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<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

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

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

Despite efforts to raise new funds, SPD simply couldn’t afford to go on: “SPD lost hundreds of thousands in grants in the past few years as funders moved away from supporting the arts.”

I worked for a little while in a bookstore in the US, and had friends who owned or managed bookstores. One thing that surprised me was finding out that such a large proportion of US literary culture was distributed through a non-profit, that an incredibly important… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:30 AM on April 2, 2024

I’m glad that there’s a good representation of Chinese nominees. I’m still furious about how Chinese nominees were tossed off the shortlist of last year’s Hugos, seemingly because Dave McCarty wanted English-language works to win.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:08 PM on March 29, 2024

In a comment to the File 770 post that I claim sanctuary linked to, Abigail Nussbaum says: “In case it had slipped some people’s attention, on the very day McCarty was ejected from Eastercon, we learned that a 2024 Hugo nominee declined a spot on the ballot because they could no longer trust the award after 2023’s shenanigans.”

This has completely slipped me by. Which nominee declined a spot on the ballot because they didn’t trust the Hugo Awards anymore?
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:25 AM on March 31, 2024

I'd seen the 'Dumbest Boy Alive' video before but had never noticed that Jon texts himself a YouTube link at one point. The video has been removed from the internet, but the Internet Archive still has it and it's a slightly longer version of the Pretty Good episode about the Music City Miracle.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:12 AM on March 28, 2024

bq: It’s why ‘the mystery of the Trinity’ is attractive - of course 1 =! 3, that’s the point. It’s like trying to visualize the fourth (spatial) dimension.

A trinity sounds counterintuitive, but it’s not so difficult to think of examples of real world trinities. One obvious example is words. A word when it is thought, a word when it is spoken, and a word when it is written, is in each case the same word, but each is still three distinct things.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:15 AM on March 30, 2024

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Viðey is an island just off the coast of Reykjavík. In the late 80s, Richard Serra was commissioned to do a piece in the city, and he opted to do it on the island. The pieces are dotted around one end of it, and they're really striking to walk around, framing the surroundings, and functioning almost like doorways. They're very meditative, or at least have that effect on me whenever I walk around Viðey.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:41 PM on March 28, 2024

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I live in Finland, which is very much a karaoke culture, there’s even a 24-hour karaoke bar in downtown Helsinki, but I’ve felt a bit out of the culture because essentially all I can sing are English-language songs.

One resolution during the early part of this year was to learn my favorite Finnish perennial hit well enough to be able to sing it at karaoke.

It’s funny, I’ve never really thought to consider that karaoke… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:57 PM on March 16, 2024

I stopped shopping at Amazon a decade and a half ago because I like having bookstores near me, but the year before last I needed to buy something that was only available through them.

Out of curiosity I browsed around the site for a bit, or rather tried to browse, and found it remarkably difficult. Their whole thing used to be discoverability, and that seemed to have gone by the wayside. Whatever innovations they’d made I algorithmic sorting and searching didn’t make it… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:19 PM on March 11, 2024

w.fugawe: The internet has always had quality issues. It's easy for anyone so inclined to have their say and to get it out there. What's sad is that they have nothing much to say but that's not going to stop them. They insist on sharing. (Sort of like '.' here)

Unless you’re talking about something different, I’ve always thought the obit post period was a really respectful way to mark that a MeFite is indicating that a person’s death has meaning for… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:18 AM on March 12, 2024

Oh wow, UbuWeb changed my life. When I was a teen in Iceland, it could be so hard to find the avant-garde weirdness I was attracted to, and there was so much available even by the time I found it, which would probably have been 1999-2000. This archive capture is really giving me a falling-through-time feeling.

I'm sad that it's no longer being updated, but extremely happy that it will be preserved.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:58 AM on March 8, 2024

If Greedo shooting first is now canon then this also canon. I will not be taking questions at this time.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:35 AM on March 7, 2024

Mr. Bad Example: What's really going to blow British people's minds is that Kylie Minogue was a one-hit wonder in the US.

