hilarious non-equivalences

Sep. 20th, 2025 11:19 am
thistleingrey: (Default)
[personal profile] thistleingrey
For me, Charli XCX's remix of Brat fits the same aural resting place as the basic version of Lofi Girl (pro tip: close the chat channel in the right-hand column). Ten years ago, Vienna Teng's Aims sat there, though primarily for heavy-duty XML tasks. Brat is okay even when I'm reading a textbook, unless it's for coding (one of my current classes)---probably because I can't catch more than two words in a row in most dance music, which is a longstanding me problem.

What do you listen to, if at all, when some sort of aural prop would aid your concentrating on something completely unrelated to the sounds?

Touching grass

Sep. 20th, 2025 05:14 pm
oursin: Fotherington-Tomas from the Molesworth books saying Hello clouds hello aky (Hello clouds hello sky)
[personal profile] oursin

I was intending posting a link to a really depressing article in Guardian Saturday about an awful trolling site and the people who seem to have nothing to do but troll on it: but it's not currently online, you are spared.

I was thinking about such people, who seemed to be spending hours of their lives being horrible about other people and trying to dig up dirt on them, did they not have lives? could they not be doing something else?

Like, you know, bringing ghost ponds back to life: An expert team are resurrecting ice age ponds and finding rare species returning from a ‘perfect time capsule’:

The two ponds returning on farmland are the 25th and 26th ice age ponds to be restored by Sayer’s team of academics, volunteers and an enthusiastic digger driver in the Brecks, a hotspot for ancient ponds and “pingos” formed by ice-melt 10,000 years ago. Over the past two centuries, thousands of such ponds have been filled in as land was drained and “improved” for crops. So far, most of the 26 ponds have been revived on land bought by Norfolk Wildlife Trust, which has supported the restoration effort with funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Brecks Fen Edge and Rivers landscape partnership scheme.
But the latest two ponds have been dug out thanks to a Norfolk farmer, who is one of an increasing number of private landowners reviving ghost and “zombie” ponds. New surveys by Sayer’s team have revealed that 22 of the ghost ponds restored since 2022 now support 136 species of wetland plant. This represents 70% of the wetland flora found in more than 400 ponds on Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s Thompson Common, an internationally important nature reserve whose ponds have survived since the ice age.

Admittedly this is not quite the sort of thing that I am up for myself, but this other thing struck rather a chord:

The Hunt: Friction to feel. which is about the culture of searching for music before it was (theoretically) All Online:

The hunt is built upon friction. Friction is good. Friction is healthy. Friction develops adaptation. The hunt is also born of curiosity. The desire to seek and discover something you don’t know, and might never know. In the pursuit of knowledge and experience, you teach yourself about empathy, other perspectives, and mold a person who is resilient and grateful. We lost something along the way in pursuit of efficiency and this idea of saving time for productivity.

It certainly resonates with my own days of book-hunting, and these are not, in fact, past. Was having a discussion the other day in another venue about books (not even terribly Old Books) that we longed to see republished and available at prices less than £££/$$$.

And, of course, as I am occasionally moved to point out on The Soshul Meedjas, most archives are not digitised and online (and mutter mutter a significant % of the ones that are were digitised by proprietary bodies and paywalled), and finding them can still involve Expotitions.

(no subject)

Sep. 20th, 2025 12:28 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] sharpiefan!

am i the weird one here

Sep. 19th, 2025 07:29 pm
wychwood: New Burbage (don't bother) (S&A - New Burbage (don't bother))
[personal profile] wychwood
I was reading an article about, more or less, how to tackle the discrepancies between what you want (short-term) and what you want (long-term) when I stumbled across the line "Everyone has once-worn clothes strewn on the furniture.". I've seen people talk about it as a "problem" sometimes before, but - is that really a common thing that people do?? I am now madly curious.
Poll #33636 floordrobes and other clothing distribution methods
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 27


Do you routinely have part-worn clothes around?

View Answers

Never. Clothes are on my body or in the laundry.
1 (3.8%)

Maybe one or two items
12 (46.2%)

Half a dozen outfits in various stages of wear at any given time
11 (42.3%)

My entire clothing stock is spread around my living space in a quantum superposition of dry laundry not put away and various stages of wear
2 (7.7%)

Do you think it's totally normal to have multiple part-worn items lying around the bedroom etc?

