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  Hitler was consciously imitating Mussolini. I state it here because it explains some of the ersatz thrice-removed feeling which fascism has taken on in this century. It really is an imitation of an imitation.

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  I barely knew who Ed Sheeran was before the scandal, but the "apology" I just saw makes things much worse. He's rich, right? And he read the statement from prepared notes?! They don't have publicists any more to stanch the bleeding? I mean, I personally hate him now, from zero, in less than a week.

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  Hi everyone. @lionelb@expressional.social would like to say that their instance has been down for 14 hours, but they will be back on here as soon as possible. Thx.

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  A friend sent this from a service station in the USA.

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  Psychopaths are a lot like AI. I can't believe I'm just noticing that. The love-bombing and the flattering and the nefarious bloodless reptilian plotting below.

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  In a shop we're planning, we aim to feature toys and intimate items based on creatures normally feared or loathed, especially by children - spiders bats sharks snakes slugs crocodiles ants etc. In our research we discovered this site which I thought might appeal to many here: https://www.gagebeasleyshop.com

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  I really think things like the Kennedy Center are distraction and chickenfeed compared to what's up. For the record.

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  Matisse. Gouaches Découpés, 1952. I'm not posting this late-career cutout painting for artistic merit, but rather because of how prescient it seems in both forms and color choices. He was an unrivalled talent. #Painting

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  Hans Memling. The Man of Sorrows in the Arms of the Virgin, 1475/79. Have you ever wondered why many Christian images feature tools like hammers, pliers, saws and nails just sort of gratuitously tacked on? It's Arma Christi, and it's very weird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arma_Christi #Painting

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  Only a British person can tell you what "taking the piss" means. Rather, only they will try, and make sense to themselves, and to no one else. As nearly as I can discern it means making fun of, or being made fun of, or spoiling the fun. Those are... antonyms, like twice over?

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  TIL that lacuna and lagoon are the same word adapted to two different purposes. It changes how I read both. #EditorsNote

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  Big news to make sense of words I encounter each day: In Italian there is a noun and its magnified & minimized forms: Casa, Casina, Casona But there are also cutifiers & uglifiers, too! Casetta/Casuccia, Casaccia Pentola (pot) Pentolino (little pot) Pentolone (cauldron) Pentolaccia (piñata game, ugly pot to break) Libro (book) Libretto (small) Librino (very small) Libricino (cute small) Librone (big) Libraccio (pulp/trash) -accio is bad, -uccio is cute These decline for gender, num...

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  Europeans, we need to appreciate & defend what we have. Americans... well, it's just not working: "[USA] without insurance, a colonoscopy could range from $1,250 to more than $4,000. A colonoscopy screening generally costs less than a diagnostic colonoscopy, which includes a biopsy or excision..." A no-insurance pay-at-the-counter colonoscopy with excision & biopsy in Italy today costs €368. Without biopsy it's €318. With any European national health insurance, it&#3...

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  Egg ideas: Microwave gently in bowl ~30s, no added fat Hardboil (boil water, dip in 11.5 mins, cold water shock to peel), less for softboil Salt only after cooking in all cases Scrambled, omelet: add dash of water for fluffy steam, beat, fry (20mins on low-low with constant stirring makes egg velvet) Canton omelet (beat, spice heavily, spread wide & thin, cook well one side, then cover to steam finish) Frittata: flip using a prop plate Oeuf à plat, coddled, poached, thread soup #Reci...

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  This article on Jared French is exceptionally good: https://www.artcritic.com/en/jared-french-and-the-american-kouroi/ Jared French. Washing the White Blood from Daniel Boone, 1939. Piero della Francesca. Baptism of Christ, ~1450. #Painting

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  It took my brain a month of rummaging around in the mental files, but I finally found whom I had cast as Judge Holden in Blood Meridian: Major Briggs (Don S. Davis), my favorite character from Twin Peaks. He's an exact fit for me, so clear while reading: look, tone, demeanor, pontifications. And yet it took me forever to place him. I'm thrilled. Now I'm going to walk around talking like that, pretending I'm the lonely devil out collecting paranormal artifacts. In fact it's no...

