MetaFilter

That looks like an interesting list, and the albums I've listened to are indeed good. Thanks for posting it, hippybear!

One thing I've been struck by in recent days, looking at English-language "best songs/albums" lists online is how similar they are. For instance, more than half of the Guardian's 20 best songs of the year are on Pitchfork's 100 best songs lists. It's nothing new that critical opinion has tended to herd towards the same works of art, but until… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:31 AM on December 5, 2023

Oh, and to stop being grumpy and get into the spirit of the post, the album released this year that I've listened to the most is certainly Lana Del Rey's Do You Know There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd? with Blur's The Ballen of Darren being a close second.

But if I had to pick one album that's most got under my skin, it would be Aperture by Hannah Jadagu.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:50 AM on December 5, 2023

morspin: Thought I'd see Sudan Archive there, but maybe she was more last year than this year. What's a year anyway?

Yeah, I made the same mistake. My first comment was going to be “what where’s Natural Brown Prom Queen”, but then I checked the date and saw that it came out last year. I listened to her music a lot this year, and saw her live – the show was fantastic – so I’ll probably always associate her with 2023 in my head.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:22 PM on December 5, 2023

I have a friend whose play was yoinked-with-not-much-of-a-twist and turned into a mystery miniseries by a big production company, and sold to a bunch of TV stations all over the world. My friend sued but had to give up because the legal process was too expensive, so that beginning clip about how Harris Brewis couldn't find a more recent example than one from the 70s felt very ooph. Ooph.

One thing that my friend had to spend a lot of time doing was explaining to people… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:06 AM on December 4, 2023

There’s a Reddit thread where people are making recommendations and also contributing additional plagiarisms that they find in the videos of Internet Historian and James Somerton.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:28 PM on December 4, 2023

Old cases are now being brought up, like when the podcast Chilluminati plagiarized historian Jonathan M. Katz last year.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:09 AM on December 5, 2023

On his other channel HBurgerGuy Brewis has posted a 20-minute supplemental video called Iilluminaughtii and the perils of lazy video essays which pretty much explains itself, but is still fairly jaw-dropping.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:15 AM on December 5, 2023

This may be common on Reddit, but I was shocked to see comments by AI-bots on the HBomberguy thread about the episode, specifically a product summary about the book The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War on Homosexuals.

Absolutely not the time, topic and place, even if there were ever a time, topic or a place for garbage LLM nonsense.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:02 AM on December 5, 2023

“strongholds of vegetarianism Austria, Denmark and Sweden”

I’d like to confirm that all the Nordic countries (with the exception of Greenland and the Faroe Islands) are more veggie than average, ranging from 10-12% of the total population. I didn’t know that Austria was similar, but that makes sense. I think I’ve seen bacon-flavored chips in Iceland recently, but I can’t be sure because it’s been long enough since I’ve eaten red meat that bacon smells like turpentine to… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:34 AM on December 5, 2023

Amelia Tait wrote an earlier article about potato chip flavors and mentioned Tayto and Murphy, but yeah, it's a bit odd not to mention that in this article too.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 6:10 AM on December 5, 2023

That was significantly better than I expected. That's a really well argued video, and dovetails with things I've been thinking about for years.

Way back in 2006, film critic Mark Kermode talked about the "death of the art of narrative cinema", which he initially blamed on computer games (a causal link he's later said he was wrong about). Here's the core of Kermode's article: While popular movies were once dominated by ripe melodramas (All that Heaven Allows,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:27 PM on December 2, 2023

If someone saying he was a time traveler had told me in the 1998 that by the year 2023 people wanted John Carmack to shut up more and John Romero to say more, I'd've said: "what is it like to plug your brain into the consensual hallucination of cyberspace, and how many people live on Mars, and have the aliens … wait, Carmack's the annoying one now and Romero's the basically okay guy who lacks a certain perspective, yeah right, a lot can change in twenty five years but that's just… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:59 PM on December 1, 2023

