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Thank you all for your answers! I’ve read Connie Willis, but it’s a good spur to read more, and many of these other books look really intriguing. I’ve reserved Malka Older's The Mimicking of Known Successes at my local library already.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:05 AM on April 22, 2024

A few months back I posted on the blue about Annika Norlin and Jens Lekman’s Correspondence project. It features the former’s Silent Night, which is the story of the well known Christmas song, told through an indie song. The website has the original demo and here’s a nice choral version.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:02 PM on April 15, 2024

That seems very likely, but I haven’t found the source yet. None of the videos I’ve found from any of the official social media accounts look similar.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:04 AM on March 7, 2024

Thanks, terrapin! Hopefully you get an answer from Stu Phillips himself.

Here's an account of the session, which was in New York, by Marv Goldberg, but there's no mention of a drummer. He cites a book by Stu Phillips, Stu Who?, but what little I've gleaned about it online it doesn't seem like it's got detailed information about session players. Unfortunately, the closest library to me that's got a copy is in Germany.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:42 AM on January 23, 2024

Thanks, terrapin! That's above and beyond.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:43 AM on January 24, 2024

Yay! Fingers are very crossed.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:28 PM on February 12, 2024

WOW! Thank you! And extend my warmest thanks to your local librarian.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:38 AM on February 15, 2024

Oh wow! Hopefully the answer is there. And even if not, that’s above and beyond, terrapin.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:33 AM on February 27, 2024

Thank you so much for running down that lead, terrapin. I was talking with a friend about MetaFilter this weekend and used this as an example of how rigorous MeFites could be about answering questions.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:01 AM on March 4, 2024

Ooh, that's a good suggestion, but I haven't been able to find it there.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:22 PM on February 15, 2024

Starflight (as an addendum, here's a video of Marvin Herbold's never completed indie Starflight remake)

Ultima VII Part 2: The Serpent Isle
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:47 PM on February 9, 2024

I just remembered about Little Big Adventure (renamed Relentless in North America). It's set on a planet, Twinsun, which has two suns that are above each pole. The equator is mountainous and called Hamalayi, and very cold. In the first game the hero, Twinsen, has to find a certain frozen lake, which he melts with a magic flute, to obtain an item.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 6:02 AM on February 10, 2024

Thanks, General Malaise! That does seem to answer most of my question. The layoff is indeed real, and it's because of workers being replaced by AI. Hopefully some journalists dig further and find out how many translators were fired and how many remain, if only in percentage terms.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:04 AM on January 8, 2024

Thanks! Yes, that tracks, I probably read that around the time it was published, but I don’t have that book anymore. My local library has a copy, and I’ll try to go find the scene. Is it towards the end?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:48 PM on October 20, 2023

Thank you, sixswitch, for going above and beyond!
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:03 AM on October 21, 2023

I should reread him; it’s been a minute, as the kids say.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:37 PM on October 21, 2023

Oh, and just to be clear, this would be free on the web, we don’t want it to be a subscription webzine. The stories would be on the web, and the epub and mobi files would just be an optional, secondary way to read them.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:38 AM on July 4, 2023

Thank you all for your answers! This has been very helpful.

I think Wix and Wordpress are the services that suit me best and I will explore a bit more and confer with my coeditor.

And yes, the epub files are meant to be free of charge (very helpful to know that epub works for kindles too), so we won’t need a storefront.

One final question to tavegyl:

How much control do you have over the look of… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:40 PM on July 5, 2023

We ended up going with Wordpress. We paid an Icelandic hosting service that specializes in Wordpress, so we didn't have to go through Wordpress.com. I got some advice from a friend who's a Wordpress designer and then I built the site. Even if you have limited understanding of website design and HTML, like myself, Wordpress does make things fairly easy. So I'd recommend it. Anyway, if you want to see what our Icelandic-language short story webzine looks like, here's Stelkur.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:35 AM on October 2, 2023

It’s not Meat Is Murder. I’m pretty sure the voice I hear in my head is female. Thankfully, the voice I hear in my head is rarely Morrissey.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:33 AM on August 14, 2023

These are all good songs, but none are right. If it helps, the first syllable in "murder" is held, so it's something like "it is muuuuurder".
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:21 AM on August 14, 2023

