Michel Vuijlsteke's weblog

Oh no.

Heather Armstrong, Dooce, lichtend voorbeeld voor zoveel mensen die ook eens een blog gingen schrijven op het internet, hilarisch grappig en vreselijk ontroerend, dochter van de Avon World Sales Leader, moeder van Leto en Marlo, is overleden.

De wereld is armer geworden.

Haar laatste post is van schat ik net vóór ze van de wagen viel, en is alles wat Dooce fantastisch maakte.

Depressie is een vuil beest.

🙁

Hohoho, wat een uitstekende serie op de Netflixen. The Diplomat, over een mevrouw die de nieuwe ambassadeur van de VS in Londen wordt.

Ik vond het bijzonder goed.

Helaas wel met een cliffhanger.

Gelukkig wel met een bevestigd tweede seizoen.

Ik was meer dan een paar keer ontroerd door cononvanvlaanderen.

En om de één of andere manier trots om Vlaming en Europeër en al te zijn.

Fijn.

We zijn gaan kijken met het hele gezin en behalve dat het ons 120 euro of meer gekost heeft en dat er irritant veel voorfilmpjes waren en om de één of andere reden twee voorfilmpjes vol spoilers voor de film waar we naar gingen kijken, en dat de zetel niet comfortabel was en dat er een irritante pauze in het midden van de film was, was het een uitstekende film.

En dan na de film nog op café gaan zitten met maten.

Een geslaagde avond.

‘t Is aflevering 16 van de 16, we zijn 1 uur en 11 minuten ver, en ik ben heel hard aan het wachten op het happy end.

‘t Was Live Up To Your Name, met een dokter-acupunturist die 400 jaar geleden doodgeschoten wordt en wakker wordt in onze tijd, en een dokteres-westerse geneeskunde met een trauma omdat ze haar vader heeft zien doodgaan voor haar ogen toen ze klein was. De dokter van het verleden zit ook met een trauma wegens zijn moeder doodgedaan voor zijn ogen.

Dat schept een band.

Uiteraard komen ze in minofmeer conflict, en uiteraard worden ze verliefd op mekaar, en zijn er reizen achteruit in de tijd en weer terug (telkens hij doodgaat, springt hij over en weer, en als hij iemand vastheeft, springt die mee).

…en kijk, we zijn 1 uur en 16 minuten ver, en het mechanisme van het happy end is in gang gezet.

Oef.

Dat maakt er een aanrader van, Live Up To Your Name.

Tijd voor een streepje muziek.

Goddamn.

Vrouw dronken, rijdt twee mensen dood, lacht er wat mee.

Sommige dingen ga ik nooit begrijpen: zat rijden, en klagen over boetes wegens te snel rijden.

Om de zoveel tijd komt er eens een artikel over iemand die het zo vreselijk erg vind dat hij/zij tien boetes op een week kreeg en hoe schandalig dat het allemaal is.

Rijd dan niet te snel, of zo?

Zot.

En zeggen dat zijn manier om de hoeken af te ronden eigenlijk het gevolg was van een koerscorrectie wegens fout ingestelde dinges toen hij deze opaal aan het doen was:

• A Brutal Sex Trade Built for American Soldiers – The New York Times
  It’s a long-buried part of South Korean history: women compelled by force, trickery or desperation into prostitution, with the complicity of their own leaders.
• SimplyDifferently.org: Yurt Notes & Calculator *
  Zal zeker van pas komen de volgende keer dat ik een joert moet opzetten.
• “All Tomorrow’s Parties”: KI-Synthese – Ende des Copyrights, wie wir es kannten | heise online
  Die Zufälligkeit einer stochastischen Bibliothek und der interpolative Charakter von KI-Synthese widersprechen grundsätzlich den Prinzipien US-amerikanischer und europäischer Urheberrechte, die individuelle, identifizierbare Werke von natürlichen Personen und eine gewisse Schöpfungshöhe voraussetzen, um tätig zu werden. Wie solche Kopierrechte auf einen interpolierfähigen Latent Space reagieren sollen, in dem ich Muster bestehender Werke auf kreativ-molekularer Ebene miteinander frei verbinden k…
• Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences | New Scientist
  The sensation of moving down a tunnel towards a bright light, reliving past memories and hearing or seeing deceased relatives have all been reported by people from many cultures who have had a brush with death. Sceptics, however, say these experiences could be caused by people hallucinating as they recover in hospital.
  Now, it seems we may have identified the brain activity behind these experiences.
• “A Great Ox Stands on my Tongue”: the Pitfalls of Latin Translation – Antigone
  Too often, Classicists treat translation as something akin to a crossword puzzle, forgetting that people once spoke and thought in the ancient languages, which were never simply voiceless words on a page, as they now seem to be. When you translate a coherent text, it ought to be rendered into intelligible English: you should not feel awkward reading your words aloud to someone else, unless what you are translating itself makes you squirm.
• Tattoo HIStories: The Skin Collector – Fukushi Masaichi (1878-1956)
  “Some people donate their bodies to science. Lyle Tuttle is donating his to art. When he dies, he says it will be shipped to Japan, where they’ll skin it. The hide will then go up on the wall as part of a private collection at the University of Tokyo’s Museum of Pathology.”
  Deze twee foto’s in de buurt van elkaar waren, euh, mja.

