taina

i'm really looking forward to Minecraft's "Copper Age" update. the main reason is copper tools and armour! it'll be wonderful for the early game. currently, since iron is scarce and iron tools don't last much longer than stone ones, it's generally not worth it to me to make them, and i go more or less straight from stone to diamond. but since copper is so much more plentiful, it'll be worth it to craft tools that are a bit better than stone but still cheap! i won't feel a need to rush up the tech tree so fast.

i think the aged variants of the lightning rod are a good addition too, they're great detailing blocks. and while i do think iron chains look better than any of the copper chain variants, i like the exposed copper chains enough that i'll be happy to use them as an affordable alternative to iron chains.

i almost forgot about the copper chests and copper automata/statues. i don't really care for them, i don't expect i'll ever use them.

mes bibliothèques sont pleines et les nouveaux livres s'empilent au sol. je suis très contenxe de la valeur esthéthique des piles de livres, mais je lamentais qu'elles ne suivent pas le système d'organisation de ma bibliothèque personnelle dont je suis si fièr. ma partenaire m'a dit qu'alors je pourrais les organiser, elles aussi.

ce qui a entraîné une grande réorganisation de ma biblithèque. la section non-fiction s'est élargie et tous les livres de non-fiction vont de nouveau dans l'étagère ; j'ai fait plus de place aux recueils de poésie aussi.

la fiction en anglais (sauf science-fiction et fantasy) et la fiction en néerlandais sont sorties de l'étagère intégralement pour être entassées en piles séparées. à vrai dire, ça fait un peu plus désordonné maintenant – sans doute parce que les piles de livres sont à présent plus nombreyx et de tailles hétéroclites. (la solution est évidente : obtenir davantage de livres pour les augmenter...)

combat mods

she lives 100 years ago in the future

abandoned galaxy

moominous

kriebelbeesten

feestleegte

verdwaalbaarheid

ja nee dit dat

want er is sprake.

Een kastje met uh... (bluh) (blägh) inhoud

You are more of an accident of nature than other people

herbts

I don't want to alarm anybody, but I think it's detail time.

some heavenly occurrence

recursive hedgehog

it's all happening at the speed of life

kattendistributiesysteem

met een beetje beleid en gevoel

a review of Bloodywood's second album Nu Delhi

i was very excited for a new album from my favourite band, after a number of covers and singles and a spectacular first album! however, the second album Nu Delhi is a bit disappointing. it's not bad; it's... fine. it's all okay, good music, but nothing stands out. i feel like the debut album Rakshak had a lot more variation in moods and styles and levels of heaviness, with some very memorable flute melodies ("Jee Veerey", "Endurant") and haunting choruses ("Zanjeero Se", "Jee Veerey").
Nu Delhi sounds like they blended "Gaddaar", "Machi Bhasad" and "Chakh Le" from Rakshak and made seven variations on the theme. also, with 8 tracks and a runtime of 33 minutes, Nu Delhi a bit shorter than Rakshak's 47 minutes over 10 tracks.

there are some nice riffs (see below), but i miss Jayant Bhadula's clean vocals. i've read a review of Rakshak that called Raoul Kerr's English rap lyrics "rote posturing", which i agree with, but somehow the English rap lyrics manage to be even duller on Nu Delhi. all that said, i still enjoy the new album and i'm happily listening to it on repeat. it's just the comparison with the mind-blowing debut where everything stands out that's causing the disappointment.

( track by track thoughts: )

Спросите: Не знал ли никто?
— Всё понимали большинство.
Затем спросите: Чья вина?
И только слышно тишина.
Мы позволяли сгорать свету.
Предупреждали столько раз,
А как случилось — действий нету.
Потомки, не прощайте нас.

i love* how John Flanagan's Ranger series gets less and less subtle about how Araluen meddles in international affairs, and the eponymous rangers of Araluen are the fantasy!CIA. the interventionism is not really condemned, but not portrayed as beneficial to those at the receiving end either: the text is pretty clear on the fact that it serves the interests of Araluen's ruling family, and not necessarily anyone else.

they've previously propped up a friendly regime in a foreign country's internal power struggle. now they're supporting a weak ruler in a neighbouring country just enough that he remains in power, so that the state remains too unstable to grow into a threat to Araluen.

* i'm not being sarcastic, by the way. i genuinely think it's genuinely an interesting dynamic and it entertains me greatly.

a review of Toward Eternity by Anton Hur

Toward Eternity has a lot going for it that should really be my shit: poetry; AI; AIs reading poetry; exploration of the meaning and import of language(s); of what makes humanity (especially in a world where there are sentient beings that are not (biologically) similar to H. sapiens as we know it today. But I found it just okay. It didn't really focus enough on language(s) and I felt it also forgot about poetry for a while.

It also cared deeply about capital-M Music (especially classical European music – Bach and Mozart in particular), and that is an effective trick for making me lose interest. I simply feel "an intense, burning indifference" to it as a major component in fiction. I cannot relate, I anti-relate, it's just not for me. (To be clear, I haven nothing against music, I just don't care for it in fiction.) At least one of the points of view contrasted Music with poetry (which in the rest of the book are cast as an eternal, essential part of the universe, something that transcends humanity and keeps existing even if no one is around to read or recite or remember it anymore), and considered it even more pure and sublime(?) and so on than language – and then it wasn't really brought up again.

