The Harder They Fall

Western, Black actors and settings.

(Them going into a "white town" which is literally white is just great.)

Proper Western.

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

about how stories change and morph.

I thought I would love it, but couldn't care much about it.

Played this probably a year or more ago.

Gears of War and Disco Elysium essays by Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Gears of War

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_7ngJDbUQE

Disco Elysium

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-gQCZL8VA8

Saltburn

With the (in)famous cum bath scene.

Parody? Satire?

I couldn't really see the point.

Genevieve Valentine - "Dream Houses"

Jump ship, crew got killed/murdered, except for one.

Novella.

The Killer

Great "slow assassin protagonist" film by David Lynch.

Negatiator - "Dark is the Night - Soviet Song Тёмная ночь"

It seems the "soviet song" part is part of the title.

Krobak - "Broken (Are Little Victories by the Ship of Life)"

It's as if Yann Tiersen goes post-rock.

Noah Caldwell-Gervais on Bloodborne, Sekiro and Elden Ring

Don't always agree with him, but as always, mightily entertaining essay.

Olivie Blake - "The Atlas Six"

Another magic novel, enjoyable so far.

Six (former) students are invited for an apprenticeship at the "hidden" library of Alexandria, ran by a guy names Blake Atlas.

Nico + Libby ("physicalists"?), Callum (empath), Parisa (telepath), Reina (naturalist), Tristan (illusionists)

Writing is OK, the story is fun, even though some parts and character descriptions seem rushed.

Every chapter is told from the viewpoint of one of the six, which works surprisingly well to create a coherent narrative. 

Noah Caldwell-Gervais reviews games

• Fallout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7FLCg4KdyE 
• quite the listen, over nine hours, 
• Souls Inheritors - Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPRo4arGaSk 

Elemental

Enjoyable enough pixar film of fire girl and water boy.   Not nearly as amazing as "Inside" but enjoyable nonetheless.

The Long Walk (2022)

Interesting quiet time travel film set in Lao.

A man can travel 50 years back to his younger self. As he once saw his mother die, he now "helps" his young self prepare a tea for his mother that will kill her, as he has "helped" many other girls.

A silent girl, a motorcycle crash, who he found when he was young, accompagnies him and his younger self. 

Things start to change through his actions. Glass he breaks in the past that never was broken, now is. A girl who stays with him after searching for her mother, initially leaves for Vientiane with her girlfriend, but later becomes his captive.

The quiet girl has watched him grow old "a thousand times, but only saw him die once". Buddhism wheel of fate?

from rotten tomatoes:

An old man walks the dusty roads between his isolated farm and the nearby rural village in the company of a silent spirit whose death he witnessed fifty years earlier. For decades, the old man's regret over losing his mother to tuberculosis has bred a pathological need to ease the suffering of the terminally ill, and over the years, he has quietly euthanized several sick women. As he realizes that his spectral companion is able to transport him back in time, the old man trespasses into his own past to set in motion a plan to convince his younger self to preempt his mother's terminal suffering.

Leslie Jamison - "Why Everybody Feels Like They're Faking It"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/the-dubious-rise-of-impostor-syndrome

imposter syndrome, the people who first coined the idea/phrase

[Jody-Ann] Burey, who was born in Jamaica, didn't feel like an imposter; she felt enraged by the systems that had been built to disenfranchise her. She also didn't experience any yearning to belong, to inhabit certain spaces of power. "White women want to access power, they want to sit at the table," she told me. "Black women say, this table is rotten, this table is hurting everyone."

Every time [Suzanne]Imes hears the phrase "imposter syndrome," she told me, it lodges in her gut. It's technically incorrect, and conceptually misleading. As Clance explained, the phenomenon is "an experience rather than a pathology," and their aim was always to normalize this experience rather than to pathologize it. Their concept was never meant to be a solution for inequality and prejudice in the workplace–a task for which it would necessarily prove insufficient.

The psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir, in her book "Animal Joy," explains imposter syndrome by drawing on D. W. Winnicott's concepts of "false self" and "true self." She sees the anxiety as stemming from "a False Self that is so fortified by layers of compliant behavior that is loses contact with the raw impulses and expressions that characterize the True Self." Attempts to prevent the discovery of one's "true self" end up compounding the belief that this self, were it ever discovered, would be rejected and dismissed.

Dual (2022)

Curious film about a girl (Karen Gillian) with a terminal illness who creates a clone, then has to fight her when she doesn't die.

Very dry, dark humour and acting. Almost no music.

Strangely, in style somewhat reminiscent of Scarlett Johansson's "Under the skin"

Curtis White - "It's not about you"

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/freedom/its-not-about-you

As the sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, by way of quoting Pliny the Elder, “Custom is the most powerful master of all things.” Montaigne expands the characterization:

Little by little and stealthily, she establishes within us the footing of her authority; but having, by this mild and humble beginning, stayed and rooted it with the aid of time, she then displays a fierce and tyrannical countenance, in opposition to which we no longer have liberty even to lift up our eyes. We see her do violence constantly to the laws of nature.

 Alexander Herzen makes much the same point in "Omnia Mea Mecum Porto":

    People allow the external world to overcome them, to captivate them against their will; they renounce their independence, depending on all occasions not on themselves but on the world, pulling ever tighter the knots that bind them to it. They expect from the world all the good and evil in life; the last thing they rely on is themselves.

Miles Davis interview with Playboy

sep 1962

https://www.erenkrantz.com/Music/MilesDavisInterview.shtml

And I remember one time when I hired Lee Konitz, some colored cats bitched a lot about me hiring an ofay in my band when Negroes didn't have work. I said if a cat could play like Lee, I would hire him, I didn't give a damn if he was green and had red breath.

Lupin (s3)

Enjoyable, though major logic fallacies.

Attack on Titan (s4)

Definitely not as engaged as I think I was with s1 and s2. 

Did (re?) watch s3 as well. It's alright.

Violent Night

"fun" Christmas based action film with him (police chief) from Stranger Things.

It's meh.  Too illogical, not funny.

Inside Man

four-episode series with David Tennant as a vicar who spirals into violence to protect people around him, while a "smart psychopath" on death row in America figures things out.

A bit too much on the nose.

The Fall of the House of Usher

proper horror about the Edgar Alan Poe inspired story, with lots of references to his other works.

The biting commentary on today's pharmacy industry and wealth was good.

Kirsty Logan - "Now She Is Witch"

Amazing book about a girl discovering herself and her ancestry while traveling from South land to North land.

Lauren Groff - "The Vaster Wilds"

a girl escapes her English family after child Bess dies when they arrived in America. what follows is a harrowing tale of her journey.

Bloodborne

Amazing <3

Seems sometimes slightly unhinged regarding difficulty levels.  

Old Hunters DLC is just as fantastic.

Maru Ayase - "The Forest Brims Over"

has murakami vibes.

writer's wife turns into a plant?

main character (his editor) and writer both do not seem to understand their wifes' emotions.

Terry Pratchett - "The Light Fantastic"

 

    A shadow starts to blot out the distant glitter, and it is blacker than space itself.
    From here it also looks a great deal bigger, because space is not really big, it is simply somewhere to be big in, but planets are meant to be big and there is nothing clever about being the right size.

Terry Pratchett - "The Colour of Magic"

Beach Boys - "Lonely Sea"

interesting slow song

Terry Pratchett - "A stroke of the pen"

old stories, some published under a pseudonym.

Definitely Pratchett style, but lacking the finesse.

Sebastian Barry - "Old God's Time"

it's good but it's not easy to read.  I imagine it's like "Ulysses", all hidden references etc. long trains of thoughts, but they do make sense if you're willing to throw yourself into it. A copper, ugly past of Catholic priest's abuse, his wife the same....

But that evening, sitting on the plastic chairs, with the electric lights fizzing and humming in the refurbished airport lounge - didn't he remember well the old airport, a scimitar of concrete as graceful as a cruise ship, where all sorts had arrived in vanished days, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Ronnie Delany after the Olympics - that evening it wasn't important if he had got there or not, because his son, which was his destination really, was going back to New Mexico to work, and he, old Tom Kettle, detective sergeatn extraordinaire, as in, never promoted beyond that rank, but still valued - he hoped - he was to be left behind. It wasn't as if his son was going, but as if he himself were going. The world would continue to form around Joseph, and retreat from him. Joseph would drink his fizzy water on the flight, and look out the darkening and brightening porthole, at new cloud-lands and land-lands, maybe drop by drop, bit by bit, not forgetting his father exactly, but sort of losing him. As if his father were going away, further and further, and at length beyond retrieval.

Zaho De Sagazan - "La Fontaine de Sang"

amazing sad haunting song.

"Trístesse" is a bit 

Sunset Boulevard (musical)

In the Savoy theatre.  Took me a bit to get into, but the camera work was fantastic, particularly the bit where he goes outside the theatre. 

Sunset Boulevard

Watched in anticipation of the musical. Enjoyable although still a bit harder on the modern senses.

Interesting that so many famous people played themselves.

Damien Rice - "Famous Blue Raincoat"

amazing cover

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUaE69TNRMo

The Expendables & The Expendables 2

silly but fun

Susain Cain - "Bittersweet"

While not really my type of book, it might be good to read at this point; to love oneself first...

"Making yourself feel good is not a nothing," Sharon said.
This hadn't occured to me.

For Sharon, the simple act of privately wishing people well has a way of changing the way we relate to them, and to the world.

