decibal cooper

dayum! only checked out Floresence so far but that's some top tier lushness I always loved the pads in this wsg song. They are audible throughout the whole song but become more lush around the middle of each verse. Sound like the human voice, kinda ghostly, sorta reminds me of some sounds from NTS Session 4

Same vibe at the Aphex show

This clip shows the ship right before making impact with one of the bridge's support beams: https://x.com/Brick_Suit/status/1772577086424645907?s=20

Very terrifying! Imagine driving over a bridge and then next minute you in your car are going headlong into the water. Still a developing story apparently on how many people have died. Also read that the Port of Baltimore is a top 20 in America in terms of cargo traffic and that this bridge is a big part of that (it is the beginning of distribution routes after the shipping containers come into port), so this will probably impact the city & distribution of certain goods throughout the mid-Atlantic negatively for some time.

Eva Marie Saint

You know recruitment going badly when they breaking out the waifus

fukd around & found out

Over the weekend I watched the William Wyler film from 1946 The Best Years of Our Lives. It focuses on three US serviceman returning to their small town American lives after fighting in WWII for three years. One of them had his hands blown off and has hooks in their stead. The guy playing this character was an actual war veteran who lost both hands and was not a professional actor but gave an incredible performance and won the Oscar for that year best actor. One of the other characters was a bank executive, and he has to go back to work and get pressured by his superiors to deny GIs bank loans (which they were promised by the GI Bill) because they are poor and have no collateral. The last character returns home and all the skills he honed during the war as a bombardier are not transferable to any civilian career. He goes back to his job at the local pharmacy making ice cream sundaes and sandwiches for people. The pharmacy was a mom-and-pop place when he left but was bought out during the war and became one of those empty consumerism department stores. At about three hours long, the film is unrelenting at chronicling the challenges faced by soldiers returning to society after being at war for three years. Surprisingly, given the date that it was released and the fact that Hollywood execs were most certainly looking for patriotic stories that glorified the war, the film seems to suggest that in some ways these soldiers were not fighting for anything meaningful back at home (although no question that imperial Germany & Japan needed to be stopped). My favorite thing about the movie was the cinematography. Legendary DP Gregg Toland (who shot Citizen Kane) was in the mix, and his use of lighting and special lenses to develop 'deep focus' cinematography is on full display. Basically, there is a greater depth of field in the images, where characters in the foreground and background of a composition are completely in focus, and the action in the foreground is often secondary, has less dramatic weight than what is happening in the background. This scene, where the character with hooks shows off his newfound piano skills, while in the top-left corner one of the other characters makes an important phone call that will impact his life severely, is a good example (although this technique is used throughout the film in sometimes more subtle and very effective ways): The French film critic Andre Bazin, who was influential to a lot of the big French new wave guys, applauded this technique and used it to develop his theory of realism in film, where the images are ambiguous in a way that comes closer to how the human eye perceives a visual field or image. The camerawork and editing are not force-feeding the audience on what to pay attention to, as was the custom for most films of the time. The audience is instead invited to participate in the drama and develop their own meaning. Bazin's article about Citizen Kane fleshes this idea out very nicely, although I cannot seem to find a link to it online. The only thing about the film that imo has aged poorly is some of the music, which is a little melodramatic and interferes with the realism and unrelenting darkness of this story. The performances were all top tier, and I definitely recommend based on the cinematography style. Can't lie, though, it is not only very long, but almost every scene (and some more than others) is very difficult to watch.

David Lynch statue made by David Cerny in Santa Monica

Big shakeup in conservative media as Ben Shapiro's company the Daily Wire fires commentator Candace Owens

The warning came from the US embassy, not Russia, and you are correct the warning was issued on March 8th about two weeks ago: https://www.reuters.com/world/us-embassy-warns-imminent-extremist-attack-moscow-2024-03-08/ I've never heard of Islamic state attacking an Eastern country. Gonna be interesting to see what exactly happened after the dust settles. Of course you are right Mr. Ostanek, I think, that no matter who is responsible, Putin can use this to his advantage in someway to either crack down on his own population or that of Ukraine.