levende en niet meer levende meneer

levende en niet meer levende meneer

• The epistemology of software quality – Increment: Teams
  Say you run a new team. You have carte blanche to implement any policies you want to make the people more productive and the code less buggy. What do you do?
  Careers have been built selling the answer. Take up pair programming! Switch to Haskell! Use UML for everything! These techniques get their own books and conferences. But are they worth the effort? How long till they take effect? Do they even work at all?
• How Our Team Overturned the 90-Year-Old Metaphor of a ‘Little Man’ in the Brain Who Controls Movement – Scientific American
  Instead of a continuous head-to-toe representation of body movements in a single homunculus, our findings show this neural representation of the body is sliced into three sections, one for the feet, another for the hands and a third for the mouth. Separating or adjoining these areas are the locations of the mysterious three spots that produced so much frustration for us. All three turn out to be interconnected, and we found that they are responsible for a range of tasks, including planning, regu…
• Humanity is the reimagined 3D Lemmings we didn’t know we needed | Ars Technica
  Is it a bad time or the perfect time to release a game about humans mindlessly marching toward their doom unless an ethereal Shiba Inu guides them toward the light?
  Humanity, a new puzzle-and-somewhat-platformer game from the publisher of Tetris Effect, was shown off in a trailer at Sony’s State of Play event last night, and in many ways, it stole the show from more traditional big-name titles.
• The Imgur Apocalypse Is Going to Break Large Parts of the Internet
  It’s not just porn that’s getting deleted from Imgur. Millions of images that are embedded elsewhere will also eventually be taken down.
• Beamer, Dressman, Bodybag
  The longer I live between languages, the more I realise that language is roomy; people’s minds, and lives, are roomy. If homogenization has a kryptonite, it is not the closing of borders but the survival of plurality. Here in Berlin, a cosmos of authors make hay in the linguistic collision zones.
• Palantir Demos AI to Fight Wars But Says It Will Be Totally Ethical Don’t Worry About It
  Uh huh. Okay. Sure. Yeah. Right.
• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns
  I thought that if self-awareness was recent then “I” must be too, and that can be tested fairly easily. The distribution of 1sg words should have been random, and it would have been case closed. Instead I found that dozens of language families use similar pronoun forms and linguists have been debating the enigma for decades. Not only that, but the introduction of the Rainbow Serpent corresponds with the memetic, but not genetic, expanse of Pama-Nyungan over the whole of Australia.
• Xiongnu – Wikipedia
  Xiongnu were a confederation of nomadic peoples who inhabited the eastern Asian Steppe from the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD.
• Monster Anatomy – Google Docs
  Here is the new and improved list of monster peens, vags, appendages, tails, etc that make monster smut as fun as it is! I’ve updated it based on comments, DMs, and additional books I’ve read.
• The 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings – Progressive Boink
  And then, there’s Rob Liefeld. You know how people draw comics? Rob doesn’t do that. He had his own Levi’s commercial directed by Spike Lee in the 90s. He had best-selling comic books. He was a revolutionary and helped co-found Image Comics when all the hot artists ditched their classic gigs (like Spider-Man, the X-Men, and, uh, Guardians of the Galaxy) for creator-owned projects. But he doesn’t “draw” comics. Oh God, no.
  Just… ugh, just let me show you.
• Worse than Oedipus
  After birth, the females venture out to find a new egg to feed on, while the males emerge from their mother only to die shortly after. They do not feed and they do not mate – they just wait for their demise. For decades, this strange characteristic puzzled zoologists, who wondered why the males existed if all they did was die.
• lofi air traffic control
  Muziek en ATC.
• 10 remarkable things about Battlefield Earth | Den of Geek
  “A million monkeys with a million crayons would be hard-pressed in a million years to create anything as cretinous as Battlefield Earth” wrote the Washington Post. “A cross between Star Wars and the smell of ass” said Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. “Everything about Battlefield Earth sucks,” added Jonathon Ross on Film 2000. “Everything.”
• End-of-Life Dreams: A hospice doctor makes sense of our final visions.
  “Medically,” Dr. D said, “Lisa is much better. Her vital signs are strong, and she is not experiencing any nausea. This is the good news. The bad news,” he continued, “is that your wife called the nurses in the middle of the night to say that she saw her parents on a boat outside the window beckoning her to come. I know this may not make sense,” he went on, “but we see this repeatedly in our patients. When patients report a vision like this, they almost always die within a day or two. I’m so sorry.” My wife died a little more than twenty-four hours later.
• The 42 Best Pens for 2023: Gel, Ballpoint, Rollerball, and Fountain Pens | JetPens
  The title of “The Best Pen” is a weighty one—not everyone wants the same things from their pens, and what makes for one person’s perfect pen may be intolerable to another. It’s also true that different types of pens aren’t directly comparable. The best fountain pen has different characteristics from the best gel pen, and the best pens for writing aren’t the same as the best pens for art.
  To make this guide as useful as possible, we’ve limited our choices to the best pens in specific categories …
• Crazy ants are chimeras thanks to a weird way of reproducing
  All the cells of our body (except gametes, sperm and eggs) contain copies of both our maternal and paternal chromosomes, so we’re diploid.
  Researchers found that the cells in the male crazy ant’s body are actually a mixture of two different lineages – some contain copies of maternal chromosomes, while others contain the paternal ones, so they’re haploid.
  “We discovered that the male ants have maternal and paternal genomes in different cells of their body and are thus chimeras. To put it anothe…
• Midjourney AI Guide
  Handig.
• A Number System Invented by Inuit Schoolchildren Will Make Its Silicon Valley Debut – Scientific American
  In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere’s first new number system in more than a century. The “Kaktovik numerals,” named after the Alaskan village where they were created, looked utterly different from decimal system numerals and functioned differently, too. But they were uniquely suited for quick, visual arithmetic using the traditional Inuit oral counting system, and they swiftly spread throughout the r…
• Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic
  Some might be surprised at this blunt disparagement of one of the world’s most revered military texts., but they shouldn’t be. Sun Tzu’s own contemporaries and later Chinese thinkers did not shy away from spirited debates over the enduring wisdom found in his work.
  

