justsomeinternet

[justsomeinternet]

I restarted reading actual books this year - rebuilding my tattered attention span page by page. What were your faves?

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“Eventually the party started up again. By then I had worked my way around to her part of the room and was rewarded with the following tableau vivant: blonde Marilyn was seated in an armchair. On one of its arms perched Carson McCullers, her brown hair chopped short and uneven as if she’d taken an ax to it, her body fierce in tomboy tension and twisted like a pretzel. Sitting in a chair on the other side of Marilyn-in-her-slip was Edwina-Williams-in-her-Hat. They were conversing with each other, all three with heads inclined.”

From Elaine Dundy’s autobiography - I’m not sure I will get over this mental image, that’s Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams’ mum and Marilyn Monroe chatting together at a party..

[justsomeinternet]

“Some emotions never grow up; it always seems to be the same day with them.”

— Life Itself!: An Autobiography by Elaine Dundy

[justsomeinternet]

2015: New Zealand holds a vote to change their flag due to its similarity to Australia's, leading to the submission of the 'Lazer Kiwi' flag. Designer Lucy Gray said her inspiration was that "Australia has a lot of animals that can kill you, so New Zealand should get one too"

[justsomeinternet]

Medieval texts for young girls warning of the danger of vanity and looking in mirrors did not come play

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“I would love a math that engaged all the various perplexities of the person. Not to solve them so much as give them an abstracted form, an abstracted individuation, like an “x” or a “y,” that would allow one to move them around, see them from different angles. I guess that’s what writing provides.”

— My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman

[justsomeinternet]

““Take this picture here,” Jack said, pointing to the landscape behind him. “This thing is such bullshit.” Which got everyone’s attention. He continued: “Landscape artists were not free to simply find a thing they liked and paint it. They were not free to depict whatever they wanted. They had to construct a view. And who was the view for? The collectors. The benefactors. It was for the people with money.” Jack was aware that a note of bitterness had entered his voice, but he kept going. He explained to his students how the landscape artists they were studying did not paint what the world really looked like, but instead were told by the wealthy what the world ought to look like and then went searching for examples. Landscape artists, he said, were not painting the world as it was, because between the painter and the landscape was a school of thought about what a landscape should be. They saw the land through a lens of doctrine and dogma. Which required them to travel enormous distances to find appropriate subjects, vistas that overlooked a scene close to the ideal: something that evoked the beauty of God’s creation but not the actual tangled mess of real unruly nature; something that triggered feelings of awe but not in a way that would make a rich art collector feel small or ignoble. Often, of course, the world did not cooperate, and so the painters would invent their own scenes, taking elements from a real landscape to establish a kind of local “truth” and then surrounding them with fabrications. ”

— Wellness by Nathan Hill

people like to be like "well i like art that can speak for itself, not something that needs 10 paragraphs on the placard to explain" but really i think those are just an accessibility aid. okay, so they're often not very good as far as that goes, but still. like people can figure this stuff out but it just takes a lot of knowledge and a lot of looking at paintings that most people don't have. but you can get there. often like understanding a specific genre well enough to do that isn't that challenging. but there's often a lot of variety on display at a museum and few people have it all.

[justsomeinternet]

Everyone has goth sex hormones it came free with your fucking existence.

[justsomeinternet]

More like Barely Clinging On Close

[justsomeinternet]

The Addams Family (1991) dir. Barry Sonnenfeld

[justsomeinternet]

we need to make using chatgpt embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can’t write an email

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I’ve just been reading the wind and the willows to my eight year old, and thinking that Mole and Ratty are the ultimate “and they were room mates”. Of course I then googled it, and:

[justsomeinternet]

I hate to say it because it’s AI, but perplexity is a genuinely functional search engine. It’s like using google 10 years ago.

It’s kind of bizarre to think that one of the main benefits of artificial intelligence is to circumvent how scammers, content farmers and advertising has ruined search engines

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

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Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

[justsomeinternet]

I think this depends on the job, I do this and like it 🤷‍♀️it combines well with remote work, because the time I save by not commuting is in itself almost a full work day

I don’t know why Angela Rayner should need to be told this, but compressing five days of work into four days is not a four day work week.

[justsomeinternet]

Girl photographed by Hugh Magnum c. 1909

Magnum’s photographs are notable for their informality, which was unusual for the period. I just adore the series of this girl, she’s such a beauty.