I have found the ultimate in music suited to the Insufferable Music Snob (IMS): Icelandic indie post-electrorock. I think….I think I can stop looking for new bands now.
h/t to whomever coined the phrase IMS, btw. Amanda Marcotte, maybe?
And WCF! WOOT!
Toothpaste for Dinner: National Organization for Men
See, Drew gets it.
(also, I’d embed it, but it’s too wide. Curse you, narrow theme! )
So I’m back to Germany today (technically yesterday, but I was too tired to do anything but flop over and sleep), and after going to the supermarket, I sort of re-realized just how much American language and culture permeate Germany (and Europe in general). A large percentage of packing cartons for products in supermarkets have English instructions or shipping labels, “look” and “image” have both entered the standard German vocabulary (mostly in ads), C&A sells a shirt with “Eat me, baby” on it (with pictures of apples on it, too), and a large number of “hip” businesses have English words in their slogans and in many cases consist entirely of English. Examples: Forever19, Terracotta-arts and pots, and my favorite brand of peanut butter, “Real American Crunchy Style Peanut Butter” or something. Sadly I don’t have any of it at the moment, so I can’t be sure of the actual exact name.
On a cold morning in February, while waiting for the bus to the train station at about 6am, a man with luggage came up next to me, out of breath, sort of looked at me a for a bit, then looked at the schedules for a while, then back at me again. He began to speak, hesitated, then went on in very excellent English, “Have I missed the bus to the train station already?” I started laughing, simply because I hadn’t at all expected it to be English. Turns out he was a researcher from Puerto Rico working at the Max Planck Institut and was going to a conference of some sort. I find it, however, very interesting that his chances of finding a person who could speak English were really quite high. In my experience so far, I have not met even a single student (German student, I should clarify) at Universität des Saarlandes who could not speak at least reasonably good English.
Jon Stewart on Jim Cramer (and other stuff)
4:40 to 6:00 pretty much proves to me what I’ve long thought: most people on TV are not that well-informed.
To commemorate the passing of Gary Gygax, co-creator of D and D, this week will feature my favorite tribute comic, courtesy of xkcd. I was never a D and D guy, but I appreciate what he did for geekery.
And on a separate note, I’ve recently been seeing even more misogyny in WoW than normal, with the brunt of it from a particular incident in one of the world’s top raiding guilds. With a post on the website of the guild Death and Taxes titled “The cunt that broke the web,” you know this is gonna be a bad.
Additionally, I have bonus comics this week:
This beauty from Such Rubbish and another gem from Penny Arcade.
Also, actual content is in the works…I have about 5 partway finished posts, none very close to completion, sadly.
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Now playing: Múm – Faraway Swimmingpool
via FoxyTunes