This is incredibly fascinating! I got totally lost in looking at videos of sand drawing online. This one is my favorite. It features Edgar, and the subject of the drawing, which he tells the story of, is the enslavement of Pacific islanders by the British in the 19th century.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:02 PM on December 1, 2023

The Wikipedia entry on the album has the full writing credits. Also, full disclosure, Brynjólfur Jóhannesson, one of the singers of Brestir og brak, is my great-grandfather.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:11 PM on December 1, 2023

some of you may regret that we won’t have Kissinger to kick around anymore

but friends, we have shovels
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:00 PM on November 29, 2023

In my circuit of various websites chronicling the truly sickening amount of death and destruction that Kissinger was responsible for, I stumbled on a speech he gave in 2007, recounting when he was part of a US Army unit that liberated the Hanover-Ahlem subcamp of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp.

In case you think I’m presenting this as a “not everything Kissinger did was evil” data point, that’s the not the case at all. What I find remarkable is that he had to confront… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:12 AM on November 30, 2023

It’s been mentioned a couple of times, but I just came across the full quote from Gore Vidal’s memoir about running into Kissinger at the Vatican (the Agnellis are a family of Italian industrialists): The Agnellis had taken over the newly restored Sistine Chapel for an evening; then dinner for 150 in the Hall of the Statues, a brilliant long room with statues in niches like front-line troops poised to defend Olympus from the Titans. Among the crude Titans was Henry Kissinger. In the next few… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:51 AM on December 1, 2023

.

She clearly made Washington DC a more interesting place. Making the world richer in culture and art is a great way to spend your life, and I’m glad she made the most of her opportunity to do so.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:19 PM on November 30, 2023

Huh, I thought I was au fait with the history of blogging, having been a reader of Justin Hall’s links.net in the mid-90s, but I’d never heard of Ranjit Bhatnagar. I added information about him to the Wikipedia entry on blogs.

That I learned something new in the article’s second paragraph bodes well, and I can’t wait to get back to it, but unfortunately writing a single, properly cited paragraph on Wikipedia consumed my lunchtime. I remember listening to Megan Marz, the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:10 AM on November 26, 2023

This was a really interesting essay. I think Megan Marz is absolutely correct about autofiction being close to blogs. The positive spin would be that those writers wanted to bring some of the energy of blogging, its immediacy and intimacy, to their writing. The counter-take is that writers wanted to take what were essentially blogposts and dress them up as fiction.

Personally, I think autofiction misunderstood both the appeal of blogging, which is the feeling that… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:24 PM on November 27, 2023

I’ve watched about 45 minutes and this is a phenomenal documentary. Thanks for posting it, cashman!
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:20 PM on November 27, 2023

If, like me, you’re fascinated by Wikipedia and the production of historical knowledge, his latest video, How One Man Rewrote 1000 Years of History is really fascinating.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:00 AM on November 27, 2023

.

There’s a kind of minimalism that starts from the idea ‘what if we take all the aspects of an art form, except the last thing we can’t take away because then we’d have nothing’.

Hennix’s Electric Harpsichord is like that. There’s no melody, there’s no rhythm or chords. What it has is tone, and then Hennix figured out what could be done starting from that point. I find it really beautiful.

I’m glad Hennix lived long… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:18 PM on November 26, 2023

I was surprised to find that I had seen most of these films, as I don’t really think of myself as a Fincher fan. I wouldn’t dispute putting Zodiac up top, it is a great film, but I feel that the writer doesn’t understand Fight Club. It’s a comedy, first and foremost, from its “Office Space” beginnings to its destroying capitalism finale. I thought it was hilarious at the time, and was really baffled when I started running into guys my age who took its ideas of “fight clubs” seriously. I still… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 8:36 AM on November 26, 2023

Once, when I was living Providence, Rhode Island, I came home only to be greeted by my neighbor who beckoned me over to the backporch. An adult wild turkey was just hanging out, walking slowly and deliberately around the yard like a baron inspecting the work of his groundskeepers. I’d never seen one before in the flesh, and he was enormous and stately. After a while our next-door-neighbors’ pair of loud, aggressive dogs caught whiff of this unexpected visitor and they rushed to the fence and… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:55 AM on November 26, 2023

I think there are two fairly obvious contributing factors, that play into this. The first is that the hipster subculture goes mainstream in the early 00s, with its focus on reusing stuff and handcrafts, and no other subculture has since eclipsed it. It’s not even really a subculture anymore, it’s just the culture.

