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It's a head in profile. The c is the nose, the " is the eyes, the , is the mouth and the ) is the back of the head: c",)
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:21 AM on April 15, 2012

I also didn't pick up on it at first. They might have been around for a while and I just haven't seen them for what they are, but just dismissed them as nonsense.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:22 AM on April 15, 2012

Actually, I see from the Urban Dictionary entry you linked to, SillyShepherd, that they've been around at least since 2008.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:25 AM on April 15, 2012

Yeah, that's a good point about ISO-Latin-1. I'm Icelandic and have Facebook friends in other European countries. Both ° and ¨ are standard on several keyboard layouts. c¨.) was used by an Icelandic friend, but I'm not sure about the other ones. I feel like if the head-in-profile emoticon was an Icelandic-only thing and has been around from 2008, I would've heard about it before.

Also, as a complete sidebar, I just realized that this emoticon style reminds me of Ziggy.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:20 AM on April 15, 2012

This isn't getting me closer to finding an origin, but I was talking to a friend about this who's very involved with gamer culture, and she has never seen the Ziggy style smiley. But she came up with this, a piggy: c"\/)~
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:26 PM on April 15, 2012

Ooh! SymbolHound found seven results for c",) and all by the same guy on StackOverflow. That guy is from Norway. There were some more results for c'',) (two apostrophes instead of a quotation mark) though most of these are doubles. The one person on StackOverflow who used that was from South Africa. Symbolhound found nothing for the other ones.

Some of these examples are pretty old, the oldest I found was from 2009. I'm tempted to think that this might be most… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:29 PM on April 15, 2012

My favorite Velvet Underground album is White Light/White Heat, but I can kinda understand why people wouldn't like it (they'd be wrong not to, but to each his own and all that). However, I don't know why What Goes On isn't a up there as an unquestioned classic alongside Heroin, Sweet Jane and the rest.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:29 AM on March 25, 2012

Oh, speaking of underappreciated Radiohead songs... Pearly might be my favorite Radiohead song, and it's not very well known.

And speaking of 90s British groups, my favorite song of all time just might be End of a Century. It's not their best known song (though hardly unknown), but it's a song I never ever get tired of, and haven't for nearly two decades now.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:11 PM on March 26, 2012

This article about R.E.M. mentioned how severely underrated Binky the Doormat is, which I agree with. R.E.M. have a long history and a ton of buried gems. Pretty much all of the album Up qualifies, one example being Walk Unafraid.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:44 PM on March 29, 2012

Yeah, that's definitely "coffee," and "of print" seems very plausible. The more I listen the more convinced that it's "All these people make me so happy." So now the only mystery is what "candy bar" has been replaced with in the later version of the chorus. To me it sounds like "nothing but a smashy bar" or "splashy par" or "fashion car," but nothing seems right.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:13 PM on March 20, 2012

I still can't hear "candy bar" but what with all the stuff that's going on in the track, your argument is persuasive, soundguy99. I think I'll leave it at that, but if it continues to bug me, I'll e-mail Roberto Cacciapaglia (or at least his webmaster).
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:48 AM on March 28, 2012

Hauntology is a genre that some of my friends have been very excited about for the last couple of years. It comes out of the UK, but it's spread around enough for me to hear of it independently from people in Iceland and the US. One of my friends wrote a good blogpost on it two years ago when it was new and fresh but it has spread to mainstream publications, even making an appearance in Wired last year.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:00 AM on March 27, 2012

I'm an author in a very different kind of market from the American YA one (Icelandic, FYI) and s I don't have any concrete advice for you regarding that aspect. That said, I do want to is echo changeling's "do you feel comfortable communicating with him?"

Do you feel you can go to your agent (or call him) and talk to him about your worries about your working relationship? I feel like I can communicate easily with everyone at my publisher and I have the kind of… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:32 AM on March 22, 2012

I came here to mention Delany, but I see he's already been mentioned, so I'll mention William Gibson. Joanna Russ is also quite good.

Of the old school Theodore Sturgeon is good.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:53 AM on March 21, 2012 marked best answer

We Find Wildness casts a wider net than just painting, but it's my favorite contemporary art blog.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 6:02 PM on March 20, 2012

There's a lot of goodness mentioned so far, the only other things I can think of are Jackie-O Motherfucker, Sunburned Hand of Man, Ruins and Arab on Radar.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:28 PM on March 19, 2012

Have you seen Marebito? I have a friend whose an Asian horror film fan and he's shown me a bunch of Asian horror films, but that's the only one that has stayed with me.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 6:04 PM on March 18, 2012

I have a vague feel that the song has something to do with the decline of a town, but I'm not sure, but it sprang into my head while I was reading about literature which dealt with people moving out of small rural towns into bigger cities. Also, the singer is from the US or Canada.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:31 PM on March 12, 2012

Yes! It is indeed Star Witness by Neko Case. The version that was knocking about in my head was this beautiful cover that was posted to The Blue last December. Thanks shushufindi and random thoughts.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:46 PM on March 12, 2012

Code inconnu, more than most films I've ever seen, has stayed with me. I couldn't analyse exactly why, but it lives in my head like few other films, even though at the time that I saw it, I didn't realize how greatly it affected me.