Thank you all, these are great tracks, and I appreciate the vote of confidence in my taste in music, but none of them are the right one.

urbanlenny: Point of clarification: which part of the Blur song in particular is triggering this connection for you? Is it the chorus? The chorus to me is so eerily like something else I know very well…

The whole song, in a way. When Albarn sings “it is barbaric” my brain wants the female… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:05 PM on August 14, 2023

Good songs both, but not the one in my head. For a bit I thought the voice in my head was Tracyanne Campbell, singer of Camera Obscura, but I’ve pretty much ruled her out, though it’s a similar kind of voice.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:35 PM on August 14, 2023

That does sound really close vocally, rollick, but not quite.

And yeah, urbanlenny, early Belle & Sebastian is the right sort of area. If you figure out what the song is, please let me know.

Paying attention to Blur is both good, as they’re a really good band, and risky because there’s always the chance of being pulled into the Damon Albarn Extended Universe, featuring African music jams, film scores, random solo albums, random solo albums… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:07 PM on August 15, 2023

How about mother-of-thyme (also known as creeping thyme? It’s pretty, smells good, and it’s a flavorful herb and very nice tea can be brewed from it.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 9:41 AM on August 12, 2023

Oh, and if anyone knows the source for this story, if there is one, that would be interesting.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:39 AM on June 22, 2023

Hahaha! No, I haven’t thought about it in decades, but I can see how the post comes across that way. Not long after I heard this story, I learned the real story of his death. I was reminded of this story because I saw a phone fall down and break.

When I think back, I have a memory that this was supposed to have come out of a biography, and the only Elvis biography to have been translated into Icelandic at the time was the ill-thought-of one by Albert Goldman. I’m going… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:58 AM on June 23, 2023

I kinda accidentally did this for a while. I founded a poetry chapbook series that ran for almost a decade, and it was volunteer-run, and most of the poets were publishing their first book. What I found was that it was generally good to meet in a comfortable environment, often a cafe, and chat at first generally, before getting into the text itself. In my experience, what helped the poets most was talking about the finer details, e.g. did they want to say “push a traffic cone over” or “flip a… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:11 AM on June 22, 2023 marked best answer

Tornio in Finland and Haparanda in Sweden are one metropolitan area and have been cooperating extensively for decades. Here’s an article with an overview and here’s their shared tourist website.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:30 AM on June 22, 2023 marked best answer

I’m almost positive this wasn’t an ad, but it could’ve been a short film shown on television in Iceland. These ad compilation clips weren’t shown on tv in Iceland.

The performance was in an old-fashioned grand opera hall or ballet theater.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:46 AM on May 13, 2023

Thank you all! I’ll add citations and delete the proposal, with a note on the talk page.

Thank you especially for clarifying that this wasn’t the formal proposal for deletion. I’ve been using and intermittently editing Wikipedia for nigh on two decades now, but the intricacies of its processes are opaque to me. I thought I would have to mount a defense and editors would vote.

Also, do I understand it correctly that notability isn’t an issue in… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 8:55 AM on April 26, 2023

I've added a bunch of citations to the wikipedia page, hopefully establishing notability, and deleted the proposal for deletion. I will try to tinker with it some more, adding references as I find them. Any and all references you can find will be very much appreciated.

Oh, and Busy Old Fool, the Formenti link brings me to a blocked preview page, can you provide a bit more information so I can add it as a reference?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:02 PM on April 26, 2023

Thank you both, dreamyshade and Busy Old Fool, for all your work! I think it’s not in any danger of being deleted now.

I will tinker with the page this evening and hopefully it’ll then be shipshape and I won’t have to think about it for another fifteen years.

For what it’s worth, my impression is that the Wikipedia editor who proposed it for deletion really did think it wasn’t notable. As offog mentioned above, the phrase “once upon a time” is… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:09 AM on April 27, 2023

I've added the references that Busy Old Fool provided to the Wikipedia entry on Once Upon a Time…

Thank you all again for helping to keep information on this animated series easily accessible in English.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:02 PM on April 27, 2023

The medieval Icelandic sagas, mostly written in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, have plenty of descriptions of clothing and people's reactions to them. From there it's clear that people in that era were very aware of what was fashionable and sought out nicer clothing. There are also items of clothing that are stored away for special occasions, and usually these are fine clothes that came from abroad.

