I love the photos on the TV. Fun use of the medium.

It was a commercial for his shirts. They talked about it on the latest Knowledge Fight.

Please let me know how it goes if you do! I’ve made it a couple times now, and it’d be interesting to compare notes. I used all-purpose flour for mine, but I picked up some bread flour that I’ll try next time.

I’m not my of a baker, but this is easy enough that it’s worth doing to have fresh bread around.

I wanted one that worked well in a food processor, since it was a new time-saving gadget that I picked up. Here’s the recipe that I used, it’s super easy even for me.

I just watched it again recently. It’s a sublime piece of filmmaking.

No need to apologize, people are wrong about lots of stuff.

Mad Max: Fury Road is a perfect film, and I’ll die on this hill.

That’s really the heart of the matter: it’s so disrespectful to put in the effort to change an artist’s work just to remove the credit.

My kids are artists, and they have their work stolen constantly. They don’t care about being paid, but it pisses them off when someone likes their work enough to repost it without the basic decency to post the whole thing.

Beep is a bad netizen.

It’s supposedly a sequel to Run Hide Fight, which looks like a cynical cash-grab by grifters.

So, a typical conservative project.

It’s about how a teen fights back during a school shooting as a “good guy with a gun.” Even this glowing review makes it sound so terrible:

The trailer makes it obvious that it’s a conservative fantasy of being in an active shooter situation. Jesus, these people are sick.

We don’t know shit.

There are a couple parts of the court music book Orchésographie that I think would be particularly interesting for a bard character.

Court musicians in the late 16th century frequently traveled to where the work was: either following a particular patron or looking to perform where they could. Most of the dances in the book are bransles, a folk dance popular with the “common people,” and formalized when brought to court. As a D&D bard, this would be a cool way to explain why your music is beloved by all, and why they could move in all social circles.

There’s also a part at the beginning that explains how to play the drum and fife for a marching army: how to improvise a melody or change up the drum pattern while keeping the march going. It seems to imply that the court musicians the book was written for were potentially marching with armies, likely playing music in the camps or stops at night.

We actually have quite a few troubadour “songbooks” from the late middle ages, indicating that it was a useful resource for minstrels of the time.

If we’re getting into the Renaissance period, a professional musician would almost certainly be able to read; we have printed music manuals from the period for all kinds of instruments; for example, Arbeau’s Orchésographie is a primer on courtly dance music that we still read today.

Unless I’m actively listening to something I’ve always got music going in my head.

You should definitely read the book if it’s a topic that interests you; it’s the best overview of conservatism that I’ve read. I’d say you’re pretty well aligned with what he wrote within, too.

But I’m not sure how to reconcile that with modern “rightists” who want to burn down the system and aren’t conservative in the lowercase-C sense.

The Republican party (and conservatism as a movement) are full-blown reactionaries. I like this passage from Corey Robin’sThe Reactionary Mind:

People who aren’t conservative often fail to realize this, but conservatism really does speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner. The loss may be as material as money or as ethereal as a sense of standing. It may be a loss of something that was never legitimately owned in the first place; it may, when compared with what the conservative retains, be small. Even so, it is a loss, and nothing is ever so cherished as that which we no longer possess. It used to be one of the great virtues of the left that it alone understood the often zero- sum nature of politics, where the gains of one class necessarily entail the losses of another. But as that sense of conflict diminishes on the left, it has fallen to the right to remind voters that there really are losers in politics and that it is they— and only they— who speak for them. “All conservatism begins with loss,” Andrew Sullivan rightly notes, which makes conservatism not the Party of Order, as Mill and others have claimed, but the party of the loser.

The chief aim of the loser is not— and indeed cannot be— preservation or protection. It is recovery and restoration.

And from another section:

There’s a fairly simple reason for the embrace of radicalism on the right, and it has to do with the reactionary imperative that lies at the core of conservative doctrine. The conservative not only opposes the left; he also believes that the left has been in the driver’s seat since, depending on who’s counting, the French Revolution or the Reformation. If he is to preserve what he values, the conservative must declare war against the culture as it is.

Burned like a CD-RW

I saw Amadeus (1984), which I never had watched before.

It was incredible; give it a watch if you haven’t seen it. Of course it’s largely Mozart fan fiction, but the sets, costumes, drama, acting, and (naturally) music are such a delight.

Bushido Ball is one of those games I’m surprised I hadn’t seen done before. It’s such a great idea: elegant in its simplicity while still having a high skill ceiling.

A 45 year old man hit two kids and Greg Abbott blames the children.

What a fuckin’ chode.