akawil

He Helped Shape Austin’s Music Scene. Now, as He Stares Down ALS, He’s Still Playing. This is so sad, and I'm really glad all the people he's worked with are coming together to help him.
Three-year-old child forced to serve as her own attorney in Tucson immigration court. Not new, but the part of the story about the nonprofits being out of money but still working with the kids is depressingly unsurprising.
Related: The Undocumented Underground Is Fighting Back Inside New York’s Notorious Immigration Court. I wish I had the health and strength to do something like this.
Why we have two nostrils instead of one big hole. Today I learned. I still think putting nasal drip over the mouth is suboptimal design, though.
Rubio Deletes Calibri as the State Department’s Official Typeface. It's more readable for folks with visual problems (aka folks who need glasses).
Local fans outraged at 2026 World Cup’s ‘inconceivable’ and ‘extortionate’ ticket prices. Dynamic prices mean that good seats may cost more than $2000 for local games. Good thing I don't want to go to any of these games because it's a little rich for my blood!
The Boomer Humor That Raised Gen X All about the awful sex humor that defined my teenage years.
Major Weight Loss and Knee-Pain Relief Seen With New Eli Lilly Drug. I'm more interested in the pain relief (which is helped by the weight loss) but losing 28.7% of your body weight over 68 weeks is a lot.
A Former King Seeks an Exit From Exile but Finds No Royal Treatment. Mostly a book review but I'm interested in him as an inheritor and refuser of Franco's fascist power.
In Shakespeare, Food References Are a Window to the Soul. I hadn't considered humour theory in Shakespeare's menus, but of course.
I Grew Up Ismaili in Houston. Here’s What America’s First Ismaili Center Means to Our Community. I had no idea this center was being built in my home town. I hope I have a reason to visit.
Scientists Thought Parkinson’s Was in Our Genes. It Might Be in the Water. My mother-in-law died of Parkinson's and my father had an early case of it so I was surprised to find out how little genetics actually seems to contribute to the diagnosis.
Why everything is ‘aesthetic’ to Gen Z and Alpha. I don't like this use of the word "aesthetic" but I'm an old and don't need to use the kids' slang.
Schrödinger's Royal Heir: Succession and Medieval Political Crisis. I love this kind of public scholarship about parts of the medieval world I'm less familiar with. Substack sucks but this kind of newsletter does not.

Current Music: Wind chimes.

Books
The Glassmaker, by Tracy Chevalier. Lit fic about a woman born in late Renaissance/early modern Murano and her family of glassmakers. They and their contacts magically live into the present through unexamined time skips (no other magic is involved). Interesting family and historical drama and obviously reasonably well studied but although it was good it was super light as a read.
It Doesn't Have to Hurt: Your Smart Guide to a Pain-Free Life, by Sanjay Gupta M.D. This was more interesting and potentially useful than I expected. Some of it is directed to people with different pain problems but some of it is useful for folks like me who have demonstrated physical causes for pain. I may have to buy a physical copy to mark up and perform some of the exercises.

Music
Víkingur Ólafsson, Opus 109 (Beethoven | Bach | Schubert). I'm not as familiar with the Beethoven and Schubert but I love his Bach, always.

Current Music: Silence is golden.

We had the mold guy in last week to look at the drywall behind the dishwasher. Turns out it does have mold but it's very mild and only a very little over baseline. Still, it has to be remediated and we now have a plan and dates. The two weeks after Christmas will be mold remediation.

If things go as planned, we'll have the fridge, pantry, and stove/microwave available. We also have a sink in our wet bar but it'll be hard to wash anything of any size. I foresee a lot of plastic cutlery in my future. It also means we'll need to clean out the rest of the cupboards, though I don't think Michael has really thought about that, and a lot of decisions about what stays and what goes.

They'll have to tape off part of the breakfast area but we don't use that anyway and we'll still have access to laundry (and the cats to the Litter Robot, which is the important part). They estimate two weeks and it's going to run us about $7000 on top of the $1500 for the initial report.

Home ownership is not for the faint of heart or budget.

