"Dum superbit impius" [music, pols]

Mar. 22nd, 2026 12:31 am
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[personal profile] siderea
[requires both audio and video]

Jonasquin on YT (previously) has written a wholly original motet in the 16th century style after Desprez upon the cantus firmus "Seven Nations Army", for the words of Psalm 10, verses 2, 3, 7-11.

Comment would be superfluous.

2026 Mar 20: Jonasquin YT: "A 16th century motet for the US President"



Click through to the video on YT to see the translation in the description.

The cost of literacy [medieval hist]

Mar. 20th, 2026 10:33 pm
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[personal profile] siderea
I knew that other contemporaneous cultures than those of Europe had unfathomably higher numbers of books than Europeans did, but I didn't know about this in retrospect obvious reason why:

2026 Mar 19: Dwarkesh Patel feat. Ada Palmer [DwarkeshPatel YT]: "Why Medieval Books Cost as Much as a House" (1 min, 7 sec):


Without papyrus, what you're writing on is a dead sheep. And if you think of the price of a head of lettuce and the price of a leather jacket, you're understanding the difference between a sheet of papyrus and writing on a dead sheep. So every page of a medieval book is as expensive as that much of a leather jacket. And a medieval book hand written costs as much as a house.

And so to have a library is to be not just rich but mega rich. So only the wealthiest cities contain anybody who has a library. The great library of the University of Paris, the library from Europe's perspective, has 600 books.

There's definitely more than 600 books in this room. Every kiosk at an airport selling Dan Brown novels has more than 600 books. This is nothing.

And at the same time as that, in the Middle East, sultans have libraries of over a thousand books or 5,000 books. There are libraries in Sub-Saharan Africa with thousands of books.* There are libraries in China with thousands of books. Because they in China have cheap paper and rice paper. The Middle East has papyrus.

Europe, and only Europe, is writing on a leather jacket.
* Three hundred thousand. It's been thirteen years and I am still not remotely over that fact. Every time I encounter it anew, my SCA persona gets acrophobic trying to imagine a library that big and has to sit down and put her head between her knees so she doesn't pass out.
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[personal profile] siderea
The previously expected ICE enforcement surge never materialized. Curious.

I wonder if this just means they're short-staffed. Or perhaps distracted.

(I also wonder if somebody made a judgment call not to try what they did in MN in MA, but have largely rejected the notion. It would not be to anybody's advantage if they did, on either side, but I'm not seeing a lot of good judgment in evidence anywhere.)

the Friday Five...

Mar. 20th, 2026 11:00 am
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[personal profile] hafnia
The Friday Five for this week, since I suppose I feel like doing it for the first time in a very long time, and why not? Questions here.

1. What was the reason you began a Dreamwidth or LiveJournal account (or both)?
LiveJournal — because it was the Year of Our Lord 2003, and it was what everyone else in fandom was doing. I'd just turned sixteen and thought it was the bee's knees.

Dreamwidth — post-Strikethrough, saw the writing on the wall, made one under my (now defunct) lj username for writing-only (and God, what a long time ago that was!), then made this one after I realized that I didn't want to be known as a pun username for the rest of my life...

2. How many DW or LJ communities do you subscribe to?
A handful? Fewer than 10, definitely; I don't really use DW for that.

3. Do you have a favorite community or one you check out often to see what's new?
I'm fond of the book reviews that get posted in [community profile] booknook.

4. How did you pick your user name?
I wanted something that would be difficult to link directly to me, that was unlikely to be taken on most sites, and that was something that had meaning to me. "hafnia" is the common name for Hafnium (IV) oxide, a material used for high-k dielectrics (if this makes you go, "???", fear not, it's a semiconductor thing). It also happens to be one of the materials I worked with most during my PhD.

I'm hafnia or titania the web over. If I ever make another pseud on AO3 (...maybe? can't imagine what for), it'll be as zirconia, probably. Group IV all the way.

5. If you could change your user name, would you?
I'm fond of it, so, no, it stays!
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[personal profile] siderea
Just hit play.