This equanimity about death lasts maybe three minutes, but each time it happens, it changes me slightly. If you define transcendence as a moment in which your self fades away and you feel connected to the all, these musically bittersweet moments are the closest I've come to experiencing it.

The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death - bitter and sweet - are forever paried. "Days of honey, days of onion," as an Arabic proverb puts it. The tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor; you could tear civilization down and rebuild it from scratch, and the same dualities would rise again. Yet to fully inhabit these dualities-the dark as well as the light-is, paradixcally, theonly way to transcent them. And transcending them is the ultimate point.

 

If we don't transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect.

 

the "wounded  healer," a term coined by the psychologist Carl Jung in 1951, is one of humanity's oldest archetypes. In Greek myth, the centaur Chiron was injured by a poisoned arrow that gave him terrible pain, but also curative powers. In shamanistic cultures, often healers must first undergo an initiation process involving great misery. In Judaism, the Messiah's powers derive from his own suffering; he surrounds himself with the poor and the sick because he's one of them. In Christianity, Jesus is the wounded healer who cures bleeding women, hugs lepers, and dies on a cross to save us all. And in Islam, Muhammed is the impoverished orphan who grows up to spread a message of honoring the pariah, the parentless, and the poor.

Longing itself is a creative and spiritual state.

There is a traditional trope of laughing at how badly our dates go. We think: "I'm a still circle of perfection in a sea of madness!"
    "Who in this room wants to be loved for who they are?" he continues. "Put your hands up if you want to be loved for who you are."
    The hands raise again.
    "Oh, my goodness," chides Alain De Botton. "We have work to do still. Have you not been listening to anything I've been saying? How can you possibly be loved for who you are? You're a deeply flawed human being! Why would anyone love you just as you are? You've got to grow, and you've got to develop!"

People whose favorite songs are happy listen to them about 175 times on average. But those who favor "bittersweet" songs listen almost 800 times, according to a study by University of Michigan professors Fred Conrad and Jason Corey, and they report a "deeper connection" to the music than those whose favorites made them happy. They tell researchers that they associate sad songs with profound beauty, deep connection, transcedence, nostalgia, and common humanity-the so-called sublime emotions.

The Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca collected many of this country's lullabiews and concluded that Spain uses its "saddest melodies and most melancholy texts to tinge her children's first slumber".

The Japanese, who love sakura flowers most of all, attribute this preference to mono no aware, which means a desired state of gentle sorrow brought about by "the pathos of things" and "a sensitivity to impermanence"

We don't actually welcome tragedy per se. What we like are sad and beautiful things-the bitter together with the sweet. We don't thrill to lists of sad words, for example.

The Spanish call it duende, the yearning, burning center of flamenco dance and other art forms of the inflamed heart. Portuguese speakers have the concept of saudade, a sweetly piercing nostalgia, often expressed musically, for something deeply cherished, long gone, that may never have existed in the first place. In Hinduism, viraha - the pain of separation, usually from the beloved - is said to be the source of all poetry and music. Hindu legend says that Valmiki, the world's first poet, was moved to verse after watching a bird weeping for her mate, who'd been making love to her when he was killed by a hunter. "Longing itself is divine," writes the Hindu spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. "Longing for wordly things makes you inert. Longing for Infinity fills you with life. The skill is to bear the pain of longing and move on. True longing brings up spurts of bliss."

Yiddish word kvelling. It means "bursting with  pride and joy for someone you love."

This longing you express
is the return message

The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.

[Rumi]

It might be more useful to view creativity through the lens of bittersweetness - of grappling simultaneously with darkness and light. It's not that pain equals art. It's that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.

University of Washington business school professor Christina Ting Fong found that people who simultaneously experience positive and negative emotions are better at making associative leaps and at seeing connections.

"If followers mess up on an important project," Schwarzmüller told Ozy Media's digital magazine, "it might be good to consider saying, "I'm sad this happened," instead of "I'm angry this happened." Personal power "motives people to work for you toward shared goals, and because they like you.

Tim [Chang] observed that peopel build companies and teams that reflect not only their values and strengths but also what he calls their "core wounds."

They open up to Susan about all the things they wish they didn't feel. "I don't want my heart to be broken," they say. Or, "I don't want to fail."
    "I understand," Susan tells them. "But you have dead people's goals. Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure."

One, the interviews were full of stories of pain and suffering at work: panic attacks, injured relationships, feelings of devaluation. Two, the interview subjects rarely used words such as pain or suffering to tell their stories. They were anxious but said they were angry; they were sad but said they were frustrated. "There's an unspectacular mundane suffering that pervades the workplace," [professor Jason] Kanov told me. "But we don't feel allowed to acknowledge that we suffer. We endure way more than we should, and can, because we downplay what it's actually doing to us."

Leaders who behave angrily during challenging situations are often assumed to be more powerful than those who react sadly. [...] Yet a 2009 study by management professors Juan Madera and D. Brent Smith found that showing sorrow rather than anger sometimes leads to better outcomes for leaders, including stronger relationships with followers, and a greater perception of effectiveness.

Pennebaker found that the people who wrote about their troubles were markedly calmer and happier than those who described their sneakers [during daily 20min writing sessions]

As Estelle Frankel explores in her excellent book Sacred Therapy, this is why so amny societies celebrate coming-of-age rituals in religious contexts, and why so many of those ceremonies involve the death of the childhood self and the birth of the adult one. In some cultures the child is buried (temporarily!) in the ground, and disinterred as an adult; sometimes he's tattooed, or maimed, or performs some other feat marking the end of childhood and the emergence of a new, adult self. Sometimes this involves a separate physical space, whether an initiation hut or a body of water, a church or a synagogue. The point of these rituals is that X must always give way to Y, and that this process, which involves both sacrifice and rebirth (the ultimate creativity) belongs to the realm of exaltation.

Whatever pain you can't get rid of, make it your creative offering.

compassion literally means "to suffer together"

psychologist Jonathan Cohen found that people asked to consider the suffering of victims of violence displayed activation of the same brain region as a previous study had shown of besotted mothers gazing at pictures of their babies.

processing people you've never met as if their pain is your own... reactions were likely influenced by your vagus nerve, your anterior cingulate cortex, your periaqueductal gray.

Darwin is associated, in the popular imagination, with bloody zero-sum competition, with Tennyson's "nature red in tooth and claw" – with the motto "survival of the fittest." But this wasn't actually his phrase. It was coined by a philosopher and sociologist named Herbert Spencer and his fellow "social Darwinists" who were promoters of white and upper-class supremacy.

If you're a melancholic type, you might expect to find your deepest stirrings reflected somewhere in the discipline [of psychology]. But other than the "high sensitivity" paradigm, the closest you'll come is the study of a personality trait called "neuroticism," which is about as appealing as the name sounds. According to modern personality psychology, neurotics are fretful and insecure. They're prone to illness, anxiety and depression.
    Neuroticism does have upsides. Despite their stressed immune systems, neurotics may live longer because they're vigilant types who take good care of their health. They're strivers, driven by fear of failure to succeed, and by self-criticism to improve. They're good scholars because they turn concepts over in their minds and consider them at great length, from every angle.

An important first step is to cultivate humility. We know from various studies that attitudes of superiority prevent us from reacting to others' sadness–and even to our own. "Your vagus nerve won't fire when you see a child who's starving," says Kletner, "if you think you're better than other people." Amazingly, high-ranking people (including those artificially given high status, in a lab setting) are more likely to ignore pedestrians and to cut off other drivers, and are less helpful to their colleagues and to others in need. They're less likely to experience physical and emotional pain when holding their own hands under scalding water, when excluded from a game, or when witnessing the suffering of others.

But perhaps none of this [noticing suffering in others] is possible without first cultivating self-compassion. This may sound like the opposite of what you'd do to encourage humility. But many of us engage, without even realizing it, in a constant stream of negative self-talk: "You're terrible at this." "Why did you screw that up?" But, as Jazaieri observes, "There's no empirical evidence to suggest that beating ourselves up will actually help us change our behavior; in face, some data suggests that this type of crticicism can move us away from our goals rather than towards them."
    Conversely, the more gently we speak to ourselves, the more we'll do the same for others. So the next time you hear that harsh internal voice, pause, take a breath–and try again. Speak to yourself with the same tenderness you'd extend to a beloved child–literally using the same terms of endearment and amount of reassurance that you'd shower on an adorable three-year-old. If this strikes you as hopelessly self-indulgent, remember that you're not babying yourself, or letting yourself off the hook. You're taking care of yourself, so that your self can go forth and care for others.

"The word "loser" is spoken with such contempt these days, a man might like to forget the losses in his own life that taught him something about good judgement."
    Garrison Keillor

But where did this "tyranny of positivity" come from? Why did her father believe that he had to "fight" cancer with blind optimism? And why did his bereaved daughter feel so much pressure to smile?
    The answer to these questions can be found in American cultural beliefs about the self. We're encouraged to see ourselves, deep down, as winners or losers - and to show, with our sanguine-choleric behavior, that we belong to the former group. These attitudes shape countless aspects of our lives, often without our realizing it.
[...]
    Americans, it turns out, smile more than any other society on earth. In Japan, India, Iran, Argentina, South Korea, and the Maldives, smiling is viewed as dishonest, foolish, or both, according to a study by Polish psychologist Kuba Krys. Many societies believe that expressing happiness invites bad luck and is a sign of selfishness, shallowness, and an uninteresting, even sinister, mind. When McDonald's opened its first franchise in Russia, local workers were bemused by its ethos of employee cheeriness, according to the radio show and podcast Invisibilia. What is this American smile? they asked. "We are all serious about life, because life is struggle," as one employee put it. "We were always a little bit afraid of America's smile."

