Mental Wires

Programmer, rationalist, recovering brain in jar. Mostly art blog by volume.

[ymutate]

Helen Whitaker, England

" Sycamore Seed "

Glass , copper and brass

[il-castagno-press]

A page of forget-me-nots from my current sketchbook.

[afurioushawk]

I bet any word with the suffix -gate is impossible to directly translate in most languages. At that point it’s a a proper noun. Like, how do you translate Debategate?

[softmatzohtruther]

apparently this type of linguistic phenomenon has happened in exactly one other language: Italian

from The Oxford English Dictionary:

In the early 1990s Italy was rocked by its own scandal, when a criminal investigation exposed widespread corruption and bribery among the country’s politicians, civil servants, and businesses. The investigation was centred on the city of Milan, which was dubbed Tangentopoli by the press. Tangentopoli is formed from the noun tangente, meaning bribe, and the suffix –poli used to designate a city or town (compare the English suffix –opolis); an English rendering of the term is Bribesville (compare the –ville suffix, a use dating from the mid-sixteenth century and in regular use from the late nineteenth). By metonymy the name Tangentopoli was transferred from the city in which the scandal was centred to the scandal itself. As with –gate from Watergate, the suffix –poli became detached from Tangentopoli and took on a life of its own, creating new words to describe new scandals. These included Affittopoli (rentgate, a scandal in which politicians were revealed to be renting luxury apartments from the state for very low sums of money), Esamopoli (examgate, in which it was discovered that lecturers at the University of Bari had been selling exam papers to students) and, most famously, Calciopoli (footballgate, a match-fixing scandal involving some of Italy’s top football clubs; also known as Moggiopoli after the Juventus director Luciano Moggi). However, even in Italy, Calciopoli is sometimes called Calciogate, illustrating the enduring and far-reaching influence of a suffix that can trace its birth to a burglary in Washington on the evening of 17 June 1972.

[penny-anna]

okay, for those interested, here is a full timeline of how we got to Count Binface:

1977: Star Wars is released, featuring, of course, Darth Vader

(Pictured: Darth Vader)

1984: Director Todd Durham releases his Star Wars parody movie, Hyperspace, featuring Darth Vader inspired villain Lord Buckethead.

(Pictured: Hyperspace poster featuring two Jawa-esque aliens flying through space in a shopping trolley.)

1987: Hyperspace is released on video in the UK, under the new title Gremloids.

(Pictured: Gremloids cover in the style of the original Star Wars poster, featuring Lord Buckethead.)

To promote the film, Mike Lee, the owner of the distributing company, ran for parliament as Lord Buckethead. He ran in Margaret Thatcher's constituency, Finchley, in order to get on TV. Lord Buckethead was representing the Gremloids party.

(Pictured: Lord Buckethead on TV with Margaret Thatcher.)

1992: Gremloids is re-released. Lord Buckethead rides again, this time against prime minister John Major in Huntingdon. (Here's a fun fact about Huntingdon: I was born there! :D) 87/92 Buckethead seems to have leaned pretty hard into the space supervillain thing, with campaign promises including 'demolish Birmingham to build a spaceport'.

(Pictured: Lord Buckethead on TV with John Major. Other notable candidates include Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony Party.)

2017: comedian Jon Harvey, having recently watched Gremloids and learned of Lord Buckethead's candidacy for parliament, decides it's a great bit. He runs against Theresa May in Maidenhead. 2017 Buckethead seems to have a wackier and also more political approach, with campaign promises ranging from nonsense like 'nationalise Adele' to gesturing at actually sensible policies with stuff like 'lower the voting age to 16 and restrict voting after age 80'.

He also made an appearance on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. As with his previous incarnation, he was a member of the Gremloids party.

(Pictured: Lord Buckethead dabbing on stage with Theresa May.)

2018: Director Todd Durham asserts his legal ownership of Lord Buckethead. Jon Harvey opted not to go to court over Buckethead and handed over the reins. Todd Durham extended an invitation to anyone who wanted to be the 'authorised' Lord Buckethead.

(Pictured: the new Lord Buckethead.)

2019: Lord Buckethead, now played by journalist David Hughes, stood against Boris Johnson in Uxbridge and South Ruislip. He ran for the Monster Raving Loony Party, the UK's pre-existing gag candidate party. He ran with a similarly silly manifesto as the 2017 incarnation, but with a bit less of a political edge. His promises included 'All doorways to be increased by 1 foot (30 cm) in height' and 'Nigel Farage to be sold for parts'.

(Pictured: Lord Buckethead and Count Binface square up.)

Meanwhile, Jon Harvey in his new persona Count Binface, also ran against Boris Johnson. Buckethead and Binface face off! Binface ran as an independent with a manifesto once again blending silly and semi-serious promises such as 'nationalising model railways' and 'giving £1 trillion a week to the NHS'. This was also I believe the debut of his promise to 'move the hand dryer in the men's toilet at Uxbridge's Crown and Treaty pub to a more sensible position'.

(Pictured: Count Binface presenting the offending hand dryer, inconveniently close to both the sink and the urinals.)

He has a point.

