The blue people from Avatar are hot, and iâm tired of pretending theyâre not.
Editorâs Note: Xanthe has not yet seen either Avatar film.
The blue people from Avatar are hot, and iâm tired of pretending theyâre not.
Editorâs Note: Xanthe has not yet seen either Avatar film.
Iâve been hammering away at a big olâ 2022 recap post, trying to get it ready before itâs irrelevant. It seemed cruel to leave you all with nowt over the new year, though, so i thought i might send you some photos from a recent evening walk.
Ashington1 is a poor erstwhile mining town at the very tip-top of the local conurbation, Newcastleâs last gasp before coal and collieries give way to princes and pastures. It takes pride in two things: one, its mining history, and two, the fact that two Ashingtonians delivered England the world cup in a final remembered by ever fewer people.
This is the Queen Elizabeth II Country Park â not to be confused with the Queen Elizabeth II Olympic Park down in that London â a marvellous regeneration project which has turned a spoil heap into a lovely lake complete with a Premier Inn. That purple light off in the distance is the Woodhorn Colliery Museum, a whistle-stop tour of Northumberlandâs mining history which apparently fancies itself the Blackpool of the North.2
And thatâs all i wrote. Tune in next time for either another bashed-together filler postcard (by Gods, am i going to have to make Blyth sound appealing next?), or the first annual Horny Awardsâ˘. Weâll see how far the Procrastination Monster lets me progress. :â-)
Today i learned that the Marshall Islands have almost no copyright laws. Since the U.S. handles most of their foreign affairs for them, theyâve slipped through the cracks of international treaties: per Wikimedia Commons, the only restriction is that you canât directly copy/rip/transfer/sell/publicly perform another citizenâs work and try to make money off of it. (Which i think is quite sensible â even as someone who opposes the whole idea of copyright as a nasty intrusion of peopleâs freedom of speech â so long as we live in a capitalist society.)
Good on you, ášajeḡ. Now if only they had decent internetâŚ
Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and good tidings to everyone else â my gift to you is one last sack full of links to send off the year. Mx Tynehorneâs Link RoundupŽ⢠will return in 2023.
Our final submission of the season comes from one RĂŚl H. Bishop, a dear friend of mine. Thank you so much for all the entries this year â itâs a lovely thing to have a tradition continue, especially when iâd worried youâd all forgotten i existed. And as always, please leave all your comments on the main site.
This past summer, I lived in a big coastal city. After two months, things took a turn for the worse and I had to move out. I found the city plastic and frustrating anyways. During my time there, I would go to the beach quite often. But not to swim or make sand castles. In the mornings, Iâd walk with a book and a bottle of water and watch the sun dance over the horizon. In the evening, Iâd find a vacant spot and watch the cargo ships sail over an increasingly indigo skyscape. It was very cathartic. I feel itâs the same feeling all cathedrals, mosques, and mandirs try to cultivate: a sense of awe and serenity that lets our minds meld and our troubles wash away.
I have a very beach-y metaphor for your consideration. The emotions we experience in our lives are like waves lapping onto a shoreline. All emotions are found in these waves. We get caught up in waves of anger, of depression, of pride and lust, of sorrow and shame, greed and jealousy, euphoria and ecstasy. They are strong, powerful waves. We all stand on these shores, but most folks spend their lives getting tossed and turned by these waves, smashed into the undercurrent and washed up to repeat the process the next day. What we need to do in the face of these waves is not to get knocked over by them, but to hold steadfast and let the waves pass. We observe the waves as they emerge, not âpushing backâ and not âfalling inâ, but noting as they come and noting as they pass. The waves leave, and more take their place, but theyâre all transient nonetheless.
Iâve tried taking this notion to heart since I realized it. I hope you can find use of this. The next time youâre caught in a slump, or a fit of rage, or in some all-consuming obsession, just remember that itâs another wave approaching from the distance. You have the power, the strength, the will to keep standing in its wake.