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  Of all the things that should fell AI, I think the thing that will get it is just how profoundly uncool it is. Even online we are still social creatures and it has no human connection, no swoon. It's the social equivalent of polyester.

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  If you are trying to learn another language, here are the two best teachers I know of: 1. Having forced immersive normal conversations, knowing that you are making errors. 2. Translating random blocks of text without the use of LLMs, and then going over them with help for corrections. Both of these teach me more and faster than anything else.

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  With 32c (90F) in the Arctic right now, it seems inevitable that we will all have forest fires. However, we may only have them once. I wish that were good news. The planet will not grow back as it was.

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  Leonora Carrington. Les Distractions de Dagobert, 1945. This article is a good artistic assessment of a work which is almost always discussed in terms of gross financial worth first: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/leonora-carrington-les-distractions-de-dagobert-2718627 I will only add is that they elide the period of her nervous breakdown and abandonment by Ernst with a few glib words, when the reality was horrific sexual violence. She undertook an amazing rebirth which informs her later fe...

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  Franciszek Honiok Famously he was the first victim of WW2, but we wouldn't know anything about him, or the origin of the false-flag Nazi operation that murdered him and started the war, except for the Nuremberg Trials. He has no memorial and his body was never found. How many others remain unknown? And how much like the regimes we're familiar with the today to plant such false flags. [This was prompted by a TIL post someone deleted earlier and I wish they hadn't!] https://en.wiki...

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  Dalí. Living Still Life, 1956. I won't go into my freely-associating thoughts about this painting, but I just want to point out that it's often tagged on the internet as containing phallic symbolism, and I'm like, oh really, which one??? #Painting

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  He has unexpectedly taken the day off work. He slept until 8! Then waking with uncharacteristic alertness, he first thing asked for "church music;" I was dubious but went as far as Handel, just to see what all this was about. Now, still naked, he's got both arms in the air yelling yes yes yes, bring it girrrrrl, during the crescendo of Coronation Anthem No. 1. I'm thinking I should call for help.

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  Yesterday was a vision of the future: 38c at rush hour in a traffic jam on a narrow sunk channel of controlled-access black asphalt highway, each car a single fragile airconditioned bubble in a cauldron, churning out toxins & rippling heat. 1 jam turned into 4. 1 hour became 2. I started to run out of gas. Cell connectivity flickered. Then I had a random health emergency (better now thx, but I was not okay to drive). It was the 2nd time in 6 days that heat became life-threatening. #ClimateDi...

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  Carl Moll. Roman ruins in Schönbrunn, 1892. Why don't we hear about him alongside his Vienna Secession peers? It wasnt lack of talent but rather that he was an early, rabid Nazi. So much so that he and his family committed suicide rather than be captured at the end of WW2. It brings questions of objective beauty, subjective intention, the "statute of limitations" we impose on art. No one queries Fragonard's political opinions. But this is too close, too alive. This we do not...

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  4 separate notes came today to see if we are on fire. Such times. We're not on fire, yet, but I was right in the heart of a parched tinderbox woodland over the weekend and it was so scary, until it rained hard at last on Sunday morning before dawn, rained and hailed for 3 whole hours. It was an awful destructive storm in other ways, but at least it dampened the fuses for a few days down in that driest area. Stock masks, y'all. And keep a bugout bag with car keys in it.

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  Raoul Dufy. Seaside, 1960. I went looking for happy distraction but even Dufy seems foreboding today. #Painting lithograph

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  Podcast in Italian: "Burnham is above all focused on bringing down the cost of living, for making affordable things like beer and whatever else English people may consume."

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  Reading about painting, I often run into the pat phrase "Virgin and Child." I know what it signifies but find it humorous for two reasons: 1. the in-your-face ko-an; and 2. the hijacking of the focus from the singularly redemptive male baby onto a female Mother cult. To me "child" makes it sound like just any kid she happened to have handy, like virgin with psalter or lapdog or curling iron. Stefano da Verona. The Madonna of Humility, ~1430. (Imo this Virgin is anything but...

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  I've said this before but people seem overly focused on the Nazi comparison. A much more exact and useful comparison imo is Mussolini's Italian Fascism of the 1920s. In that vein you will never run out of parallels. "It's the same picture."