I'm sorry, but chart pedantry needs me to point out that she had two top ten hits in the US, The Loco-Motion and Can't Get You Out of My Head. Admittedly, nothing like the cultural omnipresence she's had in the rest of the English-speaking world.

One weird consequence of that was that when Zadie Smith based… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:28 AM on March 4, 2024

Damn, that's annoying. Apparently it was announced three days ago that Max would be rolling out in France later this year, so they may have pulled that.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:15 PM on February 29, 2024

And the new episode is online.

This has really revolutionized my Monday lunchtime.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:59 AM on March 4, 2024

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posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:41 PM on March 3, 2024

hippybear: I see someone else also watched the Karen Carpenter vs John Bonham video that was released recently.

Oh damn, I wish I had, because I'd've included it in the post.

Here's that video by YouTuber TJR, comparing Bonham and Carpenter, because of an intemperate outburst by the former about being ranked below the latter on a Playboy list of best drummers.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:23 PM on March 3, 2024

I’ve been enjoying Modes of Thought in Anterran literature. It’s not perfect, with some jarring moments if you’re familiar with ancient history and academic historians, but what’s good about it is very, very good. There aren’t many successful entries in the genre of Borgesian horror, but this one hits the target it’s aiming for. This is probably the only audio-drama I’ve enjoyed for more than five or six episodes.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:03 AM on March 3, 2024

interrogative mood: Omitted from the future presented in the Saturday Review, but very much circulating in 1974: Population Bomb

The Population Bomb is a racist tract whose every prediction has proved embarrassingly wrong. For an entertaining and thorough run-through of the book I recommend Michael Hobbes’ and Peter Shamshiri’s episode on it on their podcast If Books Could Kill.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 8:43 AM on February 27, 2024

Russia’s Sber confirms list of over 250 books removed from online marketplace due to ‘LGBT propaganda’ law, including works by Dostoevsky and Stephen King.

That Putin's regime has reached the point where they're banning a book by Dostoevsky is something fucking else. I honestly thought I couldn't be surprised anymore.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:27 AM on February 25, 2024

Ukrainian-American miliatry analyst Michael Kofman takes stock of the war at the two year mark on the War on the Rocks podcast. He isn't terribly optimistic. On a similar note, James Meek has a big article in the latest issue of the London Review of Books [archive link], where he goes over the military situation at some length. He also addresses some of the narratives that have taken hold in the West. Excerpt: There’s a self-comforting argument made by some in the West which holds that Putin… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:55 PM on February 24, 2024

Oh hey, physicsmatt, once of this parish, makes an appearance.

What a fascinating story, I hope the researchers gain access to the data.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 6:59 AM on February 24, 2024

Translator Yilin Wang (whose struggle to get the British Museum to credit her I posted about last year) has written a Bluesky thread about the blogpost by an editor of the magazine Science Fiction World which McCarty referred to as a “slate”. The whole thread is worth reading, but let me excerpt her translation: During previous years, the Hugo Awards were always dominated by speculative fiction from the Anglosphere. Recently, as more attendees from non-Anglophone regions become members of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:45 PM on February 18, 2024

Charting the Cliff: An Investigation Into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones. Here's the executive summary: The nomination statistics for the 2023 Hugo Awards (conducted by the Chengdu Worldcon Committee) were released on January 20 2024. The release had been unusually delayed for several months. Once released, the document raised numerous questions among Worldcon members and Hugo Award finalists. Most notably, several potential finalists had been… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:55 AM on February 23, 2024

I haven't finished reading this incredibly charming article but I just wanted to say that the factoid that Michael Shannon was in Groundhog Day (his feature film debut no less) and that it is a memorable bit part (though all the bit parts in that film are memorable) absolutely made my day. I ran into the next room where my friend, a film nerd, was working and I blurted out this factoid and she was just as excited as me. Anyway, back to Michael Idov's wonderful article.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 9:38 AM on February 22, 2024