Reblogged pinnipetal
Reblogged charl0ttan
[Image ID: Screencap from unspecified website in dark mode. Text reads:
"After that that stupid thing from Bezos and Musk about how a trillion humans would mean a thousand Mozarts, it got me thinking.
We clearly must have Mozarts today, and at least a couple of them probably got the same upbringing he did to nurture their skill and talent, and we would therefore have:
- a musician of significant talent, dedication and skill,
- who can write music across a bunch of different contemporary genres,
- who explicitly draws from the work of other musicians to build their style, and
- who is willing to do the musical equivalent of shitposting and wear fancy outfits while doing it.
I can only conclude that the modern-day Mozart is Weird Al Yankovic.
I will not be taking questions."
Followed by: a portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and a photograph of Weird Al Yankovic, in similar 3/4 poses with similar eyebrow-raised and smiling expressions. End ID.]
i think a lot of people who have never done music do not understand how absolutely implausible weird al's skill level is. you can say "so many musicians can do at least one of his songs, obviously", and yes, they can, but they couldn't do all of them. you have people who studied ten or twenty years to be able to do something genuinely incredible, and they've specialized and focused and developed the ability to produce a particular kind of thing, and they do it really well, and then this guy comes along and says "welp, time for a new album", picks ten of them, and duplicates their shtick well enough to be clearly recognizable.
this man produced a piece of music which an experienced listener can hear and say "oh, that's Frank Zappa". how? not even Frank Zappa sounds like Frank Zappa!
Is weird Al doing different shit now? Bc if he was writing pastiches this would be true, but all I'm really familiar with is the stuff where he just rewrites the lyrics to an existing song, or does a polka cover of it.
Weird Al's "style parodies", or original compositions explicitly in the style of a particular artist or band, are approximately as numerous as his actual song parodies. Generally the Regular Parodies get all the attention, they're the big money spinners, but his style parodies are both numerous and legendary.
Dare to Be Stupid, the title track off the album of the same name, is probably the big one that people would know - a more Devo song than actual Devo, and that's according to Devo themselves.
An incomplete list of other ones that rule, actually, are:
- Germs (Nine Inch Nails)
- I'll Sue Ya (Rage Against The Machine)
- Pancreas (The Beach Boys)
- Craiglist (The Doors)
- My Own Eyes (Foo Fighters)
- Bob (Bob Dylan)
- Everything You Know Is Wrong (They Might Be Giants)
- Trigger Happy (The Beach Boys again but from a different era)
This lists all Weird Al's known style parodies. There are a LOT.
Reblogged pinnipetal
"stress" by yoan capote - made of bronze and concrete
Reblogged
Anonymous asked:
you are obviously a person who reads a lot: do you have any tricks that you use when you need to study a huge amount of material? do you have any strategies or methods to organize your reading and your pauses?
I was just talking about this with my editor!
When I read for knowledge, I practice a skim and return method. I try to skim the entire text as fast as possible, making note of anything that catches my eye. Once I'm done skimming, I return to the text, and hone in on the specific facts I need from that specific text.
For example, I recently read Keichefer's Magic in the Middle Ages. I skimmed the entire thing, and learned that roughly 1/3rd of the text was discussions of Norse and Celtic magical practices, and how we don't really know much about them. I did not need to read that closely. I was interested in the evolution of the European Grimoire Tradition.
Also never highlight what can be summarized with three words in the margin. You need to understand why a passage is important.
Reblogged
Don’t join the army to get free college. First two years of community college is free. Peace corps and Americorps have scholarships and student loan forgiveness programs for their volunteers. If you’re not rich you probably qualify for Pell grants. Go to a state college. They teach you the same things they do at fancy colleges. Sometimes there’s scholarships for people of a certain background. Ethnicity. Sexuality. Gender. Religion. Go to a grad school that’ll give you free tuition for working there as a teacher or assistant. Become a stripper or something. Just don’t join the army.
If you want to do something structured and physical for a few years and see the world like do a working holiday in Australia or something. Join the peace corps and do some agricultural work with them. Volunteer with some other overseas organization that’s setting up infrastructure in poor countries. Spend a summer in Alaska working in fishing or Arctic tourism. See if you qualify to be a United Nations volunteer. Work on a ranch. Become an apprentice to a welder or electrician. Train to become a ship captain. Just don’t join the army.
Reblogged charl0ttan
“I’m much happier at 53 than I was at 23.” (x)
thislovelymaelstrom
i love you guillermo del totoro
[ID: Four gifs of Guillermo del Toro in an interview. He says, “I think the sublime confusion is from 19 to 29. You think you are late for everything, you’re a has-been, nothing is happening, there’s no opportunity for you, the world is closed, everything is a disaster, you wanna die. And then you’re 30.” /end ID]
He once gave a class in Guadalajara and said “Ustedes los jóvenes están en la edad exacta de la desesperación. Yo nunca me sentí más acabado y viejo que a los veintitantos. Decía ‘ya me pasó la vida y no hice nada’. Pero estoy aquí para decirles que no: tienen un chingo de tiempo”
Which translates to “You young people are in the exact age of desperation. I never felt more done and old than in my twenties. I’d say ‘life has passed me by and i did nothing’. But i’m here to tell you that’s not true: you have a lot of fucking time”
Reblogged charl0ttan
hello my fellow Horror And Houses fans.... i have come to recommend the book "horror in architecture" and its sequel "horror in architecture; the reanimated edition" by joshua comaroff and ong ker-shing to you all. ive been reading horror in architecture for the past couple days and it is excellent
this book is incredible. it is all i can think about, it is all i want to talk about
i feel crazy. but its so goddamn specific, how do i go "does anyone else want to read this Incredibly Dense and Highly Niche book on (checks notes) architectural theory, culture, and horror so that i have someone to talk about it with" in a way that doesnt sound like im an on-the-nose character symbolizing obsession and madness in a horror novel
i love tumblr because the pitch i gave for this book is one that i made in a frenetic state after literally pacing around my apartment with my hands clasped behind my back like a harrowed detective who is haunted by the specters of his past and the notes are full of people going "thanks for the rec op!"
