David Lynch’s Weather Report 3/6/21, 4/10/21, 2/20/22… among others! It was a very recurring sentiment. He wanted everyone to have good luck and fun with our projects.
everybody’s like “I want famous actor X in season 2! I want ridiculously expensive song Y in season 2!” shut uuuuuuuup the only stunt casting we need in season 2 is Gritty
*gathers all of the people in the world who write the number 7 with a little dash in the center of it so I can study them like little critters and find out what makes them do that*
There’s actually a lot of history regarding the development writing systems and why there are different visual representations of numerals,
but the short answer is: it’s regional, and you probably picked up how to make your numbers look based on your parents or your primary school teachers
I do it out of spite because in grade school a kids detective story identified the culprit by saying NO American wrote their sevens with a line and I thought that was super flimsy evidence and it made me so mad I started putting a line through my sevens so the fictional detective would be wrong and then kept doing it for several decades since.
I do feel one can’t underestimate the “elementary school child taught themselves how to do this Out Of Spite” crowd
it has been like at least eight years and sometimes I still think to myself, when I am tired, “but I am le tired… well then take a nap! AND THEN FIRE ZE MISSILES” even though in retrospect that is like one of the most embarrassingly unfunny videos to ever come out of the internet
tbh i still start sentences with “hokay, so” at least 3 times a day
same, aggressively so. I also still use “wtf, mate.”
who doesn’t think this is STILL AS HILARIOUS as it was when we all watched it over and over and over again 15 years ago?
I’ve reblogged this before and will doubtless reblog this again because MY ENTIRE GROUP OF FRIENDS WAS SO OBSESSED WITH THIS VIDEO IN 2002/2003 THAT WE COLLECTIVELY BANNED ANY MENTION OF IT EVER AGAIN
AND YET
WE ARE NOW GROWN-ASS ADULTS IN OUR THIRTIES
AND IT STILL GETS QUOTED FROM TIME TO TIME
I HAVE THE WHOLE THING MEMORISED
TO THIS DAY, MY MOTHER REGULARLY SAYS “BUT I AM LE TIRED” BECAUSE OF A VIDEO I SHOWED HER IN FUCKING HIGH SCHOOL
THIS IS AN ICONIC PIECE OF INTERNET HISTORY AND I WILL FIGHT ANYONE WHO SAYS OTHERS
my wife and I still regularly say “hokay so”, “but I am le tired” and “and some big meteor’s like ‘well fuck that’.” Fucking iconic.
I HAVE NEVER SEEN THIS BEFORE AND I’M SO GRATEFUL FOR THIS POST BECAUSE I’VE SEEN IT NOW AND I CAN’T STOP FUCKING LAUGHING
God how has it been that long
Happy Anniversary to this twenty year old flash epic!
Imagine for a moment that you’re a French (or Spanish or Hungarian, etc.) envoy en route to Rome. It’s 1430, and you have letters and instructions for your papal ambassador. Florence is on the way, so you’re stopping off there, nominally for a rest, but also to scope it out and report back about strengths, weaknesses, and how worthwhile it would be to conquer. If you’re an official envoy you’re at least the son of a lord or a count, so there isn’t anyone in this little merchant republic of sufficient rank to address you as an equal.
You know Florence’s reputation too, infamous as a center of sodomy, so much so that the verb to Florentine is the word for anal sex in French (and several other languages), while back in Paris you can be indicted for sodomy simply on the grounds of being from Florence or having visited Florence. So you ride into this wretched hive of scum and villainy, but at first glance it’s a big city, impressive, dense houses, crowded streets. There’s no duke or marquis to host you, so you’ve arranged to stay with your dad’s banker (you have his address at least).
On the way you pass a little square church called Orsanmichele with Roman statues integrated into it, big ones too, impressively intact, or… wait, they look new! Yes! They’re still installing one, and… two are bronze? But… you didn’t know people could make bronzes that big, the way the Romans did. That art was lost! Impressive!
So you continue on, spotting the bell tower, though the tower’s not plain stone like in Paris, it has green and pink marble, costly stuff, you’ve rarely seen it, from Arabia as you recall. And look at the size of their cathedral! It’s not complete, crawling with workers, but you didn’t think it possible to build a dome that big! French cathedrals back at home are massive, but a tower is simple, a dome like that you would have called impossible!
