Ronin Trail

 

Game du jour: Cyberpunk 2077

 

A complete A-Z list of every political party that's ever existed in Australia

 https://www.6newsau.com/post/a-complete-a-z-list-of-every-political-party-that-s-ever-existed-in-australia

Der Vogelfanger bin Ich ja

 

Korean Literature Now

 http://www.kln.or.kr/

The Magic Flute

 

Welsh Landscape by R. S. Thomas

To live in Wales is to be conscious
At dusk of the spilled blood
That went into the making of the wild sky,
Dyeing the immaculate rivers
In all their courses.
It is to be aware,
Above the noisy tractor
And hum of the machine
Of strife in the strung woods,
Vibrant with sped arrows.
You cannot live in the present,
At least not in Wales.
There is the language for instance,
The soft consonants
Strange to the ear.
There are cries in the dark at night
As owls answer the moon,
And thick ambush of shadows,
Hushed at the fields' corners.
There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics,
Wind-bitten towers and castles
With sham ghosts;
Mouldering quarries and mines;
And an impotent people,
Sick with inbreeding,
Worrying the carcase of an old song. To live in Wales is to be conscious
At dusk of the spilled blood
That went into the making of the wild sky,
Dyeing the immaculate rivers
In all their courses.
It is to be aware,
Above the noisy tractor
And hum of the machine
Of strife in the strung woods,
Vibrant with sped arrows.
You cannot live in the present,
At least not in Wales.
There is the language for instance,
The soft consonants
Strange to the ear.
There are cries in the dark at night
As owls answer the moon,
And thick ambush of shadows,
Hushed at the fields' corners.
There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics,
Wind-bitten towers and castles
With sham ghosts;
Mouldering quarries and mines;
And an impotent people,
Sick with inbreeding,
Worrying the carcase of an old song.

Sunset over a forest lake, 1895 by Peder Mørk Mønsted

 

Age of Stars

 

The Performer’s Voice: Performance and Analysis in Ravel’s Concerto pour la main gauche

https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.05.11.3/mto.05.11.3.leong_korevaar.html




On a fundamental level, the physical in this Concerto constrains the structural. Maurice Ravel felt that “the music of a Concerto . . . should be lighthearted and brilliant, and not aim at profundity or at dramatic effects” but, because “in a work of this kind [the Concerto for the Left Hand] it is essential to give the impression of a texture no thinner than that of a part written for both hands, . . . I resorted to a style which is much nearer to the more solemn kind of traditional Concerto” (Orenstein 1990, 477). “The most formidable aspect of the problem . . . is to maintain interest in a work of extended scope while utilizing such limited means” (Orenstein 1990, 396). The left-handedness of the concerto, then, dictated its one-movement length, as well as its dramatic affect (in stark contrast to the divertissement character of Ravel’s G major Piano Concerto, written at the same time).

[22] The Concerto’s left-handedness is essential. Ravel’s disapproval of Alfred Cortot’s two-handed rendition (Orenstein 1990, 327) suggests as much, for the concerto exploits and stretches to their limits the possibilities of this single hand.

[23] In an essay entitled “Ravel ou l’esthétique de l’imposture” (Ravel or the Aesthetic of Imposture), Ravel’s student and biographer Roland-Manuel states that “il ne procède pas habituellement par métaphores, . . . mais volontiers par antithèses, allusions, . . . ”.(14) Ravel loves to exploit ambiguity, to fulfill expectations in unanticipated ways. For example, in Alborada del gracioso he both fulfills and fools the listener’s expectation of a trumpet by simulating the sound of a trumpet with a flute (Roland-Manuel 1925, 20–21). The left-hand concerto is about the left hand masquerading as two hands, and hence about the distance between the physical and the musical.

Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog)

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/308/308-h/308-h.htm




The chief beauty of this book lies not so much in its literary style, or in the extent and usefulness of the information it conveys, as in its simple truthfulness. Its pages form the record of events that really happened. All that has been done is to colour them; and, for this, no extra charge has been made. George and Harris and Montmorency are not poetic ideals, but things of flesh and blood—especially George, who weighs about twelve stone. Other works may excel this in depth of thought and knowledge of human nature: other books may rival it in originality and size; but, for hopeless and incurable veracity, nothing yet discovered can surpass it. This, more than all its other charms, will, it is felt, make the volume precious in the eye of the earnest reader; and will lend additional weight to the lesson that the story teaches.

London, August, 1889.

Candidates 2022

 

everything everywhere all at once

 

Thomas Aquinas in a N64 game

 

Leda and the Swan W. B. Yeats - 1865-1939

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

On His Deceased Wife - John Milton - 1608-1674

Me thought I saw my late espousèd Saint 

Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave, 

Whom Joves great Son to her glad Husband gave, 

Rescu'd from death by force though pale and faint. 

Mine as whom washt from spot of child-bed taint, 

Purification in the old Law did save, 

And such, as yet once more I trust to have 

Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint, 

Came vested all in white, pure as her mind: 

Her face was vail'd, yet to my fancied sight, 

Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin'd 

So clear, as in no face with more delight. 

