didn't even distinguish between yellow, green, and grey, calling all three colours by the same word.
    In America, Albert Gatschet wrote that the Klamath Indians in Oregon were happy to use the same term for 'the colour of any grass, weed or plant, and though the plant passes from the green of spring time and summer into the faded yellow of autumn, the colour-name is not changed'. The Sioux from Dakota used the same word, toto, for both blue and green. This 'curious and very frequent coincidence of green and yellow, and of blue and green' was common among other American Indian languages as well. 

There is an inverse correlation between the complexity of society and of word structure! The simpler the society, the more information it is likely to mark within the word: the more complex the society, the fewer semantic distinctions it is likely to express word-internally. [...] The resent surveys strongly support Perkins's conclusions and show that languages of large societies are more likely to have simpler word structure, whereas languages of smaller societies are more likely to have many semantic distinctions coded within the word.
    [...] If words tend to be more elaborate in simple societies, the reasons must be sought in the natural and unplanned paths of change that languages tread of time. In The Unfolding of Language, I showed that words are constantly buffeted by opposing forces of destruction and creation. The forces of destruction draw their energy from a rather unenergetic human trait: laziness. The tendency to save effort leads speakers to take shortcuts in pronunciation, even flatten whole arrays of endings and thus make the structure of words much simpler. Ironically, the very same laziness is also
 behind the creation of new complex word structures. Through the grind of repetition, the words that often appear together can be worn down and, in the process, fuse into a single word – just think of 'I'm', 'he's', 'o'clock', 'don't', 'gonna'. In this way, more complex words can arise.
    In the long run, the level of morphological complexity will be determined by the balance of power between the forces of destruction and creation. If the forces of creation hold sway, and at least as many endings and prefixes are created as are lost, then the language will maintain or increase the complexity of its word structure. But if more endings are eroded than created, words will become simpler over time.
    Can the balance between creation and destruction have anything to do with the structure of a society? [...] All the plausible answers suggested so far go back to one basic factor: the difference between communication among intimates and among strangers.
    [...] One relevant factor is that communication among intimates more often allows compact ways of expression than communication among strangers. [...] More generally, when communicating with intimates about things that are close at hand, you can be more concise. 
    [...] Another factor that may explain the differences in morphological complexity between small and large societies is the degree of exposure to different languages or even to different varieties of the same language. [...] Contact with different varieties is known to encourage simplification in word structure, because adult language learners find endings, prefixes, and other alterations within the word particularly difficult to cope with. So situations that involve widespread adult learning usually result in considerable simplification in the structure of words. The English language after the Norman Conquest is a case in point: until the eleventh century, English had an elaborate word structure similar to that of modern-day German, but much of this complexity was wiped out in the period after 1066, no doubt because of the contact between speakers of the different languages.

"Yellowjackets"

Fun series about a group of girls crashlanded and the secrets (cannibalism?) of what happened there, seen through split timelines.

Good 90s music as well, like Tracy Bonham's "Mother mother"

Michelle de Kretser - "Scary Monsters"

Not sure what to think of it. Enjoyable enough to read but never really sucked me in.

I'm not sure I properly understand the possible connections between the two stories. Printing them upside-down from each other is a good trick to make you choose randomly which one to start first, but I had trouble linking the Australian Lili in Montparnasse with Lyle in dystopian Australia.

When striding around tired me out, I'd go to a down-at-heel cafe for warmth. It was the kind of place where old men hunched over drinks at the zinc-topped bar. Chronic little miseries seeped from the clientele – not operatic desolation, but the everyday erosion worked by creeping age and never quite enough money. A woman with receding eyes was always there, sitting in a corner with the furry croissant of a dog clutched to her heart. It was in that cafe that I learned to drink tea without milk. Milk came in a single-serve stainless-steel jug, whereas hot water was unlimited and free. The toilet à la turque was grim, but for the price of a cup of tea I was left alone for hours to draw up lesson plans, write homesick letters and read. There was never a flick-flick – the lightning, down-and-up glance with which the French took in every detail of someone's appearance from shoes to hair. In the upmarket cafes at L'Oeuf, the flick-flick assessed, classified and dismissed me in the time it took to blink.

Candyman (2021)

Jordan Peele as execute producer.

Still good, yet without the impact of the original one. I'll never forget that line. "It was you, Helen. It was always you."

Why are a few notes changed in the Candyman theme (from Philip Glass' score of the original film, which I watched a while ago) during the credits?

Doesn't make sense to me.

Hellblad: Senua's Sacrifice

Amazing game set against Nordic lore (the Edda) of Senua who has to travel through Odin's nine hells for her beloved. Your arm rots with every dead. When it reaches your head, you die, save game gets deleted. Rather intense.

Played "The Stanley Parable" afterwards to relax.

Orbital - "The Box"

Also, U.N.K.L.E. and Thom Yorke - "Rabbit in your headlight"

Also, Massive Attack ft Young Fathers - "Voodoo In My Blood"

The Week In Virology (twiv)

Some boring meanderings (starts with a twenty minute discusssion of local weather) but interesting dissection of scientific papers on covid.

Learned that there's a "mouse strain" (model?) called 129, or rather 129S2

And there's a difference between attenuation and infection? Attenuated vaccines, wikipedia tells me, are the ones that make a virulent agent less harmful while keeping it alive.