And you keep going, north, yes, there’s your banker’s house, he greets you humbly at the door, bowing and apologizing that his poor home is unworthy to host Your Excellency. But suddenly, as you step inside your breath catches: the inner courtyard is so bright and cool, clean sunlight streaming on white stone, with airy rounded arches, and the breeze so fresh it feels almost like stepping into open countryside from crowded streets.
This space is like nothing you’ve ever seen before, or… wait, no! You have seen this before! It’s like the Roman ruins in the backyard of your father’s castle back at home. But those are ruins! No one knows how to build like the Romans did, except… Then how… And as the banker leads you further in, he has ancient Roman statues, busts of Caesars, gods, those stunning bodies real enough to spring to life, but, no, these aren’t all ancient, some of them are new; that bronze statue of young David standing on the head of Goliath is obviously new, the metal hasn’t even turned green yet! And also it’s super naked!!! like Roman ones, and very sexy so you can’t help staring (sodomy capital they say?), and…
Wait, what’s that sound? People, there in the corner, speaking in a language you don’t know. So you ask, “Who are they?” and the banker answers, “Oh, they’re Platonists, they’re practicing ancient Greek.” Your breath catches again. “But ancient Greek is lost! Plato is lost!” "Oh, no, we have lots of Plato here,” he answers, "look, here’s my nephew Francesco, he’s just written a poem about the nature of the soul in mixed Latin and Greek, would you like to hear it?” And now there’s a little boy reciting a poem at you in ancient Greek, and your brain is going: Where am I? This… all this is impossible! These things do not exist! And all the haughtiness and scorn are gone, as suddenly it’s you who feels weak, small, uncultured, staggered by the presence of this power older, vaster, grander, far more real than jousts and battlements and all the trappings of French cities built on Roman ruins. And when he sees you staring and wordless, that’s when Cosimo de Medici turns to you and says, “Would your king like to make an alliance?”
And you could say no.
You could say no, we’re France, our royal armies just drove back even ambitious England, we’re unstoppable. We’re going to march in here, and crush these walls, and sack this puny town, and burn these palaces, and loot the gold sacks from within your vaults, and all of this, these impossible time treasures from another age, will vanish like a dream. Or you can say: Yes. Yes, let’s make an alliance. Send me an architect, and a bronzesmith, and a Greek tutor, and a Platonist, and I’m going to take them to France, and we’ll do the royal court like this, and the next time envoys come from backwater England yammering about their title to our throne, they’re going to know our king is Caesar, and they’ll feel like uncultured bumpkins, just like I do now.
It’s a defense mechanism.
If war is politics by other means, then the art, the Greek, the courtyards, all of it, it’s war by other means, war waged by tiny city-states that will never win in wars of troops on troops or ships on ships, but Italy will always win the war to have the most antiquity. Cosimo may not have the blood of Charlemagne, but he has busts of Caesars right beside the portraits of his sons, so our ambassador can feel the presence of a different nobility, which awes, intimidates, threatens (bronzesmiths don’t just make statues, they make cannons), a nobility which projects power and legitimacy but requires no blood, no title, only the ability to activate antiquity. The classical revival has turned antiquity into a language of power.
– Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age (2025)
My local mayor posted this and I’m mesmerised. Every time I look at it I spot a new problem. It’s like a rorschach test.
Not only did the AI fail to make a functioning UK map despite TONS of accurate maps available, but then a team of people actually thought “that looks about right, that’s probably the North, it’s got at least one Hull that’ll do” and posted it.
York ⁽Yᵒʳᵏ⁾
No you know, it’s easy to hate, but I want this team to tackle another section of rail next. Let’s give them their heads
One of the biggest pains with rail in the north is having to cross the pennines (it’s an issue by road too).
Relocating Manchester Piccadilly to the east of the pennines is clearly a solution to that problem, resulting in much faster connections between Manchester and eastern cities like York, Hull, York, and Hull.
You get it! It’ll take a lot of work, but if we simply align the existing infrastructure with this vision, I reckon we can really identify the roadblocks (Warringtons) to unlocking the potential (Warrington) of the North (Warrington).
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