Favorites from zompist
Subscribe:
Displaying post 1 to 50 of 243
An extravagant waste of time
From the beginning, intarsia has served as a projection of imperial singularity and superiority. According to Maurice Sven Dimand, the first specialized curator of Near Eastern art at the Metropolitan Museum, the technique arrived in the cathedrals of Europe via Andalusia and Sicily from the mosques and minarets of North Africa, where, due to the prohibition on graven images, it was useful in effecting complex calligraphic patterns and tessellations. More than mere ornamentation, the intricate tiling served as a unifying design element, as much a part of the architecture as a pillar or qubba (dome). One can still feel transported before lonely door panels and orphaned minbars (pulpits), as one marvels at the way these features summon the ineffable through sacred geometry from the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia (ca. 836) to the Alhambra in Spain. from Exquisite Rot [Public Domain Review]
Bangladesh's government overthrown by protests, P.M. flees to India
Following weeks of anti-government protests over job quotas, in which hundreds of protestors have been killed, Bangladesh's Prime Minister has ended her stretch as the longest-serving female head of government in the world by fleeing to India.
The saddest creatures in late-stage capitalism
Nearly 250 years after the publication of Adam Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’ and the West has lost the economic plot
‘Sometimes we imagine things.’
The idea had come to Queneau on a visit to Greece in the early 1930s. There he learned about the dispute between adherents of the two rival forms of the Greek language: the archaic, revivalist Katharevousa, harking back to classical Greek, and the modern, vernacular Demotic. Queneau recognised a similar gulf between literary French and the contemporary spoken language: ‘I came to realise that modern, written French must free itself from the conventions that still hem it in.’ What was needed was an overhaul, an attentiveness to everyday speech, which would bring about a new written language, a ‘néo-français’, corresponding to the language as it was actually spoken. from How to Speak Zazie [London Review of Books; ungated]
Mario is the Maître d'
Copacabana Dollmation [3m50s] is THAT song with a video made with stop motion dolls. That is what it is.
English as she was Spoke
In 1586, Jacques Bellot published one of the earliest printed phrasebooks for refugees, the Familiar Dialogues: For the Instruction of The[m], That Be Desirous to Learne to Speake English, and Perfectlye to Pronou[n]ce the Same. [...] The book, in 16mo, is laid out in three parallel columns: English, French, and a quasi-phonetic transcription of the sounds of the English text. [...] Bellot says “I have written the English not onely so as the inhibaters of the country do write it: But also, as it is, and must be pronoun[n]ced”. [...] While men had contact with the local community through their work and would have developed enough spoken English to get by, their wives and other family members who were mostly at home had limited opportunities to learn the local language. At this time, there was significant local hostility to foreigners in England, and [...] “a knowledge of everyday English was some protection against mindless scare-mongering” [...] The content of the Familiar Dialogues belies its audience in that it caters to the immediate language needs of refugees and deals with everyday interactions. These include going to school, shopping and eating a meal [...] Indeed , this little book, with its focus on domestic situations rather than travel/touristic situations, anticipates the refugee phrasebooks of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Jacques Bellot’s Familiar Dialogues: An Early Modern Refugee Phrasebook // Read the book on Project Gutenberg // The history of Huguenot refugees in England // Linguist Simon Roper has a neat video exploring (and re-enacting) the book's practical "Street English"
public domain [book cover] atrocities
[B]ooks in the public domain—books anyone with a digital file, a printer, and a dream can produce and sell—can be a sweet side hustle for people looking to make a quick buck, and they are free to make their own choices when it comes to the cover art they select, but this one cracked me up because it is not even close to representing the contents or the tone of the book. I decided to do a deep dive into the world of public domain publishing, to see what else was out there… (Karen T. Brissette) Bonus: 50 Very Bad Book Covers for Literary Classics (LitHub)
Movie: Alice
[TRAIILER] In Czech director Jan Švankmajer's surreal adaptation of Lewis Carroll's classic children's book, Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) follows her stuffed rabbit through a portal inside her dresser to be whisked away to Wonderland. While the White Rabbit, Mad Hatter and Cheshire Cat are still present, the familiar magical world and bizarre characters have undergone an unsettling transformation in the director's vision through the stop-motion animation of dead animals, puppets and other assorted objects.
