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Album of the Week, January 11, 2025 In the 1980s, before streaming services and the Internet, if you were a fan of an artist you often traded cassettes of that artist’s rarities—b-sides, bootleg recordings from live concerts, and maybe obscure appearances the artist made on other peoples’ albums. Today’s album falls solidly in the last category. I first heard the seriously off-kilter songs on today’s album thanks to a compilation …

Dear Diary, I’ve been taking it very, very easy for 11 days. I’ve been playing video games for the first time since 1996, reading unedifying literature, gently strolling along, sleeping late. Today I took a very cheap bus to Edinburgh to mooch around some free art galleries, and then to stay up late watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on a friend’s comfortable sofa. It’s like the the 1990s are back. …

The previous post was an AI-generated podcast that I friend made by crawling my web site. I decided to create an actual podcast for posting occasional audio files. I expect to post very sporadically. I’ve posted two audio files, and I have one more in mind to post some day. Maybe that’ll be the end of it, or maybe I’ll post more. The first file I posted was the one …

I guess because of the success of the 2024 movie A Complete Unknown (about Bob Dylan’s early career), the video of the crowning piece of the Dylan Nobel Prize ceremony popped up on Facebook recently: Patti Smith performing Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” as part of her accepting the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature on Dylan’s behalf. I post this because the performance is heart-breakingly wonderful (like many viewers, …

Photos by Salt Water New England

by Cláudio Alves The guilds are coming together in support for CONCLAVE. To talk about awards in the face of such a catastrophe as the LA fires feels fundamentally wrong. And yet, we need to acknowledge them to explain why this past week has been so odd for those following the Oscar race. Amid the ongoing calamity, various Hollywood guilds have delayed their announcements and extended voting periods. This includes …

When someone like Nicolas Nova dies, we are tempted to ask in despair: Why? Or rather: Why him? In the ir/rationality of life and death, we wish that brilliant and generous minds (a very rare combination) would simply live forever. But with Nicolas, it’s even more devastating, because despite his many high-profile cultural productions, he only lived to be 47. Nova had that kind of conceptual magic that gave substance …

Tim Carmody wrote a piece earlier in the week about why HTML is a programming language: Because HTML looks easy and lacks features like formal conditional logic and Turing-completeness, it’s often dismissed as not a programming language. “That’s not real code; it’s just markup” is a common refrain. Now, I’m no stranger to the austere beauty of the command line, from automating scripts to training machine-learning models. But underestimating HTML …

Story of Floating Weeds (Yasujiro Ozu) Kristin here: This surprisingly popular series started with what we assumed to be a one-off entry. In 2007 David and I saluted the birth of the Classical Hollywood Cinema in 1917 as a full-fledged new set of norms that would last until the present day and influence filmmakers around the world. Introducing the list of ten films from ninety years earlier (for the list, …

Friends of Trees and a whole bunch of volunteers planted Ponderosa pines, oaks, and others behind the library this morning. 🌲 We’re turning this empty field into a climate-tolerant forest for our community to enjoy for generations to come!

In Laravel, you can use the intended method on the redirect response to redirect the user back to the intended URL after they’ve been authenticated. This is usually used when the user is not authenticated and they’re trying to access a protected route. However, sometimes you might want to manually set the intended URL for a route. For instance, the user is on some page and you want your user …

I was just enjoying Simon Willison’s predictions and, heck, why not. 1: The web becomes adversarial to AI The history of search engines is sort of an arms race between websites and search engines. Back in the early 2000s, juicing your ranking on search engines was pretty easy - you could put a bunch of junk in your meta description tags or put some text with lots of keywords on …

For anybody interested in the particular subgeekery of language design, I thought of five potential ways to address the Dactal usability issue of .of.of:=where are we?.of being hard to follow. 1. Try to embrace the weirdness. This is always my first discipline. Don't be too quick to treat every weirdness as a problem that has to be solved. Some things are weird compared to outside references, but normal in a …

Several former members of Blue Cheer formed Mint Tatoo in 1968, and produced one album, from which this catchy tune comes: Feel free to post links to other Mink Tatoo or obscure Blue Cheer numbers in the comments.

The peasants in Anton Chekhov’s novella Peasants published in 1897 live unremittingly grim lives. Impoverished, they sleep on the floor in huts and are hungry, cold, and illiterate. The men drink heavily, increasing their poverty, and beat their wives mercilessly. They are dishonest, unbelieving, and conniving. They think that live was better before “freedom,” when they were serfs. Chekhov wrote the novella after five years of living in a village …