Current Music: Silence is golden.

chuckro

Terranigma Redux (v1.5.2) (SNES, Played on Trimui Smart Pro) - I had a combination of thoughts regarding both the original game and the hack. In things that weren’t changed; there are a lot of obtuse things you need to do and the signposting isn’t that good. And it's way too easy to miss stupid event flag snags in the late third chapter while trying to upgrade the cities—without a walkthrough, you might just conclude you’d locked yourself out of sidequests or that they don’t exist. (That said, there isn’t a lot of value to doing them—you unlock a couple of equipment upgrades that there’s no point to using because the HeroPike you get automatically is better; and a couple of MagiRocks when magic is only useful at one point you’ve already passed.) Regarding the hack, the difficulty is definitely different from the original, forcing you to use different elemental weapons and still requiring some grinding. The translation is a little smoother and I’m pretty sure they added a few more signpost dialogue bits. And the items/weapon descriptions are an excellent addition given the elemental and special effects. I used the optional patch where the CrySpear and ElleCape you get at the beginning are upgraded to +99 weapon and armor effects; and these are helpful, but not overpowering-- levels still matter a lot. And they didn't fix Bloody Mary (she still took minimal damage from all of my weapons at the point I reached her), which really feels like an oversight. Overall, I think the increase in difficulty versus the original isn’t worth the gimmicks.

Final Fantasy Adventure DX (GBC, Played on Trimui Smart Pro) – A hack that colorizes the game up to Game Boy Color standards and nothing else. There are a few cases where I felt like they could have gone a little harder—I feel like there are places where the colors could have been more vibrant or where caves could have been more varied to make them feel less same-ish. But they did successfully make the Dragon green and the Red Dragon red, which means a lot of other things can be forgiven. And they did successfully make it pretty and not garish.

Final Fantasy Legend 3 DX (GBC, Played on Trimui Smart Pro) – I’m apparently impatient with the grinding in the early game; I actually turned my mutants into a cyborg and a beast but expected better from them. As I note every time I talk about this game, it gets a lot easier once you have access to instant death/stone attacks. In this hack there were a number of graphical glitches, random colored boxes, and weird transparencies that were less noticeable in the original. Maybe it’s a little too "classy" with the muted colors? There were also issues with some houses being glitches in the first Pureland town and the credits were messed up. Large bosses were two or three color palettes neatly split and it was weird; but Xagor was multicolored and that actually worked.

Final Fantasy Legend DX (GBC, Played on Trimui Smart Pro) – The monsters that get left white actually look weird, like a stark contrast to the rest of the colors. The castles in the first world have the same problem—they entire sprite is white, including the ground around the castle, so it sticks out oddly. I only played the first two worlds of this; for this experience you’re better off playing the fan-translated Wonderswan version of the game, which manages to be prettier and fixes a lot of bugs.

I fiddled with a few more of the Game Boy colorization / DX hacks; the one for Metroid 2 was solid and the ones for Super Mario Land and Super Mario Land 2 are actually really vibrant and pretty, especially since they change some sprites to take advantage of having colors to work with.

Daiva Story 6: Imperial of Nirsartia (NES, Played on Switch) - A Japan-only blend of genres where you search for various planets, then conquer them in side-scroller shmup mode; but enemy fleets try to retake them and you need to fight them off in turn-based tactical space battles. There are also some sort of resources you get from conquering planets that let you build more ships at your home world. We beat the game on level 1 in a couple of hours; apparently if you play on level 4 you can find the hidden planets and get the secret best ending. The difficulty is reasonable at level 1, but I don’t feel a strong need to replay it.

Tetris Blast (Game Boy, Played on Trimui Smart Pro) - I’ve actually been playing this on-and-off on several of my handhelds, because it successfully captures the casual nature of Tetris. What I discovered recently was that it also has an ending: If if you finish Level 25, you get a credits roll! Which also means there’s a theoretical “perfect game”, because each level starts with 100 points and decreases by one for each piece you use, but increases slightly if you create a big bomb or clear 3+ rows. The closer you get to 2500 when you finish, the better your run.