  For too many, especially in the West, Sun Tzu is often the lone voice speaking on behalf of millennia of Chinese strategic and military thinking, with the exception of a smattering of Mao Zedong quotes. The 2,400 intervening years of Chinese strategic writing and history between Sun and Mao—let alone the centuries preceding Sun Tzu—remain an unexamined black box.The mischaracterization of Sun Tzu as a metonymy for all Chinese strategic wisdom, past, present, and future, grossly distorts the text’s importance and provides unrealistic expectations of what The Art of War can reasonably offer the modern strategist. Moreover, it leads to a myopic view of current Chinese strategic thinking, as too many contemporary analysts seek to neatly trace back almost every Chinese action to verses found in this solitary ancient text.

• The Kissimmee River has been brought back to life—and wildlife is thriving
  Much of Florida’s Kissimmee River has been restored to its natural state, a milestone worth celebrating—and learning from.
• His software sang the words of God. Then it went silent.
  I can tell you what TropeTrainer was, what it did, and what it meant to people. I can tell you about the person who made it, about what happened after he died, and what was lost.
  But I can’t quite describe that voice.
  I first heard it played to me over the phone from a copy that hadn’t yet ceased to function. It was a voice unlike any I’d ever heard: not human but made by humans, generated by a piece of computer code dating to the 1980s, singing words of a text from the Bronze Age in a cadence…
• La troisième guerre mondiale a commencé
• AI Shakespeare by DAISYS.ai
  Tekst en dialoog en gesproken woorden en al.
• Wat
  Dit blijft zo hard een klassieker.
• The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic is International: The Anglosphere
  Teen mental health plummeted across the Western world in the early 2010s, particularly for girls and particularly in the most individualistic nations.
• Paris bans cars: The city pulled off an urban dream. Is it a model or a warning?
  Allemaal de schuld van Watteeuw.
• John Burn-Murdoch on Twitter: “NEW: I’m not sure people fully appreciate how dire the US life expectancy / mortality situation has got.
  Hallucinante cijfers.
• Abell 1201: detection of an ultramassive black hole in a strong gravitational lens | Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | Oxford Academic
  Dr Nightingale told BBC Radio Newcastle: “Even as an astronomer, I find it hard to comprehend how big this thing is.
  “If you look at the night sky and count up all the stars and planets you can see and put them in a single point, it would be a fraction of a percent the size of this black hole.
  “This black hole is bigger than the majority of galaxies in the universe.”

Zucht ja. Socialisten met op den duur alleen nog maar aanhalingstekens en daartussen lucht.

Pff.

Ik dacht: ik heb eigenlijk nooit alle Saw-films gezien. En dus heb ik dan maar Saw I, II, III, IV, V, VI en The Final Chapter bekeken.

Slechte films. Meer een tv-serie dan een reeks films ook: één continu verhaal, dat waarschijnlijk voor minimaal budget gedraaid is, met het oog op één film per jaar.

Ik ben nu door alle films van 2004 tot 2010 geraakt. Eén deze zal ik dan naar Jigsaw (2017) en Spiral (2021) kijken. In de hoop dat ze minder formulaïsch en voorspelbaar zijn.

Daarnaast heb ik ook naar Wellmania gekeken, dat goed was maar helaas op een cliffhanger eindigde — er is écht iets te zeggen voor Koreaanse series die gewoon op één seizoen gedaan zijn en daarmee doef.

Zonder afspraak had wél een einde, was onderhoudend en pijnlijk herkenbaar bij momenten. Het had even goed een serie kunnen geworden zijn à la Keeping Up Appearances, met stapels jaargangen en alsmaar meer zichzelf parodiërende personages, maar ‘t is proper geëindigd. Aangeraden.

We zijn gaan eten met vrienden en het was bijzonder zeer fijn, met drie koppels alsmaar ouder wordende mensen waar toch nog wat kleine kinders in zitten ook.

We gaan dat nog doen.