Sam Howard-Spink

Post from Threads user rodneyowl: "Ireland has declared the Basic Income for Artists scheme permanent. This will be officially announced in tomorrow’s budget. Details to follow. Congratulations to all who fought for it and the present and future artists of all sorts in Ireland. That includes me 👌We’re just comin to the end of a 3 year pilot scheme. It’s been a roaring success. For every €1 paid out to the 2000 participants, the government got €1.46 back. Can’t argue with that. Other countries are already taking note."

Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy:
www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...

y'all ever wanted to hear beavis and butthead voiced by a manzai duo

33

Werner Herzog gazed upon the "empty and soulless" abyss of AI-generated movies Werner Herzog gazed upon the "empty and soulless" abyss of AI-generated movies

“I have seen movies, short films, completely created by artificial intelligence,” Herzog said. “Story and acting and everything, they look completely dead. There are stories, but they have no soul. They are empty and soulless.”

Get their ass, Werner.

Stupid and Clever, by Alex Pappademas: My favorite story about the fictional rock band Spinal Tap involves Liam Gallagher, the self-proclaimed (and intermittently self-aware) rock-and-roll star who, in the 1990s, founded the non-fictional Britpop group Oasis with his brother Noel. In 2001, when Tap co-creators Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer got back together to play live as Spinal Tap for the first time since the Break Like the Wind tour, the Gallaghers went to see them at Carnegie Hall in New York City. At showtime, Guest, McKean and Shearer took the stage -- in matching khaki-and-madras fifties nerdwear, opening for themselves as the Folksmen, the earnest Kingston Trio-eseque characters they'd play in Guest's then-forthcoming mockumentary _A Mighty Wind_ (2003). For Liam Gallagher, this gave rise to a moment of great confusion, and then a rude awakening.

"We were laughing," Noel later told comedian David Walliams in an interview, "and [Liam] said, 'This is shit.' We said: 'No, those three are in Spinal Tap.'" Upon being informed, apparently for the very first time in his life, that Spinal Tap was actually made up of actor-comedians and not a real eighties heavy-metal band -- and that aside from Guest, the American-born son of a titled English diplomat, they weren't even British -- Liam (according to Noel) said, "I'm not fuckin' 'avin that," marched up the aisle faster than a cannonball, and left the building. "He's never watched _Spinal Tap_ since," Noel said.

I am also pleased by the start of the essay for _This is Spinal Tap_ by Alex Pappademas, as it is simultaneously, and has been for a long time, one of my favorite Spinal Tap stories and one of my favorite Oasis stories.

Gojira in New York, 2016, credit Gabrielle Duplantier

In this first and only book dedicated to Gojira, journalist and author Jean-Charles Desgroux looks back on the seven studio albums and thirty-year career of France's biggest metal band

Ah! Ça ira: Gojira, the French Wild Children of Metal

buff.ly/tneVzMQ

Hermeto Pascoal, Eccentric and Prolific Brazilian Composer, Dies at 89 A self-taught multi-instrumentalist, he rose from a childhood of rural privation to become a favorite of jazz musicians and audiences around the world.

"While recording the album 'Slaves Mass' for Warner Bros. Records in 1976, he brought a pair of live pigs into the studio and 'played' them as if they were bagpipes, incorporating their squeals into the mix."

Hermeto Pascoal, Eccentric and Prolific Brazilian Composer, Dies at 89 (gift link):

The old world is dying; the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. The words are on a bright, rainbow colored picture of a cartoon crescent moon and unicorn

Happy Wish You Were Here Day to all who celebrate.

Otters with hats again, for no reason other than otters in hats!

A white blob with big eyes and a beak is standing on a red carpet and wearing green boots and a red soup bowl hat.

Hatton, a sentient aerial view of a spilled bowl of soup, is the mascot for Tome City. The ingredients in the soup are local produce, and the spillage is in the shape of the city.

Much like "crab", industrial music is constantly re-evolving from first principles basically anywhere where there's a bunch of metal and plastic laying about

Looking forward to this gradually getting worse and worse and and absolutely nobody doing anything about it before I'm beaten to death by a disciples of an iPad baby turned warlord who believes he's the reincarnation of Christ in the coming resource wars

Them: “Cities are all rotting hellscapes!”