The Black Sun of Democracy
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is arguably one of the oldest continuously functioning democracies in the world, and greatly influenced the thinking of the founders of the United States. This post is about the argument over just how old it is, why that matters, and what eclipses have to do with it.
Mary Poppins had more magic than you know
The folks at Corridor Crew recently reached back sixty years to recreate a truly wonderous piece of special effects technology that was thought to be long lost.
There are more dead men than living women in the funny pages
Major newspapers restructure their comics pages and guess who's missing? The answer will probably not surprise you, but it's disheartening anyway.
Image generation as fast as you can type
While the generative AI scene is transfixed by trillion-scale chipmakers and bleeding-edge text-to-video models, there's plenty of work being done on simpler, more efficient open-source projects that don't require a datacenter to run. In addition to homebrew-friendly text options like Mistral, Llama, and Gemma, the makers of image generator Stable Diffusion have also experimented recently with SDXL Turbo, a lightweight, streamlined version that can generate complex images significantly faster. Previously, this required a decent graphics card and a complicated install process, or at least registration on a paid service -- but thanks to a free public demo from fal.ai, you can now generate and share constantly updating images yourself in real time, as fast as you can type. The quality may not be quite as good as the state-of-the-art stuff, but DALL-E Mini it ain't. No word on what it's costing the company to host or how long it might last, but for now the real-time responsiveness makes it easier than ever to get an intuitive feel for how modern image diffusers interpret text and what exactly they're capable of.
The Name of This Cartoon Would Ruin It
Wow, dang! Dang, you guys! There's a new Homestar Runner toon! You can watch it on the website (which now uses Ruffle to play Flash in modern browsers) or you can watch it on YouTube, if you truly must.
The Missouri French Creole Folk Tale of Chasse Galerite
Chasse Galerite, a story told by one of the last fluent speakers of Missouri French Creole, Pierre Aloysius Boyer, was recorded almost half a century ago. It has now been paired with the graceful animation and art of Brian Hawkings, bringing new life and vitality to the story of a great French hunter in the late 1600s in North America.
The Tube map but make it aeroplanes
In the mid-1930s, Harry Beck, of London Underground 'Tube' Map fame (previously), created a similar map showing air routes from London, England, to destinations across the globe.
This... is my mastapiece. This is the one that they'll rememba me for.
Clone-a Lisa: Can you paint a copy of the Mona Lisa in 60 seconds?
"Anything over 80% is good, 85%+ very good, and 90% may be possible if you're extremely fast and accurate." [via mefi projects]
100+ Years of Yuri
Okazu is the internet's longest-running blog devoted to the study and review of yuri, a genre of manga and anime featuring romances between women and girls. Run by noted yuri expert and historian Erica Friedman, Okazu features loads of reviews ranging from recent series to untranslated classics. There are also essays galore. And if you're new to yuri, you can also find recommendations on where to start.
Punk and Porn in New York City
In the mid 1970s, there was a crossover between punk rock and porno movies. Maybe it was because we were all fighting the system, or because we were looking for an anarchic and creative outlet for our energy. Or maybe it was just because we were kids with no money and we were acting out… I don’t know, but the reality was that a lot of us would hang out together. from Part 1: Elda Stilletto, Warhol, Glitter Rock, and the Birth of Blondie [NSFW, words & pictures]
20 genre-defying sci-fi books that broke the mold
BookRiot.com, a bit breathlessly, gives us
20 genre-defying sci-fi books that broke the mold. I've read four of these, and they were all very good, so I'm taking a chance on sharing the full list.
I Interpret the Body Electric
What the Hell is Going On Inside Those Neural Networks?
