I am so tired of writing profiles
685 followers 198 following 5,316 posts
view profile on Bluesky
Eh, I think @theophite.bsky.social is fundamentally correct that the magic era of Google Search / PageRank was built upon a sufficient number of people making websites with good links and people stopped doing that maybe a decade ago (for many reasons): bsky.app/profile/theo...
I do think a lot of that later impulse -- testing the space between music and silence, the idea of the minimum viable song -- is there in "Life's What You Make It" which is why it's such a singular song of that era. Verses? Chorus? It's a call-and-response and an iconic lick. I love it so much.
The guy has resting punchable face.
That's great, and the link certainly wasn't directed at you personally: one of my long-standing grouses is that the Internet Archive operates on a much lower budget than the Wikimedia Foundation at a greater risk to its survival given the work it does.
Early Depeche Mode is also part of this space, I think: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t-g...
They have quite different trajectories (if you don't know Spirit of Eden / Laughing Stock / the Mark Hollis solo album, go there) but they both were too good to stay in the groove that their labels expected them to occupy.
Had to go back close to the original date to find a good snapshot but I’m used to that by now. archive.org/donate
So I assume that every NYT piece that covers Johnson from now on will include on first mention that he is a liar?
web.archive.org/web/20160515...
www.reddit.com/r/masskiller...
Oh, good call. It’s one of those R.E.M. songs where the verse and chorus don’t quite mesh and yet I still love it. (Also here for “So Fast, So Young”)
I don't mind people going back to "TCI" but sometimes I think it it eclipses the much broader (mostly UK/Euro) conversation about the limits and contradictions of technoutopianism in Mute, nettime, Rewired, and to some degree Wired UK.
No need for caveats. The uncanniness for me is that for most of his songs there was for so long just one extant version and so they etch themselves on the brain in a different way from ones with multiple versions, which in turn creates a different response.
The blessed aisle that is namkeen / chivda on one side (gotta try them all) and big boxes of cheap loose-leaf builders’ tea and bourbons on the other.
I don’t know if it’s just the general nature of pandemics to create this kind of amnesia or that the deaths were distributed in a way that somehow distances people from the cost.
all the best windows software in history is called something like "joe's thing doer". it does the thing and nothing else and is available on a html website in plain text and takes up under a megabyte of space and uses default windows ui elements and will work until the heat death of the universe
I would be inclined to agree with you had I not seen Four Tet play a late-night set at a festival, but in fairness Four Tet is the best in his business.
More about it here. superdeluxeedition.com/reviews/the-...
Another rediscovered Nick Drake track on Guy Garvey? That was an uncanny experience; I thought it was a (very very good) modern cover and then came the vocal. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tVl...
Last time was 2014, next will be 2031. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_D...
Gosh I’m sure they’ve thought hard about the complex and messy state of land ownership in the occupied territories. (From 2015, and thus the image is incredibly jarring.) www.nrc.no/resources/re...
Gregorio Astengo explores the innovations employed in early issues of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions, the world's first scientific journal — new forms of image making which pushed the boundaries of 17th-century book printing: publicdomainreview.org/essay/m...
tfw you think it’s an ARG
I feel like this is a reading where the current map of the contiguous United States is somehow a fait accompli in the 1840s and 1850s and that the US Army was somehow defending a state that did not yet exist.
The second biggest metro in Hungary is Debrecen which is a tenth of the size of Budapest and the size of metro Topeka.
I saw today that the Root Bar had been demolished after 11 months of being flooded out and caved in and so I will link to this in its memory: flaminghydra.com/the-root-bar...
“How do you manage Budapest?” Is kind of the key to Orbanism and there is politics in letting shithole outer Hungary treat Budapest as a cesshole of depravity.
My only time in SF was in early 2001 and the billboards were entirely that and the CNet building was half-built and signs and portents.
I think there is a legitimate reading of the Civil War as colonialist expansionism coming home; I think Marx was right to see it as a kind of internal colonization.
This is Louvre-y but whatever: he was trained for wars of colonial expansion and subjugation of indigenous people. There was no external existential threat to the United States in that era.
And he runs because pandemics completely fuck people’s heads and also make them forget and this means the only people truly capable of writing about past pandemics are people who experienced a pandemic and force themselves not to do what everyone around them does.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Ri...
I visited Budapest in 1992 when people were still selling Soviet watches and pins and other tat next to the Liberty Statue; I know people who spent time in Hungary last year and they were like “yeah, there are boba tea shops on the Pest side now and rural Hungary just looks mean.”
The Budapest / not-Budapest dynamic makes US urban/rural look genteel // I think a lot about the EU cultural identity survey where Budapest was the only place that self-identified as “European” // it’s funny that foreign Orbanites go to live in the capital and not shithole ultra-Fidesz towns.
Jamelle Bouie wrote a good column a while back about how the Guarantee Clause is one of those parts of the constitution that everyone agreed to ignore because enforcing it would be fraught. (Same with the penalties for disenfranchisement in the 14th amendment.)
