medievalmvb

these have been good years for medievalists, first wondering if the pope will excommunicate the emperor and now watching the king have his brother locked up

Amazon order page screenshot: headline says “Now expected tomorrow by 6 PM” and copy reads “We're very sorry your delivery is late.”

seeing more “unexpected” delays on the occasional overnight order

and I wonder, if Amazon is as AI-first as they claim, if their logistics bot simply sees a better statistical correlation in *promising* speedy delivery & purchase

I'm starting to think this president is never going to acknowledge my polite requests to use alt text

I would add the caveat that in both cases it’s probably worth replacing “smart” with “be able to generate plausible verbiage in support of a user’s goal”—given existing epistemological fractures, there is market fit for a tool that is agnostic about truth claims but what a world that imagines

KHAK’ TO THE FUTURE (2027) — My Back to the Future reboot in which every character in every era is wearing khakis. Presented by Dockers.

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINOS

New Yorker, November 20, 1978

“Gaining traction in his efforts to yoke Flavor Aid and revolutionary suicide, preacher Jim Jones…”

this is exactly the kind of extremist-view laundering that got me to cancel my subscription of many years

“gaining traction” hot-dog-guy meme

THANK YOU (I have tears in my eyes)

oh wow some of us were going to catch up AFTER WORK 😤

god I love flash cards, thank you!

This reminds me I need to always be promoting The Riddle Ages (Megan Cavell & Friends) which keeps growing and growing

If you’re not familiar with the fascinating world of early medieval riddling be warned, it’s rabbit holes all the way down

they really do hate it!

Admins Hate This One Weird Trick (Quoting Mission & Values Back to Them)

stringer bell from the wire but he’s labeled “tower of london.” he says, “I WANT YOU TO PUT THE WORD OUT THERE WE BACK UP”

i can’t find it so i’ll recreate it because it made me laugh so fucking hard.

“Not if I ruin it first!”

impressive resonance w Old English descriptions of warrior-Christ’s crucifixion

“In fact Leschi seemed to be the coolest of any on the scaffold. He was in good flesh and had a firm step and mounted the scaffold without assistance, and as well as I did myself."

that was fast(ly)

“Believe it! Post more!”

What a great moment for my wax seals and signets Etsy store

this kind of thing as huge on IG Reels when I was still on IG, clips from TV and movies labeled like it was real and hundreds of comments about how sick it was

obviously I’m going to reskeet this apropos medieval citation

YouTube video by Gogol Bordello Gogol Bordello - Immigraniada (We Comin' Rougher)

Seattle PSA

Gogol Bordello play The Showbox on March 4, touring for their new album We Mean It, Man!

they said they wanted an ai with 'phd-level intelligence', and they got one that's 6 months from its submission date and has just had a meeting with its supervisor

A Wall Street Journal headline reads “Billionaires' Low Taxes Are Becoming a Problem for the Economy” Subheading: “Tax avoidance by the superwealthy is an economic issue as well as a political one.”

bloody commies

feeling a bit superior due to the firm ontological footing of literary theory 💅🏻

Zunoqua of the Cat Village, 1931 oil on canvas Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust The curators are keen to correct Carr's misapprehension that her Zunoqua figure (left) is "really" Zunoqua, but this isn't a guidebook, it's a painting and we must understand that for Carr it very much was the wild woman of the forest she saw there, with a horde of tree-cats hidden in Carr's trademark frothy green forest-oceans, it's worth noting that nominally both her Zunoqua and the two background buildings are made of wood, but Zunoqua appears to be stepping out of frame left, a burnished, androgynous mask-wearing entity, holding a tablet(?) under its left arm

Regular readers will know I was in Vancouver to see a ballet about T’əl, the Tla’amin wild man of the woods

Carr's Zunoqua (Dzunukwa) is the wild woman of the woods from Kwakwaka'wakw tales

It's like Sting said, synchronicity

The Little Pine, 1931 oil on canvas Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust Here we see a "happy little tree" that is nonetheless going through it. The little pine tree is central, with a tight line of darker green, tall triangles extending behind from the left side to right, foreground left has three smaller pines, only the first catdhing some of the light, foreground right has two more scraggly examples, the little pine is suffused with light, ribbons of yellow highlights on fluid green branches blowing rightward so hard you can see patches of trunk, it's like the paint is blowing off the canvas

Untitled, 1938-39 oil on paper Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust This "untitled" features a central trio of incredibly slender, tall trees with only mops of green up top, young trees that grew fast to gain sunlight, Carr's brushwork for the trunks is just thin horizontal strokes of varying browns stacked on top of each other to dizzying heights, in the background is a muddied, tree-spiked hillside, also with a lot of lateral brushstroke but also zig-zag verticals, the blue sky is swirling, on the left greens in the blue seem to be arriving to paint the forest

Carr's vitalism is grounded in and transformative of her lived experience of these landscapes

The Little Pine is wind-blown and darkly shaded, if you join in that background tree, you can see a wave breaking

The slender pines, tops almost lost in the blue tumult of sky, are logging leftovers

Skidegate, 1912 oil on paperboard Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust A totem pole seen in (semi) profile fills the frame top to bottom, situated like a snapshot, you can see grass and shrubbery at the bottom, a wooden slat fence behind, then more trees and blue-white sky, the palette is blues, lavenders, and greens, a little yellow in the lower sky, brushwork alternates between bold, defining strokes and daubed highlight colors, there are three faces on the pole, the middle being has its hands clasped around its middle, and there are two projections (shaped like chainsaw bars, roughly) above the bottom face which looks to me like an angry deer

Totem and Forest, 1931 oil on canvas Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust This later totem painting of Carr's places the pole in a rippling green forest, most the background is fluid movement from left to right, with only three thin tree trunks upper right, the pole itself is much more detailed and given solidity with shading brush strokes on its vertical edges, the upper half of the pole is a head with body, and then small humanoid figures in different positions down its front, hanging from its mouth, seated at its midsection, posed between its feet, the bottom face has large eyes and looks birdlike to me, the pole's coloring is mainly a light brown wood, with darks for shading

Vancouver Art Gallery is your source for Emily Carr (1871–1945) paintings, and they've got a proper retrospective on currently (usually she's tucked away in the attic)

these two totem paintings contrast her later-in-life shift from "flat" documentary realism to animist psycho-geography