Chris Olah: "...the question that is crying out to be answered is, how is it that these models are doing these things that we don’t know how to do?...How do these systems accomplish these tasks? What’s going on inside of them? Imagine if some alien organism landed on Earth and could go and do these things. Everybody would be rushing and falling over themselves to figure out how the alien organism was doing things. You’d have biologists fighting each other for the right to go and study these alien organisms. Or imagine that we discovered some binary just floating on the internet in 2012 that could do all these things. Everybody would be rushing to go and try and reverse engineer what that binary is doing. And so it seems to me that really the thing that is calling out in all this work for us to go and answer is, “What in the wide world is going on inside these systems??”
Related: How Chat-GPT Actually Works
Shaping Chinese Home Cooking in America
The family behind the wonderful recipe blog The Woks of Life is profiled in Bon Appetit by journalist and author Kat Chow.
"Love & Rockets" at 40
For one trio of brothers raised in Oxnard, there was no use in asking for permission to make their comics. They didn't need it. With all the trademarks of an '80s punk mentality, Mario, Jaime and Gilbert began sharing their work on their own... Fans quickly followed, and their fervor remained steady, as did the brothers' creative output. "Love & Rockets," the brothers' ongoing series — now helmed by Gilbert and Jaime — is celebrating its 40th anniversary. And in celebration an hourlong documentary
The first members of the Metafilter Steering Committee
Hi y’all, we have the final results for the inaugural Metafilter Steering Committee, so without further ado, here they are, in alphabetical order:
'Cause t'es gone nulle part avec ta 9 piece luggage set (chuis jet set)
Chiac is a French/English dialect from the Canadian province of New Brunswick, fluidly mixing English loaner words into principally French speech. Listening to chiac as song lyrics can be a delightful -- or disorienting -- experience for people, especially those with passing knowledge but not fluency in French. There are a lot of opportunities to find out, as there's no shortage of bands and musicians who record in chiac, from rap like Radio Radio's "Cliché Hot" to Lisa LeBlanc's "Gossip" to the bonkers brilliance of P'tit Belliveau's "Income Tax".
Researchers Pinpoint Reason Infants Die From SIDS
Researchers from The Children's Hospital Westmead in Sydney appear to have identified the cause of SIDS (Sudden infant death syndrome), which accounts for about 37% of sudden unexpected infant deaths a year in the United States. This could potentially lead to screening and/or other interventions.
The Black Falconer
Rodney Stotts was looking to get a short-term "on the books" job so he'd have the paystubs he needed to convince landlords to rent him his own apartment, where he could more comfortably expand his real line of work--as a mid-level drug dealer in Southeast DC. The first employer who called him back was Earth Conservation Corps, an environmetal group focused on cleaning up the Anacostia River. There began Stotts' journey from drug dealing and prison to environmentalist and master falconer--perhaps unique among "escape from life on the streets" accounts.
The Lem
‘Extrapolation’ may be a purer ideal. The term is imported from mathematics: a writer, keenly observing the world around them, can measure its trends and implications, then offer persuasive suppositions about what comes next. Yet, like multi-tasking or Tantric sex, extrapolation is easier to name than it is to find examples of people really doing it, or doing it well. A few, like Philip K. Dick, seem cursed to endure it as an abreactive symptom, a cry of protest at living through the 20th century. Stanisław Lem belongs in that company of SF writers – Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Kim Stanley Robinson – who have practised intentional extrapolation with regular and sustained success. from My Year of Reading Lemmishly by Jonathan Lethem [LRB; Archive]
The Art of Character Design
A model sheet is a visual reference that depicts an animated character with a variety of expressions and poses, often from different angles. They're used by animators to establish a definitive style for a project and reduce variation between artists. Character Design References hosts an extensive collection of model sheets and other reference art for animated movies and television series. Want to hone your character design skills? The site has resources for that as well.