SOME OF US had 48k Level 9 / Mag Scrolls / Quill parser as our ceiling for a very long time.
I wouldn’t prescribe the Len Deighton Action Cookbook but I wouldn’t proscribe it either.
East Fife 4 Forfar 5
It is a ridiculous cliche to say that Britiish people doing “we must watch to make sure this is cooked but not overcooked” is revolutionary but it is, it is borderline French.
Cooking as in “engaged with ingredients changing in real time in front of them?” That’s actually a big deal.
We are all doing early text adventures in the shadow of Infocom text adventures — which I personally knew only by reputation — and we tind that it can do really weird command line stuff (the command line is a text adventure)
New blog post, I laughed and I laughed and I clicked
I tend to think that the magats who categorically object to big hairy gay men wearing leather straps have their own set of after-hours preferences but whatever.
In fairness to the NYT they basically gave over The Daily today to Dr Demetre to say what was needed and who was clearly deeply beloved at CDC and is also despised by magats because he is a big hairy gay man with a Jesus icon tattoo.
The Sunday Post is a still point in a turning world and everything that makes it possible is good.
I am genuinely blessed to know this.
You have described The Economist.
For those who don’t know: there is a Scottish Sunday newspaper that is also sold (and fairly popular) in the north of England and it is known for its cartoons and pseudonymous inspirational pablum: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun...
There is a scenario where the current president ends up reading import copies of The Sunday Post that his mother really likes and if he is not dead yet someone should ask him if he knows Oor Wullie.
So this just looks to me like a Scottish granny and I wonder if she was reading Oor Wullie and The Broons and Francis Gay in her later years.
The first few days after Helene were a lot like that. Some crickets and frogs but muted. The daylight hours were filled with the drone of helicopters and spotter planes, but after sunset the darkness and stillness were wrapped into one thing.
And local reporting in rural areas — where there are baseline issues in establishing trust and good faith, and all kinds of subtle and opaque power structures — is hard work. There are maybe one or two people in rural WNC (west of Asheville) who remain and do it well.
His parents were not compelled to be the world’s main character every day in their later years but he is and the kind of interventions required to make that happen are not really the same as those that give you many more days.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSRm...
Yeah, when the core premise sprang out of wherever you choose to believe inspiration comes from.
How old were you when DVTL showed up?
Back in the 00s this specific framing was known as “Nit Picklering” (h/t @eschatonblog.com) because Nedra Pickler did it all the time: prospect.org/article/nit-...
The fact that I have about 98% of my email since 1994 in notmuch (I lost a chunk of 1999) is not quite the same as having boxes of diaries but it definitely makes you confront the idea of a continuous self.
We talked about Life Is Sweet, and the strangeness of the tour for that album, which is beloved to me. And in lieu of buying a ticket to a trans rights fundraiser she did in London, I paid for a Cameo of her reading a Blake poem she liked, which she did with her dog on her lap.
I once had a chance to buy a 900 Turbo with two caveats: it had been serving as a chicken coop and the nearest mechanic competent to handle the transmission was 3 hours away.
IME the big problem with my local city council (pop. 100k, 7 members, all lib/prog) is that it is collectively terrified of making difficult decisions and I think the small size is a factor.
I’m ambivalent about state legislature size — the fundamental problem is that nobody gives a shit about them — but I do think city councils should be much bigger, like they are in Europe, with governing coalitions of parties that are not tied to the national binary.
(Just a few chats on IG going back many years.)
I love CMAT so much (and I told Maria McKee about her.)
You have to assume that TypePad is being held together with wire and duct tape and that large exports have a strong chance of breaking things and what I’m saying really is that someone(s) who did ok out of the golden age of blogs ought to ask its owners about taking it over.
Someone who remains on Twitter really ought to know that “selfish libs break up families over politics, we don’t” is a common statement of ideological affiliation, a belief one is supposed to have in order to remain in good standing.
Yeah, I haven’t seen as many searches where the results page is 🤷 since the early 00s. I don’t know if the intent is to push you to Gemini but it feels like a capitulation.
It’s all getting more and more recursive and I do not like it.
This seems a little overdetermined when the toxic corners of social media are now primed to declare every mass shooter as trans within seconds of the news breaking, and the shooters themselves are increasingly nihilistic irony-poisoned shitposters www.them.us/story/vast-m...
Plus “it’s the libs who break up families over politics, not us” is as much a part of maga ideological bonding as “2020 was stolen”, you would think the guy who loves twitter so much has seen this.
bsky.app/profile/holg...
Again with the load-bearing “very”, which exposes two key flaws: - the belief that “more likely” is aberrant and “less likely” isn’t - the presumption that the maga response is sincere and not a statement of partisan ideological identity like “was the 2020 election rigged?”
Quantify that “very”, Lakshya.
