MetaFilter

Her aesthetic is very heavily “of the Internet”, but it feels like it’s the Internet of twenty years ago. This reminded me of nothing so much as Salad Fingers.

I really need to watch and listen to more of her work.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:46 PM on May 18, 2024

I’ve been listening to a lot of early Ella Fitzgerald songs lately, and coming across a reference to The Dipsy Doodle created a weird feeling of connection across time, that Laura Perea had also listened to that same song.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:46 AM on May 16, 2024

If, like me, your eyes bulged at the figure of 500 thousand pieces of type being thrown in the river by just one man, Robert Green helpfully works it out in the video linked in the article. That’s a 170 trips, 12-15 pounds each time. That’s literally a metric ton of type.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:08 PM on May 15, 2024

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Earlier this year I went back to her final collection, Dear Life, and found it really profound, in a way that it hadn’t struck me when I first read it. I used to think that the 1982 collection Moons of Jupiter was the place to start with her work, she may be a writer best read backwards, chronologically.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:33 AM on May 15, 2024

In my little corners of the world, the Icelandic government took the unprecedented step of buying arms for Ukraine. Iceland doesn’t have an army, and traditionally has offered non-offensive military aid, for instance by buying medical supplies. This was a bit controversial, but hasn’t been much discussed, at least publicly.

Meanwhile, Finland has absolutely no qualms about arming Ukraine, as to be expected, providinf over two billion euros in military aid in total since… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:19 AM on April 22, 2024

hippybear: I think the leveling of Mariupol, while not involving human beings as the resulting wreckage, is of equal magnitude.

I understand your meaning, but I just wanted to note that thousands and thousands of people died in the siege of Mariupol. Human Rights Watch released their report on the siege earlier this year and it makes for sobering reading.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:32 PM on April 22, 2024

Sergey Radchenko and Samuel Charap wrote an interesting article about the early peace talks between Ukraine and Russia for Foreign Affairs. The main thing that surprises me is that, to my memory, the talks were clearly over after the Bucha and Irpin massacres came to light, but they seem to have kept going for a couple of weeks afterwards. I think Radchenko and Charap overestimate how close the two parties were to a settlement, but it’s still interesting to see where Russia and Ukraine saw… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:52 AM on April 23, 2024

Putin removes Sergei Shoigu as Russia’s defence minister by Pjotr Sauer in the Guardian. Excerpt: Shoigu’s position appeared to have weakened last month when the security services arrested his long-term confidant Timur Ivanov, a deputy defence minister, and charged him with large-scale corruption.

On paper, Sunday’s reorganisation places Shoigu in a position formally considered higher ranking than his role in the defence ministry in what some observers believe is a move… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:42 PM on May 12, 2024

How One Crack in the Line Opened a Path for the Russians by Marc Santora for the New York Times [ungated]. Excerpt: Russian infantry storm across mine-strewn fields on foot and use dirt bikes and dune buggies to try and outrace Ukrainian exploding drones. They attack in armored columns of varying sizes, with large assaults often led by tanks covered with massive metal sheds and equipped with sophisticated electronic warfare equipment to protect against drones. Western observers have dubbed them… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:23 AM on May 14, 2024

Like a lot of people who normally tune in, I haven’t watched this year, and probably won’t tonight either. I’m sure the show will be good, but the EBU’s cack-handed attempts to depoliticize their show has made it so it’s impossible to watch without thinking about the invasion of Gaza. It’s difficult to enjoy silly pop songs when your mind keeps returning to the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:26 AM on May 11, 2024

There might be more absences tonight than just Joost Klein. Icelandic media is reporting that Ireland’s Bambie Thug didn’t show up for practice or the flag carrying thing (translating from Icelandic, don’t know what it’s called in English), and the contestant’s from Switzerland and Greece also didn’t do the flag whatever.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 6:42 AM on May 11, 2024

Until about an hour ago I thought the EBU would be able to pull themselves out of this PR hole, given that it’s an organization made up of media professionals. Then I saw that Swedish public radio is reporting that Jean Philip De Tender, who’s EBU’s director of media, is saying that they have a zero tolerance policy towards workplace misconduct. I can’t imagine that the Dutch delegation, who’re reportedly apoplectic about the situation, are being soothed. I’m honestly starting to wonder if there… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 8:14 AM on May 11, 2024

Käärijä was supposed to announce the points from Finland, but he’s stepped down. There was a kind of weird incident a couple of days ago where the Israeli singer was filmed dancing with him, and he didn’t want to be filmed, and there was fallout. In other Finnish news, this morning protesters gathered in the atrium of YLE, the Finnish public broadcaster, demanding that Finland steps away from the competition.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:13 AM on May 11, 2024

Oh, and also, while there is a real chance that Israel wins the televote, and might win the whole thing, the 40% of the televote thing in Italy might not be particularly representative, if it turns out to be true.

The Big Five countries, which pay more than the other ones, get a by to the final, so audiences are fairly small for the semifinal. Therefore, if voting for Israel in Eurovision has become a cause celebre among the far right, that would be outsized in this case.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:31 AM on May 11, 2024

There were lots of protests in 2012, when Azerbaijan hosted Eurovision, and Loreen, the winner that year, met with human rights campaigners in the country and criticized the government.