[Americans] don't turn over our water glasses at night, as Tibetan monks do to remember that they might be dead by morning. We don't write down our wishes and expose them to the elements, as the Japanese do at Mount Inari. We don't weave imperfections into our rugs, as the Navajo do, or bake them into our pottery, as the Japanese practice with the art form of wabi sabi.

a remote tribe required mothers to give up something precious every year, to prepare for their sons' departures at adolescence.

expressive writing exercise: would the people who love you still love you if they knew what you just wrote? Would you still love you? Do you still love you?

A field in social psychology called terror management theory. According to this theory, the fear of death encourages tribalism, by making us want to affiliate with a group identity that would seem to outlive us. Various studies have shown that when we feel mortally threatened, we become jingoistic, hostile to outsiders, biased against out-groups.

Carstensen even found these patterns among healthy people facing social unrest. Young and strong Hong Kong residents who were worried about Chinese rule in 1997, and later about the SARS epidemic, made the same social choices as older people. But when life appeared to settle down after the political transition, when the threat of SARS subsided, these young people started acting "like themselves" again. Again and again, Carstensen's studies showed that the important variable is not how many years since you were born - but how few good years you feel you have left.

When the Romans triumphed, writes Ryan Holiday, an influential author on Stoicism, the victorious commander would be stationed at a place of honor, where the adoring crowds could see him best. But instead of immersing himself in glory, he was followed by an aide whispering in his ear, "Remember, thou art mortal." Marcus Aurelius, too, wrote in his Meditations, "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think." Seneca suggested that each night we tell ourselves that "You may not wake up tomorrow," and that we greet every morning with the reminder that "You may not sleep again."

"I'm not saying that Hindus are happy about death," Ami hastens to explain. "They feel just as much loss. But there's more of a sense that death is part of life. There's a fatalism, a sense that we don't have an ability to change it, that there's a power that's greater than ourselves, even greater than science's ability to find treatment and cures. Things happen for a reason. If this is our time, this is our time."

But the doctrine of reincarnation doesn't solve the pain of separation between two attached souls, Ami explains. "It's unlikely those two souls will meet again. And who knows where one will land and where the other will land. And that is a true loss."

(we don't move on, we move forward)
We need each other to remember, to help each other remember, that grief is this multitasking emotion. That you can and will be sad, and happy; you'll be grieving, and able to love in the same year or week, the same breath. We need to remember that a grieving person is going to laugh again and smile again... They're going to move forward. But that doesn't mean that they've moved on.

Yehuda and her colleagues studied a particular gene, associated with stress, in a group of thrity-two Holocaust survivors and twenty-two of their children. They found that this gene, in both parents and offspring, showed a typoe of epigenetic change called methalation. It was remarkable evidence that "preconception parental trauma" might be passed on from one generation to the next.

not only can pain last a lifetime, it can last many lifetimes.

But evidence started to accumulate that trauma could cause long-lasting bodily change, including to brain neurocircuitry, the sympathetic nervous system, the immune system, and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.

"I have poor shock absorbers, and I should just let it pass, because my biology is going to have extreme responses before it calmes down."

Nietzsche, who wrote that "he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."

"Live as though all your ancestors were living again through you," said the ancient Greeks. And this didn't mean literally to reenact their lives; it meant to give them a new life, fresh and clean.

The ancient proverb quoted in Ezekiel: "The fathers ate sour grapes, and the children's teeth were set on edge." But the Bible quotes this proverb in order to reject it: We aren't responsible for the sins of our parents, it says. And neither must we bear their pain.

Maybe you're a manager who realizes that sadness is the last great taboo in the workplace, and you want to create a healthy culture, one that's positive and loving yet acknowledges the dark along with the light, and understands the creative energy contained in this bittersweet fusion.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-30458-001?doi=1

Roger Zelazny - "Damnation Alley"

already knew this, about an asshole doing a crazy drive to Boston in a dystopian violent America.

Still a fun read.

Joan Didion - "Play It As It Lays"

One of those "dry" novels, as all great American novelists seem to write.

I did like it. Maria, main character, loses her pregnancy and doesn't care about anything. Yet there are glimpses of her anguish, of other people's true feelings, instead of dry descriptions.

Great language.

Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where sucessful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal movea across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly. 

    "You've been brushing it wet," the hairdresser said, lifting a strand of Maria's hair and letting ti drop with distaste.
    "I guess so." Maria could never keep up her end of the dialogue with hairdresssers.

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre

Guy Ritchie, and Jason Statham.

Pretty boring action film.

Somerville

Same makers as Limbo I think?

Atmospheric "crazy aliens descend on earth" 2.5D game

Unpacking

Short video game where you learn the life of someone just by unpacking their stuff.

Nice and yes, a bit zen. No real emotional punch though.

Bargain

K-horror about survival after an earthquake (?) rocks a hotel where a man is being sold for his liver, heart, etc.

Very bland; endless discussions about trust while nobody seems to be driven by realistic fear or goals; "we need to discuss this", no you need to get the fuck out of there.

Shot in almost single-shot style

1923

Harrison Ford and others in yet another Yellowstone spin-off.  Could not care that much for the characters, they seem more bland and flat. 

Like Yellowstone, ends halfway into the story.

1887

Story kicking off the Dutton's quest west- and northwards to what will become their Yellowstone ranch.

Not too long, good stuff.

Lara Hogan - "What Does Sponsorship Look Like"

 https://larahogan.me/blog/what-sponsorship-looks-like/

 

 

What members of underrepresented groups in tech often need most is opportunity and visibility, not advice.

 

Ursula Le Guin - "The word for world is forest"

Short book about a world far from Earth (Terra), colonized by humanoids, with all the same stereotypes as per old

And the translator is the god. Selver had brought a new word into the language of his people. He had done a new deed. The word, the deed, murder. Only a god could lead so great a newcomer as Death across the bridge between the worlds.

Dongh was worried by these multiple-choice futures, but Lyubov enjoyed them. In diversity is life and where there's life there's hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest one to be sure.

Kenneth Boyd - "The Antidote to fake news is to noursih our epistemis wellbeing"f

https://psyche.co/ideas/the-antidote-to-fake-news-is-to-nourish-our-epistemic-wellbeing

One of the most lamentable aspects of our current epistemic situation is the rise of conspiratorial thinking: people are willing both to believe a whole host of outlandish theories, and to share them widely on social media. This might come about partly as a response to a decreased sense of epistemic wellbeing, with the result that we look to potentially surprising places to try to find truths, trusthworthy sources and opportunities for dialogue.

Cooking, Monasteries, Arithmetic: Lorraine Daston on the history of Rules

https://www.publicbooks.org/cooking-monasteries-arithmetic-lorraine-daston-on-the-history-of-rules/

The root of the word arbitrary refers to "an act of will," and its associations are quite positive up until about the 16th and 17th century, when it starts to take on a distinct odor of whim and caprice–often cruel whem and caprice–in the political theory of the era. John Locke, writing in the Second Treatise on Government, can think of nothing, aboslutely nothign more intolerable than to be subject to the arbitrary will of another. "Arbitrary will" is somewhat redundant (because arbitrary is always about the exercise of will), but the ipso facto assumption is that all exercises of will as only an act of will are somehow unjustified, excessive, and a form of the unacceptable exercise of power that in the most extreme cases is that of master over slave.

Paul Bloom - "The Strange Appeal of Perverse Actions"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/perverse-incentives

Wegner proposed that such attempts at thought suppression [trying not to think about racial stereotypes makes people more conscious of them, sometimes to the point of distraction and anxiety] involve two distinct mental processes. First, there's a conscious and effortful system that works to create the desired outcome–for example, by finding something to think about that's not a white bear. Second, there's a part of the mind that remains alert to what's being suppressed–it scans for white-bear thoughts so that they can be shooed away. Sometimes, especially if we are tired or distracted or inebriated, the workings of the second system seep into consciousness. Now you're thinking of, and maybe talking about, just what you were trying to avoid thinking about.

And there might be something respectable about perversity done right. The righteously perverse individual appreciates the value of rationality, morality, and the good life–and then, chafing against them, chooses another path. Evolutionairy biologists sometimes speak of "hopeful monsters": although evolution typically occurs when tiny changes in phenotypes lead to greater reproductive success, hopeful monsters, which are the products of macromutations, make huge leaps through evolutionary space. Such leaps, theorists say, would be almost certain to fail–but, theoretically, could spawn new lineages. The standard procedure for a rational decision-maker is to consider the alternatives and settle on the option that has the highest probability of maximizing whatever it is that one wants to mazimize, all the while trying to avoid pitfalls, such as myopia, weakness of will, whishful thinking, fear, and overconfidence. But what if you sometimes choose to behav erratically, unpredictably? A small dose of perversity might have its benefits. On an organizational level, for instance, it makes sense for a granting institution to spend its money on the proposals that its experts think are best. And yet it could also make esense, simulatenously, to allocate some of the money by lottery–or even to put aside some small fund for the proposals that the experts think are the worst.

