What are you reading, watching and listening to? - All languages

[akam chinjir]

Veronica Mars season 4?!?

[Salmoneus]

Veronica Mars season 4?!?

Veronica Mars season 4!!!

Or Veronica Mars season 5, if you include the film as season 4.

Or Veronica Mars 2 season 1, possibly?

Or just Veronica Mars season 1, I think it's currently listed as, only it's NuMars now. The New Adventures of Veronica Mars...

Anyway, it's a fourth season of Veronica Mars. It's currently filming, and will come out on Hulu next year (Hulu are also getting rights to the first three seasons and the film). It treats the first three seasons, the film, and the two novels as canon, but doesn't require having read the books. I'm guessing it'll also include brief intros to the characters for people who haven't seen the previous seasons (if there are such people). It has many returning actors - off the top of my head, I know Veronica, Keith, Logan and Dick are all in it - and some new ones.

In terms of format and content, it's a miniseries of only 7 or 8 episodes, they'll be focused on a single case, it's specifically NOT going to be a fanservice nostalgiafest like the film, and it's going to be darker and more adult in tone.

That said, Veronica is running a private investigation firm, out of the same office her dad used to have - rather than being in the FBI, a lawyer, the sheriff, etc as people have suggested - so it's keeping some nostalgic link to the original, it would seem.

I've not heard about there being a season 5 - I don't know if that's because they don't have the ideas for one, or because Hulu want to see how this season goes first. On the other hand, nobody's said anything like "bringing Veronica's story to a conclusion" or anything.

Frankly, since Kristen Bell clearly adores her character and Rob Thomas (the writer) is evidently pretty keen on the show too [eg, as well as doing the kickstarter for the film, and a metafictional comedy webseries of the crew agitating for the film, they also did the two novels, with Thomas as co-writer and Bell reading the audiobook, which I can't imagine paid her her usual rate...] , I wouldn't consider VM over until one or both of them are dead - I could see this being something they could come back to every five or ten years for the rest of their careers, if they keep having ideas.


As it's only 7 or 8 episodes, Bell can fit this alongside her ongoing work on The Good Place. Which I guess also suggests how much she cares about it - apparently The Good Place has short seasons specifically because Bell wanted plenty of time off for the sake of work-life balance, but it seems that VM doesn't fall into the 'work' category in that regard...

[akam chinjir]

Definitely in favour of short seasons, and people doing what they love

[Ryusenshi]

Listening to a ZZ Top song called Hummbucking, Pt. 2. Two things are very weird with this song:

• It's called "Pt. 2", but there's no Pt. 1.
• Is that diphonic singing? It sure sounds like diphonic singing!

[Ares Land]

I'm reading the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin. I also bought How Long 'til Black History Month, but I'm afraid the appeal of genre short stories is mostly lost on me.
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms doesn't have the sheer brilliance of the Broken Earth books are; but it's still pretty good.

Listening to Björk.
Isn't it weird that everyone completely forgot about Björk? Maybe that's because there's really only just one tolerable song per album.

[Raphael]

One of several books I'm trying to read at the moment is The Medical Detective, by Sandra Hempel, about cholera in the 19th century. One little bit of information that I find quite interesting is that apparently, during the Second Cholera Pandemic (1826-1837), there were conspiracy theories in some places according to which cholera didn't exist and it was all just a way to move poor people into hospitals where they were poisoned by doctors because the powerful had decided that there were too many poor people. Interesting - usually history books don't mention which conspiracy theories people believed in the past.

While we're on the topic of cholera in the 19th century, I've also tried to start Richard J. Evans' tome Death in Hamburg, about one of the less pleasant episodes in the history of the city of my birth, when the rich merchants who used to rule the city were too cheap to pay for a modern late 19th century infrastructure and were rewarded with a major cholera outbreak at a time (1892) when cholera had already been mostly beaten in most parts of the Western World. But I haven't gotten far into the book yet.

[xxx]

strange martial gun dance

[Vijay]

The "Sausage Song," the buffalaxed version of an Arabic alphabet song from a Malaysian kids' TV program. Oh dear Lord

[Jonlang]

At the moment I'm loving the latest series of The Last Kingdom, their use of Old English is just the right amount of geek to please the likes of me and not alienate the casual viewer.

[xxx]

somthing wrong out ther...

[Raphael]

Another book I'm currently reading is The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?, by Jan Zalasiewicz, about what traces of human activity alien explorers might find in 100 million years. Parts of it also serve nicely as an introduction to some basic ideas of geology.

[Salmoneus]

Another book I'm currently reading is The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?, by Jan Zalasiewicz, about what traces of human activity alien explorers might find in 100 million years. Parts of it also serve nicely as an introduction to some basic ideas of geology.

Interesting question. Is there an easy one-line summary? [and of course, there's an obvious corollary: can we be sure we're really the first intelligent species on earth?]

Of course, the first point would have to be: it would depend what happened to the humans! Did we build a city-planet and then die in a pandemic? Did we blast off into space, carefully repairing the world first and maintaining it for a while as a nature preserve? Or did we all die in 2034 when there was an immense and unexpected asteroid impact?

Let's say we all just vanished in 2021 for no perceivable reason (i.e. today's technology, and no obvious catastrophe to follow)...

I guess the alien explorer's first clue that something weird had happened would be the sudden changes in the ecosphere - they'd find evidence of a very rapid climate change accompanied by a mass extinction, yet they wouldn't find evidence of igneous provinces or asteroid impacts to explain it. This would be very curious - although it wouldn't be unique in Earth's history.