That said, I agree that there should be more focus on Azerbaijan than there is.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 6:00 AM on May 14, 2024

Unsurprisingly, Sheba Blake Publishing is well represented. Here’s a blogpost about them, with many examples. Excerpt: Had the whole Sheba Blake collection been a series of random covers, it would make more sense. But someone seems to actually be designing these and picking the images. Are they seeing something in these classic works that the rest of us are missing? Or are they deliberately trying to provoke articles like this as a cynical publicity stunt?

We’d like to… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:56 PM on May 12, 2024

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posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 8:51 PM on May 11, 2024

A week ago I was at a cookout and a young hipster was telling horrifiex me how much he liked Creed and I was instantly transported to my past of being a young hipster telling a horrified older someone else how much I liked Styx and Hall & Oates.

Our youthful sins are visited upon us in middle age.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 9:13 AM on May 9, 2024

ashbury: Come Sail Away is ridiculous?

Yes? I mean, yes. And that’s what makes it great. A normal band would’ve written a song about wanting to escape humanity by going out on a boat. An out there band would’ve written a song about a guy wanting to escape humanity by going out on a boat and encountering a host of angels that will whisk him away to heaven. But that wasn’t enough for Styx, no, in Come Sail Away the angels are actually aliens, and he’s… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:36 PM on May 10, 2024

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I read the chapter about him in Our Band Could Be Your Life and concluded that he was unable to see the world from a perspective outside his own, and was pleasantly surprised by how much he grew as a person in the last two decades. It’s an important reminder for myself to examine my own biases and deal with them, but also that you can never write anyone off, because humans are complex and always capable of change.

Mind you, I always thought he… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:37 PM on May 8, 2024

Orangutans are clearly highly intelligent, have complex societies that transmit knowledge across generations, and yet were unable to communicate with them.

I sometimes suspect our galaxy is full of interstellar chitter-chatter between intelligent being but that we just don’t recognize it as such, given that we’re not even able to speak with our fellow great apes.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:33 AM on May 3, 2024

The Onion: Orangutan Stuns Researchers By Using Rogaine To Fix Bald Spot.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:37 PM on May 3, 2024

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Paul Auster had a real profound effect on me. I knew of him early, because my dad really liked his works. Sometime in the early 90s, my dad interviewed him for Icelandic radio, and Auster said he should be in touch when he was in New York. My dad didn’t really think much of it, but once when he was headed to New York for a conference, he sent Auster a letter, and was promptly invited to brunch.

Some years later I read Auster’s novel Moon Palace… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:15 PM on May 1, 2024

Siri Hustvedt made a heartbreaking post on Instagram: I was naive, but I had imagined that I would be the person to announce the death of my husband, Paul Auster. He died at home in a room he loved, the library, a room with books on every wall from floor to ceiling, but also tall windows that let in the light. He died with us, his family, around him on April 30, 2024 at 6:58 PM. Sometime later, I discovered that even before his body had been taken from our house, the news of his death was… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:06 AM on May 3, 2024

Six comedies of John Lyly’s were published together in a duodecimo a few years after the First Folio. That’s pretty close to the complete works, as there only eight plays he’s known to have written.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 9:22 AM on April 29, 2024

I kinda wish The Onion and Clickhole would merge, if only in spirit. In its first couple of decades, the Onion had a real whimsical streak in its satire, even sentimental, which started to fade out after Clickhole was spun off.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:25 AM on April 26, 2024

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posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:11 AM on April 26, 2024

<Moe Szyslak voice> You know what I blame this on the shutdown of? Reader. </Moe Szyslak voice>
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:27 PM on April 23, 2024

Curlie was down for maintenance for a few days at the end of March, but it came back up. I don’t see anything about an outage on the Mastodon page, so hopefully it’s just temporary.

In tracking down the Curlie account I came across the Mojeek Mastodon account, and was surprised to find that the Mojeek search engine is still around. It seems to work pretty well, and it’s still apparently using its own index, and hasn’t signed up with Bing or Yandex.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:53 AM on April 24, 2024

Also, I got curious about Qwant, the French search engine, which I had a vague idea was using Bing. Apparently it’s a hybrid, with a 20 billion page index of its own which it supplements with Bing.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 8:20 AM on April 24, 2024

JHarris: searching for info that's probably on Wikipedia, this isn't such a problem

This is perpendicular to your argument, but I had such a frustrating experience with Wikipedia a couple of days ago. There was a glaring error in an article about an old jazz standard, saying that that the first line of the second verse was the opening line of the song. In the old days of not so long ago, I could’ve just corrected that in a matter of seconds, but the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:11 PM on April 24, 2024

Jebus effing fuck that’s beautiful

I’ll never get tired of looking at pictures taken of space or from space
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:38 PM on April 24, 2024

Watching Dan Stevens and Aubrey Plaza bounce off each other in season one of Legion was a real pleasure. It had a lot of other things going for it, but the interactions of those two actors was absolutely what pushed it over the top, in every sense.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:02 AM on April 24, 2024

I’d watch a movie about this. Heck, I’d watch a TV miniseries.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:39 PM on April 22, 2024

The phrase “after sifting through the Sibelius manuscript archive” was meant to link to this story by Vesa Sirén. He also wrote the pieces linked as “correspondence” and “copyist”. Incidentally, the copyist’s name was Paul Voigt.

