The entire album is pushed into the red on the mono mix - it clarifies it tremendously; not hard-edged R&B exchanged for kazoos, dulcimers, and dance-band pianos, but turning kazoos, dulcimers, and dance-band pianos INTO hard edged R&B www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg1E...

So much second-generation-and-after rockwrite received opinion and reevaluation has to be reevaluated itself - for instance, this is from Between The Buttons, the universally apprised 'baroque pop' effort from the stones - which isn't TOTALLY inaccurate, but clearly incomplete youtu.be/Gwzr2X0qPlY

Fascinating that there's a huge swathes of canonical 64-67 pop albums that hit like bombs contemporaneously, were sort of looked at askance for decades afterward, and it's only recently that it was realized that the vastly inferior stereo mix was the only commonly available version for that period

Slytherin is TECHNICALLY "the house for all of the antisemitism and tall poppy syndrome in England", but JKR is a really bad writer.

Putting the Clash at number one might offend more British people than placing the Ramones there would have

By the way, I love when Rowling tries to couch Slytherin's guidelines in more morally neutral terms (and thereby skirt the issue of why it exists at all), and the best she can do is the literal Dark Triad

wow, sorry. Deleting now. I didn’t know she was French

I already knew this from Simpsons commentaries, where with a few exceptions (Schwartzwelder's scripts tended to be left fairly untouched for instance, which is one reason he did so many of them), the credited writer may have had little to do with what actually got in there

That makes a lot of sense, and fits in better with both Rowling's likely childhood reading (including the comics) and weird gender hangups

… the gender-switch being an added element in the perversity! (UK girl-aimed comics in the 60s & 70s routinely included such tales, some of them with fairly gothic fantasy elements; UK boy-aimed comics ditto, but considerably less frequently)

viz enid blyton's malory towers and st clares' stories: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malory_... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Cla...

as someone who read a fvckton of british school stories wildly varying in quality as research for the if…. book, i have to say i think the root source of HP isn't edwardian schoolboy fiction but post-WW2 posh school*girl* fiction

Even before the heel turn, one of the most bizarre and fascinating cultural phenomena in recent memory - a revival of Edwardian schoolboy fiction injected with fantasy that three and a half books and a burgeoning craze in, shifts to an unedited Greek tragedy epigraph-ing supposedly universal 'epic'

I think that, to square the circle between you and the person you’re quoting, the success of Avengers cemented this mindset even within movies because it oriented the MCU around the same writer/star power mechanics of continuity over a director’s idiosyncrasies.

the four school houses: Protagonist, Nerd, Houseplant and Literally Hitler

transphobia aside, it is crazy to me that there are adults who go to harry potter media for their entertainment.

Something you don't hear a lot nowadays but was ubiquitous in 00s/10s cultural discourse was the idea that long form TV was both artistically and (implicitly) morally superior to film because, since it elevated the 'real' writer above the director, it avoided the excesses of dread auteurism

It makes perfect sense that the idea of the Crusades appeals today to the exact kind of loud, adolescent-brained, self-aggrandizing, just-rich-enough-to-cause-problems idiot that the actual Crusades were designed to siphon out of the body politic like the snake venom they were, and are.

Makes you think

I don't give a shit about Zack Snyder or the DC whatever, but do you realize how insufferable Whedon had to have been to be brought in to smooth over a troubled production and instead make things ten times worse? I think that's as much what killed his career as the fan backlash

“complicated and intellectual art is for bros and pop culture is for girls” is not actually a progressive opinion :-)

Fascinating that there's a huge swathes of canonical 64-67 pop albums that hit like bombs contemporaneously, were sort of looked at askance for decades afterward, and it's only recently that it was realized that the vastly inferior stereo mix was the only commonly available version for that period

I've enjoyed reading various definitions of slop, the word of the year according to Merriam-Webster. But they all focus on its attributes, which misses the resignation to a cynical instrumentality that I think explains why many people find slop repulsive

I like how this year we've gotten three distinct movies about how weird we've become

There's something to be written about how self-referentialism, camp, and irony have progressively filtered down to the bottom levels of culture so that they're exactly now as corny and stupid as the old self-seriousness, but less enjoyable. My evidence would be modern Lifetime movies and Mary Worth

we gotta stop with the whole "they misinterpreted the meaning behind the torment nexus" these guys just fancy themselves as villains

By the way, Gavin Newsom is apparently raising money to fight AGAINST the billionaire tax. So thoughtful of him to come to their aid at this particular time in history,

Merry Christmas

I’m the guy in charge of watering down the NFL’s social justice slogans a little more each season. For next year I’m thinking either “Inspire good” or “Be the nice”

In America, where irony is dead, a hotel chain uses a policy denying shelter to local people, for fear of accidentally housing homeless persons… To deny a reservation to the author of a much-lauded book on how American economic unfairness forces working people into homelessness.

I think about this a lot

"The concept resonated in Bay Area circles, where crime had become a constant topic during and after the pandemic, despite San Francisco Police Department statistics showing property crime and homicide rates declining last year." So it was inspired purely by the ultra-wealthy's paranoid delusions.

I mean, the entire Manhattan project was underpinned by immigrant researchers, and the reason why America got the nukes and Germany didn't is because the Nazis adopted the exact vile, boneheaded blood-and-soil bullshit that Miller is spouting and drove out all their smartest guys.

Rob Schneider comparing himself to Mark Ruffalo is a really good bit

I'm not saying that there aren't plenty who are aware but don't care, but a lot of the English-speaking people earnestly toasting Bardot remind me of how a lot of Americans treated the pre-Covid denial Clapton - they just didn't know there was a problem in the first place

All these guys have terminal cases of "l'etat, c'est moi:" when they say "the state" will pay a price, they mean "I, your overlord" will pay a price. In the minds of Ackman, Thiel et al. they already rule us, they are the state, they're just letting us pretend to have a democracy--like a doll house.

It's remarkable how insane how American municipal and state tax structures are tbh

So I picked up a case of Peach Fresca (yeah, I know), and I noticed that it had 'grapefruit juice' on the ingredients list, but that it was less than 1 percent juice total - that's basically homeopathic and therefore not going to screw with my many many meds, right?

So my knowledge of McCaffrey is limited, and when I read in a reply to this that it's because she thinks pegging made cishet men gay, I thought it was a weird Greek/Roman-type mentality, and then I looked it up, and no this is much much crazier www.fanlore.org/wiki/The_Ten...

I'm sure that there's a famous old hockey player named Don Cherry, but I was only aware of the free-jazz trumpeter slash father of Neneh, so this threw me for a second

Caryl Churchill is the greatest living playwright in any language - there have been only three people in 70 years worthy of that title

In case there was any doubt about where big tech stands.

When Waters talks about the primary reason he went into the 'mainstream' in the mid/late 80s being that, not simply his original cast and crew, but his original audience almost entirely dying from AIDS and/or hard drugs around then, this is who he was talking about. This was his original audience

The country as currently constructed depends on free land and unpaid labor and we’ve run out of one of those

Watched the new Beatles Anthology ep and reminded how much of the group's sense of humor was lost with George. There's a bit where everyone else is reverently listening to a string/brass part from Carry That Weight, and George cracks "a bit cheesy, that."

The exponentially accelerating number of stories about “Husk Cornson, three-time Trump voter, expressed his dismay that a farm his family maintained even through the Dust Bowl is being repossessed” or small business tyrants seeing the health plan jumps has me wildly curious how 2026 is gonna go