Jethro Buck - Little Big Bang
Secret cinema found beneath Paris.
In September 2004, French police discovered a hidden chamber in the catacombs under Paris. It contained a full-sized movie screen, projection equipment, a bar, a pressure cooker for making couscous, a professionally installed electricity system, and at least three phone lines. Movies ranged from 1950s noir classics to recent thrillers.
When the police returned three days later, the phone and power lines had been cut and there was a note on the floor: “Do not try to find us.” (via)
SECRET, MILDLY THREATENING UNDERGROUND COUSCOUS CINEMA
I WANNA GO
LET ME JOIN YOUR KIND, UNDERGROUND MOVIE PEOPLE
nO YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS ENTIRE CINEMA WAS HIDDEN BEHIND AN UNDER CONSTRUCTION SIGN THAT LEAD TO A CHECK-IN DISK WITH A FULL CCTV HOOKUP THAT WOULD TURN ON AND RECORD ANY UNREGISTERED VISITORS. AND IF SOMEONE SNUCK IN? A TAPE OF BARKING SECURITY DOGS WOULD BEGIN TO PLAY.
BEYOND THE CRAZY FRONT DESK AND THE MOVIE THEATER, THERE WAS A STOCKED BAR AND TABLES AND CHAIRS, MEANING THAT AFTER CATCHING A FLICK IN AN ILLEGAL PARISIAN CATACOMB THEATER, YOU COULD THEN EAT COUSCOUS AND SIP A COCKTAIL NEXT DOOR. THERE WAS A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICITY SYSTEM SET UP, AND AT LEAST 3 WORKING PHONE LINES. THIS SHIT WAS LIKE A BOND VILLAIN.
BETTER YET? IT WAS RUMORED THAT THE PLACE WAS SET UP BY THE UNDERGROUND FRENCH ART GANG UX “Urban eXperiment”, WHO NAVIGATES THROUGH THE PARISIAN UNDERGROUNDS AND ILLEGALLY RESTORES ABANDONED WORKS OF ART, ALONG WITH HOLDING FILM FESTIVALS IN THE BASEMENTS OF GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS. THEY EVEN RELEASED A SHORT FILM ABOUT THEIR WORK RESTORING THE ICONIC PANTHEON CLOCK OVER THE COURSE OF ONE YEAR. NO ONE SUSPECTED THEIR INVOLVEMENT, UNTIL THE CLOCK BEGAN TO WORK AGAIN AFTER 60 YEARS OF RUSTING.
IF YOU DON’T THINK CATACOMBS AND THE PEOPLE WHO HANG OUT IN THEM ARE SOME OF THE COOLEST FUCKING THINGS IN THE WORLD THEN I IMPLORE YOU TO EAT SOME COUSCOUS AND RECONSIDER.
i keep trying to reread wyrd sisters but i can't get further than this cause every time i see it i have to turn my phone off and close my eyes for twenty minutes.....this is SO funny. you just know there's a little recipe book in goodie maysherestinpeace whemper's old cottage with an entry that says RECIPE FOR HOT LEAD BONES: step one you get some lead step two you put it in their bones
“The only Hebrew version of the perennially popular Arthurian legends was written in northern Italy in 1279. […] The 13th-century Italian Jewish translator’s literary methods are as fascinating as are the Arthurian stories in Hebrew dress. The scribe not only translates from Italian, [..] he also changed and Judaized the story. The scribe’s manner of Judaization is evident at the outset of the romance; the apology itself is filled with terms from a familiar Jewish world. Instrumental to the Judaization of the Arthurian romance are the scribe’s choice of plot (the seduction of Igerne by the king, with its parallels to the David-Bath-Sheba story), additions and omissions, use of language, and treatment of certain passages to stress Jewish ideas. For instance, the feast at which Uther meets Igerne is described in the Old French sources as a Christmas feast. In the Hebrew version, the statement “Then the king made a great feast for all the people and all the princes” (based on Esth. 2:18) conveys the aura of a Purim feast. Another example of such transference of concepts occurs when the translator takes the talmudic word tamḥui (“a charity bowl from which food was distributed to the needy”), with its uniquely Jewish associations, to describe the grail, an overtly Christian symbol. The constant use of well-known biblical phrases reminds the reader of religious literature and produces the effect of biblical scenes in the midst of the Arthurian narrative. In this fashion, then, the text and the language interact in polyphonic fashion.”
— Jewish Virtual Library | King Artus: A Hebrew Arthurian Romance of 1279 (via bors-of-gaunis)
Hey, my apologies if someone has already done this but I wanted to add a link to both the original Hebrew pdf and the translation in Modern English by Curt Leviant. It’s a wonderful Arthurian text and one of the most delightful versions of the last days of Camelot that I’ve read. I can’t recommend it enough for a quick and fun read.