It's also worth going back in time. Modern French cinema stems from the New Wave, and Truffaut is the best entrance point into that, I feel. Jules et Jim is a great film (a scene from it appears in Amelie) but 400 Blows is great too.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 8:42 PM on March 10, 2012 marked best answer

Write longhand. No backspace key. Then you can edit the text when you type it up. Thereby you separate those two functions of writing. I'm someone who rewrites as I write my first draft, which works for me, but the way I do it is write longhand first and then edit while I type up my text.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 6:17 AM on March 9, 2012

deathpanels: I really do care about this project and now that I've bitten off a sizable chunk, I want to finish it. Does the word count milestone make sense for pacing? Should I write in the mornings or in the afternoon? Where do I set the next milestone, if I don't know how long I really want this to be?

Different writers have different ways of working. For instance, China Miéville sets each chapter a certain word-count minimum and writes to fit that.… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:09 PM on March 5, 2012 marked best answer

Yeah, Romeo and Juliet is fairly straightforward, I wouldn't worry about it. One thing I'd point out to them, maybe not before, but perhaps after, is that Juliet is the most active character in the play. Romeo gives up and gets mopey but Juliet is the one with drive and determination. Yes, things do turn out badly in the end for the couple (though not for the city of Verona, because the Montagues and Capulets kiss and make up) but Juliet is a strong, active character. Literature is sadly often a… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 6:37 PM on February 29, 2012 marked best answer

I read Moon Palace and Hand to Mouth, both by Paul Auster, back to back when I was 17. After I was done reading them I knew I wanted to be a writer. 14 years later that's what I do for a living. I should mention a third story I read, just before that, which also helped form that decision, Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers by Lawrence Watt-Evans. It's available in his short story collection Crosstime Traffic.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:56 PM on February 27, 2012

This is a fairly common motif. The only one I can think of that hasn't already been mentioned is that Icelanders refer to Danes pejoratively as bauni (plural: baunar). Baun means bean and adding the -i/-ar ending turns it into a demonym, i.e. bean person/people. I don't know the origin of that. I can't think of another food-based ethnic slur in Icelandic, though.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 9:43 AM on February 25, 2012

2666 by Roberto Bolaño is exactly about what you are dealing with. It's a hard read, not in terms of style, but in terms of the heaviness of its subject matter and the unremittingness by which it approaches it.

Candide by Voltaire is a more humorous, if no less bleak, take on the same issues.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 9:37 AM on February 25, 2012

Helium pumps, which make the hamster-ball float and possibly stick to the ceiling.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:04 PM on February 24, 2012

Icelanders often switch up v's and w's. There is no w-sound in Icelandic. You'll hear phrases like "wery vell." It usually only happens if the v and the w are close to each other, this rarely happens in isolation. You wouldn't hear something like "ve vent vhale-vhatcing on a vindy day."
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:21 AM on February 22, 2012 marked best answer

caek: Herodotus' Histories

There's a great new translation out. I can't recommend it highly enough.

As for more recent works, Chris Wickham's Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 is pretty stunning in scope and ambition.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:53 AM on February 21, 2012

Herodotus' Histories is a fun read too. There's a great new translation out and if you're interested in that period in history, it's a must read. It's not just history, but also ethnography and sociology and the main thing Herodotus is interested in is the interaction between Greeks and non-Greeks.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:02 PM on February 20, 2012

The things I do when I feel like I'm producing blah (I'm a writer) is to either change the parameters of what I'm doing so that I'm trying to do something I've never done before, and I'm not entirely comfortable doing, or simply change the tools. If I'm having a hard time writing with pen and paper, I'll switch to typing, or change the kind of pen I'm using, or start using a notebook instead of loose sheets.

That said, when I've had serious blocks, they've been solved… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:28 AM on February 20, 2012

Well, he seems at least to have been a source for at least one biography before his own book, according to a New York Times article about him. NYT had another article reviewing his and another book and the impression I get from it is that the reviewer thought it was fake as all heck.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:26 PM on February 12, 2012

The best thing I've found, is to go somewhere with only pen and paper. Coffeehouses are very good for me, something about the combination of coffee and background chatter allows me to focus. For me, the biggest part of writing is staring into space, so I need to stay somewhere for a couple of hours at least if I'm going to get a reasonable amount of writing done, so make sure you pick a café that doesn't kick you out if you dawdle.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:40 PM on February 12, 2012

Roberto Bolaño makes very good use of epigraphs. The Savage Detectives has as its epigraph this fragment of dialogue by Malcolm Lowry:

"Do you want Mexico to be saved? Do you want Christ to be our king?"
"No."