Stefano Mancuso - "Why Bumblebees Love cats and Other Beautiful Relationships"

https://longreads.com/2021/03/23/nation-of-plants-excerpt-stefano-mancuso/

excerpt from "The Nation of Plants"

There is a famous story along these lines told for the first time by the German biologists Ernst Haeckel and Carl Vogt. As the story goes, the fortunes of England would seem to depend on cats. By nourishing themselves on mice, cats increase the chances of survival of bumblebees, which, in turn, pollinate shamrocks, which then nourish the beef cows that provide the meat to nourish British sailors, thus permitting the British navy—which, as we all know, is the mainstay of the empire—to develop all of its power.

Darwin tells us that trying to imagine the final consequences of any alteration in these relationships would be as “hopeless” as throwing up a handful of sawdust on a windy day and trying to predict where each particle would land.9

bales of finely woven cotton and delicate yarns of an amazing carmine red. The dye used by the Aztecs to produce this incredible tone of red was obtained from a tiny insect, the cochineal, that lives on cactus plants (various species belonging to the genus Opuntia, the prickly pear). The color was so beautiful and precious that states under Aztec domination were required to furnish annually to the emperor a certain number of sacks full of cochineals as tribute. A fine brilliant carmine dye was, and still is, obtained from the dried bodies of these insects.

...an aamazing carmine red. The dye used by the Aztects to produce this incredible tone of red was obtained from a tiny insect, the cochineal.

Enamored of Spanish carmine, which they used to color their military uniforms (their famous red coats)

Nature always wants the last word.

Erik Larson - "The Devil in the White City"

Interesting story telling simultaneously about the Great Exhibition of Chicage (trying to outdo Paris, where its Eifel tower got shown to the world) and a mass murderer, mostly of women and girls, living very close to the exhibition grounds.

It can be a bit grinding though.  Particularly the less juicy parts of the exhibit planning.  Maybe there's a bit too many details, too slow a pace. Or it's just less my style.

Now Burnham pushed them even harder. He made good on his threat and doubled the number of men working on the building. They worked at night, in rain, in stiffling heat. In August alone the building took three lives. El.sewhere on the grounds four other men died and dozens more suffered all manner of fractures, burns, and lacerations. The fiar, according to one later appraisal, was a more dangerous place to work than a coal mine.

Even New York had apologized – well, at least one editor from New York had done so. Charles T. Root, editor of the New York Dry Goods Reporter and no relation to Burnham's dead partner, published an editorial on Thursday, August 10, 1893, in which he cited the ridicule and hostility that New York editors had expressed ever since Chicago won the right to build the exposition. "Hundreds of newspapers, among them scores of the strongest Eastern dailies, held their sides with merriment over the exquisite humor of the idea of this crude, upstart, pork-packing city undertaking to conceive and carry out a true World's Fair..." The carping had subsided, he wrote, but few of the carpers had as yet made the "amende honorable" that now clearly was due Chicago. He compounded his heresy by adding that if New York had won the fair, it would not have done as fine a job. "So far as I have been able to observe New York never gets behind any enterprise as Chicago got behind this, and without that splendid pulling together, prestige, financial supremacy, and all that sort of things would not go far toward paralleling the White City." It was time, he said, to acknowledge the truth: "Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world."

The Witcher s3

 very meh right now

Yellowstone

still first episode.  Good so far.

Top Boy

Final season. Shorter?  Still good.

Puscifer - "Tumbleweed"

from yellowstone, the series.  good vocals.

Game Consoles and Micro Machines readings

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/

https://readonlymemory.vg/the-making-of-micro-machines/

bands and albums I should not forget

• Tom Jones - "Reloaded"
• Tom Waits - "Blue Valentine"
• Editors - "An End Has A Start"
• Tricky - "Blow Back"
• Jem - "They"
• Goldfrapp - *
• John Cale - "Homo Sapiens"
• K's Choice - "Almost Happy"
• Wattican Punk Ballet - "Playground"
• Knife - "Rabid"
• Placebo - "Black Market Music"
• Radiohead - "Knives Out"
• Room Eleven - "Six Elephants"
• Anne Clarke - *
• Cake - *
• Yann Tiersen - "Dust Lane"
• DJ Shadow - "The Private Press"
• Skunk Anansie - "Post Orgasmic Chill"
• Ane Brun - *
• Arcade Fire - "Neon Bible"
• Arcade Fire - "Suburbs"
• Sonic Youth - "Daydream Nation"
• Sex Pistols - "Live Anarchy"
• Cardigans - "Gran Turismo"
• Björk - "Homogenic"
• Tanita Tikaram - "Ancient Heart"
• Tanita Tikaram - "Secret Keeper"
• Sparklehorse - "It's A Wonderful Life"
• Cranberries - "Wake Up and Smell The Coffee"
• Nick Cave - *
• Muse - *
• Moustaki (Arjen!)
• Moloko - "Catalogue"
• Toon Tellegen - "Dierenverhalen"
• Paul Biegel - "De Kleine Kapitein"
• Massive - "Blue Lives"
• Massive - "Wild Bunch"
• Hooverphonic - *
• Zita Swoon - *
• Nouvelle Vague - *
• Groove Armada - *

Rabbit hole

Kiefer Sutherland.  Bit 'enemy of the state'ish?

Oppenheimer

Good. Weird to see all these famous scientists together.

Armored Core IV - Fires of Rubicon

Love it, but tough as shit

Barbie

Good. Enjoyed it, including the fourth wall breaking. 

And the opening scene persiflaging 2001 A Space Odyssey

Allman Brothers Band - "Drunken Hearted Boy"

amazingly jazzy song

also: "Whipping Post" for some incredible guitar solo.

Alanis Morissette - "Reasons I drink (Girlpool Remix)"

after discovering her amazing "No Return" opening song for Yellowjackets, listening to more recent stuff.

Samanta Schweblin - "Seven Empty Houses"

Strange short stories.

Elmore Leonard's 10 rules of writing

 

1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2 Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."

3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".

5 Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "Ameri­can and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're ­Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

Brendan Cooper - "Deep Pockets: Snooker and the meaning of life"

a bit over the top, but enjoyable forget-after-reading approach to snooker, ticking off many of its historical details in chapters such as "truth"

William Faulkner avowed, "The field [of battle] only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."

In Japanese philosophy, the practice of wabi-sabi centres around the embracing of imperfection. George Orwell claimed that 'the essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection'; 'every book,' he said, 'is a failure.' Victorian writer John Ruskin went further, suggesting that it is only by welcoming imperfection that liberated, create work becomes possible: 'To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality.'

Yellowjackets

a series about  a soccer team of girls crashing in a remote place ... and it changes them.  Full Lord of the Flies.  Flits back and forth between then and years later, after they have been rescued and live "normal" lives.

Amazing.

Also, the music, so good...

Has her from Six Feet Under in it (Lauren Ambrose)

and Juliette Lewis

• Alanis Morissette - "no return" (theme music)
• Pulp - "Sorted for E's & Wizz" 
• Echo & the Bunnymen - "The Killing Moon"
  

Kazuo Ishiguro - "Klara and the sun"

nice read, but nothing like his previous book.

it didn't grip me, I wasn't moved. Sure,a bit of a twist, but only a little.

music - random

• Trash Palace ft Brian Molko - The Metric System
• Room Eleven - "Hey Hey Hey"
• Dresden Dolls - "Coin-Operated Boy"
  

Catherine Lacey - "Pew"

narrator is a nameless, sexless person found sleeping in a church (hence them getting the name "Pew")

Mostly reflects the worst in humans, particularly in small minded harsh Christian places

Recently she said to me - she said - God spoke to me, and now I don't question it. That put an end to our discussion... she put an end to it. She didn't want to be questionned. When someone says they heard something you did not hear, and they know you did not hear it, then you cannot tell them they did not hear what they believe they heard. They have heard their desire to hear something, and desire always speaks the loudest. It is the loudest and most confounding emotion - wanting.

Richard Fisher - "The Long View - Why We Need to Transform how the World Sees Time"

As the late Middle Ages arrived, religion and time became entangled in other intriguing ways. Around the thirteen century, timekeeping technology made another leap forward, with the invention of the escapement, which allowed clock designers to build mechanisms with gears that 'ticked' one tooth at a time. While these more advanced clocks promised an evermore precise view of shared time for societies, it would be centuries before they were widely owned in households. Instead, many of the first timepieces in Europe rang as bells in churches, calling to prayer. And the world's first mechanical clocks can be found in Salisbury and Wells cathedrals, dating to the late 1300s. Time, for many, was owned by the Church.

[Stonehenge's] sacred usage as a cemetery suggests those ancient people clearly valued the links between generations. However, its 1,500-year construction took shape in distinct stages, beginning with ditches and wood, and evolving through various forms over time. The Great Wall of China, too, was completed section by section, by several unconnected dynasties, and by different officials in response to local needs. If Grandeur can foster an illusion of grand design; if aliens landed on Earth today, and looked at all the world's metalled roads, or the global railway network, they might make similar assumptions about a longsighted plan, when the reality is a patchwork of uncoordinated engineering.
    In the present day, we also only see the architecture that survived the centuries, so ought to to be cautious about assuming that it was representative.

Finally, it's worth remembering that if cathedral-builders did have a long view, it would have been rooted in a different societal context to our own. Perhaps it was easier for them to imagine baton-passing into the future because change happened more slowly. They would have expected their descendants to have essentially the same life as them, with the same needs and desires.