Reblogged charl0ttan
ok this tag really got me
...girl
sapphosdickandballs
immortalizing these tags
When me and my brother were toddlers and we spilled anything liquid, my mom would singsong, "[Name] Valdez! [Name] Valdez!"
Eventually, as we grew up, this morphed into just saying "Valdez!" whenever we spilled something. As far as I was concerned "Valdez" was just a word for "oops!" specifically in this context.
It wasn't until I was probably a teenager that I discovered she was referencing the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989.
[Image IDs: Image #1: Tweet from verified user Nicole Cliffe (@/ Nicole_Cliffe) reading: If you normalized something (non-awful) because your family did it and then realized it was not, in fact, normal or remotely common, I would love to hear about it.
Reply from Morgan 51 Finkelstein (@/ momofink) on 08 Sep 20 reading: the villain in my bedtime stories was always the President of the Homeowner's Association and I was sooooo confused when no one else had heard of him
Image #2: Tumblr tags from you-held-the-door reading: #when I was kid my dad and I would play that game at the playground where the kid stays up on the climbing structure #and the adult stays on the ground to chase the kid #usually the adult is like a monster or a lava monster or something #but my dad always pretended to be george bush
Image #3: Tumblr tags reading: #my dad never let me roll down the windshield when we were on highways #because and I quote "the car is going so fast that the wind can topple cars" #and I just never questioned it until years later #turns out he just didn't like the noise
#also another thing: #you know that game grown ups do with young children where they chase you around #and go "oh you're so cute I could eat you up! I'm going to eat ya!" that kind of thing? #well when my parents did that I used to go "no you won't, you guys love me. also I'm you're only child." #then my mom would go really silent and fake being contrite and tell me that #actually no I had an older sibling that they cannibalized. #I only survived because I was a cute baby and they waited too long and I got too big to fit in the pot anymore. #and it would make me really angry because I knew she was lying but I had no way to prove it #and mom thought it was the funniest thing ever #anyway I only found out in high school when I was trying for a "lol so relatable" type of joke with my friends that apparently #having a long-running joke that your parents had a dead first child that they cannibalized isn't a common thing that other families also do #mmari rambles
Image #4: Tumblr tags reading: #my family has a phrase for when someone eats most of something and leaves less than a serving of it left #(usually done to avoid having to throw it away. like leaving less than a cup of milk or just crumbs in a bag of chips)
#we call it 'buddyfucking.' bc ur fucking ur buddy over #apparently it came from my dad's time in the army #Anyways. i quickly learned when i went to college that when most people hear 'alright who buddyfucked me' #they do Not think i am asking who left one square of toilet paper on the roll without changing it /End IDs]
Reblogged
Penny monsters typically have at least nine or ten sufficiently uncorroded pennies in their stomachs at any given time, meaning that it can be a somewhat lucrative endeavor to bait and trap them during the early spring when their hibernation has concluded, but very little non-coin food can be found in the wild. A plastic bucket with just a few hundred pennies should create enough of a scent to attract thousands of them. Empty two to three bottles of antifreeze (use the blue kind; purple antifreeze has a sweet smell that will mask the penny aroma) into the bucket and wait a day or two; soon you should begin to find penny monster carcasses all over the place. Make sure you have a work station far enough away from your house as to not taint your home with the stench of dead penny monsters. It will several hours to harvest all of the coins from their stomachs, so try to recruit a few friends (who won't fuss over the smell) to help you out -- get some beer and make a day out of it! If you have an old boat laying around, line the inside with a tarp and lay out all of the usable pennies down with as little overlap as possible. Then, buy a few gallons of cheap generic brand vinegar (Great Value from Walmart works well for this) to dump into the boat and clean the pennies up over the next week or so. MAKE SURE that you cover the boat with another tarp that is tightly bound down; you don't want to lay out a feast for the penny monsters that you missed the first time around! The vinegar smell should hide the coin scent sufficiently, but you can't be too safe when you're handling a few thousand pennies. Trust me, they don't mind the taste of apple cider vinegar. You may be able to skip this step if the bank is willing to accept particularly stinky pennies, but most won't. When they're nice and clean, drain out the vinegar and dump them into a heavy-duty garbage back. You NEED to line the bag with at least three or four more to prevent them from tearing a hole in the bottom from the weight. It's going to take the bank people a while to count all of them, so be patient and bring a good book. Once they have it all counted up, ask about which coins you can have them converted to. My go-to is quarters, because there's a good chance you'll get a modest amount of pre-1965 quarters that are made of almost pure silver! Check out my guide on melting down old coins into ingots if you want to get more bang for your buck. Happy hunting!
Reblogged regexkind
“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me – it still sometimes happens – and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous – not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… That pure chance could be so generous and so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful… The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived.
That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday.
I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”
Reblogged
34+33 ccreates a number so monstrous we cant even calculate it
when you add a nuimber to a number thats bigger than it the result will be at least twice as big as the number. thats all we have so far
here is my best guess at what such a number may look like
please note the presence of both horns and a halo. these are likely due to the fact that I thought they would look cool
scientests are really astounded by this becauswe basically they thought it couldnt be done but you made it reallyeasyt and they re really confused and amazed.