villagecharm | Reading

I can't recall if I mentioned this before, but one of the reasons I started this #PodcastFriday thing is that I want to eventually build a podcast episode recommendation app, esp. for lefties. In Canada we have unrigged.ca but it's basically a feed aggregator for the top 40 lefty podcasts in the country (which is probably half of the total selection...), so you still have to wade through the garden hose and pick *whatever*.

I would like to build an app where you could share episodes that you liked, and you could also give the app some thematic preferences, and it would build a personalized recommendations podcast feed for you. You could then queue these episodes right in your podcast player of choice. You could decide to follow a number of people as well. You could build 1 or 2 or 3 different feeds. ("the algorithm", "people I follow", "these 2 tags I want to follow", "all of these feeds put together").

My last job actually was quite useful for thinking about the architecture of such a project, and now that I have time on my hands, I feel like this is going to be a fun summer project...

frandroid

READER. I thought I had lost all of my Firefox tabs. All 918 of them. While trying to recover them, I mistakenly shut down my browser again, preventing the "restore last session" type of dialogue from happening easily. And my Time Machine backup is not running on my work computer, which has remained my main web browsing machine. I had LOOOTS of podcast episodes banked on there. Plus different windows with extensive bibliographies for special research topics. ("

frandroid, why don't you just bookmark the pages?" "Shut up Pinky!"). I was fairly despondent. I have a back up going to last September which has the bulk of my special topics, but the podcasts seemed to be lost. Finally today while I was looking at something different, I realized that there was a different "restore session" button than the about:sessionstorage dialogue in the 'fox. I clicked on that and it restored a month-old session I had tested with, so I was overjoyed. Finally I searched the trash bin, found a session backup dating to just before I lost my tabs, and restored that. Magic!! I am so relieved.

Alright, on with our regularly scheduled program. The first item is pretty nice "me" stuff but the second one was fun.

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Chasing Leviathan - Understanding Modern Kurdish History with Dr. Djene Bajalan

In this episode, Dr. Bajalan describes how Ottoman, Turkish and Kurdish modernity were intertwined and how the idea of their respective nation-states developed in relation to each other, esp. In the crucial decades of 1910-1930.

(The PKK held a symbolic "weapons surrender" ceremony today, where they put 50 automatic rifles in a big container and set the whole thing on fire. Empty symbolism, clearly, which matches the Turkish' state own emptiness in this "diplomatic process". To demonstrate the point, an hour after this symbolic demonstrating of good will by the PKK, the Turkish air force bombarded a PKK position in Northern Iraq. What a clusterfuck. I've promised a follow-up post about this... It should come up soon.)

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Better Offline - Silicon Valley Fashion With The Menswear Guy

So it’s been a bit of a trend this year, if you have a successful podcast (probably one which pays appearance fees), to have

dieworkwear come on to talk about whatever? So Ed Zitron didn’t miss his chance and had him on to talk about the style a variety of tech executives, from Zuck to Jensen Huang (nVidia). At the end of the episode he discusses buying the best leather jacket for your taste. The thing that I love about him is that he’s all about “figure out your style, then rock it” kind of fashion guy, rather than the old school “this is the style now, forget everything you knew yesterday” thing.

...

I love Ed Zitron to bits, but other than in this episode and a few other interviews, his ranting about AI is getting pretty repetitive. I think I'll focus on listening to Tech Won't Save Us more than him.

frandroid

So even though I've been selling zines for 25 fucking years now, there are two big zine things I have never done until now:
1) put out my own zine
2) organize a zine fair.

Amusingly, the second item is happening before the first one. I had thought about organizing a small bar-hosted zine fair for a while (Cut 'n Paste in Toronto used to be held at Sneaky Dees (a sizeable punk-ish bar with two floors), and the first zine fair I visited, Generous Margins, was held at the Sugar Refinery). I long have had a bar-owning friend who is open to the idea. Then last fall, Canada's largest fair, Canzine, was cancelled because the guy running it and Broken Pencil got cancelled for a second time in a few years, this time for being a rabid, lying, libelling, fabulating Zionist. So he decided to just destroy his two indie institutions. Then this spring I learned that SOMEONE ELSE had held a bar fair (which I missed by a day), so now I was like IT'S ON!! This summer I was talking to a new zine friend about it, and he told me that he and some other people were getting together to organize a new zine fair, to ostensibly replace Canzine. So I have joined this collective, we have held a few organizing meetings so far, and it looks like this thing is serious!!! I'm very excited. It's going to be on a smaller scale than Canzine (it had between 150 and 200 vendors, depending on the year/venue--we could probably cram 80 in our venue but others are a bit more conservative/chill/insecure about it, so we're looking at 56 to 70. It's going to be an application fair so we'll see how many people we decide to let in and possibly adjust the number of tables in consequence.