[late 17th century] By this period, maritime insurance to protect against future losses had also been introduced in European ports, and life insurance had been developed in Amsterdam, following research on the mathematics of probability. As well as evidence of forward planning, these financial inventions reflected the idea that multiple futures were possible and to be successful one needed to prepare for various scenarios to play out.

These eighteenth-century ideals about the deep future were not to last. The French Revolution and other political changes in Europe would nudge many utopian, future-facing intellectuals and writers into a more pessimistic and circumspect mode.

Amazing philosphical approach to time.

 

 

In the nineteenth century [...] a sense of shared timekeeping day-to-day was emerging across Europe.
    The days when churches were the main arbiter of hours and minutes were now long gone, and the West was entering the era of 'industrial time'.

Historians argue that the machine that drove the Industrial Revolution was not the steam engine, but the clock, because clocks could synchronise people.

Consider that agriculture before the Industrial Revolution had been predominantly shaped by the natural timescapes of climate and seasons. In the mid-1800s, however, British scientist-entrepreneurs discovered that crushed bones treated with sulphuric acid vastly improved crop yields. Coupled with the other impacts of industrialisation, these 'superphosphate' fertilisers would impose a new timescape on farming, meaning farmers no longer had to rely on the capricious cycles of nature. Crucially, it was a phase-change that came at the expense of the future, via phosphate pollution and soil depletion.
    In sum, at this point in history, the future became a space that could be exploited on industrial scales to serve the economic needs of the present. And in many ways, this has been the story ever since.

Unlike our ancestors, we are fully aware that tomorrow will be different to today, and that our societies exist within deep time. Unfortunately that hard-won knowledge is ignored in practice. In a time-blinkered age, all modes of thinking are shaped primarily by present-day concerns, meaning the long view is often seen only through the lens of satisfying current needs, increasing profit or winning political battles.

To [Aristotle], "all discoverable things have already been discovered; all thinkable things previously thought; all forms of government already assessed; all workable feats of engineering tried and tested", wrties the historian Thomas Moynihan. What this implies is that Aristotle and his contemporaries had littel sense that tehere could be a future world with ideas, technologies and things that were not already part of their universe.
    All this could explain why the Romans and Greeks turned to mysticism. Troughout history, ancient societies in Europe, China or Mesopotamia sought the wisdom of oracles, who promised answers from entrails, fire, dreams, bones, or even the crakcs on roasted turtle shells. And the Romans were no different. Before officials embarked on battles or elections, they'd ask a priesthood of augurs to study bird behaviour for guidance. (In Latin, the word 'auspices' essentially means 'looking for fortunate signs in birds') With the confidence of the historian relating fixed events in the past, these august would provide information about fixed events in the future.

'Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man, and his number is six hundred three-score and six.' Centuries later scholars would realise that this number – 666 – was not random. It was a figure calculated useing the Hebrew letters for 'Nero Caesar', which can be converted to 50, 200, 6, 50, 100, 60 and 200, adding up to 666. [some refute this interpretation]

"You're going to have lunch with the President. The menuy is humble pie. You're going to eat every last  mtotherfu8Icking spoonful of it. You're going to be the most contrite sonofabitch this world has ever seen."

Italy's Beretta was founded in 1526, and Grolsch started brewing beer in 1615.

Researchers studying Japanese firms have found that companies with adopted heirs consistently outperform companies with blood heirs (which in turn outperform non-family firms.) Motivated by the honour of adaptation, the practice encourages star managers to invest themselves in the long-term prospoects of the company.

Another way that targets nudge people away from the long view is when goals are thought of as 'ceilings'. This is best demonstrated by the 'New York City taxi effect.' When it rains in NYC, it's hard to get a cab. Common sense would suggest that it's because demand is high, but it's also due to supply. Researchers have found that taxi drivers often don't choose to take full advantage of bad weather. They could, of course, reap in fares all day. What actually happens instead is that they earn their day's target faster, and so clock off early. Rain encourages people to take a greater number of short journeys, which are more lucrative for taxi drivers, but after a while it leads to fewer cabs on the roads.

'Almost inevitably, many people become adept at manipulating performance indicators through a variety of methods.' Muller writes, 'many of which are ultimately dysfunctional for their organisations.' This negative effect of metrics on people's behaviour is neatly described by a principle called 'Goodhart's Law', named after British economist Charles Goodhart, which is often phrased as: 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.'

'... when firms are forced to increase reporting frequency, they cut back on investments.' Kraft told me. Other studies suggest that quarterly reporting correlates with reductions in R&D spending, patents, advertising and hiring, as well as cuts in discretionary spending and project delays.

People have often moved on to new roles before the consequences of their actions become accountable.

The managers who used short-termist language worked in firms that were more likely to cut R&D in years when they reported small earnings. And when the researchers looked at the shareholder composition, they found many more 'transient' than 'dedicated' investors.

One intriguing fact about shinise is that a large proportion of them provide services that never go out of fashion. Of the 1,000 companies more than 300 years old, 230 are in the alcohol business, 117 are hotels and 155 in the food industry. But it's also a question of priorities, and the targets they set for themselves and their employees. Scaling up, maximising profits, reporting quarterly or increasing market are not top of the list. Instead, it's just as important, if not more so, to aspire to other goals, such as ethical and stable stewardship or passing the baton to the next generation.

Kongo Gumi, a construction company established in the year 578. The company refers to an idea called 'ie', which means 'house' and emphasises continuation.

The University of Al Quaraouiyine provides an education underpinned by both the Islamic faith and benevolent concepts such as 'ummah' - Muslim community - social responsibility as expressed in 'zakat', and endowment via 'waqf', which advocates giving wealth to last beyond death.

Joining me in the Lords gallery to watch the debate was Roman Kzrznaric, who co-authored the analysis of teh Intergenerational Solidarity Index we covered earlier. He has been a prominent advocate for the rights of future generations in recent years - and in his book The Good Ancestor has called for a new movement made up of what he calls 'time rebels'. One of his arguments is that modern democracies, especially in the wealthiest countries, as 'colonising the future'.
    'We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk, nuclear waste and public debt, and that we feel at liberty to plunder as we please.'

favourite suggestions is a mischievous idea called 'an intergenerational chaining effect' proposed by the philosophers Tyler M. John and William MacAskill. As an incentive to focus on the long view, the pair suggest that the generosity of a politician's pension should not be decided until the political generation that follows.

'One of the design features of language is displacement, the capacity to refer to the nonpresent,' writes the evolutionary psychologist Michael Corballis.

Tim Hardin - "How can we hang on to a dream?"

one of those sentimental songs I've always loved yet would not for the world be able to remember

Swedish words about travel

flygskam - shame of flying

tågskryt - train brag

Marina Dyachenko & Sergey Dyachenko - "Vita Nostra" (translated by Julia Meitov Hersey)

One of the most amazing books I have read in a long time.  Hints of Steven Hall's "The Raw Shark Text".

Even though the backflap or a review had hinted at the outcome, it was an amazingly capturing book where a girl gets somewhat unwittingly enrolled in a "university of special skills" and slowly deconstructs herself by reading impossible texts, doing impossible mental exercises, to finally emerge as a Word from the Speech.

Here they are, eating and drinking. They are still almost entirely human; they have human psyches and human bodies. With time, during the learning process, they will come out of their human skin and become Words, tools of Speech, the bones of tendons of a highly complex text that is called reality. Words know no fear, and no death. Words are free and conform only to Speech. And Speech – Sasha knew this! – is the core of harmony.

Andor

yet another star wars series; weird pacing, the first few episodes are alright, then the third gets really good.. .then things slow down again until the finale.

Still, nice stuff.

Loki

enjoyable enough during a flight; suffers a bit from the usual Marvel drivel of endless amazing Final Endtime shizzle.

Conjure One - "Redemption"

 interesting enough, slow beat, long female vocals, trance-y

Front Line Assembly - "Virus"

Robbie Robertson - "Somewhere down the crazy river"

Pomplamoose - Weeknd + Michael Jackson + Justin Timberlake mashup

Lou Reed - "The Room"

amazing instrumental guitar track

Air - "Run"

Too long since I listened to this.

Matthew Bourne's "Romeo And Juliet"

music by Sergei Prokofiev

 

wonderful stuff.

R. F. Kuang - "Babel"

Amazing story about an alternate historical 19th century England where silver runs everything, and a boy "rescued" from Canton, is whisked off to Oxford by his not-addressing-the-daddy-issues professor Lovell.

Grasped me from page 1.

The Analects of Confucios made the claim sibujishe, that even a four-horse chariot could not catch a word once uttered, that the spoken word was irrevocable. But this seemed like a great trick of time. It did not seem fair that such a minuscule action could have such reverberating consequences. Something that broke not only his world but Ramy's, Letty's, and Victoire's should have taken minutes at least, it seemed; should have required repeated effort. The truth of the murder would have made more sense had he stood over his father's body with a blunt axe, bringing it down over and over into his skull and chest until blood sprayed across both their faces. Something brutla, something sustained, a true manifestation of monstrous intent.