Would this perhaps be accompanied by recognisable chemical traces? I guess our artificial radioactive isotopes would have decayed by then. Perhaps there'd be other traces of atmospheric pollution that wouldn't normally occur, but I suspect the period of its production would be too shortlived to be detectable over that sort of timeframe...

Then I suppose they'd be intrigued by fossilised humans. First, they'd be struck by how cosmopolitan our distribution was - it's unusual for large animals to be found everywhere, from the Arctic to the Sahara to the Amazon. Of course, they'd be just as struck by the ubiquity of dogs - and horses and sheep and cattle would also intrigue them. What happened to suddenly produce a suite of animals that did so well across so much of the world, at a time when the positions of the continents and the climate were not ideal for that? Then I think they'd find some cemetaries and be amazed by how dense the fossil fields were. The Catacombs (if they happened to survive more or less 'intact') would stand out - not just for the six million remains but for the way they would form effectively solid volumes of fossils (they might not even recognise them as fossils, in that context). On the other hand, somewhere like Arlington might puzzle on account of the seemingly geometrical distribution of fossils, which would not seem natural. Or maybe the conditions won't be right and there'll be no fossils... though you'd think that given the sheer number of humans, some of their remains would make it. In particular, rapid inhumation practices ought to enhance the chances of fossilisation, aiui?

I assume it would be very difficult to spot remains of our concrete cities - the substances are too weak to survive geological pressures, and the structures are too fine to reliably remain recognisably intact. But perhaps freakishly high concentrations of metals in a very narrow stratum would raise some eyebrows? And perhaps in a few decades, when we have graphene everywhere... will that eventually produce a 'diamond layer' in the geological record?

I wonder about subterranean megastructures, like CERN or the Gotthard Base Tunnel. I presume these tunnels will eventually be crushed flat - but they might produce a noticeable anomaly in the process? Hundreds of feet of strata could be 'missing' or 'condensed' from the stratigraphy, forming long lines or large circles, and the anomaly could be highlighted by the presence of unusual concentrations of metals.

I assume nothing in orbit would stay there long enough, and that anything on the moon would be pulverised, and that anything on Mars will be covered in dust that turns to rock?


Any good guesses here?

[Raphael]

Another book I'm currently reading is The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?, by Jan Zalasiewicz, about what traces of human activity alien explorers might find in 100 million years. Parts of it also serve nicely as an introduction to some basic ideas of geology.

Interesting question. Is there an easy one-line summary?

I haven't gotten to the parts where Zalasiewicz explains our own future traces yet; aside from the prologue, which offers some glimpses of that, I've only read parts that explain basic geological principles as background information.

[and of course, there's an obvious corollary: can we be sure we're really the first intelligent species on earth?]

Very good question.

Of course, the first point would have to be: it would depend what happened to the humans! Did we build a city-planet and then die in a pandemic? Did we blast off into space, carefully repairing the world first and maintaining it for a while as a nature preserve? Or did we all die in 2034 when there was an immense and unexpected asteroid impact?

Let's say we all just vanished in 2021 for no perceivable reason (i.e. today's technology, and no obvious catastrophe to follow)...

Zalasiewicz generally seems to assume something like that last scenario.

[xxx]

conlang to open a new door

[Raholeun]

Spending the day off ploughing through Salmoneus' book review. If I ever allow myself to move out of the Russian literature section, sure I will get my recommendation from him.

[xxx]

the fascinating interface

[Vijay]

This is a Christmas hymn in Malayalam that our Malayalam hymn book claims has an "English" tune, but I can't find any trace of any such tune in any song in English. This version was performed in Salalah, Oman, and sounds fairly close to the way we might sing it at home:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hcOT56ae28

This is another one that doesn't seem to have an equivalent in English but I'm familiar with:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmp5ReQBYGQ&t=2s

And another (this is a really fancy version, but the general tune is the same):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDq6aMDfzaM

Interestingly, there is also a Tamil hymn with the same tune and mostly the same lyrics (only the third and last verse sounds considerably different from its Malayalam equivalent):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjtYVrb5yN0

This is the same as the second song but with a completely different tune and a few minor improvisations substituted each time Vani Jairam sings the chorus (and of course they didn't sing all the verses in this version):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9R_VjSlyn8

And there's a Tamil version of this last song that begins with almost the same words as well!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZKaXVMFTMw

[alice]

The SCK, of course. Why aren't you?

[Birdlang]

This is a Christmas hymn in Malayalam that our Malayalam hymn book claims has an "English" tune, but I can't find any trace of any such tune in any song in English. This version was performed in Salalah, Oman, and sounds fairly close to the way we might sing it at home:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hcOT56ae28

This is another one that doesn't seem to have an equivalent in English but I'm familiar with:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmp5ReQBYGQ&t=2s

And another (this is a really fancy version, but the general tune is the same):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDq6aMDfzaM

Interestingly, there is also a Tamil hymn with the same tune and mostly the same lyrics (only the third and last verse sounds considerably different from its Malayalam equivalent):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjtYVrb5yN0

This is the same as the second song but with a completely different tune and a few minor improvisations substituted each time Vani Jairam sings the chorus (and of course they didn't sing all the verses in this version):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9R_VjSlyn8

And there's a Tamil version of this last song that begins with almost the same words as well!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZKaXVMFTMw

Just listening to these, nice songs!

[Raholeun]

The SCK, of course. Why aren't you?

Because I do not own a credit card and I would need one to order it off Amazon. Recommendations or alternative paths to purchase it are welcome.