"You know what a camel is, right?  A horse designed by a committee."

Arcade Fire - "Sprawl I (Flatland)"

Sad, lamenting

After Life

Ricky Gervais in a series where he struggles after the death of his wife.

Not always good to watch.

Metal Gear Solid 4 - Guns of the Patriots

Bloody insane story, so many and long cut scenes that it's more like a movie.

Susie Dent - "Word Perfect"

Word a day.

 

 

Janus words:

• leave
• warrant
• sanction: approval; (economic) disapproval
  
• fast: firmly fixed; very quick
• cleave: to split; to adhere firmly
• clip: to attach something, to cut off
• custom: usual; specially made
• overlook: to look over something, to fail to see
• dust: to make free of dust; to sprinkle with dust
• screen: to hia from view; to show
• left: went away from; remaining
  

John Wick vs John McClaene vs John Rambo

Silly but kinda funny

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN5lzg3TE60

random stuff, because it's a rainy Saturday

Peter Gabriel - "My Body is a Cage" – from the Dark OST, because Gustavo Santaolalla's The Last Of Us put me in this mood. Wondering how Arcade Fire's version compares. One of the best song build-ups ever.

Reading ROCKSONG by Golnoosh Nour. Peter Gabriel's song is fitting. Good stuff, need to look up a lot of Iranian references.

catchy: Lady Gaga - "Bad Romance"

Also, fitting whacky video.

Lawnscapers

Wonderful mini series with Olivia Colman and David Thewlis about a true story of a couple of cold hearted murderers... or broken misfits... who killed her parents and pretended they were alive for the next fifteen years, before coming back from France, no money but some signed film posters and books and giving themselves up to the police.

Interesting filming, once actively breaking the fourth wall.

Hollie McNish - "Slug and other things i've been told to hate"

Only read a little so far but wonderful combination of prose about her life and experiences followed by a few poems about this.

 

"When I am Dead, Will You Finally Shut The Fuck Up" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi-sWAAjqtQ

"Megatron, Transformers" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCO-YmLT8t4 

"British Natural Breakfast" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJw9yGqBYJ8

 

1917: Shortly after the United States' entry into the First World War, the US War Industries Board asks women to stop buying corsets to free up metal for war production. This step liberates some 28,000 tons of metal, enough to build two battleships.

On the topic of selfies, this made me rethink my dislike of them: Not everyone has a garden though, do they? Or a house they can furnish and decorate. For many people, especially pooror or younger people, their own body is all they have through which to represent themselves. Their owe blank canvas. Caking yourself in make-up and taking a selfie is surely not so different from obsessing over the pansies in the front garden or posting yet another photo of your kitchen renovation.
[...]
("The Self-Portrait" in Art Quarterly) a line about selfies. While the author rejoiced in artistic self-portaits in general, writing, 'The Self-Portrait claims its unique place in the history of human culture because of its ability to map, or seem to map, the fluid transformations of human identity. Making yourself visible is an attempt to clear some space', he then went on to say, while discussing the self-portraits of Paul Gauguin, that his complex representations of self 'read as especially pertinent in today's accelerated climate of personal aggrandisement through self-representation'. (Yes, selfies.)
[...]
his aside about selfies being 'personal aggrandisement' pissed me off. I don't believe that people take and share selfies merely for 'personal aggrandisement'. It seemed a very smug tosser of a comment to me. In fact, I think using big long words like 'aggrandisement' in an article is more of a cry for 'personal aggrandisement' than taking a selfie is.
[...]
After years of being represented, or not, by other people, finally a hell of a lot of people who couldn't before are able to take their own photos, to show themselves in the light they want with the filter they want at the time they want doing what they want tos how the world who they are according to themselves.i

apparently pigeons have twenty-four different receptors in their eyes (we only  have three). So chances are, pigeons are absolutely spectacular, but we have no way of seeing them.

dublin pigeon

for Rhiannon, who has always loved pigeons

i see you pigeons!
see that neck!
all emerald!
all amethyst!

sick to death
of all the praise
those fucking
parrots get

if you were
on instagram
i imagine
your account

would be
everyday updated
with selfies
of that lovely neck

shouting:

look at me you bastards!
i'm beautiful as well

yes, but have you ever seen my tits?

i agree with you completely;
nature is a precious source
of constant inspiration;
the way swallows sleep in air;

those starling mumurations;
migrations of the humpback whale;
the balance of a mountain goat
on misted cloudy cliffs;

this planet is a wonder
of course i am in awe of it
i'm just saying: have you ever seen my tits?
because they are quite spectacular as well;

these marshmallow masterpieces
shape shift every single month
like elephants in an earthquake
to warn of coming blood

able, for almost
twelve months of their life
to shoot milk across a room
with the mere surrender of my arms;

cramping to a baby's charms
across a tesco superstore;
leaking at the mere mention
of another needy child;

at other times –
masturbation's catalys
direct line to the clitoris
a wank between two clouds
for a very lucky penis

landing pad for happy endings
two pillows for a perfect nap;
faithful office stressballs;
comfort in a bun

i'm not saying that my breasts
are necessarily better
than some birds who sleep mid-air

i'm just saying
i understand why people stare