The papers always referred to the strikers as foreign; as Chinamen, Indians, Arabs, and Africans. (Never mind Professor Craft.) They were never Oxfordians, they were never Englishmen, they were travellers from abroad who had taken advantage of Oxford's good graces, and who now held the nation hostage. Babel had become synonymous with foreign, and this was very strange, because before this, the Royal Institute of Translation had always been regarded as a national treasure, a quentessentially English institution.
But then England, and the English language, had always been more indebted to the poor, the lowly, and the foreign than it cared to admit. The word vernacular came from the Latin verna, meaning 'house slave'; this emphasized the nativeness, the domesticity of the vernacular language. But the root verna also indicated the lowly origins of the language spoken by the powerful; the terms and phrases invented by slaves, labourers, beggars, and criminals - the vulgar cants, as it were - had infiltrated English until they became proper. And the English vernacular could not properly be called domestic either, because English etymology had roots all over the world. Almanacs and algebra came from Arabic; pyjamas from Sanskrit, ketchup from Chinese, and paddies from Malay. It was only when elite England's way of life was threatened that the true English, whoever they were, attempted to excise all that had made them.

The British did not hate them, because hate was bound up with fear and resentment, and both required seeing your opponent as a morally autonomous being, worthy of respect and rivalry. The attitude the British held towards the Chinese was patronizing, was dismissive; but it was not hatred. Not yet.

The Commute

pretty silly action flic with Liam Neeson

Crazy, Stupid, Love

okayish romcom featuring ryan gosling

The Whale

amazing film about an obese man trying to come to terms with his life

Paolo Bacigalupi - "The Windup Girl"

tauted as the next William Gibson,.... nope.

I'm quiting after 100+ pages.  It's just not that interesting, I don't care about the characters, and while the world is interesting, the constant dropping of foreign phrases in italics starts to piss me off.

the MEG

Finally watched.  Terrible fun.

MIssion Impossible - Dead Reckoning - part one

as fun as always

War of the Worlds, s2 & s3

Still amazing stuff.

Was slightly confused since s1 was quite some time ago.

Noah Caldwell-Gervais - "A thorough look at resident evil"

7hour essay on all the resident evils.

Same channel that did the 5hr essay on Dark Souls. 

Good stuff.

The Mandalorian

Wonderful stuff.

Gabrielle Zevin - "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow"

https://weesbij.blogspot.com/2021/02/games.html

I didn't like "Ready Player One" too much. but this is good so far.

There are glaring failures though;  graphics cards just burning out.

    

"the myth, the narrative, whatever you want to call it, was always of supreme importante to Sam. So, I guess, by even telling this story, I'm betraying him"

They found themselves drawn to Japansese references over and over: the deceptively innocent paintings of Yoshitomo  Nara; Miyazaki' anime like Kiki's Delivery Service and Princess Mononoke, other, more adult anime like Akira and Ghost in the Shell, both of which Sam had loved, and of course, Hokusai's Thrity-six views of mount fuji"

 

 

If Marx at twenty-two had a problem, it was that he was attracted to too many things and people. Marx's favorite adjective was "interesting." The world seemed filled with interesting books to read, interesting food to taste, and interesting people to have sex with and sometimes even to fall in love with. To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could. In the first months she knew him, Sadie disparaged Marx to Sam by calling him "the romantic dilettante."
    But for Marx, the world was like a breakfast at a five-star hotel in an Asian country-the abundance of it was almost overwhelming. Who wouldn't want a pineapple smoothie, a roast pork bun, an omelet, pickled vegetables, sushi, and a green-tea-flavored croissant? They were all there for the taking and delicious, in their own way.

 

 

There were so many people who could be your lover, but, if she was honest with herself, there were relatively few people who could move you creatively.

Silo

 Silo, I did not read the books , but like the series so far, having not finished season1 

nucleear holocaust?

Sekiro

 https://weesbij.blogspot.com/2021/02/games.html        

 Fuck-ing Love. It.

it's so good

yes I was upset by  miniboss seven-lances blaap

yes I was confused by Genichiro Ashina initially. But like many folks online, that made me *CLICK*

Guardian Ape - sure, stilll took me 3 or 4 hours... but it was actually relatively easy (YES I do watch online videos, particularly "Sekiro Guru"... we all have different play styles)

Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man - "Mysteries"

From

from the makers of Lost. Enjoyable enough but I hope they have a real story and  don't derange like "Lost" did

Halle Abadi - "Boytoy"

The Game Maker's Toolkit - "The Two Types of Random in Game Design" (RNG)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwI5b-wRLic

seems to host interesting stuff, just like AI & Games

loanword & calque

English has two different terms for words that come into English from other languages. A 'calque' is translated from the source language. (E.g., flea market, beer garden, paper tiger.) A 'loanword' is ported in its original form. (E.g., cafe, bazaar, kindergarten) Perhaps ironically, the word 'calque' is a loanword, while the 'loanword' is a calque (from Ger. 'lehnwort').

Cassandra Khaw - "The Salt Grows Heavy"

amazing adult fairy tale - for lack of a better word - of a protagonist a mermaid, dragged from the sea by a prince who she led her daughters devour, and her plague-doctor.

Body horror, similar sometimes to B. Catling. Fairytale like Katherine Arden. 

There. I could go there, perhaps. Find another sovereign, who'd fish a mute from the waters, who'd marry her, bed her, murder her sisters for a superstition, and then pry the teeth from her gums for the sake of caution. I could find one of those again, maybe, and wait until my daughters come to gnaw his country down to its bones.

    "Do you not care that they are children?"
    "No." I think of the lynx beneath teh river, its veins crystallizing. Of Luke on his bier, newborn and screaming, the wet pink of his lungs like the ruined stub of a tongue hidden behind a smile. Of my daughters, suckling the marrow from their father's kingdom, growing stronger by the hour. "Like everything else, they are only meat."

    It is always interesting to see how often women are described as ravenous when it is the men who, without exception, take without thought of compensation.
    I smile at the girl and stoop so that we are eye-to-eye. "Why would she want a harvest of bones?"

    "Your eyes were green before." And they'd tasted of lime and sweat and ice, had dissolved on my tongue like crème. I had eaten those like I'd eaten the heart, the hand.
    "I'm certain," says the surgeon, fingers threading together. His new eyes are silver, like starlight strained and sieved, stainless save for the pinholes of his pupils. "That you believed they were green. Green is a very beautiful color."

I allow myself, for the gash of a moment, to remember what I once possessed: the abyssal ocean, the song in those depths like swimming down the black throat of a god; the searing colors moting my sisters' coils, sapphire and quartz crushed into constellations, patterns and prisms of incandescence spiraling through the dark, our tails in endless, restless motion; our mother's eyes colossal, phosphorescent; our father's ribs, still studded with our egg sacs, his heartbeat in our veins. I'd been happy there. I could have been happy there forever.

A drag of vermillion across the trampled snow. Bloodied palmprints clawed into the white. Countless footprints, but only one set suggests that its owner might have staggered, might have fallen, weighted down by their robes, before they wrestled equilibrium from the cold and shambled onwards, blades between their knuckles and wolves at their heels. No bile or piss, however, no pus or reek of infection. No vomit. Only red blood blackening to ice. They bled my plague doctor, but not with the intention to kill.
    To hobble, yes. To slow, to ensure against the risk of a fair game. When some children play at slaughtering, the pig must always die, or else what point is there in pursuing the squealing hog through the woods and the wild? 

Yazz Ahmed - "Misophonia"

jazz-trumpet and instrumental eeriness.

Arun Ghosh - "Hanji!"

mostly instrumental, electro jazz ish

iggy pop bbc6 2023-05-21

• Mick Harvey - "Suitcase in Berlin" - strangely sad, slow, synthy song
• Ennio Morricone - "Il Clan Dei Siciliani (Main Theme)"

Claire Cock-Starkey - "How Much Is a Smidgen?"

 https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/how-much-smidgen

 

 

The beauty of the stone as a unit of measure was that any locality could identify a rock of decent dimensions and adopt it as the local stone in weight. Since antiquity a stone had been used as a measure, although it did not need to be assigned an actual value. Instead, any good-sized stone could be used as a counterbalance to ensure that commodities could be equally split, meaning that this system could be used in societies where arithmetic had yet to develop. Across northern Europe stones were used in this way to measure dry goods, with the earliest examples dating back to the Roman Empire. (The pound of weight also originates in the Roman Empire, where it was known as libra pondo. It derived from the Latin word libra, which like the sign of the zodiac meant a balance or scale but was also used to refer to a measure—pound by weight. This Latin word is the reason why pounds are abbreviated as lbs.—a shortening of the word libra. There was little standardization, and the weight of stones could vary from country to country, region to region and even village to village, ranging from as little as 4 lbs. all the way up to 40 lbs. It was not only the location which af­fected the weight of the stone; sometimes the weight varied depending on the goods being weighed. For example, an English statute from around 1300 set a London stone at 12.5 lbs.; however, a stone for weighing lead was said to be 12 lbs., while a stone for measuring beeswax, sugar, pepper, cumin, almonds and alum was 8 lbs., and the stone for weighing glass was 5 lbs. The inconsistent and archaic use of stones continued in Britain for some time. An example of this can be seen in the system used by British butchers: the stone used for measuring the weight of livestock was generally accepted to be 14 lbs. but the resultant meat was measured with an 8 lbs. stone. It is thought that this was because butchers would return the dressed meat from an animal carcass back to the farmer stone for stone—the weight difference meant that the butcher could keep the blood, offal and hide as payment. Butchers at Smithfield Meat Market in London continued to employ the 8 lbs. stone right up until World War II.

