| Name | Marco von Ballmoos |
|---|---|
| Member since | |
| [hidden] | |
| Home page | https://earthli.com/users/marco |
| Description |
The (only) developer at earthli.com. |
| 3457 | Articles |
|---|---|
| 112 | Comments |
Published on in Fun
Stewart LeeI very much appreciate Stewart Lee and have listened to everything I can of his. I don’t really know any other comedian like him. It’s impossible for me to detail the levels of meta-analysis he brings to his sets. I can barely find a joke that I can quote of his because everything is so rambling and intricate and self-referencing that you’d end up citing half the show. You can see full transcripts of very similar shows for Tornado and Snowflake.
Stewart Lee: Tornado/Snowflake − 17th March 2022 − Harrogate by John Hodgson (YouTube)
Perhaps he sums it up best in the second... [More]
Published on in Quotes
“If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.”
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published on in Fun
Ricky JayThere has never been and will never be anyone like Ricky Jay. He was a polymath. He was erudite. He spoke in clipped tones, with words like “disapprobation”. He cited 15th-century poetry from memory, as part of his show. He cites George Bernard Shaw, “Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.”
He was the most brilliant playing-card prestidigitator the world has ever seen. He knew more about tricks and magicians and the history thereof than anyone else before or since.
Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants − Magic show (YouTube)
A large part... [More]
Published on in Philosophy
This is an excellent video essay about art, punk, edginess, featuring many of my favorite directors, musicians, and comedians. I can’t remember everyone but man, there’s Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Frank Zappa, Marilyn Manson, Patrice O’Neal, John Waters, Lars von Trier, Bill Hicks (“an anti-corporate, anti-authoritarian dark poet”), Paul Mooney, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alejandro Jodorowsky…the list goes on.
Nothing is punk anymore… by The Cinema Cartography (YouTube)
Bill Hicks, at 33:35 (cited from Rants in E-Minor),
“Bill HicksLet me tell you something right now... [More]”
Published on in Philosophy
A while ago, I listened to all 3½ hours of Hinternet Production Labs — An Audio Launch Event! by Justin Smith-Ruiu. It is pretty cool. I’m glad I listened to it. I was working on a jigsaw puzzle the whole time.
Listening to this feels like having a Wikipedia binge that leads from Yakut to rock music, the etymology of the epithet “Willard”, the application of the definition of said epithet to bands after a lengthy discussion achieves consensus, an immediately ensuing discussion debating to which musical acts... [More]
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
Are You Racist? by George Galloway | Oxford Union (YouTube)
I’d never seen this, so it’s new to me. Eleven years ago, George Galloway refused to debate an Israeli about apartheid. He claims that he was misled and would never have agreed to it. Of course, people claimed that he was being racist. He clarified in a manner that only a handful of people could, off the cuff and magisterially.
“[…]George Gallowaybecause of my time in South Africa, because of the decades that I worked against apartheid in South Africa, do you imagine that I would turn up at a university... [More]”
Published on in Technology
This was another great discussion with Catherine Liu. I’d just written about another interview of hers in Trauma, Virtue and Liberal Elites. Chris was effusive about Catherine’s book (which I’ve purchased and is in my queue) as well as her engaging writing style, which is a far sight from the dry, academic and often-impenetrable style that has established itself as the standard.
Virtue Hoarders and the Rejection of Liberalism (w/ Catherine Liu) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)
For fun, I used a service I’d learned about recently that lets you summarize a video. It’s called tl;dw (too long;... [More]
Published on in Programming
This is a wide-ranging, occasionally delightfully foul-mouthed, and brutally honest interview with PM Maddy Mondaquila of Microsoft. Kudos to them for letting their best people do these kinds of informative and insightful interviews.
MAUI Lead Leaves to Work on .NET Aspire (and interview with Maddy Mondaquila) by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)
At 45:57,
“[…] yesterday Dave [Fowler] and I were fighting about if the Visual Studio.gitignoreis getting dumber and he was like, ‘who cares about that? Why would anyone care about that?’ And I was, like, it’s 400 lines, dude. Like, we’re ignoring things... [More]”
Published on in Fun
The article Study finds AI-generated meme captions funnier than human ones on average by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica) describes what it says on the tin. As several others confirmed in the comments, the memes all suck, whether generated by an AI, a human, or a combination.
Here is a sheet of the “winners.”
They are uniformly terrible, at best confusing. Not one is funny.
For example, this is apparently a meme written by an actual human being.
“Threw something into the trash can.. Hit it first try.”
WTF. That is not even... [More]
Published on in Technology
I saw a badge in my Amazon interface when I was cleaning up some lists. I thought it might have been a notification that something on my wishlist was available as a good price. That would have been helpful!
Instead, I saw the screenshot below.
For a second, I was excited to see that Sapkowski might have published another Witcher book but that’s not what was happening. What was happening was that Amazon was trying to fool me into buying a book that I already owned again. Either they are... [More]
Published on in Quotes
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining. Show me the glint of light on broken glass.[1]”
From Quote Origin: Don’t Tell Me the Moon Is Shining; Show Me the Glint of Light on Broken Glass (Quote Investigator)
“Антон ЧеховIn May, 1886, Chekhov wrote to his brother Alexander, who had literary ambitions: “In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from... [More]”
Published on in Fun
I started my recent journey of Bill Burr videos with an interview on none other than NPR. Below the video are stream-of-consciousness notes in which I waver on Terry Gross but eventually admit that Burr badgered a decent interview out of her. I wouldn’t make a habit of listening to her interviews, though. It’s a testament to anti-intellectualism that she’s considered a leading light of liberal thought.
Bill Burr (extended interview) by Fresh Air / Terry Gross (YouTube)
I love how Bill Burr runs the interview, in that he doesn’t let her... [More]
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
Another great book interview by Chris Hedges, again with an extremely erudite author who’s written a book about Gaza. Their discussion ranges to places that most are unwilling to go, like: why should the rest of the world grant primacy to the Jewish holocaust as a historical occurrence? Why should they even know about it when they’ve suffered their own holocausts, at the hands of the same empire that is browbeating them to bow in obeisance to the memory of the horror of the last holocaust it... [More]
Published on in Philosophy
This is a brilliant 52-minute interview with the author of a book whose title is already being misinterpreted by misguided liberals as being about Trump. More’s the pity. The author is young and brilliant. May he have a long and illustrious life and career.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (w/ Omar El Akkad) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)
At about 09:42,
“All of this sort of stuff, I think, makes perfect sense if you believe in a world where there are only two options: you are either wearing the boot or you’re having your neck stepped on. And, so, to speak up on behalf of... [More]”
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published on in Technology
About a month ago, my iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015) crashed very hard. It would no longer restart into anything but the recovery console. It seemed pretty clear that something was very corrupt and I found myself facing a system reinstall, at the very least.
Since it’s a desktop, I have a backup drive attached to it at all times. Time Machine runs several times per day. My latest backup was from about ten minutes before the system crashed. I cannot stress how... [More]
Published on in Design
A friend recently asked me to review their UI/UX design in a private app they’d written. I responded with the following in an e-mail, reproduced and lightly edited/extended here for limited posterity.
The following factors strongly influence and/or limit the kind of review I’ll be able to provide.