2666 has this, by Charles Baudelaire:

An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.

Both, in an elliptical way, sum up both works perfectly.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:11 PM on February 12, 2012

Yeah, plenty of authors have written texts that ended up being presented in a completely different way in the book. Graphic novelist Don Rosa writes half the story, then stops, figures out an ending and then writes the story backwards towards the halfway point. Kafka's The Trial was written piece by piece, and if I recall correctly, the first and last chapters were written first, and then the rest was sort of filled in as he thought of it (he never quite finished it, though).
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 6:49 AM on February 11, 2012

It's a naming convention in certain congregations, yes, but a few of them are indeed first (ctrl+f first), such as First Baptist Chuch in Providence, which is the First Baptist Church in America.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:55 PM on February 9, 2012

I'll second Providence. It's got a harder edge than Portland and parts of it are run down, but it's more diverse, the food is better and getting to the beach is easy-peasy. Northampton is nice, but it's tiny. I haven't lived in Asheville or Pittsburgh, but I've heard good things about both places.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:26 AM on February 9, 2012

willpie: Or how about Portland, ME? It's even called Portland, for crying out loud. Too far?

Years and years ago I heard a radio show discussing the then new-and-shocking-to-Rhode-Islanders phenomenon of people moving from elsewhere to live in Providence after college. At one point one of the panelists said that Providence was turning into "the Portland of the East Coast." I laughed, then waited for a "well, actually" comment from… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:08 AM on February 9, 2012

Yeah, Providence is basically Portland with more dirt, regrets and flaming skull tattoos.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:43 PM on February 9, 2012

AlliKat75: The sound of it is killing me. It sounds like something a child would say.

I am brought up short whenever I find myself saying "edited it." Some words and phrases can be mildly disorienting. I've found that repeating the phrase or word out loud normalizes it until the strangeness goes away, a sort of reverse version of saying a word so often it starts to lose meaning and sound completely weird.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:41 PM on February 8, 2012

There's an Icelandic saying that goes: Að pissa í skóinn er skammgóður vermir. That translates to: Pissing in your shoe won't keep you warm for long. The meaning is roughly: A short-term solution to a longer-term problem will only compound your troubles.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:27 AM on February 8, 2012

space_cookie: nach mir die Sintflut. German

In French it is "après moi, le déluge," and it's usually attributed to Louis XV. This sentiment has deep roots in western civilization, which blogger Gabriel Laguna traces here.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 9:31 AM on February 8, 2012

What's the best American band/artist to have been big in Japan (or Europe), but unknown in the US?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:44 PM on February 7, 2012

Prior to that Life article, the only things I can find that are called 'The Old Gray Lady' are Nantucket and the White House (or possibly Congress).
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:12 AM on February 3, 2012

I lived in Providence, Rhode Island for five years, and I heard 'preciate it and 'preciate ya quite often, but never I appreciate you. I always parsed 'preciate ya as [I] appreciate your [help].
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:27 PM on February 1, 2012

I read almost all of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives on two long plane-flights.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:30 AM on February 1, 2012

Of the fantasy RPG maps I've always felt that Taladas, one of the continents of the Dungeons & Dragons Dragonlance worlds, was the most striking image. The credits list Dave Sutherland and Dave LaForce as cartographers, but I don't know who of the two designed that map and how much input the designer, David Zeb Cook, had in it.

The in-game reason for the shape of the continent and the lava-sea in the middle of it is that in the history of the Dragonlance world (the… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:45 PM on January 19, 2012

Oh, how could I forget Ursula K. Le Guin! Her website has a collection of maps. I'm especially fond of this one but Earthsea and Gethen are probably the most classic.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:28 AM on January 26, 2012

I should have clarified. I'm aware what it means when the person isn't identified explicitly, e.g. "White House sources declined to speak on the record." What I'm interested in is when the person is identified, as in this article about former White House chief of staff Bill Daley, about whom it is said: "Daley declined to speak on the record for this piece"

Is the reporter, Paul Starobin, saying that Daley spoke with him but that Starobin cannot use… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:42 AM on January 18, 2012

I'm assuming all the positions have been tried, upside down, reversed, standing up, rolling along the floor etc. Often the least intuitive angle yields the best results.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:07 PM on December 17, 2011