2021: Count Binface runs for the position of Mayor of London for the first time, with promises such as 'London to join the European Union'. He notably finished ahead of far right party UKIP.

2023: Count Binface runs in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election following Boris Johnson's resignation. He once again gets more votes than UKIP.

May 2024: Count Binface once again runs to be Mayor of London, debuting his now iconic 'build at least one affordable house' promise. Notably, he finished ahead of far right party Britain First.

(Pictured: Count Binface with Rishi Sunak. Also pictured: Monster Raving Loony Party candidate Sir Archibald Stanton with a ventriloquist's dummy.)

July 2024: Count Binface stands in the general election, running in Richmond and Northallerton against prime minister Rishi Sunak. He debuts his promise to cap the price of 99p flakes at 99p. This is his most successful election to date with 308 votes.

(Pictured: Count Binface with Andy Burnham. Also pictured: independent candidate Robert Pownell, dressed as a fox for his own reasons.)

June 2026: Count Binface stands in the Makerfield by-election against Andy Burnham, (recently) former Mayor of Manchester running for parliament with the intention of standing in the Labour Party leadership contest.

(Pictured: Count Binface on BBC's Newsnight.)

July 2026 (this week): Count Binface announces his intention to run against Nigel Farage in the upcoming Clacton by-election. He is briefly the only other candidate in the race and by the time other candidates announce themselves the narrative of 'Nigel Farage vs Count Binface' has already bedded in. And then it was now, and then I don't know what happened.

[estrogenesis-vaporeongelion]

top economists are saying today that so long as the coyote doesn't look down he will never fall

[cleverreports]

We report: as we were walking, the sky ahead of us was a milky white, certainly nothing like rain. We stopped for a sip of water, and finally noticed the clouds pooling behind us. We almost immediately felt a raindrop on our cheek, the wind pushing our hair into our face.

[tiffbaxter]

⚔️HWÆT!⚔️ Had a lot of fun designing this Beowulf inspired bookmark~

[taurzza]

[catchaspark]

if you'd like to replicate a very fun reading experience I had this weekend, click this link to a full pdf text of The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd in modernized spelling. Do not look up anything about the Spanish Tragedy. I'll give you some quick context. This was a massively, massively popular Elizabethan play that invented the revenge drama. It played to sold-out audiences, was revived over and over again, and formed an ur-text for basically every revenge play that followed.

You can do what I did (just read the whole thing) or you can skip to page 28 to have a capsule version of this, where Hieronimo (the protagonist) enters to find the corpse of his son Horatio, hung by his enemies upon a tree. Come back here when you're done with the first insertion of 1602.

Okay. So now pretend you're me and you have flipped to the introduction of the print edition I had, because you're like, ??? Who wrote this? because if you're me you're like, that was way better* than the rest of the play.

* I could actually completely see someone being like "it was not way better than the rest of the play, what are you talking about?" but it's my post.

And the introduction says (close paraphrase), These passages were originally attributed to Ben Jonson, because he was paid out in 1602 for edits made to this play. But actually these sections definitely existed several years beforehand because they're parodied elsewhere, so Jonson's edits must have been something else. They're definitely not by Kyd because he was dead at the time. They must be by the hand of some other Elizabethan dramatist.

At which point the introduction just BLITHELY MOVES ON, and I choke and go to Wiki and discover that the tentative critical assessment is, indeed, that these are likely by Shakespeare, to the extent that the RSC included them in a full edition of his work along with some other disputed additions elsewhere in the Elizabethan corpus. See this article for an efficient summary of why this is plausible. For me it's more like, well besides the textual evidence itself, extratextually it's probably not Jonson, and Marlowe was dead, and you can rule out a lot of the other guys, sooooooooooooooo

Extremely funny. I highly recommend just reading a play that you picked up because it's an interesting historical curiosity and then being like "Is that..." like Jamie Lee Curtis seeing Michael Myers in the woods, but with Shakespearean verse

anyway the play isn't very good but i am fucking losing it with joy over the subtitle. he sure is. especially in the ?shakespeare? version. he sure, sure is

[riso-wizo]

[waitingforthecat]

Image description: watercolor art showing a Tūī (Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae) sitting on a branch with yellow flowers. end Image description

[st-just]

This is not a particularly original thought (I've probably made this exact post before myself) but one of the bleaker vast cultural gulfs out there is and likely shall remain the one between 'material children can understand and engage with' and 'material guardians and gatekeepers are comfortable thinking about their children engaging with'.

The beautiful but brief period where video stores just threw every animated movie in the same section and vast numbers of parents just assumed all cartoons were for kids was a little golden age in this regard. We need to come up with a new way to trick middle class helicopter parents into letting their 7-year-olds watch Watership Down again.

[jbt7493]

has anyone noticed that sometimes you take incorrect or undesirable actions instead of the correct and desirable ones? what's up with that

[poutpourri]

This drawing started as a simple doodle.

Love the poncho!

[idlelizard]

was just informed make a bad comic day exists

[idlelizard]

He missed it this year :(

[oritoor]

[loworbittourist]

Terraced fields - Malta 🌍 4K link

[mismedleym]

toward the sun, from the sun