zompist bboard

Budding fascists and communists in this forum might find this channel interesting: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPdk3J ... =0&sort=da

Ryusenshi wrote:Currently trudging through Hamlet, which I had never read or seen before. Reading Elizabethan English is hard.

I don't know if this works for other people, but getting the accent right helps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M

An interesting tidbit about the second link: the actor there is the son of David Crystal, who wrote the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Linguistics.

Reading Maximum City, following Zompist's recommendation.

Bismarck is out: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... i0A8gTsawu

This AMV is super nostalgic for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAr-J6B1bNA

Pole, the wrote:I can't stop watching Jim Sterling's channel.

Also, he has a linguistic peculiarity: he pronounces «-ction» words as /-ktʃən/. Ever come across that before?

I am no longer reading The Count of Monte Cristo.

AlphaGo Zero: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXlM99xPQC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QprlFINq9co (https://deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero- ... g-scratch/ https://www.nature.com/articles/nature2 ... TUgZAUMnRQ)

Salmoneus wrote:I am no longer reading The Count of Monte Cristo.

You finished it or you got bored by it?

hwhatting wrote:

Salmoneus wrote:I am no longer reading The Count of Monte Cristo.

You finished it or you got bored by it?

Or perhaps he came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth the trouble to read all the way to the end?

Vijay wrote:

hwhatting wrote:

Salmoneus wrote:I am no longer reading The Count of Monte Cristo.

You finished it or you got bored by it?

Or perhaps he came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth the trouble to read all the way to the end?

For me, that's included in "getting bored". Or do you think that anyone reads a book and says, "wow, that's a really thrilling read, but it's not worth finishing it"? (Now, the obverse makes more sense to me - you can get bored by a book and still decide that you need finish it and trudge through till the end, or put it on hold.)

hwhatting wrote:Or do you think that anyone reads a book and says, "wow, that's a really thrilling read, but it's not worth finishing it"?

Pretty sure I've done this myself. I do this with other things, too. Life is too short to pursue every little thing that might be interesting to us.

Vijay wrote:

hwhatting wrote:Or do you think that anyone reads a book and says, "wow, that's a really thrilling read, but it's not worth finishing it"?

Pretty sure I've done this myself. I do this with other things, too. Life is too short to pursue every little thing that might be interesting to us.

(1) "Not worth finishing it" and (2) "not top priority" are two different categories to me, but that' maybe just me. (1) means I've decided to never take it up again (a decision which, of course, can be revised with time), (2) means I'm putting it aside for the moment (and in the end it may mean that I never get around to finishing it, but that's a different issue.) But suum cuique.
And well, I interpret Sal's post as "I won't continue reading the book", while it can, of course, possibly mean "I've put it aside for an indefinite time".

You can also decide never to take something up again because it's not top priority, though. There are some lovely books about math that we have right here in my house and that fascinate me, but I'm not a mathematician so I'll probably never finish reading any of them given that I also have plenty of language books I'd rather read first.

So everyone tells Ophelia that Hamlet's in love with her, even though we haven't heard any word from him that would imply so. And now, we finally see them together... and he basically implies that she's a slut, and tells her to get to a nunnery (which, as I understand, is Elizabethan English for "fuck off").

Is it me, or is the famous "To be or not to be" speech totally out of the blue and barely connected to the rest of the play?

The good thing is that I've managed to avoid being spoiled so far, except for the fact that basically everybody dies at the end (par for the course in a Shakespearean tragedy).

rotting bones wrote:I don't know if this works for other people, but getting the accent right helps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M

Thanks, but it's hard enough as-is. Maybe some other time.

By the way: I don't really know how meters work in English. Does anyone know about a good resource about them?

rotting bones wrote:I don't know if this works for other people, but getting the accent right helps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M

So, Shakespearean English was basically Scottish? :D

For my new conworld, I'm using this discussion as a starting point to craft stories at the personal level: https://samzdat.com/2017/08/28/the-uruk-machine/

Pole, the wrote:So, Shakespearean English was basically Scottish?

Can't deny the thought crossed my mind. :p

Pole, the wrote:

rotting bones wrote:I don't know if this works for other people, but getting the accent right helps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M

So, Shakespearean English was basically Scottish?

That's not Scottish.

It's West Country. Or more accurately, it's a southern rural accent, of which West Country is the best-known surviving representative (although the old Kent and Sussex accents won't completly die out for a decade or so). Specifically, the usual description is "West Country with an American twang".

If you like the accent, btw, I suggest checking out the John Adams miniseries; although of course it's not 100% accurate (we don't have enough information to make it 100% accurate, even if the actors could manage it), but they try to give generally believable 18th century American accents. The Boston and Philadelphia accents are very clearly (a more pleasant!) progenitor to modern American accents, but the Virginian accent Stephen Dillane has as Thomas Jefferson is very Shakesperian. (Virginia was settled primarily from the West Country).

[Apparently this was controversial - a lot of critics seem furious that HBO would unpatriotically and nonsensically give the Founding Fathers 'British accents' instead of the real American ones they obviously had... (though to a British ear they're all still very American)]

Ryusenshi wrote:Is it me, or is the famous "To be or not to be" speech totally out of the blue and barely connected to the rest of the play?

It's not just you. The Wikipedia article on that speech says: "The meaning of the speech is heavily debated but seems concerned with Hamlet's hesitation to directly and immediately avenge his father's murder (discovered in Act I) on his uncle, stepfather, and King Claudius."

By the way: I don't really know how meters work in English. Does anyone know about a good resource about them?

I think every high (or even middle?) school English literature book I've seen has a pretty straightforward description of this tbh. The most common meter in English poetry is iambic pentameter. This is also the one Shakespeare used in his plays and sonnets.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... -8xoqZns6i

Does anyone know of really good recorded campaigns?

Edit: Finished. Since they mentioned Patrick Rothfuss plays DnD, moving on to one of those: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... 4DCuyjVKSl

I've watched The Force Awakens and I must say I enjoyed it. (And it was probably the first SW movie I watched and enjoyed.)

I'm not reading it now anymore, but I've recently finished The One Device by Brian Merchant, a non-fiction book that is strictly speaking about the iPhone, but has enough parts that apply to all modern smartphones that I found it interesting although I use Android myself.

Edit: I should probably note that the book is not some kind of user guide or manual or something like that; it's partly about the technological history involved and partly about the required manufacturing processes.

Not that long ago I read The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, about the development of the Data General Eclipse MV/8000 and everything that went into it.

I saw Lucy. It was astonishing. How could a great director produce such a totally rubbish film? Was he on drugs? Has he joined a brainwashing cult? What?

I do have to give him credit for the moments where he appeared to be saying 'fuck you' to the audience - like the ending, which is just some shots emphasising how weird everything is, and then the film randomly ends in the middle of a scene.

But the "I don't care if you think my film is good!" thing works better when the film isn't total trash.

I mean, it's baffling how anyone at any stage of this could have thought that any of this was a good idea. Was a dare?

Or did anything genuinely think the key to making a good film was:
- hire a really good actress and then create a plot reason for her to show no expressions at all for the last 9/10ths of the film
- spend most of the running time on 'chases' and 'fights' where the protagonist was explicitly made clear to never be in any danger whatsoever and didn't even have to bother fighting
- have no clear narrative arc
- have a plot that was unrelated to the themes in any way, and that didn't even make sense
- spend half the rest of the running time on incredibly shallow and cliché cod-philosophy lectures
- spend the other half on science infodumps about science that made absolutely no sense, to the point where everyone in the audience knew it

It really does feel like performance art, where he's intentionally making his film as bad as possible, "ironically".