You are not these waves, these fleeting emotions. You are yourself. γν῜θΚ ĎÎľÎąĎ ĎĎν. ततŕĽŕ¤¤ŕĽŕ¤ľŕ¤Žŕ¤¸ŕ¤ż.
Todayâs post(s) come to us, in no particular order, from three different people, because like buses, good things come in threes. As always, please leave your comments on the main site.
i met Him in the woods and He told me to hold my chin up His
skin black as ash shining
hunt-drunk
blood in the snow, He gave me a bow fitted for me and said to shoot
i said what for, to shoot what, i donât want to hurt a creature
and He said the cycle of life requires death, if you reap then you will sow, to kill a crĂŚture is
to give it back.
i said alright but i was scared and He said what if the other hunters come not my Hunters the other ones
man-shaped and hunting crĂŚtures like you
and i shot
the arrow fell through the shadow, spilling, and i said to protect i would do anything
and He said now you understand what this is for. and He said daughter, your destructive anger
can construct mountains and miracles. donât listen to those as say death and life and rot and growth are anything different from each other. look at the berries grow through the snow. it kills the snow, the snow feeds them, they are not beautiful in this way without the snow.
i said, i understand i am an arrow and a Hunter and i am not yours i am my own and i protect
and like this is how my i became an I
two months later i called for Him
with my head in a bush
because the other ones had taken away my I again
and he said take it back and this time He gave me a knife
and I stole nothing
but I held the knife and sat with Him and remembered that i am I.
Listen to Hanif Aburraqib who says
âI donât know if I believe in rage as something always acting in opposition to tenderness. I believe, more often, in the two as braided together. Two elements of trying to survive in a world once you have an understanding of that worldâs capacity for violence.â
and go lightly but know yourself Leave a comment
know true, feel feind
creer, pensar
concocer,
enamorar;
se
estou na miĂąa lengua perdide
non coa morriĂąa, ni pobo.
pobre.
lellos turn, so they wanted
perdĂŠronmenĂłs
beg, simple:
Âż Leave a comment
Iâm a poet of the future
poet by mission
With pen in hand
I let any dick hard
Strong Viagra is my verse
Fills souls with lust
blowjob by passion
To all subverse
morals
I open the gates of hell
Like a ladyâs legs
For I am invited to both
May this verse last forever:
I feel sorry for those who love
destined for sadness.
Todayâs post comes to us from one Ariel, of the Library Phantasmagoria. I highly recommend looking at the version on the main site, because itâs done up with its own custom styling, per request of the author â and that you direct any comments there for the sake of consistency. Anyway. The post.
Iâve been slowly taking up drawing as a hobby. I wouldnât consider myself a very artistic person. In school, I was more math and science oriented. Now I work in computer security. But I want to share some of what Iâve learned.
One of the first things I learned when I started is that using a pencil is hard. When you write, you can have some variation in the angles and curves of your letters while still maintaining âgood formâ. An âEâ still looks like an âEâ whether you write it with curves or corners or one stroke or three or squared-off or angled. Contrast this with something like drawing a circle or a 3D box. Even a small variance in curve or angle will turn your perfect drawing into something that looks wrong.
There are tricks you can learn to making more accurate circles or boxes. For example, the lines going out from the corner closest to the viewer on a box need to have obtuse angles between them. If an angle is perfectly 90°, then the viewer will have to be looking at a side straight-on. If the angles are acute, then the box will look skewed. Drawing boxes doesnât get easier just by knowing the rules, though.
Even though Iâve come up with how every angle and line relates to every other angle and line, I still draw skewed boxes. My hand just doesnât know how to control the pencil properly. The solution is simple: the knowledge must be applied - a lot. Thatâs the idea behind Draw a Boxâs lessons. (No, this is not an advertisement for DaB.) I think thatâs the idea behind a lot of art lessons. Hell, itâs probably the idea behind most things you can learn.