The Barely Legal Type: Purity Culture, Rape Culture, and America’s Lose-Lose Proposition for Girls. Sad but true.
The Conservative Grievance Business Is Always Hiring. About that Sooner girl who wrote the horrendous essay in a psychology class and then tried to get her trans TA fired for failing her.
How Local Reporters Manage the Dangers of Covering Extremism. One of the reporters featured is on the beat in my area.
Why this Indigenous winter scene is not what it seems. It's the work of Native artist Red Star. I recognize her work from feminist art bots but didn't know much about her. Now I want to go to one of the exhibits this post talks about.
How Caravaggio Painted Class and Clothes. Particularly relevant after our visit to the Kimbell where we saw both The Cardsharps and Judith.
A week inside the opaque court where CT immigrants learn their fate. A local Connecticut publication spent a week in immigration court (the executive branch "court system" for immigrants) and reported back on it. I didn't deal with this part of immigration practice at all when I was working for an immigration lawyer in the 1990s. I did prepare some asylum and refugee paperwork, and my boss was on the State Bar's Unauthorized Practice of Law committee, which dealt with the "notarios" mentioned in the article. That was apparently a dangerous proposition, enough that he had all his bills diverted to the office so that he couldn't be doxxed easily.
Meet the billionaire pushing taxpayer-funded school vouchers. The Washington Post profiles Jeff Yass, the Pennsylvania billionaire who paid for Texas' voucher program. Not the taxes, which are from our pocketbooks, but the donations to political campaigns that made it possible.
The Fragile Heart’s Guide to Surviving the Holidays. I don't think of myself as fragile but I do have some unhappy associations with the holidays (my dad died during the Christmas season and my mother had crises at the holiday season on a regular basis, including going into hospice at that time). This is all good advice.
Raccoons Are Showing Early Signs of Domestication. Because that's what living in cities does to creatures!
How Big Should Your Tent Be?. Rebecca Solnit on working with the enemy, politically, vs ideological purity.
Exclusive: Trump administration orders enhanced vetting for applicants of H-1B visa. Of course.

Current Music: Silence is golden,

bnewman posting in

Opinions within the gamer community differ widely regarding the ethics of emulation — copying old games onto modern computers where they can be played by using software tools to mimic the behavior of older console hardware. Most video game publishers are strongly opposed of course, and fans agree that the people who make our games should be able to profit from them. But, because of their dependence on aging hardware, games are one of the least-well-preserved of all media types. Allowing pieces of our culture to vanish forever because their "owners" didn't find it profitable to preserve them, for generation after generation, doesn't "promote the progress of science and the useful arts".

And then of course there's this terrible pun.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Message in a Bottle" by The Police

( Read more... )

bnewman posting in

The Eagles' original has been crying out for this pun for a long time, and I'm certainly not the first to think of it or mention it, but I may be the first to expand it into a complete story-song. This is a shapeshifting huntress's tale in the vein of "Velvet" or "Golden Eyes".

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Lyin' Eyes" by Don Henley and Glenn Frey

listen to this song

( Read more... )

bnewman posting in

This one began with just the pun(ch) line, but when I realized what piece of media it could be about, it grew (ahem) into something deeper. Miyazaki's Nausicaa, like Frozen's Elsa, is a bold heroine who discovers a dangerous secret, an inner connection to an unstoppable natural force, and her own sense of purpose on the edge of the wilderness.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Let It Go" from Disney's Frozen by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez

( Read more... )

bnewman posting in

If you're at all familiar with action adventures or comic books, you've surely heard Justin's name before, but did you know he has a twin brother? This concept was a long time in preparation, and finally took shape in something of a Les Barker x Tom Smith form.

by Benjamin Newman

listen to this poem

( Read more... )

bnewman posting in

Hekate is a mysterious and complex goddess, associated with magic and witchcraft, liminal spaces, and threes — such as places where three roads meet; or the upper, middle, and lower worlds. I know Her primarily through Her supporting role in the story of Persephone, about Whom more is written elsewhere. Speaking with Hekate around the time of Sukkot, a Jewish (not Hellenic!) holiday which involves the gathering and waving of a bundle of symbolic plants, She suggested to me this trio of weeds, all of which grow wild in my neighborhood. Poisonous nightshades have long been Hers (and bittersweet nightshade is poisonous), and mugwort and goldenrod are associated with the dream realm and abundance respectively.

lyrics and music by Benjamin Newman

( Read more... )

bnewman posting in

In Hebrew, "chochmah" means "wisdom", and "kavanah" means "intention", often particularly referring to a statement of intention or mystical formula recited before the main part of a prayer or ritual to set an appropriate tone — so a "chochmah kavanah" would be a mystical formula to invoke wisdom. Of course it also sounds like a certain classic lounge song...