View Answers

Absolutely
10 (37.0%)

It's not ideal but mostly, yes
10 (37.0%)

I wouldn't say normal, but people do it
4 (14.8%)

Why... why would you do that
3 (11.1%)

What's worst

View Answers

Washing clothes every wear
11 (42.3%)

Wearing clothes for multiple days
1 (3.8%)

Not tweaking your outfit every day for the exact circumstances
1 (3.8%)

Clothes
13 (50.0%)


(I wear most of my clothes once before washing them; jumpers and trousers mostly go for a week before washing; at any given time I have both home and outside trousers in use and I might have a jumper around that I'm wearing intermittently, but that's the maximum "part-worn clothes lying around" I get).

Oddnesses of life

Sep. 19th, 2025 07:35 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

That thing happened this week whereby a couple of weeks ago I was looking everywhere for a book I knew I had somewhere (unless maybe I'd lent to somebody sometime and they'd never returned it, it being the biography of an NZ-born sex reformer published by Penguin NZ: and currently available according to bookfinder.com, 2nd hand, from NZ, at PRICES, not to mention, how long would that take?).

And then I was looking for Other Book entirely, in fact just vaguely casting my eye over shelf adjacent to where I was looking for that, and there was That Book, stuck between two other books and way out of any kind of order.

We are not sure that is not, in fact, entirely typical of its subject....

***

I was taking my customary constitutional at lunchtime today, and walking across the grass among the trees, under which there was a certain amount of debris of fallen leaves and twigs (these were not the horse chestnuts that were madly casting conkers on the ground), caught my foot and stumbled slightly, and somebody said, 'Be careful!'

I went off muttering that there is not a lot of point in issuing warnings to be careful after the event, but people do tend to do that, don't they, sigh.

***

I am not sure this is an oddness, but normally, by the time a conference at which I am supposed to be keynoting is only just over a week away, participants will have had at least a draft version of the programme, indicating time the thing is starting, slot they are speaking in, etc.

(I also had to do a certain amount of nudging to discover how long I was expected to Go On for.)

latest spinning

Sep. 19th, 2025 07:19 am
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
Ah, the art yarn of it all. :3

handspun yarn

2-ply from these singles:

Assorted things and stuff

Sep. 18th, 2025 06:00 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

Dept of, inventing the city: Fake History: Some notes on London's bogus past. (NB - isn't Nancy murdered on the steps of a bridge in the 1948 movie of Oliver Twist? or do I misremember.) (And as for the Charing Cross thing, that is the ongoing 'London remaking itself and having layers', surely?)

***

Dept of, smutty puns, classical division: Yet More on Ancient Greek Dildos:

Nelson, in my opinion, has made a solid argument for his conclusions that, while “olisbos” was one of many ancient Greek euphemisms for a dildo, this was not its primary meaning, nor was it the primary term for the sex toy. Rather, this impression has been given by an accident of historiography.

***

Dept of, not silently suffering for centuries: The 17th-century woman who wrote about surviving domestic abuse.

***

Dept of, another story involving literacy (and ill-health): Child hospital care dates from 18th Century - study:

"Almost certainly she was taught to read and write while she was an inpatient."
He suspects just as part of the infirmary's remit was to get its adult patients back to work, by teaching children to read and write it would increase their employment opportunities.

***

Dept of, I approve the intention but cringe at certain of the suggestions: How To Raise a Reader in an Age of Digital Distraction:

Active engagement is crucial. This doesn’t mean turning every book into an interactive multimedia experience. Rather, it means ensuring that children are mentally participating in the reading process rather than passively consuming. With toddlers, this might mean encouraging them to point to pictures, make sound effects, or predict what comes next. With older children, it involves asking questions that go beyond basic comprehension: “What do you think motivates this character?” “How would the story change if it were set in our neighborhood?”

Let's not? There's a point where that become intrusive.

***

Dept of, not enough ugh: Sephora workers on the rise of chaotic child shoppers: ‘She looked 10 years old and her skin was burning’

The phenomenon of “Sephora kids” – a catch-all phrase for the intense attachment between preteen children, high-end beauty stores and the expensive, sometimes harsh, products that are sold within them – is now well established.... The trend is driven by skincare content produced by beauty influencers – many of whom are tweens and teens themselves.... skincare routines posted by teens and tweens on TikTok contained an average of 11 potentially irritating active ingredients per routine, which risked causing acute reactions and triggering lifelong allergies.