A long time ago, I was browsing a forum thread on a fairly unpleasant website. The forum thread had something to do with programming, and someone was asking about learning programming. I donât remember the programming language in question, the person in question, or anything else. But I do mostly remember the response.
It was a well-formatted, but very sarcastic paragraph about the âgreatest developersâ. These âgreatest developersâ would spend years studying the fundamentals of the language. They learn the nuances of the compiler. They learn the most efficient algorithms for every problem. They read books and watch tutorials and browse forums until they understand the language better than the people that created it. And so on and so fourth. But one line from the paragraph summarizes the idea and stands out most in my mind: "The greatest developers go years without writing a single line of code." (And in case it wasnât clear, the post was satire.)
I donât think I appreciated that line at the time, but I find myself thinking about it more and more lately.
Iâm one of those people with a tendency to âlearnâ more than I practice something. Iâll watch hours-long YouTube videos on obscure topics, and my favourite podcast(s) came from the How Stuff Works group: Stuff You Should Know, Stuff You Missed in History Class, etc. Iâve read books on the history of tea, the book index, and capital punishment in France. Itâs knowledge that canât really be applied in my life, or is only applicable to hyper-specific niches. I donât think thereâs anything inherently wrong with this - itâs a form of entertainment for me.
Yet, learning as enjoyment and learning to apply are two different things. Returning to the art topic: Iâve spent more time watching the Draftsman Podcast, browsing r/artistlounge, and similar activities than putting pencil to paper. I - like many in my position - justify it as time spent learning, and there is value in learning from others. (âDonât reinvent the wheel,â as they say.) But that time is really more entertainment-learning than applied-learning. Itâd be better spent putting pencil to paper and improving. Using the pencil is hard, though, because it means having to face failure when the boxes donât look right despite my best effort.
I donât have any good words on failure or dealing with it. Thatâs another thing Iâm still learning. But I donât want to end on a sour note, so I want to highlight another thing Iâve learned through art: how to see it.
I know that sounds a bit pretentious, but hear me out.
Iâm going to be using a digital painting by the artist âWLOPâ as an example. Itâs titled âCivilization3â and you can find it on his DeviantArt. (Iâm avoiding posting it here directly because Iâm unsure of his re-upload policy.) The art is of a girl playing a magical steampunk-esque violin with lots of floating gears. I think itâs a really pretty piece, and Iâd probably be able to know it was one of WLOPâs at a glance (even if it didnât have a big watermark saying so).
Thereâs a few things about the painting that I wouldnât have noticed before I started learning art. For example, look at the part of the violin furthest from the girl. Itâs only a few simple strokes and even has some bits randomly floating off to the side. The more you look, the more you notice things like that. The gear under her chin has misshapen teeth. The leaf pattern on her dress is just bean-shapes and circles with a few thin lines running through it.
I donât say this to make fun of or insult the piece. Itâs actually an amazing trick that I hope to be able to emulate one day! But itâs something that I wouldnât have noticed before I started learning to make art instead of just looking at it. (I also apologize to the artists to whom Iâm probably stating the obvious.) WLOP focused on the areas that most people would unconsciously notice the most flaws with (the face and hands) and let the viewerâs mind fill in the detail for the less important parts (the pattern on the dress).
Hereâs another one to look at: Breathe by Yuumei. Itâs another portrait. This time itâs a girl wearing a respirator of sorts with roses where the filters should be. One of the first things youâll notice is the clear brushwork-iness of it and the lines again. But this one I point out for the colour. At first glance, sheâs wearing a tan coat, but notice the left side: itâs blue. So is part of her hair and face. (Also, if you go back to WLOPâs image, youâll notice the characterâs hair is actually a bit green. Especially in the back.) Before learning a bit about colour, Iâd probably have defaulted to a black or grey for shading.
Iâm happy that Iâve learned to see things this way. Itâs like Iâve learned a secret to unlocking a hidden part of the world.
