Internet Archive’s Down, Post Links
It’s been a while since I’ve done an old-fashioned linkblog. Here’s some links I’ve liked recently.
YouTube recommendations continue to be an excellent source of new music specifically, and often send me off on little rabbit holes. This week, for instance, I discovered Melbourne-based Glass Beams, who make Indian-influenced psychedelic funk (?), via this cover. The choice of cover is meaningful — it’s based on “Raga Bhairav” from Charanjit Singh’s 1982 Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat. Singh was a ‘70s Bollywood session musician who got his hands on a Roland TB 303 bassline synthesizer, writing an album now widely considered acid house half a decade before that genre’s birth in Chicago. Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat is highly recommended, as are Glass Beams’ two EPs, Mirage and Mahal.
On the other hand, YouTube’s recommendation engine failed to present me with WeRateDogs’ “St. Vincent Performs for Rescue Puppies”, a self-explanatory video that is required video if you, like me, consider St. Vincent’s Actor one of your ten favorite albums of all time.
“Don’t Take Advice From a Habsburg.”. Excellent advice in general, but especially so when the Habsburg in question is writing a self-help book with rules like “Get Married (and Have Lots of Children)” and “Be Catholic! (And Practice Your Faith).”
I’ve been loving the Poems Ancient and Modern newsletter, where two writers reprint and analyze great (and not-so-great) English-language poems. Did you know “no country for old men” comes from a (nigh-on-incomprehensible) Yeats poem? Did you know Jane Austen had snippy personal poetry chiding her acquaintances? On a more somber note, I’ve also been introduced to some beautiful works, like “The Melancholy Year is Dead with Rain” and “The Tropics in New York”.
Komeya no Bento in the Marina is highly recommended — check out that katsu!
Rosencreutz’ YouTube channel is often recommended by perennial rwblickhan.org favorite Bret Devereaux, so I finally dove into some of their backlog. They primarily make complicated historiographical arguments about video games, but their most interesting video is actually a discussion of the history of Theosophy and the many strange characters that contributed to the most important religious movement of the 20th century — one that is today almost completely forgotten, despite being the ultimate source of so much New Age mythology!
A few years ago, the founder of Google’s long-running internal film club wrote up its origins — where the idea came from, how they chose the films, and, most importantly, how he managed to get permission for it! The resulting article is unusually interesting — it’s one of the clearest examples of “lieutenants are the limiting reagent” I’ve ever read, where one particularly motivated person created a long-running institution just by asking the right questions.
“d&d is anti-medieval”. Well, sure, who expected it to be accurate? But I’m linking this because the few world-building details that the original Dungeons & Dragons books set up are fascinatingly weird in their own right — for instance, the article points out that the richest dungeon hoards are described as containing about as much hard currency as a baron can expect to earn in taxes in a year, implying there’s no lost empire that created all the dungeons you’re spelunking in. Working out the fully-fleshed-out details for how that world could work would be an interesting world-building exercise!
That reminds me of a Tweet (that I can unfortunately no longer find) that pointed out that, in a world with as many monsters and combat as D&D presents, disabilities should be vastly more common and treated rather differently.