But O as to embrace me she enclin'd 

I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.

Null Island

This paper explores Null Island, a fictional place located at 0∘ latitude and 0∘ longitude in the WGS84 geographic coordinate system. Null Island is erroneously associated with large amounts of geographic data in a wide variety of location-based services, place databases, social media and web-based maps. While it was originally considered a joke within the geospatial community, this article will demonstrate implications of its existence, both technological and social in nature, promoting Null Island as a fundamental issue of geographic information that requires more widespread awareness. The article summarizes error sources that lead to data being associated with Null Island. We identify four evolutionary phases which help explain how this fictional place evolved and established itself as an entity reaching beyond the geospatial profession to the point of being discovered by the visual arts and the general population. After providing an accurate account of data that can be found at (0, 0), geospatial, technological and social implications of Null Island are discussed. Guidelines to avoid misplacing data to Null Island are provided. Since data will likely continue to appear at this location, our contribution is aimed at both GIScientists and the general population to promote awareness of this error source.

Earth Explorer

 https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/

The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)

 

THE MYSTERY OF JOHN TITOR

This is our planet’s bleak future: a second Civil War splinters America into five factions, leaving the new capital based in Omaha. World War III breaks out in 2015, starting with Russia and the U.S. trading nukes and ending with three billion dead. Then, to top it all off, a computer bug delivers where Y2K sputtered, destroying our world as we know it. That is, unless an audacious time traveler successfully traverses the space-time continuum to change the course of future history.

In late 2000, that person signed onto the Internet.

A poster going by the screennames “TimeTravel_0” and “John Titor” on a variety of message boards, beginning with the forum at the Time Travel Institute, claimed he was a soldier sent from 2036, the year the computer virus wiped the world. His mission was to head back to 1975 in order to snatch-and-grab an IBM 5100 computer, which had the necessary equipment to fight the future virus. (His detour to the year 2000 was simply to get a little R&R while visiting his three-year-old self, ignoring every fabric-of-time paradox rule from time-travel stories.) Over the next four months, Titor responded to every question other posters had, describing future events in poetically-phrased ways, always submitted with a general disclaimer that alternate realities do exist, so his reality may not be our own. In between dire urgings to learn first aid and stop eating beef—Mad Cow was a serious threat in his reality—Titor provided a number of technical specs regarding how time travel worked, with overly complex algorithms and grainy, hard-to-make-out photos of his actual machine. (Which, yes, of course, was an automobile: a 1987 Chevy Suburban.) He even showed off his cool futuristic military insignia.


On March 24, 2001, Titor offered his final piece of advice (“Bring a gas can with you when the car dies on the side of the road”), signed off forever, and returned home. He was never heard from again.
TODAY, EVERYTHING POSTED ONLINE GETS A HEALTHY DOSE OF SKEPTICISM. LET'S CALL IT THE POST-SNOPES ERA. WE'VE BEEN CONDITIONED TO SUSPECT EVERYTHING.

IN 2003, TITOR FAN Oliver Williams—some may want to put “fan” in quotation marks, simply because of the numerous unsubstantiated theories that Williams himself is/was Titor—launched JohnTitor.com, which tracks Titor’s predictions and offers a compendium of all of his 151 posts. In 2004, members of George Mason University threw together a multimedia rock opera based on Titor. A summary of the tale at io9.com garnered over 103,000 hits in 2011. And, according to IMDB, a feature-length film about Titor is in the pipeline. What seemingly should have been dismissed as a four-month hoax, the work of some nerd killing time at his boring temp job, somehow turned into a phenomenon.

Since the beginning of the mysterious posts, Art Bell's popular late-night radio program “Coast to Coast AM,” a nationally-syndicated show that covers pretty much everything that'd fit comfortably into an episode of The X-Files, has been the go-to place for all things Titor. George Noory, who replaced Bell in 2003, has continued carrying the torch, devoting entire episodes to the ongoing mystery, fielding inane questions from callers and somehow answering with a straight face. (Examples: “Is there any way that Titor could be a godsend, sent as an angel, to warn us?” and “Do you think there's any possibility he was a space alien? I'll hang up and listen.”) In 2006, a lawyer named Lawrence Haber, who claimed to represent Kay Titor, a woman alleging to be John's mother, contacted Noory. An interview followed between Noory and Kay—with Haber acting as a phone go-between—and it ended up answering, well, pretty much nothing at all.


After that episode, the show intermittently tracked Titor's proposed timeline, looking at current events like tea leaves, possible harbingers of a nuclear armageddon. But as the false predictions piled up—while many of Titor's descriptions are vague enough to be considered “not yet disproved,” he did also claim there would be no Olympic Games after 2004—the search for Titor shifted from “Is this real?” to “Who deceived us?”

Maps Arcarnum

 https://maps.arcanum.com/en/

The Day of our Divorce Hearing

 

Running up that hill

 

Vizcomic

Programming a Computer for Playing Chess (1950)