#i mean. bro #i hate to break this to you but #you are in fact good at the small amount of piano ur playing #it is not fake
Dude taught himself to compose and calls it fake
“Just string it together in any order, the more random it is the more complex it’ll sound" improvising music on the fly was one of Mozart’s party tricks
Not saying this guy is Mozart but he’s smart and clever and talented and way, way underappreciating himself
Bimbo qualities
babe wake up new flavor of imposter syndrome dropped
Yeah 100% the joke's on him for thinking he's faking, lmao.
rokenford asked:
Do they not teach these computer basics (ie - components of a computer) in K-12 anymore?
Maybe it's an elder millennial thing when this stuff was new and they wanted the kids to get a head start or something. We didn't have like programming classes or anything, but we got taught those basics, and then like how save files, how to use a word processor, etc.
I even had a class to teach touch typing and assignments to make WordArt.
I'll admit most of my actual knowledge is from dicking around and seeing what works and what doesn't (sometimes with help from professor google) but the fundamentals were absolutely learned in school.
ms-demeanor answered:
Honestly, they didn’t teach it to me! I’m not sure that was part of mainstream classes for a lot of people.
We didn’t have dedicated typing classes at any of my schools except like an hour of computer lab a week in elementary school, during which time we learned how to use the Grolier encyclopedia and nothing else.
But also it’s like that XKCD comic -
I think people who are pretty good with computers really have a flawed conception of how bad most people are at computers.
I have had to explain to teenagers what a browser is. As in “okay open a browser - o-kay, do you see a ball that has four colors on it, and when you click on it it takes you to google? okay, that’s chrome, that’s your browser, click on that” and I think that probably two out of ten computer users don’t know what it means to right click.
You don’t have to know how file storage works if the way you access all your files is through apps that show you a thumbnail of the files! So people don’t think about how files are created or written or stored or recovered or manipulated by the computer.
But to be fair, this is also true about car parts!
Most people don’t know what a carburetor does, and could not explain how an ignition system works.
We’re all our own little Sherlock Holmeses, cheerfully deciding we have to attain more knowledge relevant to our interests and forget what heliocentrism is.
Actually, here’s a great example: one thing that customers CONSTANTLY ask me is “how do I know when to click or double-click”? And you know what, I don’t have a good answer for them. I can’t tell them why some things need a double click and some things need a single click; I can’t tell them how I know which things need a double click, I have just spent enough time on computers that I generally know what kind of click is needed. But if you’re walking someone who really only does use their computer for email and youtube through the basic steps of something like creating a desktop shortcut to go to their email, there are going to be four or five times that they say “nothing is happening” and you’re going to realize that you didn’t specify to double click.
in general
you single-click to activate things that don’t use double clicking
and you you double-click those things that it makes sense to select, which is done by single-clicking.
Exactly.
It’s like asking a native English speaker why “tired little old lady” isn’t the same as “old tired little lady.”
More frustrating than not being able to explain it is the total unwillingness to experiment on their part. There are times when single clicking doesn’t work as I expect it to! I don’t magically know everything that must be single clicked or double clicked. I guess based on context, and when that fails, I try them both. Which is obnoxious, sure, but it’s much, much faster than asking someone else for help.
Someday I’ll present a paper on the paternalistic antagonism between tech adopters and tech avoiders because that IS frustrating, but often an unwillingness to experiment is rooted in thirty years of your child who is good at computers telling you “just don’t touch anything! do this, and this, and this, and nothing else!” after they’ve cleaned viruses off your desktop for the umpteenth time. Or if it’s not the child who is good at computers it’s the IT team at work, or it’s their spouse. It IS annoying that they seem intentionally helpless and uninterested in moving beyond that, but that is absolutely a learned helplessness.
Legitimately, a lot of education about computers that is directed at people who don’t feel comfortable with computers is “don’t ever click on anything you don’t understand” so they learn to not click. And when something goes wrong and their child who is good at computers says “okay, what did you do this time” they go “!! Nothing!” and it becomes a defensive stance. “I didn’t do anything to the computer, I did just what you said, I didn’t break it, it just doesn’t like me, computers don’t work around me so I don’t mess with them.”
And then they need to file their taxes online and the form isn’t working and they’re not sure if double-clicking on the menu is going to break something (because they’re not an enthusiastic adopter so they’re running an older OS with not enough memory and double clicking the menu opens and closes it just fast enough for them to click on something that they didn’t mean to).
I’ve been meaning to make an adult activity book of “how to interact with a computer and learn to be more comfortable with it” for years but it is, unsurprisingly, a lot of work. What a lot of these folks need isn’t an adult child sighing and reorienting their screwed up monitor or renewing the antivirus license to get rid of the pop-ups, what they often need is a patient chaperone to sit with them while they dick around for two hours three nights a week until they’re less scared they’re about to break their third most expensive possession while also revealing their underwear and social security number on live TV.