IĹ Saturnalia! Just as last year, a month ago, i flipped the tables and invited you all to send me whatever you wanted and i would put it up on the site. Iâm pleased to say that even more took up my offer than last year, and over the next five days, youâll be seeing a variety of their works. Our first submission for 2022 comes from a reader by the nom de plume of Baki. Enjoy.
One thousand eight hundred and seventy dollars. That was all. She had put it aside, one dollar and then another and then another, in her careful posting of selfies and other online activity. Della counted it three times. One thousand eight hundred and seventy dollars. And the next day would be Christmas.
There was nothing to do but post an Instagram Story and cry. So Della did it.
While the lady of the home is slowly growing quieter, we can look at the home. A VW van. There is little more to say about it.
The engine had decided to finally stop working completely and needed replacement. In the back there was an area too small to hold a toilet. There was a bed, but it was not long enough. Also there was a barely functional kitchen with the names of the owners above the tiny window surrounded by little hearts, Della and James Young.
When the names were placed there, Mr. James Dillingham Young was being paid $300 a week via PayPal, Venmo, and Patreon from people supporting their #vanlife social media lifestyle. Now, when he was being paid only $200 a week, the name seemed too long and important. It should have been âJamie Young.â But when Mr. James Dillingham Young entered the van, his name became very short indeed. Mrs. James Dillingham Young put her arms warmly around him and called him âJim.â You have already met her. She is Della.
Della finished her Instagram Story and wiped the tears from her face. She sat by the window and looked out with no interest. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only one thousand eight hundred and seventy dollars with which to buy Jim a gift. She had put aside as much as she could for months, with this result. Two hundred dollars a week is not much. Everything had cost more than she expected. It always happened like that.
Only $1,870 to buy a gift for Jim. She had had many happy hours planning something nice for him. Something nearly good enough. Something almost worth the honor of belonging to Jim.
There was the interior of the van. Perhaps you have seen the kind of interior of a van that is created by two people living #vanlife on social media. There was wood. There were lots of fairy lights. There was a colorful blanket to tie it all together. It was very narrow and hard to photograph properly with an iPhone that was two generations out-of-date. However, if she were very patient and used a cheap five dollar fish eye lens attachment, she might be able to get a good pic of the interior. Della, being quite patient, had mastered this art.
Suddenly she stopped trying to film the interior of the van and stared at her phone. Her eyes were shining brightly, but her face had lost its color. Quickly she turned off her phone and set it down on the colorful blanket.
The James Dillingham Youngs were very proud of two things which they owned. One thing was Jimâs VW van. It had been their reason for quitting their boring forty hour a week jobs so they could live their #bestlife. The other was Dellaâs iPhone, the only camera they owned which allowed them to document their #vanlife on social media so they could be influencers.
If a queen had lived in the campsite next to them, Della would have taken pics of her with the two generation old iPhone and posted them so the queen could see. Della knew that her pics were more beautiful than any a queen could have taken with much more modern equipment.
If a king had lived in the campsite next to them, with his fancy $200,000 RV with pop outs and self-leveling, Jim would have invited him over for a ramen dinner. Jim knew that no king had anything as wonderful as his VW van.
So Della stared down at her iPhone then picked it up again. She stopped for a moment and stood still while a tear or two ran down her face.
With the bright light still in her eyes, she created an eBay auction for her phone then announced it on social media.
âWill you buy my phone? Only two hours to bid!â Della Instagramed.
âWonderful iPhone for sale. Only two hours to bid!â Della Facebooked.
âGet it while you can! #carpediem #2hourauctionâ Della Tweeted.
Two hours later, PayPal announced a four hundred dollar increase in their account.
Oh, and the next thirty minutes seemed to fly. She was going from online store to online store, to find a gift for Jim.
She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the online stores, and it was from a shop very close to them.
It was an original replacement engine for the VW van.
As soon as she saw it, she knew that Jim must have it. She paid the two thousand two hundred and seventy dollars for it. The owner of the shop was a fan, a subscriber to their YouTube channel, and promised it would be delivered within the hour.