Cities:

"Last year there were ten murders in the NYC subway system, with well over a billion total rides taken. During the same time period, there were 253 traffic fatalities in New York City. One person dead every day and a half. Cars? Those things are fucking dangerous."

NEW CFP ALERT 📣 Check out the details of our upcoming special issue on Music Fandom guest edited by @jenessawilliams.bsky.social & ‪@lucykbennett.bsky.social at the follow link: journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/tw...! Deadline is 01/01/2026!

❝I thought America was fabulous. Take pizza for example. For years I’d been thinking, I wish someone would invent a new kind of food. In England it was always egg and chips, sausage and chips, pie and chips … anything and chips. After a while it just got boring, y’know? But you couldn’t exactly order a shaved Parmesan and rocket salad in Birmingham in the early ’70s. If it didn’t come out of a deep-fat fryer, no one knew what the fuck it was. But then, in New York, I discovered pizza. It blew my mind wide fucking open. I would buy ten or twenty slices a day. And then, when I realized you could buy a great big pizza all for yourself, I started ordering them wherever we went. I couldn’t wait to get back home and tell all my mates: ‘There’s this incredible new thing. It’s American and it’s called pizza. It’s like bread, but it’s better than any bread you’ve tasted in your life.’ I even tried to recreate a New York pizza for Thelma once. I made some dough, then I got all these cans of beans and pilchards and olives and shit and put them on top—it must have been about 15 quid’s worth of gear—but after ten minutes it just came dribbling out of the oven. It was like someone had been sick in there. Thelma just looked at it and went, ‘I don’t think I like pizza, John.’ She never called me Ozzy, my first wife.❞ —Ozzy Osbourne, from ‘I Am Ozzy’ (Grand Central Publishing, 2010)

Ozzy on pizza:

43

The Subway Is Not Scary Fear of the subway is a mark of low moral character.

Fear of the New York City subway is a mark of low moral character.
www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-subway...

There’s still way too much *gestures at everything, so will mainly be focusing on narrative design stuff.
Speaking of which, why not hire me?
(/rhetorical question)
Behold the shop of just one stop for all your narrative needs over at www.sternword.co.uk

today is the 10 year anniversary of Mad Max: Fury Road, the last true Cool movie, so it's time to reshare Steven Soderbergh's thoughts on it

"AI is coming, its inevitable" no its not you sniveling weirdo. how are those 3D TVs going. how are NFT markets looking these days. Seen anything cool in the metaverse lately?

anyone who says we need to resign to using it, that itll be here whether we like it or not, is a feckless dipshit.

How Well Is Congestion Pricing Doing? Very. One hundred days in, honking is down; bus speeds are up.

Some stats from 100 days in on congestion pricing:
- Complaints about car-honking are down 70%
- The Holland Tunnel has 65% fewer delays at rush hour; time to get thru it is down 48%
- 6 million fewer cars
- Half as many traffic-related injuries
- 1.5 million more visitors to BIDs year over year

"I got so much trouble on my mind / Refuse to lose / Here's your ticket / Hear the drummer get wicked"

🤘🕶️🤘

They should just rerelease CDs. Put them out again as if they're a completely new format. Tell people it's the latest technology with premium sound quality. "More reliable than streaming" - "Own it for life!" - "Comes with cool art booklet" It's called marketing, bro. Look into it.

🫡

These people are your enemies

Werner Herzog reciting a time he heard someone claim documentary makers shouldn't be a fly on the wall and grabbed the mic to say "No! We are directors, we are creators, we should be the hornets that sing. There was a roar of disgust against me. So I shouted, Happy New Year losers!"

Bringing the energy into 2025

The Best Albums of 2024: A – F Our guide to the year’s best albums.

Hello Bluesky! Our first-ever Bluesky post is to celebrate the arrival of Bandcamp's Best of 2024, which kicked off yesterday. daily.bandcamp.com/best-of-2024...