(no subject)

Sep. 18th, 2025 09:38 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] auguris and [personal profile] fitzcamel!
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
[personal profile] oursin

What I read

A little while ago Kobo had an edition of CS Lewis's 'Space Trilogy' on promotion, so I thought, aeons since I read that, why not? It turned out to have been not terribly well formatted for e-reader but I have encountered worse, it was bearable. Out of the Silent Planet, well, we do not go to CLS for cosmological realism, do we? But why aliens still so binary, hmmm? (okay, I think there is probably some theological point going on there, mmmhmm?) (though in That Hideous Strength there is a mention of 7 genders, okay Jack, could you expand that thought a little?) I remembered Perelandra as dull, at least for my taste - travelogue plus endless theological wafflery - and it pretty much matched the remembrance. However, while one still sees the problematic in That Hideous Strength (no, really, Jack, cheroot-chomping lesbian sadist? your id is very strange) he does do awfully well the horrible machinations of the nasty MEN in their masculine institutions, and boy, NICE is striking an unexpected resonance with its techbros and their transhuman agenda. Also - quite aside from BEARS!!! - actual female bonding.

Possibly it wasn't such a great idea to go on to Andrew Hickey, The Basilisk Murders (Sarah Turner Mysteries #1) (2017), set at a tech conference, which I think I saw someone recommend somewhere. Not sure it entirely works as a mystery (and I felt some aspects of the conference were a little implausible) - and what is this thing, that this thing is, of male authors doing the police in different voices writing first-person female narrative crime fiction? This is at least the second I have encountered within the space of a few weeks. We feel they have seen a market niche.... /cynicism

Apparently I already read this yonks ago and have a copy hanging around somewhere? I was actually looking for something else by Dame Rebecca and came across this, The Essential Rebecca West: Uncollected Prose (2010), which is more, some odd stray pieces it is nice to have (I laughed aloud at the one on Milton and Paradise Lost) but hardly essential among the rest of her oeuvre.

At the same time I picked up Carl Rollyson, Rebecca West and the God That Failed: Essays (2005), which apparently I have also read before. It's offcuts of stuff that didn't make it into his biography, mostly talks/articles on various aspects that he couldn't go into in as much detail as he would have liked.

On the go

Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918), on account of we watched a DVD of the movie recently. Yes, I have a copy of the book but have no idea where it is. I was also looking for Harriet Hume, ditto.

Up next

Not sure.

(no subject)

Sep. 17th, 2025 09:43 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] hairyears!

Creepy, creepy, creepy

Sep. 16th, 2025 06:14 pm
oursin: Cartoon hedgehog going aaargh (Hedgehog goes aaargh)
[personal profile] oursin

‘I love you too!’ My family’s creepy, unsettling week with an AI toy:

Designed for kids aged three and over and built with OpenAI’s technology, the toy is supposed to “learn” your child’s personality and have fun, educational conversations with them. It’s advertised as a healthier alternative to screen time and is part of a growing market of AI-powered toys.

Can we get a very loud UGH?

I thought I'd linked somewhere to the instructive tale of techbro who made, was it an interactive doll or was it a teddybear for his daughter, that would talk to her, and in very short order she turned the thing off and played with it as Ye Kiddyz have played with dolls since dolls were A Thing (Ancient Sumeria???). Can't find it, however.

Anyone else read Harry Harrison's 'I Always Do What Teddy Says'? which also springs to mind, although that is about plot to subvert conditioning via teddy.

lolnope

Sep. 16th, 2025 04:02 am
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
behold, a spammer

A particularly hilarious example of low-effort spammer/scammer.

Seriously considering how much spam I could effortlessly screen out if I set up my email to automatically delete ANYTHING with the word "Amazon" in it that isn't on a very small (like, a half-dozen people small) whitelist of family and close friends.

(no subject)

Sep. 16th, 2025 09:36 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] copperwise and [personal profile] noveldevice!
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
(cross-posted: [community profile] communal_creators)

earlier:
- part 0: preliminaries
- part 1: brief demo: engraving software (Dorico)



Brief walkthrough of the start of a fake piano sketch in Cubase Pro that I'll build into a hybrid orchestral piece using MIDI and VSTs. I don't claim this is good music, just something for demonstration purposes and to talk through some of the technical details. This is musically unexciting but covering DAW basics will make the later hybrid orchestra bits easier to understand, hypothetically.

(Sorry, the audio recorded in mono; I will look at my audio interface settings again.)

For those curious about my usual style(s) of music, my music reel.

Futtock-shroudery

Sep. 15th, 2025 07:22 pm
oursin: The Delphic Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel (Delphic sibyl)
[personal profile] oursin

Or, do the details matter?

Concede that sometimes they do, cue here whingeing from me and from others about historical inaccuracies anent the rules of succession, the laws on divorce, etc, which have completely undermined our belief in the narrative we were reading.