What luck! To find the engine so close to their location and so close to Christmas!
Humming Christmas carols under her breath, Della quickly posted that âbig things were afootâ and that she âmight be off social media for a whileâ to her social media accounts then packed up her iPhone to be shipped to the winner of the eBay auction.
When Della had done this, her mind quieted a little. She began to think more reasonably. She started to try and cover the sad marks of what she had done. Love and large-hearted giving, when added together, can leave deep marks. It is never easy to cover these marks, dear friends â never easy.
Within forty minutes her head looked a little better and the engine had been delivered. âIf Jim doesnât kill me,â she said to herself, âafter he realizes we canât post to social media any longer. But what could I do â oh! What could I do with one thousand eight hundred and seventy dollars!â
At seven, Jimâs dinner was ready for him.
Jim was never late when he was out scouting new locations worthy of being photographed. Della held the colorful blanket that the engine lay on and sat cross-legged on the bed. Then she heard his step outside and her face lost color for a moment. She often said little prayers quietly, about simple everyday things. And now she said: âPlease God, make him think the engine is nice.â
The van door opened and Jim crawled in. He looked very fit and he was not smiling. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-eight â and with only a couple hundred followers on Twitter!
Jim stopped inside the door. He was quiet as a hunting dog when it is near a bird. His eyes looked strangely at Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not understand. It filled her with fear. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor anything she had been ready for. He simply looked at her with that strange expression on his face.
âYouâve bought me an engine?â asked Jim slowly. He seemed to labor to understand what had happened. He seemed not to feel sure he knew.
Jim put his arms around Della. For ten seconds let us look in another direction. Two hundred dollars a week or a million dollars a month â how different are they? Someone may give you an answer, but it will be wrong. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. My meaning will be explained soon.
From inside the coat, Jim took something tied in paper. He threw it upon the blanket. âI sold the van to get the money to buy you the new iPhone.â
For there lay The Latest iPhone â the iPhone that Della had been reading reviews about for months. A beautiful iPhone with improved lenses and increased memory, perfect for taking selfies and pics of their van. She had known it cost too much for her to buy. She had looked at it without the least hope of owning it. And now it was hers, but the van was sold.
And then she cried, âOh, oh!â
The magi as you know, were wise men â wonderfully wise men â who brought gifts to the newborn Christ-child. They were the first to give Christmas gifts. Being wise, their gifts were doubtless wise ones. And here I have told you the story of two influencers who were not wise. Each sold the most precious thing they owned in order to buy a gift for the other.
But let me speak one last word to the wise these days. Of all who give gifts, these two were the most wise. For when Della popped back onto social media that night using her new iPhone to tell their followers this story, Della and Jim went viral. Money and offers of sponsorship poured in. The lady who bought Jimâs van gave it back to him for nothing. The shop who sold Della the engine installed it for free. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are most wise. Everywhere they are the wise ones. They are the influencers.
#blessed #bestlife #vanlife
P.S. Lords of Misrule starts tomorrow. Hope you enjoy everyoneâs submissions â i know i did! :-)
I like a lot of SCP stuff, but man, they really shot themselves in the
foot by giving them all numbers and never using the âofficialâ article titles. It makes it
impossible to tell what people are talking about unless theyâre talking about a
really famous one like 173 or 3008: how am i meant to tell the difference between
SCP-5031 the one where they realise torture is bad,
SCP-3930 the one that doesnât exist, and
SCP-4999 the one who offers you one last smoke for the road,
all great in their own right, when they all have iPhone passwords instead of names?
Thereâs been a lot of kerfuffle in the art world as of late about the ethics and capabilities of AI art (previously), and as Britainâs leading institution for contemporary art, you seem like just the right people to bring it to the public. My proposal is simple, but effective â let man and machine compete on equal footing.
Eight or so talented human artists will be given a prompt to work from. At the same time, the same prompt will be given to a state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithm, like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. In the gallery, the two works â one made by metal, one made by flesh â will be hung side by side, and the audience will not be told which is which.
