Greg Costikyan lists some examples of completely impractical programming languages, like Intercal, brainfuck, Unlambda, Funge-98, Haskell and Malbolge.
Blink. Haskell?
Month: June 2006
Categories
Saddam and Osama
Saddam and Osama – Saturday morning cartoons for an Arab world – (via Lying in the Gutters, which points out the Batman vs. The Jews
ad in the middle).
Yep, I’m still revisiting teen enthusiasms.
We know we can find bizzare retro rock videos on YouTube; well, speaking of bizzare and retro, apparently it’s filled with Kate Bush videos, clips, rare-rare appearances, all sorts of strange obscure bits from TV specials that I got to see only once in the days that the Third Ear was a pub (and not just that, but a pub on Derech Petach Tikva, under Beit Maariv, of all places, which it was for just a brief while). And also those two videotapes I had and didn’t touched for maybe 15 years but which were part of my identity or something.
Anyway, the point is that now instead of seeing all this in crappy quality taped-from-TV and duplicated VHS, you can see it in crappy flash video, whenever you want.
Looking at the interviews and her choreography, most of it so painfuly bad that it speaks of a supreme, WTF??? level of daftness, Kate Bush seems heartbreakingly naive and innocent, even, well, stupid. Far more so than, say, Bjork in the video Tal linked to recently: Sometimes I suspect Bjork is just pretending to be the childlike pixie, that there’s a very self-aware, postmodern intellect there that’s posing. Maybe it’s because I suspect that, because she realizes her accent makes her sound strange, she delibrately over-plays the weird naif angle, just like some of my friends would talk English with a delibrately dumb Hebrew akzent.
But Kate Bush comes across as genuinely naive, or, not to be coy, stupid. I mean, this is a woman talking about the clip to The Sensual World and saying that the director worked with her to emphasize the sensuality of the world
. She was in her thirties when she said that. In earlier interviews (there was one about Babooshka), she just comes across as the sweetest little girl.
But, you know, the mind boggles to think that a peculiar work like There Goes a Tenner has a clip, and was performed on TV.
Thinking about it, I think that there’s a similarity to Robert E Howard who I was just on about. like REH, Kate Bush is an amazingly naive artist, just doing what she loves; and her passion comes across.
Oh, that and her being bloody gorgeous.
If this interests you at all, you’ll want to crawl the search results. But I still can’t resist one more link: here’s an appearance on some odd TV show, with clips for Babooshka and Delius!:
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Robert E. Howard
I got some RPGs this week from the Indie Press Revolution sale, so I got to read Dogs in the Vineyard on the train to and from word (Car problems), and I read the two first Sorcerer supplements. Sword and Sorcerer made me think of Conan, and thinking of Conan made me read the biography on the Robert E. Howard site. Interesting stuff.
When Howard was my age, he was dead for 7 years. How’s that for a sobering thought. Before committing suicide, he got to be a successful writer, taking that young angst and enthusiasm we would pour into roleplaying games or fan-fic or whatever and putting it into stories which will probably endure long after I am dead. He didn’t fret with editing or rewrites – except maybe that time when, you know, the magazine couldn’t go to press because the only copy of a story’s manuscript was with the cover artist, and he had to write the story again from scratch. He lived his stories, and I guess he had a lot of fun writing them.
Still, killed himself.
Of course, reading that sympathetic biography, you wonder if he didn’t quit while ahead.
Maybe you realize that if your life isn’t going to be Kings of the Night, it might as well be Worms of the Earth.
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Zagor! Tex!
Italian Comics! They invented Tex Willer! And Zagor! He’s like Tarzan, Old Shatterhand, the Lone Ranger and Flash Gordon rolled up into one,
living in a fantasy kingdom on the outskirts of Pennsylvania!
Oh, and they also have a Constantine type dude, a horror fighting hero called Dylan Dog, except he looks like Rupert Everett instead of Sting.
Why did I recall these comics? Because I want to write a blog entry about the recent collections of Marvel Comics’ Conan, by Roy Thomas and John Buscema; I think that Conan is a rare example of an adventure strip, of the sort the Europeans have done very successfully, but which so rarely comes out of America.
Although, we’re talking Rascaly Roy and Big John here; obviously their Conan sometimes tastes like the Avengers.