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Copacabana" by Barry Manilow

( Read more... )

bnewman posting in

According to a meme that has been going around, the name of OpenAI's flagship product sounds especially funny if you know French.

lyrics and music by Benjamin Newman

( Read more... )

bnewman posting in

Having disposed of certain people's ambitions of Mars colonization, let's plant the seeds of a more egalitarian vision for our future on the red planet — a future we can build together if only we keep ~~marching~~ Martian.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Bread and Roses" by James Oppenheim, set to music by Mimi Farina

( Read more... )

bnewman posting in

Avinu Malkeinu (Our Father, Our King) is a solemn hymn chanted on the holiest days of the Jewish year, reminding us of the G-d before whom we stand. Modern progressive Jews vary in their relationship to those particular metaphors. This new, um, translation, reveals a surprisingly modern and scientific view of the Source of Life in the coming together of simple organic molecules under geothermal heat.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Avinu Malkeinu", trad. Hebrew

Amino volcano

Molecular tango

Amino volcano, molecular tango

That gave rise to all living beings

They say the dawn-soup

Thickened when heated

They say the dawn-soup thickened when heated

And out of that soup we all grew

Today we took a museum day in Fort Worth and visited the Kimbell and the Amon Carter.

At the Kimbell, we saw the Myth and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection exhibit. The works were Roman statues from the collection of a noble/royal Italian family. The interesting part to me was how many of them had been altered, mostly but not all in "modern" times, to make art that was interesting to collectors in the period that it was altered. (Modern in this case meant the Renaissance and later. One of the sculptures was altered in the workshop of Bernini's father.) My favorites were in the section of the exhibit on portraits of the Imperial family, where I learned that a lot of the statues believed to be of Imperial women were identified on the basis of their hairstyle alone, and now a number of them have been reconsidered. The curation was extremely good, with most of the statues having labels showing which parts were original, which parts were ancient sculpture pieces repurposed as part of the new statue, and which parts were later additions. Also, one of the statutes was left semi-restored so visitors could also see the conditions of the various sections of the works and how they were "restored" in the past.

We also saw Caravaggio's Judith Beheading Holofernes, which was on loan. I like most of the art but I don't care for his depiction of Judith. Spouse and I had a discussion about her wrist positioning: she looks like she's sawing Holofernes' head off but without sufficient force, never mind enough force to lop his actual head off. I prefer Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith, who looks like she's actually killing the guy.

Before we left we also visited our favorites, the Lee brothers and Caravaggio's Card Sharp.

After we were finished at the Kimbell, we went over to the Amon Carter for American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection. Butt, for those who don't know, is from the family that owns the HEB grocery stores. The art choices were interesting, like the Pollock landscape, but the curation of the exhibit didn't do a lot for me. Instead of contextualizing the individual pieces in artistic traditions or explaining why Butt chose them, the Carter's curation team had reactions from local artists, which were honestly a little banal for my taste. If it drives other folks to the museum, though, I guess it works. I enjoyed the seascapes and the landscapes, but the flat industrial paintings that Butt seemed to like did nothing for me. Probably my favorite from this exhibit was a study for a larger painting set at Broadway and 47th in New York, with a lot of bright signs.

We did look at some other art including a flat industrial painting of oil derricks off Galveston, which I really enjoyed because I knew what I was looking at, and a favorite Childe Hassam which shows flags on the Waldorf Hotel.

We had more than filled our two hours of museum time, which is how long they say you can absorb new art, so we went home after the Amon Carter instead of staying for late hours at the Modern.

Current Music: Silence is golden.

ACNW session 1

Lee as GM

Jill as Laila (second youngest child of Akkiz)
Michael as Rayan (eldest child of Akkiz)
John W as Ordille (youngest child of Clarissa)
Thaddeus as Tridath (eldest son of Clarissa)
me as Rhiannon (third child of Nurhu)

( Notes under the cut. )

Current Music: Silence is golden.

Books
Some Danger Involved, by Will Thomas. First in a series of Victorian noir detective novels. The plot is interesting but the writing is both historically accurate in some very unpleasant ways and reeks of testosterone. I'm not sure whether I'll read the next one.

While it doesn't count for formal reporting, I did read about 1.5 million words of Star Wars AU fanfic while I was sick this weekend. Also I have 3 or 4 books in progress. I need to commit to one and finish it!

Current Music: Washing machine.

( No list of players as all PCs but one were there. )

Current Music: Silence is golden.