The book was maybe also too short for what it wanted to do (or at least for what I felt it was setting up). There was not enough page time for each character, and the book ended in a kind of awkward place of not enough mystery to leave me intrigued after finishing it, yet not enough revelation to leave me satisfied either. I would also have liked the eternal essence of poetry to be supported a bit more.
(Also, the poetry featured in this book is primarily 19th century English and American poetry, which one of the viewpoints states early on was a tool of imperialist violence. And while the same character states that these poems have merit nonetheless, I do find it awkward that the only examples of eternal and universal poetry we get are from this hegemonic Anglo-American canon.)

Speaking of characters and viewpoints – the story is told through a single notebook in which a chain of roughly a dozen characters each write their own story, or part of their story, or their part of the story. The first three or so characters have somewhat distinct voices, but the later ones all sound/feel the same, and I found myself asking when and how they had the opportunity to write in the notebook, which broke my suspension of disbelief a little.

That said, Toward Eternity still manages to do a bunch of interesting stuff, and it's easy to keep turning the pages (or keep listening), and I did enjoy the musings about poetry, such as they were. It may be interesting to people who enjoyed Anjet Daanje's Het lied van ooievaar en dromedaris. It's not the same, of course (nothing can be), but the structure and red thread of the respective books are similar in some ways, as well as the poetry/literature and music themes.

1.
This part of the city was not made for people. It is the output of a terrain generator with a limited set of assets – asphalt, cars, parking space, box-shaped office, box-shaped garage, chain-link fence, more cars – and set to randomise. There are no humans.

2.
Heaters blaze all night. The radio sings to no one, briefly, between the advertising. Spotless unused desks must be cleaned twice a week.

3.
Two brand-new copies of an environmentalist memoir in an oil company’s bin. They don’t do paper recycling here. You can’t make this shit up.

4.
Anything found in a bin is fair salvage. A stapler. Intact plates. Half a dozen reusable water bottles with the name Edwin printed on them. A clipboard. Books with an unprofitable message.

5.
The cleaning supply closet is the perfect dump for anything that needs storing. Cleaning equipment, supplied by the cleaning company and miscellaneous other. A hoard of face masks left over from the earlier years of the pandemic. A supernumerary office chair. A bucket of fresh flowers. A secret stash of snacks where the other office people won’t think to look.

6.
A list of birthdays taped to a monitor. A few balloons migrate from desk to desk, slightly more shriveled each time. Bunting suspended from the suspended ceiling gently rains glitter into the cracks of the keyboards below.

7.
A small office generates an astounding volume of rubbish. Cardboard boxes. Paper towels. Paper and plastic cups. Food wrappers. Takeout bags and containers. Half-eaten food. Unidentifiable plastic. Imagine how much more trash all the office people throw away at home.

8.
Spotlights illuminate featureless concrete and polymer walls. Logos sear their brands onto the night. They offer no hint as to the product or service provided by the businesses behind them. No one is around to see them. The night sky is yellow.

After the last person who spoke Ngeswte, there was the last person who wrote it.

You didn't learn to write Ngeswte from your grandmother, who never wrote it herself (but, as you would later discover, neither did anyone else). You started when you were small, recording the mysterious words of the songs your grandmother sang to you, in the letters you learned at school. They were the letters of the country your parents and grandmother had fled to, not those of the country in which the lands of the Ngeswte people lie.

When your grandmother died, you wanted to record as much Ngeswte as you remembered. The everyday letters of school no longer seemed right. Too ordinary, too thin, too hollow. You wanted to record your grandmother, who she was, the feeling of the songs.
So you created new letters. And when those turned out too ornate to be practical, you invented new ones again. And when those seemed too blocky, new ones again. And so on.

When you were fifteen, you had a satisfying set of characters, enough to write the half-remembered Ngeswte words, and some more letters for good measure.
You never spoke it, of course, and these extra letters reflected your language; the language of the country where your parents raised you. These were letters you couldn’t imagine doing without.

You didn’t know enough Ngeswte to write more than those few words.
But you liked the look of your own writing system, the new Ngeswte script, so you used it for your own language too. Secret messages to yourself.
This was enough to content you for some time.

Eventually you wanted to choose a new name, a gender-neutral one. You tried looking into traditional Ngeswte names, to see how they were gendered, if there were ungendered Ngeswte names.
In the process, you learned that Ngeswte had never been written, so you were the first to write it, you created the first Ngeswte script.

There was that linguist who studied minoritised languages of the region and recorded some samples. But that’s transcription, it doesn’t really count as writing.
You didn't know any of the linguist's sample words, but you wrote all of them in your script anyway. Ngeswte words in Ngeswte script. All the grammar examples, even the numbers 1-10 got calligraphed.

Your research yielded nothing on Ngeswte names.

The Ngeswte left few words behind for you to record. They left you no name.

Every extant piece of Ngeswte writing is unsigned. No more recent writings are known. The future of the Ngeswte script is uncertain.