The Texan Who Saved the Beatles
So when Preston strolls into Apple Corps wearing a cool, black leather jacket, he’s hardly starstruck. He doesn’t know the band has been looking for a keyboardist; he’s just there to hang.
Earlier in the recording sessions, the band was hoping to gain some momentum by hiring a keyboard player so they could record live, rather than having to pause so one of them could lay down a track. Preston’s arrival was so perfect that Lennon casually offered him the gig: “If you’d like to do that, you’re welcome to, and then you’d be on the album.”
a faraway land to project one’s romanticized hopes
Taiwanese journalist and insomniac Brian Hioe examines the recent 'China and the Left' conference with long critique titled "Manichaeism with Chinese Characteristics." Originally a 500+ live tweet marathon, Hioe details the many questionable assertions, such as China cannot be a colonial power toward Uyghurs and Tibetans because it's a manufacturing power, or that since the largest four banks in the world by total assets are Chinese government-owned, they are owned by the people and thus not a sign of the financialization of China.
NPR's 50 best SF and Fantasy books of the decade
Let's find something new to read!
NPR assembled a list of the best Science Fiction and Fantasy books of the last decade. See anything you like?
Bring back the orange pussycat we all miss!
Bloom County update: Opus is thrilled that masking has ended, but walks right into something.
Bigfoot Is Blurry
Why we're blind to the color blue.
I'm always in the market for surprising facts. One of my favorites is that the color blue is always out of focus for the human eye. It's hard to believe since it appears that we see blue clearly, but it's astonishing when shown an example.
Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there
The 2021 Milky Way Photographer of the Year
"...we’ve gathered the best Milky Way images taken around the world....Buckle up because this trip is going to take you from the remote deserts of the American Wild West to the unfamiliar landscapes of the Australian Outback, passing by spectacular glaciers, volcanoes, mountains, beaches…always with the Milky Way shining in the sky."
Sparta seems fantastic for men like them
"Covering the whole sweep of Sparta’s presence in politics and popular culture would be a post series of its own, and that’s not what I’m here to do. I want to talk about the actual Greek polis of Sparta, not the city-state of our imagination (to get a sense of just how far off the popular conception is, let me note now that Sparta was not a city-state for the simple reason that it didn’t have a city – it had five villages instead)." Content warning: Violence, sexual violence.
munalissu
Liisa Vääriskoski
is an artist, performer and filmmaker with an extraordinary, colourful and playful style, responsible for social media campaigns, music videos and adverts, largely in her native Finland. She has just made the glorious video for Your Fandango, the new record by Sparks and Todd Rundgren.
"I haven't felt like myself for years now."
"Good ol' Charlie B" is a sad-and-sweet, talky comic by Marina Kittaka taking place years after the events of Peanuts: "half essay, half tribute to visiting old friends". A text-only version is available. "Yeah. I've been having a hard time, just. Figuring out where to go from here. Trying to piece something together that actually... feels like a life." Kittaka has also written about art and community and co-option, noting, "to practice my philosophy I must learn to be okay with people not getting it, to stop fighting to stay legible and correct-feeling in everybody's mind."
'It’s Impossible to Reduce Me'
Noam Shuster-Eliassi isn't what you think she is
Recently, comedian Noam Shuster-Eliassi gave one of her most fraught standup performances, in East Jerusalem, before an entirely Palestinian audience. After the standup comedian who had invited her there, Amer Zahr, introduced her to the audience (“Today for the first time we have a Jewish sister with us”), the tension reached a peak, she says. “I go up, in front of an audience of 300 people, and in front there are two guys sitting with their arms crossed, looking at me angrily. I looked straight at them and said: ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be here for seven minutes, not 70 years.’ That broke the ice immediately. I left the stage in tears – I hadn’t expected such love.”
Cholets, neo-Andean pop art architecture
I Went On A Trip to El Alto, Bolivia, And Discovered A New Style Of Architecture. Houses that represent success in the Andean region, a growing economy and a renewed sense of indigenous pride. Previously.