Zompist Bboard Again

On the Dropout streaming service, the Dimension 20 D&D campaigns Coffin Run, A Court of Fey & Flowers and Neverafter look promising at the outset. In my opinion, their previous smash hit was Mice & Murder.

I really shouldn't be watching Dropout.

I felt a bit depressed yesterday evening, so I did a quick partial reread of Peter Littger's 2018 classic Lost in Trainstation - wir versteh'n nur Bahnhof - English made in Germany - das Bilderbuch :
https://www.kiwi-verlag.de/buch/peter-l ... 3462051674

Gave me some good laughs, and brightened up my evening.

The final two songs from this King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard set, “Hypertension” and “Magma”. They are positively sublime. (The rendition of “Self-Immolate” in the first half is utterly fantastic too.)

I'm catching up on some papers I downloaded but hadn't had time/mental energy to read, including topics like the evidence for Proto-Korean having a distinction between /r/ and /l/, and grammatical constructs found in Ainu. Trying to get outside Japonic linguistics but still in a nearby field.

This album music for bugs is very sweet and uplifting.

I started to have a serious look at my newly revised edition of The Way Things Work, which I bought years ago and mostly left in a corner of my bookshelf since then. The original had been one of my favorite books as a child. So far, it seems to hold up well.

Raphael wrote: ↑Mon Dec 18, 2023 5:17 am I started to have a serious look at my newly revised edition of The Way Things Work, which I bought years ago and mostly left in a corner of my bookshelf since then. The original had been one of my favorite books as a child. So far, it seems to hold up well.

I remember that book from when I was a kid!

Just finished Lucy Cooke's The Unexpected Truth About Animals. Great, and greatly irreverent, book! The part that surprised me most was the chapter on pandas. Turns out their infamous refusal to breed in captivity is a result of their approach to captivity, not to breeding.

SAY3AM & Staarz – “Broken Trust”

I'm currently on my way through Ed Conway's The Summit, about the 1944 Bretton Woods conference and 20th century economic history before and after it. Informative and well-written, covering everything from grand economic theory to personal eccentricities of people involved. What I find interesting is that, while the author has worked for Sky News, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Telegraph, all of which are associated with British conservatism, so far, I haven't seen any kind of right-wing bias.

I'm trying to learn Tagalog. The syntax is really tripping me up. I don't know why people say this language is easy.

Books:

I reread Philosophical Essays and Logical Atomism by Bertrand Russell.
Against Method by Feyerabend, the book on hardheaded scientific anarchism. For example, it's argued that Galileo's arguments were irrational, and that's what puts him in the right.
Timaeus and Critias by Plato. Atlantis, Platonic solids, animal sacrifice and Pythagorean cosmology. Feyerabend would probably say this doesn't make Plato great because it didn't "pan out" in some broad sense.
On the Nature of Things by Lucretius.
Enneads by Plotinus.
The Histories by Polybius.
Poetry of Sara Teasdale
A bunch of WH40K novels.
The Metaphysics of Meaning by Jerrold Katz.
No More Manifestos by Eisel Mazard (a YouTuber).

Songs:

Doubt Comes In (Hadestown): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP2I8-Uilzs
Another Day (Rent): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oidzfBu-cJY
Pardesi Pardesi (Bollywood): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swlik5Hfu-A
Best AMVs: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... BMwpp9fkUm
Tenacious D - Wonderboy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL4HSiGvk68
Buddhu Bhutum, an old Bengali fantasy epic on radio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRcX1jPChEU

Science:

Unglossable "conlang": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze5i_e_ryTk
Money & Macro: https://www.youtube.com/@MoneyMacro/videos
Butterflies as crustaceans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yu-OIMJL1Hw
Mechanical Integrator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-y_lnzWQjk
Math breakthroughs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HHUGnHcDQw

Politics:

Schiller on beauty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tQ3VHjVO4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZypcgSn7kbw
War on education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo0M3H1QsEQ
If Republicans Said the Quiet Part Out Loud to Women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PABR6dgeQo
Tokyo Poverty Girls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSfhD5JEY6M
Sanhe Gods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRih74wGevU
Pizza Hut firings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYrNxs6ikVY
Golden age of fraud: https://youtu.be/_V4-n5aTtq8

Religion:

Paul making up verses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqtk7q1FBvM
Scientology Sunday Service: https://youtu.be/Auv8Bxnu8aU?list=PLwZ2 ... w7NEO&t=85

Misc:

A bed plunked down on a snowy plain advertised as a "room" has a "front desk" and "room service": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-lROmPEIZ4
Documentary on the town closest to space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqaGdcQh5jA
Empires rise and fall based on the availability of tech (in simulation): https://youtu.be/BCSeISYcoyI
Self-help (Jordan Peterson): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqutgfBIuMw
Accidentally busting an illegal gambling ring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFhA26rPNy4

Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant, about the Luddites of early nineteenth century England

How a guy almost scammed his way into a Nobel Prize: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... 61xaDDiZmh

Printing organs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdcyHq3XMLg

1 for All (D&D comedy sketches): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... T-SEjTNVYE

Wedding Song (Hadestown): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un9XTim_ZZ4

Denmark declares war on multiculturalism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFZjSwzdFyM

Chill Goblin's H.P. Lovecraft and the Reactionary Mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZl_urk0QvU

Psychic vs. Stock Broker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf36xPyNNUU

PS. I'm going to finish Goethe's notable works for sure this time. There are famous writers whose writing I can't stand. This is not the case with Goethe, though I can understand why people don't like him. Something about the density of his writing quiets my racing thoughts.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Fri Jan 12, 2024 1:52 pm PS. I'm going to finish Goethe's notable works for sure this time. There are famous writers whose writing I can't stand. This is not the case with Goethe, though I can understand why people don't like him. Something about the density of his writing quiets my racing thoughts.

That you bring up Goethe reminds me of something that's been going through my mind ever since I had to read his version of Faust back in school:

When I was growing up, I sometimes heard from some people that Serious, Intellectual, "High" Culture is Good, and Cheap Mass Entertainment is Bad. And how could you tell one from the other? Well, one of the surest telltale signs was supposedly the use of spectacular special effects. If a movie had a lot of spectacular special effects, you knew that it was worthless trash, with zero cultural value or intellectual merit.

And then I ended up reading the play that, traditionally, was basically the canonical example of Serious, Intellectual, "High" Culture in Germany... ...and basically on every other page of the printed version, there was an opportunity for the stage technicians of the early 19th century to show off their special effects.

I came across this video someone created about loading and trying out zeptoIP (my IP stack for zeptoforth on the Raspberry Pi Pico W).

I also came across this video with someone trying out zeptoforth as well.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat Jan 13, 2024 9:13 pm I came across this video someone created about loading and trying out zeptoIP (my IP stack for zeptoforth on the Raspberry Pi Pico W).

I also came across this video with someone trying out zeptoforth as well.

Congratulations!

Congratulations indeed; that's when you know you've made it.

I just finished Fintan O'Toole's We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958. Best book about mid-to-late 20th century Ireland I've read so far. That has, of course, the caveat that I'm not Irish myself and I haven't been to Ireland since I was a teenager (I'm middle-aged now).

I should start with a content warning: O'Toole is blunt about describing abuses in Irish society, including physical and sexualized ones. Also, at one point, when quoting someone else's racist remarks, he writes out the N-Word instead of using the "N----" approach.

Generally, what's so interesting about the book is that it describes a society basically modernizing at multiple times the "normal" speed, because it had a late start. Also a kind of time shift; I was left with the impression that to some extent, the 1960s and 1970s happened in the 1990s and 2000s in Ireland. Reading the book, I kept thinking of zompist's Almea +400 project, where he takes his initially pre-industrial or early industrial conworld into the high tech age. I can recommend the book to any conworlder who wants to have a conculture that was late to modernize but somehow managed to catch up.

Two quotes I quite liked:

When discussing a politician who said something crassly misogynistic after returning from a trip to Paris, where, among other things, he had watched a nude stage show, O'Toole writes

Whether his brain was still reeling from the best nude show in the universe or whether, as I was not alone in suspecting, he was merely brainless, he had broken something that could not be fixed.

The second one illustrates that the Troubles could sometimes have a tragicomic/absurd side:

At the same time as [Sinn Féin local politician] Joe Austin was being berated on the streets because the IRA hadn’t yet attacked the Shankill, his constituency manager told him to call to an old lady’s house where there was a problem. The cat from next door wouldn’t stop spraying the flowers in her garden. She made it clear that she wanted the IRA to do something about it. Austin called next door, where an unshaven man in a vest looked up from his newspaper and said, ‘Hello, Joe, I suppose it’s about the cat.’ ‘It is.’ ‘Look, I’ll tell you what. It’s not my cat at all. I’m just minding it for a friend. I’ll leave it back and you can get that oul’ wan off my back.’ ‘Good man.’ Austin went back to the old lady’s door: ‘That’s okay about the cat. You’ll have no more trouble.’ The woman was awestruck: ‘Did you get it shot? Did the IRA shoot it? Is it dead?’