 

Ewan Wilson - "The folklore roots of Sekiro's anus-ball snatching enemies"

 https://www.eurogamer.net/the-folklore-roots-of-sekiros-anus-ball-snatching-enemies

 

 

The kappa relate to bums in more ways than one. These y&omacr;kai are the source of many an ancient horror tale. Matt tells me they're known to "emerge from the depths to drown swimmers or passer-bys for their shirikodama (literally 'small anus ball')".

"The shirikodama is a mysterious organ said to reside in the human colon, and kappa love to extract them from unwary swimmers the hard way: by hand. Or claw." Matt tells me that in times of old kappa were often blamed for drownings.

 

Jorge Mazal - "How Duolingo reignited user growth"

 https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-user-growth

One often underappreciated risk with aggressively A/B testing emails and push notifications is that it results in users opting out of the channel; and even if you kill the test, those users remain opted out forever. Do this many times, and you’ve destroyed your channel.

Dennis Duncan - "Index, A History of the"

Amazing book about indexes and their history.

baindex.org - blog from a professional indexer

concordance; a list of all the words of a book/pamphlet and where they appear

subject index: index containing concepts and ideas (and where to find them), even when these are not literally mentioned/used in the text itself.

Two people came up with two important types of indexes roughly around the same time (11th/12th century). How that came about? From monks studying for days, people started to become more eloquent, to need to be able to read and find things themselves. Various "fraters", brothers (not monks!), e.g. Dominicans and Franciscans, preached in the common tongue. A growing demand for new, more efficient ways of reading, of using books.

Ptolemy's capital was the newly founded city of Alexandria, and it was here, around the beginning of the third century, that he built an institution in which the greatest scholars of the age would live, study and teach. It would be rather like a modern university - this is not the last time that the development of the university will prove pivotal for our story - and it would be dedicated to the muses, hence the name Mouseion, or in Latin Musaeum, which gives us our modern word museum.

Meanwhile, we may quibble over whether the Latin indices or the Anglicized indexes is the correct plural in English, but at least history has not plumped for the Greek: sillyboi.

the principle of the distinctio, of taking a topic - e.g. stone - and anatomizing it, exploding it into a variety of distinct sense, much like a dictionary entry will list the multiple meanings attached to a single word.

I am in the Bodleian Library in Oxford with a small printed book open on the desk in front of me. This is the text of a sermon, and it was printed in 1470 in Cologne a the printshop of a man named Arnold Therhoernen. The book is no larger than a paperback, and the text itself is short, just twelve leaves - twenty-four pages - long. But sitting here in the library with the book before me and opened on its first page, I think, the most intense experience that I have had of the archival sublime, that sense of disbelief that something so significant, something of such conceptual magnitude, should be here on my desk among my own workaday effects - laptop, notebook, pencil. It feels astonishing that I should be allowed to pick it up, hold it, turn its pages as though it were a novel I purchased at the train station. Why is it not under glass, sealed off, labelled and exhibited where crowds of schoolchildren might look but not touch? There's a name for this feeling: Stendhal Syndrome, after the French novelist who, on a visit to Florence, described the palpitation he experienced at being so close to the tombs of the Renaissance masters. I feel like I am on the verge of tears. [the J on the page is the first printed page number]

Most of the time, when we talk about books, about literature, we have no particular form in mind. It is not the actual book, the material object, but rather the text-in-the-abstract - words, plots, characters - that concerns us. Your copy or mine, first edition or cheap reprint, hardback, paperback or digital download, it doesn't matter: Jane still marries Mr Rochester in the end. But, reader, there is no such thing as an immaterial text. And however it is instantiated - whatever physical form it takes - we need to know that it works, that the words it delivers up to us are the right ones in the right order. What Calvino's [If On a Winter's Night a Traveller] novel does is remind us of the book itself, foregrounding its physical sequencing - something we take for granted - by removing it.

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance

Third in Park Chan-Wook's triplet about vengeance.

Girl forced to take the blame for a kidnap starts executing her revenge plan; first by pretending to be a saint in prison, then taking out people one by one, ending in her giving all parents of the children he abducted, a chance to maime/murder him.

Same actors as Oldboy

Oldboy

too long ago I saw this, was good to rewatch.

Second in the vengeance trilogy by Park Chan-Wook.

Man gets freed after being jailed for 15 years by a stranger; he has 5 days to find him. Stranger turns out to be an old class-mate. Protagonist spread a rumour that he got his sister pregnant, and she killed herself. Through hypnotism, the man falls in love with a girl who helps him, but who turns out to be his daughter. The monster will never get salvation.

Also, great score.

random Iggy Pop songs - Sunday 2023-05-07

• Ugly Mac Beer - Les Choeurs Perdus, French breakbeat
• Castle & the Blah Street band ft Matt Berry - "Cut Loose - A lesson in Jazz" - jokey song about Jazz

As Dusk Falls

Intriguing enough interactive story.  Bit silly at times (mashing buttons to escape an attack dog) but the story is good.

Vampire Survivor

Wonderful silly game where you just walk around but work on increasing your arsenal.

Also great while stuck at some mini boss (looking at you, General Seven Spears) in Sekiro.

John Lee Hooker & Carlos Santana - "Chill Out (Things Gonna Change)"

this is wonderful

Ted Lasso

one of the best shows I have seen in years.  Funny, sharp, avoiding cliches and the obvious setups.

White Shadows

Just started, but wonderfully moody game in the style of Limbo and Inside, with a dystopian black and white world that feels like a mix between Brazil and Bladerunner.

Sekiro, Shadows Die Twice

FromSoftware, hard as hell (harder than DS?) but so cool, with the grappling hook swinging between rooftops, and the stealth thing. 

Barbarian

Star Wars bits (love theme, duel of the fates)

Duel of the Fates (episode I)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2XUJ5PWg-8

Love theme (episode II)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nk_WHHTQtY

C.P. Taylor - "Good" (with David Tennant)

Amazing play by C.P. Taylor about a normal, logical man slowly falling for the Nazi "logic" of the final solution, while he has a Jewish friend to whom he keeps defending the "logic".

Chilling and amazing stuff.

Also, amazing stuff from David Tennant's co-players who switch roles sometimes within seconds.

ox

this might be a fun blog to follow

https://sesquiotic.com/2023/04/20/ox/ 

Marta Zaraska - "How Loneliness Reshapes the Brain"

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-loneliness-reshapes-the-brain-20230228/

 Instead, circuits in our brain and changes in our behavior can trap us in a catch-22 situation: While we desire connection with others, we view them as unreliable, judgmental and unfriendly. Consequently, we keep our distance, consciously or unconsciously spurning potential opportunities for connections.

Zeeya Merali - "God, Dark Matter and Falling Cats"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/god-dark-matter-and-falling-cats-a-conversation-with-2022-templeton-prize-winner-frank-wilczek/

Can you give me some specific examples of how the wisdom you have now but didn’t have earlier in your scientific career has influenced your outlook?

“Complementarity” says that you can’t use a single picture to answer all meaningful questions. You may need very different descriptions, even descriptions that are mutually incomprehensible or superficially contradictory. This concept is absolutely necessary in understanding quantum mechanics, where, for instance, you can’t make predictions about the position and the momentum of an electron simultaneously. When I first encountered Bohr’s ideas about taking complementarity beyond quantum mechanics, I was not impressed. I thought it was borderline bullshit. But I’ve come to realize that it is a much more general piece of wisdom that promotes tolerance and mind expansion. There’s also the scientific attitude that openness and honesty allow people to flourish. It enhances the effectiveness of scientists to have a sort of loving relationship with what they are doing because the work can be frustrating and involves investing in learning some rather dry material. And then there is the lesson of beauty: when you allow yourself to use your imagination, the world repays with wonderful gifts.

R.M. Davis - "What the Higgs boson tells us about the universe"

https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/what-the-higgs-boson-tells-us-about-the-universe

The Higgs field, on the other hand, is just as spinless as the Higgs boson. Like a college senior sitting forlorn in a career counselor’s office, it has no direction.

It’s no coincidence that both the Higgs boson and the Higgs field are spin-zero. “The properties of a particle are essentially properties of the field,” says Peter Onyisi, associate professor of physics for the University of Texas at Austin. Like waves in the ocean, “Higgs bosons are vibrations in a Higgs field.”

Laura J Martin - "Disturbance How atomic doomsday experiments, fuelled by Cold War fears, shaped then shook ecologists’ faith in self-healing nature"

https://aeon.co/essays/how-atomic-doomsday-experiments-shaped-disturbance-ecology

The AEC hoped the Luquillo irradiation experiment would help the mainland prepare for nuclear war. It also intended the irradiation of Luquillo to inform another imperial project, the proposed Project Plowshare Pan-Atomic Canal, a plan to ‘improve’ the Panama Canal (so that it would not require locks to move ships) by detonating a series of H-bombs through Panama. The US Department of Defense also tested Agent Orange and other ‘tactical herbicides’ for use in the Vietnam War at Luquillo. Puerto Rican forests were destroyed in an attempt to plan for the protection of mainland Americans.

S.I. Rosenbaum - "His software sang the words of God, then it fell silent"

https://www.inverse.com/input/features/tropetrainer-thomas-buchler-torah-software

This was a huge problem. Trope are not just melodies — they also function as punctuation, musically joining linguistic clauses or separating them, indicating different kinds of pauses and where verses end. Getting the trope wrong can radically distort the meaning of the text.

Several groups of Jewish scholars, alarmed by this, began working on a solution. What emerged, over several centuries, was a data-storage innovation: a set of marks above and below the letters that indicate both vowels and, crucially, the correct trope for each segment of the text.

