Cafe dog

Cafe dog

Maybe it’s because film has its own specialized techniques and visual vocabulary—e.g. the featurette one one of my King Hu DVDs is very insightful about King Hu but the critic admits he can’t speak Chinese and seems not to know that Buddhist nuns also got tonsured.

Something that surprises me is that this seems tolerated in fairly serious (as in beyond “writing reviews” but not necessarily w/PhD) film criticism—it’s not uncommon to find experts in Chinese film, for instance, who mot only don’t speak Chinese but seem to missing chunks of cultural context.

Perhaps showing my heritage a bit but while people go to Nazi comparisons with Thiel &co. this is very Atatürk coded

I they changed it to a planet of olive-skinned brunettes, though, I think it would be a great work of pro-Italian propaganda.

In the game of chess you can bever let your adversary see your pieces

Very hard to pick, especially since having recently rewatched a ton of Futurama (looking for that quote) bit have to say it’s either the cut “Make that bitch your bitch you bastard” or

For a long time my default answer was, “I’m not cute, I’m hot” but that was not Bender, but Jake the Dog.

1980s period-performance harpsichordists (clockwise from top-left) Trevor Pinnock, Nicholas Kraemer, Kenneth Gilbert, and Lars Ulrik Mortensen

I’d tell my kids these were the Beatles but they’d see through it immediately as these are clearly the Rolling Stones

Doing my part in the people’s protracted Gramscian war of position over the internet’s dorkiest cultural spaces

Case in point

it is the "vaxxed?" equivalent here

Was freaked out when I saw a massive number of notifications; never so relieved it was a bug in my life.

Finding myself browsing through late-model affordable sports cars again and not sure whether to praise or curse Mazda for making a beige Miata (lot of car for the price, but it’s prices that way because really, you want to drive a beige Miata?)

Classic case of Newton—brilliant but a lot of crazy in every dimension of his thought—versus Darwin, who didn’t consider himself smart, just very careful about evidence and reasoning, and still comes across as a reasonable guy today.

I believe there’s evidence there’s some correlation (using your intelligence to better convince yourself something’s true)

Los Angeles building with large posters of Bangladeshi independence heroes

Slowly but surely, we are Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius-ing our way to the good timeline

I looked at a BRZ last year and was very tempted (coming from my old Miata and on the heels of having to consider evacuating my home I just have been the only person who looked and thought, “ooh, look at how much luggage space)

Have you heard Andorkappen’s Reporting Live from Landa pass lol

Love a hyperlocal (this is a discontinuous street in Silver Lake) energetic-and-eccentric random CD find

Angeleno

I had a tarantula hawk land on me and I was pleasantly surprised by how calm I was, one of those, “Oh, there’s potentially some real pain involved so it’s easy to remain calm,” whereas if it were a harmless bug I’d have been quick get to Donald Duck levels of frustration.

Romance of The Three Kingdoms is better than Barney and Friends.

Really getting some emails at the bizarre-quotidian intersection today.

How did I get on the American Broadcasting Company mailing list? And who is the audience that needs an email reminder to watch something on ABC?

In the Wild West days you could walk into a saloon and put a single large silver dollar on the bar and you’d get a room for the night, a shave and a saloon girl and an entire whiskey bottle. That’s out of reach now for America’s working families of today.

Seems like trains are now using the new Wilshire subway tunnels as tail tracks, exciting

Currently experiencing the rare phenomenon of multi-modal bunching (multiple transit options to get from here to there, but they’re all coming in 10-15 minutes)

I do think in terms of material self-satisfaction or one’s perceived place in the social hierarchy TV definitely has an effect—look at how much declinism discourse comes from people watching old TV shows and assuming that was reality rather than just sets made big enough to move cameras through.

TV As Birth Control - MAHB How to defuse the population bomb: Provide people with a steady diet of soap operas and reality TV shows that depict modern, urban lifestyles. New research makes a compelling case that when TV ownersh...

Here we go (can’t 100% vouch for this bc it is not my area and haven’t read in a while but it‘s what I had in mind):

mahb.stanford.edu/blog/tv-birt...