I’m Explaining a Few Things by Pablo Neruda

You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?

and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?

and the rain repeatedly spattering

its words and drilling them full

of apertures and birds?

I’ll tell you all the news.

I lived in a suburb,

a suburb of Madrid, with bells,

and clocks, and trees.

From there you could look out

over Castille’s dry face:

a leather ocean.

My house was called

the house of flowers, because in every cranny

geraniums burst: it was

a good-looking house

with its dogs and children.

Remember, Raul?

Eh, Rafel? Federico, do you remember

from under the ground

my balconies on which

the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?

Brother, my brother!

Everything

loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,

pile-ups of palpitating bread,

the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue

like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:

oil flowed into spoons,

a deep baying

of feet and hands swelled in the streets,

metres, litres, the sharp

measure of life,

stacked-up fish,

the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which

the weather vane falters,

the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,

wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea.

And one morning all that was burning,

one morning the bonfires

leapt out of the earth

devouring human beings –

and from then on fire,

gunpowder from then on,

and from then on blood.

Bandits with planes and Moors,

bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,

bandits with black friars spattering blessings

came through the sky to kill children

and the blood of children ran through the streets

without fuss, like children’s blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise,

stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,

vipers that the vipers would abominate!

Face to face with you I have seen the blood

of Spain tower like a tide

to drown you in one wave

of pride and knives!

Treacherous

generals:

see my dead house,

look at broken Spain :

from every house burning metal flows

instead of flowers,

from every socket of Spain

Spain emerges

and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,

and from every crime bullets are born

which will one day find

the bull’s eye of your hearts.

And you’ll ask: why doesn’t his poetry

speak of dreams and leaves

and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.

Come and see

The blood in the streets.

Come and see the blood

In the streets!

Good Bones by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

I got banned from one of the UK subreddits when someone posted a lengthy comment about why Brexit was amazing, and I responded that Brexit was idiotic. I got banned for “being political” and the person I was responding to didn’t lol.

We could make Sundress and Propeller Hat the standard summer outfit, but we have failed as a society.

The Magnificent 7 and A Fistful of Dollars are just Seven Samurai and Yojimbo but westerns.

Yeah same here, I’ve been procrastinating while I gradually build my collection of mp3s/flacs, but the second I hear an ad on Spotify I’m done.

I know someone whose dad used to work as an international courier, and at some point (I think in the late 70s/early 80s IIRC) he ended up in the situation where he was in Japan for a week, with nothing to do, and his hotel room paid for by his employers. He didn’t leave the hotel the entire week, just stayed inside the entire time ordering room service and… making a point of not seeing Japan, I guess.

I know it’s probably bad form to link to reddit posts here (but I’ll use redlib to it’s slightly less shitty lol) but there was actually a pretty interesting thread on r/Linux about this the other day. tl;dr: It looks like a lot of this is due to lobbying from Meta so they can shunt responsibility for age verification onto the OS and dodge fines for not regulating their sites properly.

I’m reasonably sure that’s what’s happening with resumes largely now. People get AI to write their resumes because it’s a boring task to do, and then employers are using AI to read the resumes they receive and provide summaries. So it’s pretty much just AIs talking to each other about who should get the job.

NFTs. I’m too old for that nonsense

And a good skidibi toilet to you, sir

I use Floorp too. It’s a weird little browser but I like it

Yeah that’s always been my assumption. My retirement plan is essentially to just be eaten by cannibals within about 24 hours of everything going full Mad Max.

I have! One of the nice things is that you can do whatever you want without having to round people up or get a consensus on everything, IE: you can just go out and wander about, and if you see a weird restaurant you’re curious about you can just go right in and check it out. In a group it’s always like: that place looks interesting but A isn’t hungry and B is allergic to peanuts and what is there’s no vegan option for C, maybe a couple of us can go tomorrow and have a look and then you never do. The downside is you don’t get to reminisce about it with your friends later on, and any stories that happen don’t really mean anything to anyone else you tell them to.

Yeah the Superfish incident. AFAIK they haven’t done anything sketchy since then and if you’re the type to just wipe everything and install your own distro anyway it shouldn’t really affect anything but still not a great look.

Yeah I like Lenovo in general too! I have an Ideapad rather than a Thinkpad, but this is my second Lenovo and they’ve both lasted for ages, never had any weird problems, played nice with Linux etc.

I don’t even know what blast my microwave is at. I just put stuff in it, run for 45 seconds, if it’s not hot when it comes out = another 45 seconds. Repeat until food

I went with .ml because (IIRC, I might be wrong) that was the instance that the people who made Lemmy used. I’m not wild about how .ml censors some words but it doesn’t bother me enough to change.

They always trot out the line that it’s not fair to put all the coal workers out of a job, but when AI comes along and starts to put everyone else out of a job we’re all supposed to just suck it up.

I think they’re doing another trial right away, and one of them’s in BC where Doug Ford can’t get at it.

It’s called Hey Ash, Watcha Playin?