peculiar-and-obtuse

[peculiar-and-obtuse]

(After some very quick research,) I selected Bengali because...

1. it'd give me access to a massive new cultural playground loosely shared by over 250 million speakers globally (compared to, for example, around 400 million native English speakers)

and 2. it seems to be the language closest to Sanskrit out of the ones listed in the poll, and I'd like to read some of the old theological texts that helped form Dharmic belief systems like Hinduism and Buddhism, in their original Sanskrit form. The starting point of being fluent in Bengali would make the effort required to decipher Sanskrit reasonable.

My second option would be Hindi, the most commonly spoken language in South Asia, at around 600 million speakers.

Spanish hits similar numbers, but I'm assuming a large portion of the Spanish art worth knowing about is also available in English.

Mandarin Chinese is swiftly closing in on one billion native speakers, but I'm worried that censorship carried out by the CCP would severely limit the scope of availability for any novel or contrarian art produced in the language.

random poll. i assembled these options from a wikipedia list of languages with the most speakers

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Feminist fantasy is funny sometimes in how much it wants to shit on femininity for no goddamned reason. Like the whole “skirts are tools of the patriarchy made to cripple women into immobility, breeches are much better” thing.

(Let’s get it straight: Most societies over history have defaulted to skirts for everyone because you don’t have to take anything off to relieve yourself, you just have to squat down or lift your skirts and go. The main advantage of bifurcated garments is they make it easier to ride horses. But Western men wear pants so women wearing pants has become ~the universal symbol of gender equality~)

The book I’m reading literally just had its medievalesque heroine declare that peasant women wear breeches to work in the field because “You can’t swing a scythe in a skirt!”

Hm yes story checks out

peasant women definitely never did farm labour in skirts

skirts definitely mean you’re weak and fragile and can’t accomplish anything

skirts are definitely bad and will keep you from truly living life

no skirts for anyone, that’s definitely the moral of the story here

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random song recommendation #1

Dreamy production. As if you're gliding far beyond the clouds, towards the setting sun's own horizon. But there's no howl of the wind to be sensed, no spine-chilling breeze, despite the thinness of the upper atmosphere. Just you, sealed within your serene refuge.

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“A Helping Hand”

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I don't listen to the kind of growling grumble metal where you can't make sense of what the hell the vocalist is saying, but I appreciate bands that use this to their benefit by having the most baffling goddamn lyrics. Going like

[insane guitar solo]

Evil fucking gnome that will fuck your mom

He don't need no reason he'll do it just 'cause

Don't ask her where's her dignity it's already gone

You don't need to call him daddy 'cause she already does

[an even more balls-to-the wall batshit fucking sick drum solo]

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I'd be overjoyed to manage this restaurant.

Not in a million years would I financially back it, though.

idk maybe in LA, or another place with enough people as pretentious as myself.

A restaurant named You're Not Supposed To Be Here, where the whole point is that the vibes are unnerving. The lighting is weird, the whole place has a faint scent that's not a bad smell, but it's certainly not food smell and you can't quite identify what the hell it is. The music is weirdly janky and you can't quite tell what's wrong with it, the vocals aren't exactly garbled but sung in a language you swear you've never heard anywhere and couldn't name if you tried. Only hiring staff who have anxiety and they're 100% permitted to show how much your presence here stresses them out.

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I sent an Ask for a movie recommendation but now I can't find the blog, if you're that movie person hmu

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Rampant Growth (2023) by Steven Belledin

The Beauty and the Beast by Angela Barrett

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strange occurrences in games that don't exist

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stolen from that social media site gay millennials and grumpy boomers use

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these r my favorite basic lands from magic: the gathering if u even care🌇✨

how can you not love overgrown architecture

Welcome to the city of Ravnica.

Notice the freefall perspective in these pieces, that's not easy to get to look right by hand (or idk maybe it is. how would I know, it's not like I've tried). They're both by the same painter, as you can see at the bottom of the card.

Ravnica is an ecumenopolis, meaning the city completely covers the surface area of its home planet. It holds a multitude of competing factions, all within the limits of a single, continuous city.

You can feel the suffocating heat and coarse flakes of charcoal on your skin just by looking at this one. Imagine having to spend an afternoon touring this factory, let alone a full 70 hour work week.

There's a couple tiny little guys for scale :) Beyond the ramparts, you can faintly make out what seems to be either a river or the fringe of the another population center, or perhaps both.

Even tinier guys🐜🐜🐜 How many stone bridges and precarious ledges can you spot? Uhuh, and what about guardrails. that's gotta be an OSHA violation but it's chill cause I personally think it looks neat

oooh very spooky & scary😱

this one's prob my absolute fave😈

lovecraftian cult meeting ahh locale💀

Your way out, or yet another meandering cinder highway of madness?

btw can u tell my favorite mtg color is black.

High fidelity card art embedded from Scryfall. Link to the full cycle of Return to Ravnica basic lands

Further reading: Head on over to the Rhystic Studies youtube channel to unlock a damn-near boundless treasure trove of highbrow MTG art analysis by a degreed expert. Consider starting with the Return to Ravnica video I saw long, long before I got the idea to create this blog.

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"This is beautiful."

Yeah, my brain? Is that all you have to say about it? How insightful.

But the thing is, that's where it starts. Painting (and visual arts in general) is one of the realms of art I haven't really dived deep into yet. It's something whose discovery is still ahead of me. If I want to expand my horizons, I must accept that I don't have complete knowledge of anything and that I'll have to put in effort to learn more.