Others can do “what views? oh you know the ones.” But it’s been a while since I took statistics class so help us out by quantifying your “very” here in terms of how each cohort deviates from the population as a whole.
"Mime artists invite uninhibited encounter with the computer"
And now I have found a motherlode of uploaded documents from the Renzo Piano Foundation: www.scribd.com/document/489...
It earned a chapter in Marina Otero Verzier's doctoral thesis on itinerant architecture, which I was glad to stumble upon: www.scribd.com/document/489...
The IBM Travelling Pavilion was designed by Renzo Piano and visited 20 European cities over 4 years, almost always located near a historic building. www.historybit.it/ibm-exhibit/
Here for rebuilding the Spina di Borgo. www.andrewcusack.com/2016/spina-d...
New Miriam Toews and it's a non-linear memoir? Oh gosh. www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...
Ah, here is IBM’s “Exhibit” from 1985 in the Museum Gardens: www.flickr.com/photos/allan...
40 degrees at Newfound Gap this morning. Friend sent me this pic on her walk. Jackets in the am, 70's in the afternoon. Loving this cool spell. Have a wonderful Wednesday!!
This entirely fits, alas. I know under-publicised stuff about Savile in similar ways.
The angle of attack is all wrong; he promised you $2 gas and cheap stuff you know that didn’t happen, he was full of shit, what else is he full of shit about
Achill Island facing west is the ocean; looking west from the Golden Gate Bridge is the ocean; looking east from Charleston is the ocean; Saltburn and Whitby are the sea; Camber Sands is the sea; St David’s in spite of everything is the sea; these are distinct things.
I forgot that the best explanation of “the sea” vs “the ocean” was a Morcheeba song: www.youtube.com/watch?v=--wy...
The talk about musicals makes me think a lot about how in the 90s at college (~400 people) we absolutely honoured people’s decisions to be closeted but also recognised they were gay amid some out gay students who felt safer being out and I think if you are GenX and give a shit you recognise this.
He is so fucking late 90s in his scope
Starlight Express is an entirely heterosexual musical, said noone.
people often ask what’s wrong with gen x, and, like, there are a lot of answers, but i think the AIDS epidemic and the specific people it wiped out is probably an under discussed contributor to the bomber with red dots diagram
I’m not sure how the 80s UK “don’t die of ignorance” PSAs for AIDS compare to what was going on in the US at that time. placingthepublic.lshtm.ac.uk/2018/05/20/r...
*homophobic damnit Like, nobody really thinks of Andrew Lloyd Webber as a maker of deeply heterosexual musicals, right? They’re queer along the way.
The weird thing from a UK perspective is that while Section 28 existed I do not think Th*tch*r (an evil person) was oppositionally homophonic because there were too many gay/bi Tory men in her milieu (mostly closeted) to discount.
So, I do not like musicals but I do not judge those who do, and the thing that Seller does not say but I will is that I think the decline in funding and the human toll of AIDS are not disconnected, the Reagan decade was just shit.
As others have said, there is a plausible alternate timeline where Daddy Fred is not quite as sociopathic and dependent on fraud where that particular son becomes a Broadway producer.
The current president is especially fond of musicals from the period when the musicals were mostly foreign imports for the two big reasons Jeffrey Seller elaborates.
I have thought a lot recently about this interview in the context of the current president’s taste in musicals. www.npr.org/2025/06/30/n...
![[At the time] you had the four mega musicals from England. You had Cats, Les Mis, Phantom and Miss Saigon. And basically, that's it. Like, we were not making musicals during the '80s and the '90s on Broadway. ... In 1995, the year before Rent there were only two musicals nominated for best musical. One was Sunset Boulevard, Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, and one was a show called Smokey Joe's Café that was a review of songs by [Jerry] Leiber and Mike| Stoller. So Sunset Boulevard actually won best score and best book by default. Two musicals. And that's where the industry was in the late '80s into the '90s. I think one big reason was AIDS. Look at the number of artists we lost, Howard Ashman, Michael Bennett. The artists we lost that we don't even know. And I think it was also about economics. And for some reason, Broadway was having a hard time attracting investment dollars in the '80s into the '90s.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:fmpt3hjil3j55etlnv4q5xpu/bafkreifrbvuuyv6ye5o4voo5jir753c5oqqmaom4xtvf7n7jlxts6jtf4e@jpeg "Click to view full size")
In rhetorical terms, you start from a point of consensus — the optional Bernie embellishment is to say the only people who think it’s a good economy are crooks, billionaires and CEOs — and use that as leverage to say that all the other stuff is also really bad and he’s lying about that stuff too.
I hate how social media turns us into pundits, but: money can be grounding for other stuff. “You know he’s lying when he says gas is $1.99. You know he’s lying about grocery prices when you get sticker shock every week.” And then you talk about the other stuff.
When I visited a friend who had just started at a law office around 1997 they still had a typing pool (though with word processors) and it was a mixture of older women typing up shorthand and younger ones with headphones on for tape recordings. A real sense of transition.