(All about the sound, but visuals also nice.)

2026 Mar 18: Benn Jordan [BennJordan YT]: "I'm here to disrupt the finance synthesizer scene."

Grok, explain Butlerian Jihad [ai]

Mar. 19th, 2026 12:36 am
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[personal profile] siderea
Screenshot of two comments on X.  One says, "Reading Dune.  Frank Herbert was cooking." and shows a section of a photo of a book page reading, "'Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free.  But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.' '"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind,"' Paul quoted."  Below that someone replied, paging Grok, X's resident AI, "please explain this post and the quote in in, what should I understand about it?"

Debate is raging on BSky if this is deliberate wit or accidental idiocy.

(h/t user mlyp.bsky.social)

Bad Bunny

Mar. 13th, 2026 07:21 pm
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[personal profile] momijizukamori
Because it came up when I was talking to my dad yesterday, and I remembered I meant to post it here and then forgot - if you haven't seen the Super Bowl halftime show this year, you should watch it. Even if you don't know who Bad Bunny is, or aren't into his style of music. The level of sheer technical skill involved in the staging is next-level, and he very much had a point he wanted to make and most certainly made it.



Bad Bunny's Super Bowl Halftime Show

And if you are interested, someone one Bluesky shared their Bad Bunny 101 write-up, which has links to a bunch of other articles and listening suggestions. Reggaeton is probably not gonna be one of my top genres personally, but I feel like it's good to get out of my listening confort zone and try new things, particularly when it's like, a global phenomenon right now.
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[personal profile] flexagon
Monday still feels like a pretty reasonable day for "work" and admin catchup, so on Monday I did all the responsible things. Email, snail mail, finance getting on top of, that one phone call I'd been procrastinating. The works. Tuesday I mostly appliqued a T-shirt for the bug, using a few new techniques including a different presser foot (one with an open toe... wow, it helps a lot to see the needle path better). Wednesday was super social, with a handstand lesson and visiting friend, culminating with baking a blueberry pie with the squirrel. I think I like it that not every weekday is the same anymore.

The bug and I went to the Boston Ballet "Winter Experience" show; here's a one-minute teaser that shows a lot of the best parts. Bought the T-shirt, because the T-shirt was actually cool. I saw a family taking photos of each other holding up the program and thought that was pretty brilliant, for the sake of such things popping up as memories later, so I took a selfie. Will future me appreciate it? Who knows!

Tenants at Blue-Green place were only getting cold air out of their heat pump system. But I'm learning that sometimes HVAC components aren't broken, sometimes they're simply off. So, hoping something had just turned itself off during the recent cold snap, I successfully restarted the heat pump and it miraculously started working again! Yesssss. I am learning things about houses and successfully applying those things to save us all from having to call the pros. Victory, right? I thought so.

And... VR, haha! We're late adopters but the bug and I are now teaming up to pimp out our (refurbished, new to us) Meta Quest 3 headset. I wanted a better head strap, he wanted a better face piece, I'm reading about lens protection and have bought some things. I'm obviously going to game, probably a lot, but I'm also interested in VR apps for phobia exposure. There are a few options. I'm open to other ideas too... can I virtual-visit the Louvre without crowds? Walk through an orgy? Float through trippy candy-colored clouds? The squirrel has the same headset and we're going to try to play ping-pong and minigolf together, too.

Underneath is seething panic about my Montana trip, which is... tomorrow. I wrote most of the above on Friday. Today... eh. I keep freezing up, I stupidly flooded the bathroom earlier because I forgot water was running. I've just about given up on explaining why it's so bad to go there. No, I'm not WORRIED about something bad HAPPENING that might or might not HAPPEN. Yes everyone will be fine, yes my crew is going there too and that's likely to be a good shield, but I still have to be there and that's actually the plan. The nightmare is the plan. Me, I get to make other people happy and reset the clock on Montana visits and that's it. Birdie wanted to meet my dad, which seemed fair since I helped her to meet my mom, and there won't be a better chance than this year, so here we are. I just have to shower and force myself to do the last of the packing.

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