But exchange earlier today on bluesky about specific time/place cultural references, do they throw you out -

At which I was, have I not read books involving baseball, and, on reflection, elaborate gambling scams, and I do not understand these at all, but this does not interfere with my enjoyment of the story. Possibly we do need to feel that the author knows what they're writing about and is not commiting solecisms on the lines of 'All rowed fast, but none so fast as stroke' - though apparently this is apocryphal.

I also felt that when I was reading that Reacher novel the other day that perhaps we had a leeeetle more detail than we really required about his exact itinerary whenever he went anywhere - the street-by-street perambulations in NYC, for ex. I am sure one could trace them exactly on a map, and any one-way systems were correctly described, and the crossings in the right place.

Which is sort of the equivalent of where I got 'futtock-shroudery' from, which was reading Age of Sail novels with Alot of period nautical terminology. (On the whole I though O'Brian got the balance on this right.)

There has been a certain amount of querying expressed in the Dance to the Music of Time discussions about some of the significance of parts of London invoked by Nick Jenkins, which is not just geography but Class (there was at least one passage where I was getting strong Nancy Mitford's Lady Montdore dissing on Kensington vibes), connotations of bohemianism, etc.

Sometimes the detail is load-bearing. But often it's not, particularly.

As You Like It

Sep. 15th, 2025 01:42 pm
antisoppist: (Default)
[personal profile] antisoppist
In Bath for my birthday, which was a whole two weeks ago now, [personal profile] nineveh_uk  and I went to see As You Like It with Harriet Walter in it. Harriet Walter was playing Jacques. I was pleased to find there was more of Jacques than I remembered. I just remembered him coming on lugubriously every now and then and eventually glumly producing the Seven Ages of Man speech. This is very probably because the only other time I have seen a performance of As You Like It, Jacques was played by Alan Rickman. In 1986. 

I did As You Like It for A-level (and Hamlet) and I loved it. It's fun. They all go off to the forest and find out stuff and it all ends happily and people disguise themselves as a boy like in Twelfth Night except they aren't all ganging up on Malvolio. At 18 I mostly read it as the story of the devoted loyalty (definitely loyalty yup) of Celia for Rosalind, going into exile with her and everything. In later life I realised that a lot of this came from having seen it with Celia played by Fiona Shaw.

Here are some photographs
from the 1985 Adrian Noble production. I feel third along top row does nothing to dispel my teenage view whatsoever. It was just a pity that when they got into the Forest of Arden, Juliet Stevenson as Rosalind had to wear white trousers and braces and at times a bowler hat that made her look like a mime artist. I had also totally not realised until now that Phebe was played by Lesley Manville as an 80's punk shepherdess.

Anyway, back to 2025. Here is a Guardian review with pictures.

This Forest of Arden was conveyed by projections of actual trees on curtains. I liked the trees being real and not metaphorical. It also picked up on the "sweet lovers love the spring" bit at the end and everyone being cold when they arrive by making it clear that at the start of the play it is winter and the Duke's exiled court all had chunky outdoor-wear jackets, scarves and hats and carried rucksacks, which they sat on and handily carried off with them again. 

Gloria Obianyo and Amber James had great chemistry as Rosalind and Celia but less so with Orlando and Oliver respectively. This is partly the play's fault, especially for Celia and Oliver who only have about 5 seconds to fall in love after Oliver's had a personality change after encountering a lion, but there could have been more sizzlingness between Rosalind-as-Ganymede and Orlando in the wooing-practice-while-dressed-as-a-boy bits. They had it at court but there was a missing layer of "shit I really really fancy this boy what the fuck is going on" from Orlando in the forest and Rosalind revealing herself as being Rosalind at the end just by wearing different trousers didn't help the suspension of disbelief that no-one had recognised her before.

The Guardian reviewer thinks Dylan Moran as Touchstone was a weak link but honestly so much of Touchstone is just not funny that I think having Touchstone played like he's still Bernard Black in Black Books was a plus. He made it funny. Well done Dylan Moran.

Everyone was good, especially Harriet Walter, obviously, who managed to do All the World's A Stage while eating an apple, but I want to mention Imogen Elliott as a perky, modern Phebe in her first role I think, because she was great and if she turns into Lesley Manville, I want to remember I saw her here first. 

I nearly forgot the music. I liked it all being turned into folk songs and Rosalind getting to play a guitar.  

(no subject)

Sep. 15th, 2025 09:39 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] desert_dragon!

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