[Tiste Simeon]

Tsundoku, on 21 December 2021 - 02:38 AM, said:

Job for Simeon. Won't even have to move far either.

https://www.news.com...985180cf459d2ca

Not too far away tbh but I'm about to have twins so this committee might not be ideal.

[Tsundoku]

But think of all the time you'll have just with each other, isolated on that island ...

You'd be in a pub so the chances of "No TV and no beer make Simmo something something" are minimal.

[Malankazooie]

Been having an argument with a co-worker. Is it Michael Bubble or Bew-blay?

[Aptorian]

Boo-blay.

[Tsundoku]

I prefer boob-lay.

[Tsundoku]

More 'Straya.

Trigger warning: average sized spider and small snake.

https://www.news.com...4019d08f4753a8c

[Aptorian]

I was expecting a spider consumig a snake, that article is way more tame than what I've come to expect from the Australian hell scape.

[Tsundoku]

Generally you don't find them in the same bedroom. That's the stuff of rather large heebie-jeebies.

[Tsundoku]

More 'Straya:

https://www.news.com...c82512cfd5a7c06

Monster crab attacks Australian golfers on Christmas Island
A group of golfers were surprised that one of the world’s largest crabs joined them for a round and snapped one of their clubs ‘like a chainsaw’.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

[Tsundoku]

Stealing manuscripts? This is a thing apparently.

Industry insider arrested for allegedly stealing hundreds of book manuscripts in online scam
The notorious industry insider is suspected of having attempted to dupe some of the world’s biggest authors like Sally Rooney and Margaret Atwood.

https://www.news.com...329b70d39c33814

(Never heard of Sally Rooney. Googled her, not much wiser. Some Irish millennial apparently.)

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 07 January 2022 - 01:02 AM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Tsundoku, on 07 January 2022 - 12:59 AM, said:

Stealing manuscripts? This is a thing apparently.

Industry insider arrested for allegedly stealing hundreds of book manuscripts in online scam
The notorious industry insider is suspected of having attempted to dupe some of the world’s biggest authors like Sally Rooney and Margaret Atwood.

https://www.news.com...329b70d39c33814

(Never heard of Sally Rooney. Googled her, not much wiser. Some Irish millennial apparently.)

'It’s believe[d] Mr Bernardini did not sell or leak any documents on the internet prior to their release, nor did he attempt to hold the works for ransom.'

So... possibly just because he wanted to read them?... lol.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Tsundoku, on 07 January 2022 - 12:59 AM, said:

(Never heard of Sally Rooney. Googled her, not much wiser. Some Irish millennial apparently.)

'Winning the Game You Didn't Even Want to Play: On Sally Rooney and the Literature of the Pose

[...] Contemporary Fiction's Slow Abandonment of Literary Voice

[...]

If literary careers are like games, and they are, then Sally Rooney has won: the massive bestselling debut, the even more massive, even more bestselling follow-up, the successful television adaptation, the profiles, the prizes. "I write to you from Paris, having just arrived here from London, where I had to go and pick up an award. They never tired of giving me awards, do they? It's a shame I've tired so quickly of receiving them," she writes in her new book Beautiful World, Where Are You (no question mark). Her own celebrity, for Sally Rooney, is evidence of insanity, both in the people who envy it and in the society that values it.

"Okay, it's been a small experience in its own way, and it will all blow over in a few months or years and no one will even remember me, thank God," she writes. "And then that's it, I'm finished, and the next flashy twenty-five year old with an impending psychological collapse comes along." Her new novel is, in a sense, the collapse that has been impending. Sally Rooney has jumped through the world's hoops, and found, at the end, the emptiness of all hoops.

But Beautiful World, Where Are You is more than a young, healthy, successful, rich, famous woman in love complaining about youth, health, success, wealth, fame and love. It arrives at a particular moment in literary history, a point of transition, or properly speaking two simultaneous transitions. The literature of the voice is dying. The literature of the pose has arrived. The basis of literary style has shifted.

There is not a word out of place. Each sentence passes quality assurance: The above sentences are certified, not wrong. The writing of the pose is, first and foremost, about being correct, both in terms of style and content. Its foremost goal is not to make any mistakes. Its foremost gesture is erasure and its foremost subject is social anxiety and self-presentation. One never loses oneself in the writing. Rather, one admires, at a slight remove, the precision of the undertaking. [...]

[...]

Sally Rooney is the definitive writer of the Pose. Stripping down personality is both the primary subject of her work and the foremost aspect of her style. But she is only the first among equals. Beautiful World, Where Are You appears in the middle of a great rift in language, a rift with consequences that far transcend literature. Somewhere halfway through Beautiful World, Where Are You, Rooney casually lets it drop: "I don't think I'll ever write a novel again." I'm pretty sure she means it. At stake in the moment of transition is the capacity to make meaning itself.'

https://lithub.com/w...re-of-the-pose/

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

[. . .]



https://www.facebook...48891308479923/

https://twitter.com/...2446593?lang=en

[Tsundoku]

Apparently masks can make you more attractive now?

https://www.news.com...dd92de36db9b843

Imagine what a bag over the head could do!

[Malankazooie]

huh, interesting slant raised on the Daily Show regarding Russia. Russia is acting up because we're between Bonds. Probably.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'Chapter subheads [...]include "Terror-Death" and "Hell-Carnival," both borrowed from harrowing primary documents of the period[...]

