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Tidbits and notions. Stuff and blither. News and snooze. This little gmiphloglet be short and more mirth than matter.
Seldom has there been such a canny conflagration of scifi and fantasy genre conventions. Cherryhâs markers are all here, if with less finesse than her later works. As interesting as the stories themselves are, what compels are the layers of unspokens, mysteries, some to which the reader is privy, some not. For instance, it seems patent that Morgaine is indeed Morgaine le Fey. How did she leave Arthurian era Earth? Via Stonehenge? Is the world of Shiuaj a Precambrian Earth as implied? Whence Liell-Roh? Will Morgaine and (uncle) Vanye someday cause the Calamity? Hopefully Exileâs Gate will delve such mysteries.
So apparently the game here is one of âchickenâ. The neoliberal internationalists who have long been pushing for a proxy war in Ukraine at some point will have to commit NATO on the ground or not. They expect Putin to blink first. The problem is that Russia almost never blinks when their back is against the wall. How nice for us all that said wall is a battery stocked with nuclear arms.
Witness: ââŚAnd then he said âwe are in the middle of a coup dâĂŠtatâ and âwe need to get control of this shitââŚâ
Radio Announcer: âOops! Sorry for that offensive language, folks! Let me just talk over this historic testimony in parliamentary committee about imminent fascist insurrection for a while to underscore how much we dislike and disavow naughty potty wordsâ.
Me: đ
Mia and Ana went to a park.
Mia proposed, "Let's have a picnic".
Ana replied, "but I didn't bring food".
Mia coyly smiled, "Donât worry, I always bring leftovers..."
Speaking of, sad to hear that NATOâs expansion in SE, FI is coming and at the cost of Kurdish freedom fighters, thanks to the fascist regime in TU. The winner is empire, all around. Fun.
ăć§ćĄżĺ裥é˘ĺşćżćŹăăâŚHave to admit itâs true.
Kollok is back, finally. I just started watching season 3. A bit more scrappy, no thanks to Covid, but Iâm hoping the Eubanks can find that old juju, or forge something new of it in equal caliber.
Let us be deeply unimpressed with virtuosityâs glamour. Skill without soul is saddest vanity. It must live in an earnest heart to bear true fruit. In the ranks of the transcendent: Chopin before Liszt; Coltrane above Davis.
Say what you will about DND. When CR works, it is absolutely glorious. Brennan isnât as engaging, judicious, or nimble a DM as Mercer. But he managed to enable episode 4 in this miniseries to be an absolute tearjerker of poignancy and pathos. In 4 episodes, the players managed to forge characterization and ration shops which usually take far more time. Bravi.
https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/firefox-scrollbars-too-thin/25207
Accessibility.
AccessibilityâŚ
Accessibility!
Come on, Devs.
Thereâs something distasteful in most of Frank Herbertâs works difficult to resolve. I came a step closer to it here. He weaves between ironies and unspokens, âplans within plansâ, trying to eschew easy ideologies. Very well. But a sort of faith in Ayn Randian heroism always crops up, the triumph of the well bred. I suppose it is hard baked into most high Modernism, the Will to Power as existential baseline.
And still it goes on, in protofascist Jungische pop mythos when not egregiously explicit. If the past hundred years of geopolitical history have not given proof against the individualist vanities of Great Men, I donât know what can⌠I suppose we will either learn cooperative civilization to survive or we wonât. Some of Herbertâs metaphysical suspicions are apt, as are his instincts to peel away sociopolitical facades. His worldbuilding is nonpareil. But weâve lived under the meritocratic reign of smart men. So far smarts havenât gotten us too far, mostly helped smart men to better blind themselves to their own hubris.
Anyway, a decent book, a few plot holes aside. Herbert tries to keep just a step ahead of the readerâs own puzzling out of implicit meanings and hidden situations. Thereâs a bit of Gulliverâs travels in space mystery form. Dosadi Experiment is indeed a good example of 70âs psychedelic scifi - that inventive, sharp, delirious era before Cyberpunk crushed dreams of human thriving. I must reaffirm: Herbertâs non-Dune books are best.
âThe military mentality is a bandit and raider mentality. Thus, all military represents a form of organized banditry where the conventional mores do not prevail. The military is a way of rationalizing murder, rape, looting, and other forms of theft which are always accepted as part of warfare. When denied an outside target, the military mentality always turns against its own civilian population, using identical rationalizations for bandit behaviour.â
I never knew until this book how much Wikipedia cribbed from the OED as *process*. The OED was in some ways the first modern scholarly âcrowdsourcingâ project. And yet it also benefitted from the pensive habits of an analogue society, volunteer contributors with vastly deeper textual attentions than the average of our day. OED began mass dataset collation, even long before IBMâs diesel age quantifications of logistics. Yet this work was done via basically mediaeval scholastic praxis - from the medium of pens and paper to the aesthetic (unquantified, unmined) touchstones offered for editorial selection of entries. TPatM is interesting in itself as an history written on the eve before search engines became hegemonic. The habits of human curated mass scholarship in highly personal meditative impression are probably deeply alien to the Zeitgeist of our era. People *do* let Google think for them, then bathe uncontemplatively in the perverse, shrieking cacophony of social mediaâs groupthought. This insidious algorithmic mediumship represents a mass suicide of the higher faculties of the human mind. As Miyazaki said, humans have lost confidence in themselves. OED is a reminder of the promise and perils of that odd, long twilight between primal oral culture and the cyberpanopticon videodrome.
âYesterdayâs high temperature broke the previous record high set in (date 1990-2021). Yesterdayâs record low was set in (date 1880-1950).â đ°
There used to be a perfect little Chinese calendar applet. It is still on github. But since it requires libpanelapplet-2.0, it doesnât work and is in no repos. Iâm cross eyed from trying to find a linux lunar calendar. Ah, well.
Lindt & SprĂźngli: Spicy dark chocolate!
Said Chocolate: 47% cocoa and barely a black pepper level tingle of chili.
Me: âIâm not really very nerdy enough to do Fooâ.
Also me: Watches downloaded Critical RĂ´le episodes on her Raspad via her hacked up smbd.
Electron is the very devil. Nodejs ditto, and Pulseaudio too, natch.
In Raisin in the Sun, unawares Poitier lets his necktie dangle in his scrambled eggs. Eggtie.
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