The second factor is that 20 years ago cellphones have become non-negotiable parts of modern life, and that eats a good chunk of young people’s disposable… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 8:54 AM on November 24, 2023

I think St. Oops and rednikki are referring to Hipster – The End of Western Civilization by Douglas Haddow and its ensuing thread.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:06 AM on November 24, 2023

And here’s the MetaFilter thread about Anderson’s article.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:27 PM on November 24, 2023

One thing I wonder about is whether this has something to do with more restrictive gender roles for straight men and women. Frowner and phunniemee’s observations above about the disappearance of short hair on straight women is astute, and I think similar patterns can be seen with men, where anything that could be considered flamboyant has been excised from mainstream menswear. That happens slowly over the course of the 90s, and by the early 00s it’s almost completely gone.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:57 AM on November 25, 2023

I agree, pyramid termite.

Philosopher Isaiah Berlin had a lovely parlor game of an essay where he posited that all artists could be classified as either hedgehogs or foxes, based on an ancient Greek line of poetry that said that foxes know many things but that the hedgehog knows only one big thing.

Takashi Mizutani, unlike Neil Young (a fox if there ever was one), only had one big idea in his life, but he explored that idea as fully and thoroughly as it could be explored.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:18 AM on November 23, 2023

I finally tracked down the origin of the "restoring an ancient Buddhist statue" quote, it comes from the liner notes to the Citta' '93 album, which some kind soul has posted on Reddit. Kubota's description of how he remastered the album is fascinating.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 7:57 AM on November 23, 2023

The other day I saw a photo of John F. Kennedy at a 1963 White House thanksgiving celebration, pardoning a turkey that had a sign around its neck which said “Good Eating, Mr. President!”

“That’s clearly not real,” I thought, given that in 1963 Thanksgiving was in the week after JFK was shot, and that furthermore it was the elder Bush who started the tradition of issuing a presidential pardon to a turkey before Thanksgiving.

Au contraire, it turns… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:30 AM on November 22, 2023

Wezley Buell Frazier, the coworker who got Lee Harvey Oswald his job at the Book Depository, and drove him to work 60 years ago, is still alive, I believe. He'd be about eighty.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:47 AM on November 22, 2023

mumimor: This is so complicated.

To the peoples of the perpetrators, genocide is always a complicated story, because they have to answer the question "how did human beings we consider us… how did we… commit such an awful crime?" To understand that is a long, involved process, that requires thinking yourself into a truly horrific mindset, and see that people who look like you, talk like you, and live where you live, could be capable of evil.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:48 AM on November 20, 2023

mumimor: This is factually wrong: the Danish government did not sexually assault or sterilize any women at all. They systematically enforced the use of IUDs on Greenlandic children which was abusive, horrible and wrong, but is neither sexual assault nor sterilization. Most of these thousands of girls grew up to have children and in many cases significant influence on the development of their country.

If you had read the articles I linked to in my… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 3:42 AM on November 22, 2023

.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:18 PM on November 19, 2023

A stray mention of a neglected writer in another article on Kathleen Sully, one Phyllis Paul, led me to discover that she didn’t have a Wikipedia page. Inspired by this post and Brad Bigelow of Neglected Books I decided to remedy that.

Thankfully, she’s being published again now. A scholar Glen Cavaliero, was the only one to keep her name in the discourse for decades, and he seems to have been instrumental in her first republication. She looks like a fantastically interesting writer.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 9:27 AM on November 17, 2023

Not much happened today, thank goodness, which gave the authorities an opening to let people return briefly to their homes to collect their most important belongings and rescue their pets and other animals. Companies were also allowed into town to get valuables out. It looks like almost all animals have now been evacuated.