This is, by the way, basically what computer lab time was for those of us who got it in elementary school. I made a joke about the Grolier encyclopedia up there, but what that meant was that I spent two hours a week in a room where I was allowed to touch computers and could not meaningfully break them (because if it gets super fucked up you just do a reinstall) and had to learn how to use a pointing device to open a program and had to learn to use menus and keyboards to input search terms and use keyboard shortcuts that were helpfully pinned up on the wall to learn how to print so that I could do a fifty word report on Andy Warhol or the State of Rhode Island.
On New Year’s eve I spent three hours on the phone talking to a woman who called because her mouse was acting weird and she thought the computer had a virus. It just turned out that she was using her husband’s old computer and had never learned that there were controls that you could adjust to change cursor behavior. So I talked her through that and showed her how to use the search bar and then she showed me the microsoft popup she was getting - her microsoft license was deactivated since it had been moved to her husband’s new computer. So I talked to her about a couple of options - cryptpad, libre office, gdocs - and I told her to go to her browser and she couldn’t find it. No one had installed chrome on this desktop and she didn’t know what to do with edge. So I talked her through installing chrome and talked her through right-clicking on the icon on the taskbar to create a shortcut so that she could always get to it and then I asked if she wanted to log into google so I could talk her through gdocs and she said she had ymail - she had tried to create a google account but she doesn’t have a cellphone so she can’t make a gmail address.
And it’s that kind of thing that gets to me. This woman WAS willing to try to experiment as long as she had a soothing voice on the phone telling her what to click, but everything scared her and when she got up the will to try, it wasn’t designed for her. She tried to search her computer and it brought up the microsoft store. She tried to create an email account and it required a cellphone. She tried to open her document but the program could only be installed on one computer at a time and was phoning home to check. She was trying to access her email but windows doesn’t have an obvious built-in email client, so unless you have had someone who is good at computers helping you, doing the obvious thing of clicking the envelope that says “email” just asks you to purchase outlook. (I had her log into yahoo and we created a shortcut for her taskbar for that too).
I walked her through installing Libre Office (and pinning it to her taskbar) and made sure she was able to open her .doc files and she was so happy. I showed her how to take a screenshot and save it in paint so that she could print it out to return things (because she couldn’t save a QR code on the cellphone she doesn’t have). I showed her how to search for programs.
And every time I do this, it becomes really clear that
A) It *IS* hard for people to navigate; unless they’re running linux (which these people are very much not) then nearly everything they do wants them to connect a microsoft account or pay for more icloud storage or to download something from the app store that will be a recurring $21.95 a month
and B) Nobody has ever sat down with them like this before. Nobody sat down and was sympathetic about how frustrating it is that the search function is also a store, or that their email homepage is covered with pop-up ads, or that you can pay for a program and it can report back to HQ and tattle on you for having two installations. Nobody has let them make mistakes over and over, they get frustrated and say “here, I’ll do it” and so they don’t know what menus to click on and everyone moves so fast that they can’t see what they’re doing so they don’t even know where to look when they do it next time and their kid who is good with computers is saying “i showed you this, don’t you remember?” and maybe the kid who’s good with computers THINKS they showed mom how to save a file as a PDF but they did it in two clicks and half a second so to mom it’s the same magic as running malwarebytes, as downloading a video, as creating a gmail account.
When I first learned to knit, I was incredibly slow at it, half because I needed to built up the muscle memory, and half because any fuck up meant a full restart. It wasn’t until I learned how to tink and how to catch and redo dropped stitches that I got comfortable throwing most caution to the wind and actively trying to knit quickly.
More than anything, imo, people need to learn to fix minor errors: how to use the undo button, how to back out of error messages, how to manually fix the smaller stuff, etc.
Experimentation is natural when it’s almost risk free.
YES YES YES exactly.
One of the many stupid feelings humans are capable of having is the private, repulsive rage of seeing someone getting support and sympathy for a problem no one helped you with when you were having it, either because you didn’t have anyone or because it never occurred to you that you could ask for help. Suddenly the world seems to split into two – the realm that contains people like them, the connected and loved – and the realm that contains you, the miserable and the alone, who must suffer in solitude. This is sufficiently horrible that you grasp for reasons or world-understandings to make this reality acceptable, and a mentally available one is that it is superior to be in the miserable solitude realm, that the problem is one that should be solved with self sufficiency and dignity. That this other person is pathetic for being aided and loved when you were not. Scorn is more palatable than confronting the notion that you could have received aid (if you had made different choices or been luckier), that you desperately wish you could have been aided but were not. Scorn is more palatable than the howling hunger for things to have been different for you. So your mind chooses scorn.
It is also a bad place to be. Human existence is full of such traps.
maddie-grove