The scholars who developed these marks came to be known as Masoretes, from a Hebrew root meaning to pass down — though some argue the term derives from another root, meaning to tie down.

John D. Clark - "Ignition! An informal history of liquid rocket propellants"

Only just started but already some gems on fuel situations that went boom

Also, learned about "mach diamonds" or "shock diamond": Shock diamonds (also known as Mach diamonds or thrust diamonds) are a formation of standing wave patterns that appear in the supersonic exhaust plume of an aerospace propulsion system, such as a supersonic jet engine, rocket, ramjet, or scramjet, when it is operated in an atmosphere. The "diamonds" are actually a complex flow field made visible by abrupt changes in local density and pressure as the exhaust passes through a series of standing shock waves and expansion fans. Mach diamonds are named after Ernst Mach, the physicist who first described them.

Esnault-Pelterie use of benzene (as Glushko's of toluene) as a fuel is rather odd. Neither of them is any improvement on gasoline as far as performance goes, and they are both much more expensive. And then Esnault-Pelterie tried to use tetranitromethane, C(NO2), for his oxidizer, and promptly blew off four fingers. (This event was to prove typical of TNM work.)

Unfortunately, in his calculations Dr Eugen Sänger naively assumed 100 percent thermal efficiency, which would involve either (a) an infinite chamber pressure, or (b) a zero exhaust pressure firing into a perfect vacuum, and in either case would require an infinitely long nozzle, which might involve some difficulties in fabrication.

Boranes are unpleasant beasts. Diborane and pentaborane ignite spontaneously in the atmosphere, and the fires are remarkably difficult to extinguish. They react with water to form, eventually, hydrogen and borec acid, and the reaction is sometimes violent. Also, they not only are possessed of a peculiarly repulsive odor; they are extremely poisonous by about any route. This collection of properties does not simplify the problem of handling them. They are also very expensive since their synthesis is neither easy nor simple.
[...]
And then the whole program [chemistry of borohydrides] was brought to a screeching halt. There were two reasons for this, one strategic, one technical. The first was the arrival of the ICBM on the scene, and the declining role of the long-range bomber. The second lay in the fact that the combustion product of boron is boron trioxide (B2O3, and that below about 1800 degrees this is either a solid of a glassy, very viscous liquid. And when you have a turbine spinning at some 4000 rpm, and the clearance between the blades is a few thousandths of an inch, and this sticky, viscous liquid deposits on the blades, the engine is likely to undergo what the British, with precision, call "catastrophic self-disassembly"

Moïra Fowley - "Eyes guts throat bones"

Amazing short stories.  Weird ones, supernatural, magic realism.  I should keep an eye out for more books by her.

So many amazing bits here. "Playing house" is amazing. All of them are.

"Saying its name breaks it" reminded me a lot of that Dutch story about the school and being snowed in and the outside world is gone (or is it)... and *that* in turn reminded me of that amazing book where the world is slowly freezing over.

"Rath" reminded me of that wonderful "Troll Bridge" story by Neil Gaiman, when his writing was still captivating me.

I had a friend who was a mirror. Hold a candle up to her and you'd see the light reflected. Tall and white and straight. I had a friend who was a candle, started tall and ended up a wax splat on the floor, spent. I had a friend when the power went and because she was lit we didn't need a torch.

Crimes of the Future

Classic Cronenberg stuff.  Body horror with Viggo Mortenson, where people don't feel pain anymore, develop new organs, lots of body art / surgery art performances.

X

horror in the old fashioned style, of five young people wanting to make porn / art video at a remote farm, where the farmer, and particularly his wife, go crazy.

Beef

Bit of a slow burn, but interesting enough as the feud between two people in their cars explodes into so much more. 

The end is almost surreal, more interesting than I would have guessed.

Close to the Sun

Have to reply a fair bit, not sure this walking simulator/horror game is for me.

Just a bit too cliche in story, just a bit too dependent on style, just a bit too shallow in acting; first time main character stumbles upon corpes; oh my god!!

two minutes later... not a word.

Children of Men (2006)

Bloody hell, thought it was from 2008

Bloodier hell, it's grimmer than I realise! Good humour too...

Good luck to you, Leo Grande

Fantastic film with Emmy Thompson and Daryl McCormack. The way they get through her stigma's, and his troubles...

Three Thousand Years of Longing

Amazing fairytale / true story with Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba.

Is she imagining?

Maybe, I do not care. Amazing.

the Last of Us [series]

Fucking beautiful and as heartbreaking as the games.

Fucking hell.

the Felice Brothers - misc

Dylan-esque.  Nice enough, nothing outstanding.

Dredge

Wonderful inventory game where you fish around and things haunt you. Relaxing.

the Colorist Orchestra & Emiliana Torrini - "Thinking out loud"

haunting.

Other songs also nice, but this one stands out.

Lankum

Sad but beautiful music.

Porridge Radio - "Back to the radio"

Gene Chandler - "Duke of Earl"

amazing 50s or 60s song, mum-and-dad music

Headie One & Fred Again - "Told (Brian Eno remix)"

Strange rap-electro vocoder stuff.  Not my usual cup of tea, but nice.

Karen Russell - "Vampires in the lemon grove and other stories"

 

Fila makes the lemonade and monitors the hot dog machine, watching the meat rotate on wire spigots. I'm fascinated by this machine. The Italian name for it translates as "carousel of beef." Who would have guessed as such a device two hundred years ago? Back then we were all preoccupied with visions of apocalypse; Santa Francesca, the foundress of this very grove, gouged out her eyes while dictating premonitions of fire. What a shame, I often think, that she foresaw only the end times, never hot dogs.

I once pictured time as a black magnifying glass and myself as a microscopic flightless insect trapped in that circle of night.

Wind blows the leaves apart. Lemons wink like a firmament of yellow stars, slowly ripening, and I can see the other, truer night behind them.

Fall

Concept film about two girls climbing a 2000ft tower and of course shit goes wrong.

So-so. 

One good "scary" bit.

Smile

ok horror, nothing special

The Cog Is Dead - "The Death of the Cog"

cinematic, classic, circus, beautiful

Steam Powered Giraffe - "Honeybee"

Michael Jackson - "Billie Jean"

Jared Halley - "Pirates Of the Caribbean (He's a Pirate)" a capella

bloody fucking amazing

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

Teddie Films (ft Israel Curtis, Ryan Richardson) - "The Star Wars that I Used To Know"

amazing joke on the Gotye song

Promare

Amazing anime, lots of computer anime taking the visual into abstractions (2D triangles floating to represent blood, dust, ...)

Scissor Sisters - "I can't decide"

So fucking good

Half Life / Half Life 2 story telling

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-narrative-had-to-be-baked-into-the-corridors-marc-laidlaw-on-writing-half-life

he was a rationalist rather than a populist - oppressing with appeals to reason, not emotion.

(this is not directly important to the story or the game or the article but the sentence itself is amazing)

[Marc] Laidlaw had the dev team explain the stories they were trying to tell, and helped them solve narrative problems through level design. “Lots of traps and detours and obstacles and occasional moments of breakthrough,” he says. “Really good level design tells its own story. You don’t need NPCs popping up to tell you what to do if your visual grammar is clear enough. Then when characters do pop up, they can say lines of dialogue that make them feel like characters instead of signposts.”

Big Lebowski (35mm)

<3

Censor

Quite good horror film where the censor slowly goes mad because of the terror she watches all the time. 

words with no English equivalent

the Danish word hygge. It means the comfortable, secure, and enjoyable feeling of a space, a gathering, an event. “Last night was so hyggelig”, or “your house is hyygglig”. I love it. Snuggly

Mono no aware - Japanese. Untranslatable, but roughly: wistful melancholy at the realization that living is ephemeral (over too soon).

Saudade - Portuguese. Also untranslatable but, approximately: The sadness of deep longing for one’s true homeland.

Կարոտ (karot / garod) — the state of longing for a place, time, person/s, interactions, events or even things, usually one’s home, homeland, loved ones. Similar to saudade but even more complex

The word "yalla" in Lebanese dialect has many meanings depending on its context. Could mean "I'm coming" or "hurry up", can be used to cheer someone on, or even be like a verbal "shrug".

Irish: craic. Example usage: "The craic was great". Meaning: you enjoyed yourself / had a fun time / were entertained and laughed a lot / had good chats / in good company. Can also mean news or gossip, i.e "What's the craic?" = "Any news?"

the Hungarian hiányérzet, which is the feeling that some unnamed, unknown thing that you can't quite put your finger on is missing.

Indonesian.

Kami = refers to a group of people that includes the speaker but not the person being spoken to.

Kita = refers to a group of people that includes the speaker & the person being spoken to.

in English, both words are simply referred to as "we".

Arabic: soubhiyé. That quiet time when you’re the only one awake in the house and can enjoy a cup of coffee before the day starts

I love 'sobremesa' in Spanish, which describes that chill time around the table with those you love - normally after you've finished eating, and you're just chatting and connecting

My favourite is the Japanese "Tsujigiri", the term for trying out your newly acquired sword by decapitating a random passer-by...

the Japanese word tsundoku (積ん読), meaning acquiring books and letting them pile up without reading them.

My grandfather would say the Finnish word "sisu." Loosely translated, "stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience and hardiness," but it's hard to describe in English. You might hate doing a thing, but the thing has to be done, so you will do the thing.