Iceland is far away from continental Europe, and so fashion trends… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:56 AM on April 23, 2023

I’ve tried several games as well as a gamepad testing website, all with the same result.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 6:27 AM on December 25, 2022

As far as I've been able to figure out, Windows is unable to recognize the two gamepads as separate entities, but I haven't been able to find a Windows application that lets me check to see if that's true, or just find an application that allows me to manage multiple controllers.

Anyway, I'll keep working on it.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:55 AM on December 25, 2022

Opening up the Windows gamepad calibrator gives the same result, each controller works just fine on its own, and in both USB ports, but only one works when both gamepads are plugged in at the same time.

I downloaded USB Device Tree Viewer. When I plug the first gamepad in, I can watch it get assigned to port 2 on one of the USB hubs as “Microsoft Xbox 360 Controller for Windows - HID”, and when I plug the other in, at first it’s identified as “Nintendo Pro controller -… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:22 PM on December 25, 2022

Yes! As long as I use the home button to switch one of them to “directinput” and leave the other on “xinput”, then Windows recognizes them as separate devices. Thank you, TimHare, for saving Christmas!
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:18 PM on December 25, 2022

"How to organize my projects across my day, and week, so that I'm staying on top of each client's project but don't feel like I'm slammed."

I used to have that feeling all the time, just feeling completely slammed. I'm primarily a writer, but I've been an editor too, so I know how brain intensive that kind of work can be. Even though I'm working about as much now, it's gotten a lot better.

What changed for me is that I now have an… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:54 AM on October 16, 2022

Have you looked at the AGM M6? When I was looking into feature phones it seemed like a fairly good choice, but maybe a bit pricier than what you’re looking for. From memory, it does most of the things you want.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:09 AM on September 24, 2022

What an annoying set of faults! Sorry for steering you towards such a lemon.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:53 PM on October 12, 2022

I don’t generally write science fiction, but the last novel I wrote had some knotty science at its core, and so I had to read a lot about the science and history of time to get it right. One thing that took me a long time to figure out was that I didn’t need to be systematic in my reading, that it was better if I just followed my interests and notions within the bounds of my topic, and let the story be shaped by what I learned, rather than trying to learn according to what I thought were the… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:53 AM on June 14, 2022

Partly prompted by your examples, but what leapt to mind was the excellent Makioka Sisters by Junichirō Tanizaki. It’s an absolutely remarkable novel, that mostly takes place on inside surfaces, the interiors of rooms, and in the emotions of its protagonists. That said, Tanizaki never dwells on scenes, but events happen at a fairly regular pace, small though they often are. From what I understand, it was his attempt at blending together the European realist novel with the monogatari tradition… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:22 AM on June 14, 2022

Do you mean someone who’s a jack-of-every-specific-subset-of-a-trade, but master of no single aspect?

The term for a professional writer who can be depended on to write whatever, and doesn’t have any kind of specialty, is “hack”, which has gradations of pejorativeness, depending on context.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:58 AM on April 14, 2022

Thanks! That’s indeed the story.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:16 PM on January 20, 2022

I showed this question to a friend of mine who’s deep into board games, and he thought it might be the Battlegame Books series by Andrew McNeil.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:19 PM on January 7, 2022

These are all very useful suggestions, and please keep them coming.

So far she’s symptom free, but that NYC Covid care package is very helpful to know about (link here).
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:53 PM on December 26, 2021

After making some discreet enquiries, I opted for ordering basket of treats from a local chocolatier.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:01 AM on December 28, 2021

If you like Hari Kondabolu, I should mention the venerable and always funny podcast The Bugle, where he’s a regular guest. It’s hosted by Andy Zaltzman (brother of Helen) and covers recent news events. Since they have regular guests from all over the world, it has a broader focus than most comedy podcasts.

Oh, and since I’m mentioning a broader focus, I can’t help but recommend The Lit Pickers, a podcast about books in the widest sense (e.g. a recent episode was about… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 6:42 AM on November 1, 2021