A visual book recommender
— like a big map of the literary world, designed to simulate the experience of looking through a
used book store. Wish there were something like
this for films!
I hate this sort of thing, you hate this sort of thing, let’s get it out of the way. In addition to
capturing old web pages, the Internet Archive is also home to untold thousands of old videos, games,
and books — each of the latter of which correspond to a real, physical book in their collections.
They lend them out like a library, for only one person at a time… until the pandemic, when they made
the perhaps ill-advised decision to lift the borrowing limits for that limited time. Publishing
companies, who weren’t too happy with that, pushed the nuclear button, sued them over the entire
idea of digital lending, and
now a federal court’s decided against them. They’re planning to take the fight as high as they can go —
and they could use your donation.
As i said, i hate to do this — you don’t need me to tell you about all the ways the world is fucked
up — but i’m willing to make an allowance when it affects me in particular. So many pieces of
internet history, even on this site, now only exist as digital ghosts in their machines (hell, i
even had to replace one of the links here with an Archive.org link after the author was suspended
from Twitter). And i can’t count the number of musty out-of-print books that i would have never been
able to access here from my comfy chair in England if it weren’t for the IA preserving them for a
new generation.
The Stem Projector is the kind of
ridiculous gadget i’d think up when i was seven, with no regard for any practical value or
market — haptic channel surfing! Instagram filters for movies! Automatically-generated mood
boards! Just complete nonsense and i want it now.
“The Stink A”,
or, why Kiwis have trouble typesetting Māori
In the spirit of every Youtube video since 2016, i would first like to say that this
segment is brought to you by Sponsorblock.
Begone with those crummy razors and earbuds!
I found out that Mark Toney’s1, in Newcastle, serves Dutch-style apple pie,
and it immediately gave me flashbacks to my childhood like the critic in Ratatouille. I
honestly started crying. Delicious stuff. …Sorry, what’s that?
Apologies for the interruption; my legal team have informed me that i have to actually put links in
my link roundups. Who knew‽
“My afternoons with the singing bowl lady”
— A rare sympathetic portrayal of new-agers, one that neither revels in tired atheistic snark
nor makes me want to tear my hair out with vapid bollocks
Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and good tidings to everyone else — my gift to you is one last
sack full of links to send off the year. Mx Tynehorne’s Link Roundup®™ will return in 2023.
I heard this lovely song on Radio 6 and was shocked to discover it only had about two thousand
views on Youtube. Go get it up to three thousand, will you?
Immerse your brain in psychedelic internet goop with
Mindmelt.party
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCp_3zw-CxA
Bonus music, because i love you. (Platonically. As much as an author can love a
hypothetical reader whose life she knows no deta— you know what i mean.)
Seen on the way back home from Manchester — why on earth would you call your logistics company
“Discordia”? It’s like calling an airline “Icarus”. Just asking for trouble.
Is there any song more melancholic, and yet, so hypnotically addictive, as
“Golden Brown”? Something about that
harpsichord just sends me to another world.
Watching The Fifth Element1 recently had me thinking,
naturally, about Russian pop singer Vitas’ 1999 classic
“The Seventh Element”, which is far catchier than it really deserves to be. [4′]
I was originally going to post this excerpt from William Shatner’s new memoir, printed in
Variety, alongside the usual link roundup, but something about it touched me enough to give
it its own post.
Mr Shatner, in his own words, on his first trip to space:
I continued my self-guided tour and turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into
space. I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over
thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light
traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies
in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years…
but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic
awe to behold … all I saw was death.
I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth.
It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see
the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the
sky.
It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia.
And I was leaving her. […]
It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The
contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me
with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further
destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna … things
that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the
interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a
celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.
Upon returning to earth, and trying to put his story into words for the first time, he was, as you
may remember, bluntly cut off by Jeff Bezos, asking for more champagne:
Holy shit, they found silphium!
I hope some day, many years down the line, when cultivation comes to fruition, we can all
finally taste this ancient spice.