We were discussing whether to have sponsors or not (not soliciting them, but even just allowing them to ask for the privilege), and while I was in the "sure, we could do more things with more money" mindset, one of the collective members, incidentally the person who had organized that spring bar zine fair, was like "if they're not selling zines, even if they're an indie business, they're still a business trying to use our reputation to make more money". I'm not absolutist like that (I'm fine with indie book publishers/bookstores paying hundreds of dollars for a table if they feel like it), I dig this anarchist/zine purist take and I feel like we're in good company. (We're going to have a notice for potential sponsors to write to us to ask to sponsor, but it looks like we'll be picky. At most we'd probably have three sponsor tables anyway.)

frandroid

Watch on YouTube

microbie

Staying with the Moche culture: cats!

The pieces on the left and right are contemporary, and the rest are from the first millenium CE. According to the placard, these forms were the only type of portraiture in the Moche culture.

I was impressed by the seahorse motif (Atlantic Watershed culture, Costa Rica, 300 to 700 CE)

Caiman incense burner (Guanacoste-Nicoya culture, Costa Rica/Nicaragua, 500 to 1350 CE)

Another animal motif, this time a jaguar with human skulls on a burial urn (K'iche' Maya culture, Guatemala, 600 to 900 CE)

The cylinder vase on the shelf is from the Maya culture, Guatemala, but the others are from various cultures in Mexico. I really liked the market woman.

Amazing gold pieces from what is now Mexico.

Ditto jade

frandroid

The Dig - How Zohran Won w/ NYC DSA

If you're like me in the left, you're excited that Zohran Mamdani has won the NYC democratic nomination for mayor, esp. in light of the insane amount of vitriol and Big Money put against him. So Daniel Denvir decided to interview the co-chairs of his campaign. They discuss how this absolutely did not come out of nowhere, but is the culmination of years of running smaller campaigns and capacity city building on the part of NYC DSA. One of the top organizers there cut her teeth on the Obama 2008 campaign, so you could say that the seeds were first planted there.

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On a related note, I dislike the tag #PodcastFriday now because I do my write ups on most OTHER days. :P. I created this tag in the mold of #FollowFriday tag from Twitter's early days, but meh. :). Sometimes I bank them but this episode is totally exciting to listen to.

microbie

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore recently unveiled a new collection of Latin American art, so yesterday we went up to take a look. Latin America is huge, of course, and the exhibition is not that large, so it's not surprising that there are gaps, chiefly South America from Venezuela to Argentina. The areas now known as Mexico and Peru were well represented. The galleries were full of visitors, so hopefully the museum will do more in this area.

Most of the exhibits were old, but here is one of the contemporary pieces: Wak'a del Agua, by Kukuli Velarde, created 2022-223

From the placard: "Velarde references the Inca tradition of stacking stones to mark a place as a sacred, sentient being--a wak'a in the Quechua language of the Andes."

These vessels are from the Nasca and Moche (sea lion) cultures (Peru), ca. 200 BCE to 800 CE. The lobster and the fisherman are favorites.

Beans as decorative motif (also Nasca culture, 200 to 300 CE):

A llama (Chancay culture, Peru: 1000-1470 CE).

A stone sculpture from the Jama Coaque culture (Ecuador, 300 BCE to 800 CE)

I would like to know more about this object, also from the Jama Coaque culture and roughly the same period as the piece above, but the only description was "snuff tray." The case was labeled "Formative Cultures."

The painted dipper on the left is from the Recuay culture (Peru, 1 to 600 CE); the one on the right is from the Moche culture (Bolivia, 500 to 800 CE).

Stirrup vessels from the Cupisnique culure (Peru, 1200 to 500 BCE)

A Hash at Home is Better Than a Roast Among Strangers

A Journey Into Snacking

Reading

#PodcastFriday - The podcast recommendation app

Podcast Friday - Saved by the Bell,

behold! a zine fair!

Looks like I'm a little late discovering this, but it kicks ass

Peru to Mexico

#PodcastFriday special edition - The Dig - How Zohran Won w/ NYC DSA

Latin American art at the Walters

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