Richard Eijiro von Coudenhove-Kalergi, the half-Japanese Euro-federalist count who suggested “Ode to Joy” as the continent’s anthem
and thought all races and castes would merge in the future into “something like the Ancient
Egyptians”
I started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation recently — starting at season three, of
course, as i was repeatedly advised — and i’m positively kicking myself for not doing it earlier.
This is bloody good television (except Wesley, but i imagine they give up and throw him out the
airlock at some point), and only now do i realise how often i have stood on the shoulders of giants
without even knowing it…
(Data’s the best character. Obviously. He’s literally me™.)
Anyway:
holy shit, someone won the Vesuvius Challenge!
A library of hundreds of ancient scrolls was turned into charcoal by the Pompeii eruption, dug
up in the Victorian age, and now, with the advent of machine learning, we can finally find out
what’s in them. Glimpses at life? Religious texts? The rest of the Epic Cycle? First up in the
pile, it seems, is a newfound treatise on Epicurean philosophy.
If
Neptune isn’t really that blue, can we at least put it in the club with Mars, where we just
pretend it’s that bright because it looks cooler in movies?
(Top: Ad Astra; bottom: The Martian)
Abaroth’s World: “An eclectic mixture of my interests including models, optical illusions, historic buildings,
roleplaying games, heraldry, puzzles and gardening.”
Two iceberg charts of
surreal movies and
strange films. I may have to watch, erm,
all of these — especially Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, which keeps
coming up in my dives into net-art history…
Welcome back, ladies and gentlefolk! I’ve been trapped labouring in a Colombian salt mine for the
past four months, but after a daring escape which my lawyers have advised me not to speak of, i’ve
returned to safety to provide you all with yet more content®™.
Some links i’ve had sitting around gathering mothballs to start you off:
A visual book recommender
— like a big map of the literary world, designed to simulate the experience of looking through a
used book store. Wish there were something like
this for films!
I hate this sort of thing, you hate this sort of thing, let’s get it out of the way. In addition to
capturing old web pages, the Internet Archive is also home to untold thousands of old videos, games,
and books — each of the latter of which correspond to a real, physical book in their collections.
They lend them out like a library, for only one person at a time… until the pandemic, when they made
the perhaps ill-advised decision to lift the borrowing limits for that limited time. Publishing
companies, who weren’t too happy with that, pushed the nuclear button, sued them over the entire
idea of digital lending, and
now a federal court’s decided against them. They’re planning to take the fight as high as they can go —
and they could use your donation.
As i said, i hate to do this — you don’t need me to tell you about all the ways the world is fucked
up — but i’m willing to make an allowance when it affects me in particular. So many pieces of
internet history, even on this site, now only exist as digital ghosts in their machines (hell, i
even had to replace one of the links here with an Archive.org link after the author was suspended
from Twitter). And i can’t count the number of musty out-of-print books that i would have never been
able to access here from my comfy chair in England if it weren’t for the IA preserving them for a
new generation.
The Stem Projector is the kind of
ridiculous gadget i’d think up when i was seven, with no regard for any practical value or
market — haptic channel surfing! Instagram filters for movies! Automatically-generated mood
boards! Just complete nonsense and i want it now.
“The Stink A”,
or, why Kiwis have trouble typesetting Māori
In the spirit of every Youtube video since 2016, i would first like to say that this
segment is brought to you by Sponsorblock.
Begone with those crummy razors and earbuds!
I found out that Mark Toney’s1, in Newcastle, serves Dutch-style apple pie,
and it immediately gave me flashbacks to my childhood like the critic in Ratatouille. I
honestly started crying. Delicious stuff. …Sorry, what’s that?
Apologies for the interruption; my legal team have informed me that i have to actually put links in
my link roundups. Who knew‽
“My afternoons with the singing bowl lady”
— A rare sympathetic portrayal of new-agers, one that neither revels in tired atheistic snark
nor makes me want to tear my hair out with vapid bollocks
Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and good tidings to everyone else — my gift to you is one last
sack full of links to send off the year. Mx Tynehorne’s Link Roundup®™ will return in 2023.