Next to each diptych will sit two bins where visitors can dispense plastic tokens (like the ones they have at Asda) to vote on which painting is their favourite. At the end of the exhibitionâs run (or perhaps updating live; your call), the votes will be tallied up, and weâll finally find out whether us or our creations are the better artists.
If you really wanted to provoke, you could ask the humans to provide you with a list of every painting theyâve ever seen, every photo theyâve ever taken, every film theyâve ever watched, and every song theyâve ever heard. Then you put that big list up on the wall, tell the visitors that Advanced Biological Neural Learning Algorithms have taken quote-unquote âinspirationâ from all of these copyrighted works, and put to vote whether you should contact the rightsholders and ask them to sue. It would be only fair.
ChĂŚre and regards, Xanthe. P.S. â I am not a crackpot.
Every December, every dictionary in the English language comes crawling out of the woodwork to reveal their âword of the yearâ: a single word or phrase that they deem to sum up the past twelve months. And every December, every dictionary in the English language cocks it up. I plan to fix that.
There are a few principles that a good âword of the yearâ pick should follow. For one, the word of the year should be a word, or at the very least, a phrase with a distinct meaning. Youâd think this would be easy, but one of the Oxford English Dictionaryâs nominees for 2022 was #IStandWith â a hashtag that only means, well, âi stand withâ. See me after class, Oxford.
The word of the year should be from this year. It doesnât have to have been coined this year, but it should, at the very least, have seen a spike in popularity: another nominee from Oxford was metaverse, invented by Neal Stephenson in 1992 but buoyed by Facebookâs trendy rebrand. Merriam-Webster1 are consistent failures in this regard, and this yearâs pick was particularly egregious. Not only has gaslight been in use for years, but it was even the American Dialect Societyâs pick for âmost useful word of the yearâ all the way back in 2016!
People should have heard of the word of the year. Iâm sorry to keep picking on Oxford here, but i highly doubt your average man on the street is familiar with the concept of going goblin mode.
Finally, the word of the year should last beyond this year; ideally, people will still be talking about it in a decadeâs time. This is, to some extent, unknowable, but we in the present can take a good stab at it. We can surmise that 2007âs carbon footprint was a sturdier choice than 2006âs bovvered, and that 2014âs vape was a better selection than, say, loom band.
So then. What does that make The Satyrsâ Forestâs word of the year? It might not be a word, but as a phrase, it certainly has a meaning beyond the sum of its parts. It entered the public consciousness this year, and anyone in Europe whoâs been paying any attention knows what it means. It is destined to enter the history books: though they might not use it in conversation, every time someone in 2122 looks up the history of the twenty-first century, our word of the year will be there, staring them in the face. It is:
special military operation
noun. (euphemistic) A war which cannot be referred to as such, particularly the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Infamously coined by Vladimir Putin in his euphemistic February address, no single utterance has had as much impact on the year that was. I could have chosen Kyiv or slava Ukraini â but the word of the year is not an award for positive impact, and without special military operation, those two would be unlikely to have entered the popular lexicon. I could have gone with metaverse, but itâs an ugly word, and one on which i am personally bearish. Lettuce would have amused, but if i wanted to declare a British Word of the Year, i would have called it that in the first place.
So â âcongratulationsâ to special military operation on its victory, which is probably the only such victory Mr Putinâs side will ever have. Let us hope that 2023âs defining phrase will strike a more optimistic note.
POV: Robert Zemeckis just died and you are a cynical Universal exec with dollar signs in your eyes.
Back to the Future | |
---|---|
![]() Theatrical release poster
|
|
Directed by | Joseph Kosinski |
Screenplay by | |
Based on | |
Starring1 | |
Music by | |
Production
companies |
|
Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
Release dates
|
|
Running time
|
152 minutes[1] |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $200 million[2] |
Box office | $985 million[3][4] |
Sequels
|