In terms of the magma, the options seem to be four. Here they are in order of likelihood (if I understood the geologists correctly)… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:44 PM on November 13, 2023

Here’s a video interview about what’s going on in the town, in English, with geologist Gregory de Pascale, taken inside of Grindavík.

More on the English language RÚV liveblog.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 9:59 PM on November 13, 2023

Over the last few days, people have been going to their homes, escorted by search-and-rescue volunteers, to collect their most important belongings, and any animals that were left behind. From what I understand, the pluponderance of inhabitants will have done so by the end of the day. Companies were also allowed back into town to rescue equipment, material, and their products.

Various financial things are being set in order. People who can’t work will receive… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:51 AM on November 16, 2023

Not much in the way of news so far today, except that magmatic gas has been detected, confirming that the magma is near the surface, and geologists are still expecting an eruption in the next few days. Meanwhile, the Guardian’s Nordic correspondent, Miranda Bryant, had a good article about the inhabitants of Grindavík and how they’re holding up. Excerpt: Some people say they could not go back, even if it is deemed safe, for fear of the threat returning. Others, despite their trauma, are… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:01 AM on November 17, 2023

This is a really good piece, but I wanted to add a footnote to this statement: “This year, the duo’s fifth album, 2003’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, was certified platinum for the 13th time, making it the best-selling rap album in history.”

Because the Recording Industry Association of America, the organization that doles out platinum certifications, counts by number of discs per album. So a double album like Speakerboxxx/The Love Below gets twice the number of platinum… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:31 PM on November 16, 2023

box: It brings me no joy to observe that you missed the person with the third-best-selling rap album (in the US) of all time, Kid Rock.

oh no now I must sign up yet again for a session with Lacuna to erase from my mind all memories of Kid Rock
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:47 PM on November 16, 2023

My mom researches why people choose certain careers and jobs. In the 90s, she surveyed kids in Iceland, mostly 15 year olds. She had these questions on her survey about what kinds of music they listened to, and they were intended mostly as a way of getting an idea for which subcultures kids belonged to.

Unexpectedly she found that music taste was one of the most closely correlated factors to career desires. That is, if you knew what music they listened to, you could… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 2:07 PM on November 16, 2023

I love Emily of New Moon. It is an absolutely brilliant novel. Emily Bird Starr is such a complex literary creation, and one of the best depictions I can recall of being a child with dreams of being an author. Her writings, which appear in the text, are both convincingly juvenile, with clear influences, but also have an individual spark, or flash, to them. No one who’s read the Anne-books will be surprised to find that the storyworld is brilliantly drawn, but I agree with Elizabeth Egan that the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:34 PM on November 15, 2023

Virago, a British publisher, does a lovely paperback edition. I think Tundra Books publishes the Emily series in the US and Canada. I believe that only the first book is out of copyright, Emily Climbs and Emily’s Quest are still copyrighted.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 8:52 AM on November 16, 2023

jacquilynne: I am in Canada, where the copyrights for her published works would have all expired together based on the year she died.

I was even wronger than that. I had the dates of publication completely wrong in my head, and didn’t look it up because I “knew”. All three are out of copyright. I’m sorry for being misinformative!
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:55 AM on November 16, 2023

There are two places called Swineshead in the UK, so he can choose whichever he thinks is prettier.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:14 AM on November 14, 2023

tomsk: Things got worse after he resigned in large part because he immediately ran away from the mess he created, as you'd expect from a spoilt coward.

To be fair to Cameron, the plan was that his resignation would be followed by a three-month-long leadership contest, during which time Cameron would’ve prepared the ground for the incoming prime minister, and the incoming prime minister could prepare her positions, but then Andrea Leadsom stuck her… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:42 AM on November 14, 2023

Horace Rumpole: I don’t think I know the part about messing with the recordings.

This was a while ago, but my recollections is that she made little featurettes around the ads on the show, where the ads were just excuses for more fun stuff, but when Gimlet got new advertisers, they ripped out the featurettes and jammed in new ads.

Admittedly, it’s a smaller sin than being racist assholes to your staff, but there’s something… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 12:02 PM on November 13, 2023