This is American history narrated through gritted teeth[...] Even as the hypocrisies of the Founders have been subjected to new scrutiny, liberals routinely frame those hypocrisies as betrayals of the principles that motivated the break from Britain and were given expression in our founding documents. Whatever the flaws of the men who made it, Americans across the political spectrum believe, the Revolution was a well-justified insurrection that united colonists, animated by reason, against their irrational and tyrannical British overlords.

In American Revolutions, Taylor challenges that narrative [...] Britain had barred settlement west of the Appalachians, in a vain attempt to both prevent expensive conflicts over Native American lands and keep Colonial goods flowing to British-controlled markets. [...] the Quebec Act [...] aggravated anti-Catholicism in the Colonies below. These and other edicts fed suspicions among some colonists, who had grown accustomed to a lighter hand from British authorities, that a wayward Parliament sought to crush their freedoms altogether.

[...] citizens in England were paying roughly 26 shillings per capita to the empire each year. Colonists in America paid roughly 1 shilling per capita, despite broader Colonial prosperity and the expense of the French and Indian War. Given that the colonists were ostensibly among the war's major beneficiaries, most Britons reasoned that it would be fair to have them pay down more of its costs. [....]

The Boston Tea Party is perhaps the paradigmatic example of how elite messaging drove outrage, and Taylor debunks our folk history of the event—the British overtaxed our tea!—with palpable exasperation. To help the struggling British East India Company undercut smugglers importing tea from the Dutch, "Parliament [...] reduced [his italics] the tax on tea shipped by that company to the American colonies," Taylor explains. That move angered Colonial merchants, especially those who had been selling smuggled Dutch tea, and they scrambled to protect their businesses by denouncing the Tea Act, Taylor writes, "as a plot to seduce Americans to sell their liberty for the tea of a British monopoly." That December, over 90,000 pounds of cheap tea were dumped into Boston Harbor to the benefit of that city's merchant class.

[...] the initial grievances of protest discourse were joined by a heady conspiracism. Boston's town meeting insisted that "'a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty,'" Taylor relates. "That rhetoric struck Britons as so irrational that it must cover a colonial conspiracy by reckless demagogues out to destroy the empire by seeking American independence. Neither plot existed save in the powerful imaginations of political opponents who distrusted one another."

[...] Inviting everyone to spy on their neighbors, the committees ferreted out, seized, and burned stashes of tea and conservative books while a crowd gathered at the county courthouse to hoot at the culprits. After confessing, the suspects had to ignite the condemned items in festive bonfires that rallied public support for the new committees and intimidated the wavering.

Cancel culture—"'I never knew how painful it is to be secluded from the free conversation of one's friends,' a Pennsylvanian lamented"—was a weapon in a revolutionary arsenal that also included mob and military violence against dissenters.

[...] critic of Congress, one Dr. Abner Beebe, was abducted, stripped naked, and covered in hot tar and pig feces. [...] shoemaker who had shouted "Hurrah for King George" at passing Continental soldiers was thrown into the James River, but continued jeering his assailants, even as he was tarred and feathered in punishment.

[...]

Washington's [...] private reaction to the proclamation from Lord Dunmore, the Colonial governor of Virginia, offering freedom to Patriot slaves who joined British forces. The escapees hoping to join up included runaways from Washington's Mount Vernon, and Washington personally denounced Dunmore as not only a military enemy but an "Arch Traitor to the rights of Humanity." "If my Dear Sir that Man is not crushed before Spring," [...] "he will become the most formidable Enemy America has—his strength will Increase as a Snow Ball by Rolling." Were Dunmore to be killed in battle, Washington mused in another letter, "the World would be happily rid of a Monster."'

The Incoherence of American History: A Review of "American Colonies" | The New Republic

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 25 January 2022 - 03:10 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'Our Solar System in True Color Is Really Something Else

Venus is white. So is the sun. They’re beautiful anyway.

[...] We can’t see radio waves, so astronomers translated them into colors that we can. [...] He imagines they went with this particular set “because it befit the harsh, burnt landscape of Venus.”

[...] scientists who study Venus loved the orangey version, even though it was an interpretation[...] “That color has permeated the Venus community since then,” she said. “It’s in our logos.”

Sorry to our human eyeballs, but apparently Venus just looks better in wavelengths we can’t visually process. Because its sulfuric-acid clouds are so bright and reflective, “the planet itself looks pretty bland from space in the visible spectrum,” [...]

[...] most of the pictures of planets and other astronomical objects that you’ve seen, in textbooks or on NASA websites, are not natural-color views. [...] “We love artificial color.”

[...] Mars is more brown than red. Saturn isn’t really so yellow; it’s actually the kind of nice neutral you’d paint a living room. [...]

[...] “It’s actually a lot of extra work to pull off a realistic sun in a space graphic, because a white ball looks really odd.”'

https://www.theatlan...-system/621460/

[Malankazooie]

Saw a police cruiser this morning with the radar gun trying to get speeders. I haven't seen that in, shit, I don't know who long. Anyone else notice that doesn't seem to be a thing anymore? (traffic cops setting up speed traps to bust speeders) Used to be you could tell what part of the month it was when you saw police out, en masse, trying to bust speeders to meet that monthly quota. Doesn't seem to be a thing anymore.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

They found another case of voter fraud:

'My Cousin Allegedly Killed His Wife, Cast Her Vote for Trump'

https://www.thedaily...-trump?ref=home

... has me imagining a group of people doing this, going door to door....

#ArtOfTheWin