All I know about the context of this painting (from brief mentions in other media) is that Vincent van Gogh was seriously mentally ill, sold only one painting in his lifetime, and ended up settling the score himself. But I'm willing to bet that this particular painting has nothing to do with any of that. Hopefully I'll one day find time to sit down and research what it meant to him and who else did similar work.

But today, I'm content with just taking my first step. It's beautiful, and that's enough.

Vincent van Gogh - "Landscape at Sunset" (April 1885)

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huge shout out to this little kid for writing my favorite poem

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some obscure album recommendations 🎶

This is the first of my more serious blog posts, tagged #original. You may save it and go through it at your own pace - you probably won't be able to give every recommendation a fair shot in just one sitting :)

黒船 (Kurofune) - Sadistic Mika Band funk rock When translated from Japanese, this 1974 funk delight bears the name "Black Ships". I don't know what it is about these folks, but they just fuckin do it different over there on their tiny island beyond the seas. Don't worry, the breadth of my Japanese vocabulary can be counted on two hands. Actually, maybe just one. I had to look up the anglicized version of the album's name for this very occasion, and I couldn't name you a single song from it despite listening to all of them a dozen times. On Spotify, the album is only listed in kanji, but you should be able to find it by searching "Kurofune" or copy-pasting the original name on your platform of choice. I personally listened to what I believe may have been the 2023 remastered version. Doesn't really matter which one you go for.

Mother Nature With a Molotov - Empress Stahrr rap You know how rap aficionados sometimes refer to MF DOOM as your favorite rapper's favorite rapper (an extremely well-deserved nickname, mind you)? Well, guess what, that would logically make Stahrr your favorite rapper's favorite rapper's favorite rapper. Yes, really! DOOM himself has said that "she is like as nasty [he is]. --- she's damn near right there with me." I understand this is such an obscure piece of lore that I'll have to bring the receipts. Yes, it is from a random Russian blog from 2009. No, I don't have any reason to believe it's fake. It's a great read overall, but you can find the part I'm quoting by CTRL+F-ing "Stahrr".

Unfortunately, Stahrr never saw much commercial success, at least not under her own name. I love what little she did make, though. Molotov was only released in 2018, nine whole years after she'd been reported to have been working on music with MF DOOM. Considering the fact that it's her first and only full studio album, the quality here is staggering. Maybe she was never given the opportunity to show what she's truly capable of. Or maybe her music simply sucks. Go listen, and you tell me!

Acid Streets of Brazzaville - El Flaco Collective funk, kinda? It just slaps. All of their music slaps.

Eyes Like The Sky - King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard psychedelic rock I know King Gizzard isn't exactly an underground band, in fact it's not even particularly close. I wanted to include this album because it's one of the band's relatively underappreciated records, at least according to the numbers on Spotify. Gizz managed to clash together a gripping set of themes and modes: The album is a narrative-driven Spaghetti Western that tells the morally grey story of the titular Yavapai-Apache warrior's life. It's written and narrated by the father of one of the band members, a former rock musician himself. And it includes plenty of evil guitars.

Gizz frontman Stu Mackenzie: "I love Western films. I love bad guys and I love Red Dead Redemption. Oh and I love evil guitars."

SAM WAITIN Live @ Open Source Radio EDM DJ set This isn't an album per-se, but I really wanted to highlight it. It includes a few of Sam's original tracks, and you can clearly tell he really cares about curating quality music and putting on a good show. This set had me dancing alone in my room at 2 am, and I ended up throwing it on a second time while going for a brisk walk on another equally gloomy night.

The Binding of Isaac: Repentance OST - Ridiculon metal (original videogame soundtrack) Game OSTs are a musical blind spot for some, but I posit that they can be valued highly completely independent of the product they're attached to. Let me be clear: I've never played The Binding of Isaac. It seems fine enough as a game, but that doesn't really move the needle in this instance. The OST for the Repentance expansion is like nothing I've heard before. It's an instrumental, but the game's iconic portrayal of a gruesome and hostile world is delivered effortlessly through the airwaves.

goombacore: greatest hits (volumes 1-4) - marshall4 EDM Hilariously queer, chronically online. Not all of this record is "good" music in the traditional sense, but it is certainly chock full of obtuse authenticity. And a truckload of samples that would make a medieval peasant child croak on the spot. There's one track that I simply must highlight for its title alone: "350 page hyperpop fanfic written by a tumblr kid".

Fingers - Airto Moreira jazz-adjacent Very pleasant soundscapes all the way through. This album notably contains the original source of the main sample used in the Bellini mega-hit single "Samba de Janeiro". Listen carefully and see if you can spot it! Or spoil it for yourself by reading the next paragraph:

Spoiler!

It's part of the final track, "Tombo in 7/4", at about 4:55.

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And that's all of them! You read the full thing, right? And tried every recommendation, even just briefly? Great! Because if you didn't, that would make you a fundamentally bad person. And break my heart. And worst of all, you'd be doing a massive disservice to your own progression as an Aesthete.

Anyway, leave a comment and let me know how you felt about these recommendations and if you have any of your own. Or better yet, reblog this post and season it with your very own wall of text infodumping about your dearest obscure records. I care!

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I'm tryina live out my life as the yaoi girl if she was, like, cerebral n shi

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''what if my writing isn't good eno--'' what if it's a reflection of your soul. what if it has a place in this world. what if you write it anyway

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I like ampersands. They're so aesthetic and convenient

fuck you Tim Berners-Lee for not letting me put an ampersand in my URL