And since I’m crediting writers, I should complete the set. The first link is written by Phil Hebblethwaite, “never completed to his satisfaction” by Kari Kilpeläinen, and “burned his manuscripts of it” by Emily E. Hogstad.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:01 PM on April 20, 2024

No, I had no idea about that. I made the post because I stumbled into Rousay’s show last summer where she played songs from this album. The music had really stuck with me so I was excited when I saw that Sentiment had been released.

Having looked up the drama, it seems like a former writer for the Fader got obsessed with Rousay, started stalking her, and had a very public meltdown.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:07 AM on April 20, 2024

Garm: But I've seen this type of (again, correct) analysis to write off the Shallow Pond/Drowning Child experiment, and I'm not ok with that.

The problem with the Singer’s thought experiment is that he reduces everything down to money. The cost accrued for the benefit of saving a child is ruining a pair of shoes, and somehow it’s supposed to follow that the equivalent amount of money can magically save a child at a distance.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:48 PM on April 18, 2024

0xFCAF: How would you describe the causal chain of events where a charity gets organized, gets money, uses the money to buy vaccines and travel to a developing country, gives the vaccines to kids, and then the kids don't die from the disease they got vaccinated against?

I’d describe it as not involving magic in any way.

I’m not criticizing charitable giving, I’m criticizing the logic of Singer’s pond allegory.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:52 PM on April 18, 2024

I have a feeling that if humans still exist thousands of years from now, one of the few people they’ll know about from our era will be John McCarthy, the man who sold a bridge. He’ll live in future pop culture, our civilization‘s Ea-Nasir.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:14 AM on April 18, 2024

“Ariel Sharon, prime minister of Israel from 2001 to 2006, said: ‘I wanted to encourage my soldiers by raping Arab girls as the Palestinian woman is a slave for Jews and we do what we want to her.’”

This is a false quote. It is attributed to an interview Sharon did with a General Ouze Merham, who never existed. This has been circulating since Sharon’s term as prime minister. Here’s a correction from back then. Unfortunately, it keeps circulating.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 8:00 AM on April 17, 2024

Oops! I also meant to link to the original correction that the others reference.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 8:09 AM on April 17, 2024

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I was 13 years old when Waterfalls hit and it sounded like absolutely nothing else on the radio. I was reading mostly science fiction at the time, and for a while after, pop music in those books basically sounded like that in my head. And damn if my 13 year old ass wasn’t basically right about that. That basementful of musicians in Atlanta really created the future.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:50 PM on April 15, 2024

Sting is singing the same Schubert song that Matthias Loibner and Nataša Mirković performed.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 8:37 AM on April 15, 2024

Conan is plugging his upcoming travel show, but it doesn’t really matter.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:00 PM on April 13, 2024

I’m surprised that no one but me had the thought, while watching the interview, that there was some sleight of hand involved. There’s just too much going on, with bottles moving around, half eaten wings being stuffed in pockets, and the joke doctor coming in and out, that it’s possible that some bottles got replaced.

Now, I’m 95% sure Conan just went through with it and did everything for real, but a small part of me wonders if he tricked us all. And, honestly, I wouldn’t mind if he did.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:13 AM on April 14, 2024

nushustu: She was only about 50 years ahead of her time.

That was exactly my reaction too, the first time I heard Connie Converse. I thought for sure she was a contemporary, and not someone who’d vanished nearly fifty years ago.

I think one reason it’s easy to believe she’s still out there somewhere, is that she sounds so current.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:38 PM on April 13, 2024

The 20-times-platinum 90s album recorded in Los Angeles referenced at the end… that has to be Metallica’s black album, right? Which would be kinda funny, given their history with copyright enforcement, that they’d be so careless with their material.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:51 PM on April 12, 2024

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She was either the first or second Language Poet whose work I encountered, and I just had so much reading her stuff. It encouraged me to keep seeking out poetry which stretched the possibilities of meaning and expression, and I’ve had lots of happy times along the way. I’m glad she got a long life, and was appreciated in her time.

Also, I really should go find at least a couple more of her books to read, she wrote a heck of a lot.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:12 PM on April 8, 2024

The last update I could find on the case was that Woods was seeking to go to trial, rather than settle.

People with a connection to Hampshire College will absolutely not be surprised to find out that she’s a graduate.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 9:13 AM on April 4, 2024

In Iceland’s national finals, the format is usually such that the audience votes again between the two top vote getters, and invariably it’s one that’s a bit off-beat and different, and one that’s a by-the-book Eurovision song. The latter usually wins, and so we end up with something that’s okay, but not much more than that. The song we have this year is fine, but what we could’ve sent is a song co-written by Hatari performed by a Palestinian singer who lives in Iceland. The song is about… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:26 PM on April 3, 2024