The capybara was voiced by a baby camel

10 sundry Sunday notes

Hi there, Sundays are for sharing, and here are 10 things that I found worth sharing this week:

1. Who else here remembers ANSI/ASCII art? When I was a kid and 99% of the games I played and software I used was pirated, stuff would come with a file titled something like CrAzYY_WaREZ_CREW.nfo containing release notes and a digital graffiti (like this RAZOR graphic from 1994). There’s an interesting article about the genre’s meaning to the whole pirate scene here. What made me reminisce about it, however, was this brilliant visual piece in HTML Review. Do check it out — it’s literally minimalistic drawings made with dashes and punctuation marks. Yet, for some inscrutable reason, it has more heart than any of the “Honey I made myself into a collectible toy” pics you see generated with AI.

Self-portrait by the author using ASCII face-maker. Still better art than the Ghiblified selfies.

2. Finally got to see Flow (2024), the first-ever animated film from Latvia (or any production from the Baltics) to win an Oscar. And probably the only cartoon with a budget of just $3 million and done entirely in Blender to do so. Cute, yet eerie, it’s a story of an unlikely band of friends (a cat, a Goldie, a capybara, a thieving lemur, and a secretary bird) trying to get to shore in a world abandoned by humans and consumed by rising waters. You can check the trailer here. The animation is beautiful, even if I did catch myself thinking that I’ve seen more spectacular cutscenes in games released a decade ago. Fun fact: the capybara was voiced by a baby camel.

3. Vilnius has announced a war on graffiti. While you could argue there’s no artistic merit to someone spray-painting ACAB on a wall, this war is making the city a less interesting place to wander. It also poses a risk to urban history. Graffiti, which in some places stays for decades, safeguards certain memories. Like this bit I snapped on my evening walk. On first reading, it’s just some band names. But look closer and you’ll see FUCK DM! What’s DM? A-ha, a puzzle! Well, DM stands for Depeche Mode, and in the 90s Depeche Mode fans and metal fans in Lithuania were at war. So this right here is literally a history lesson on a wall.

   

4. I recently published this little piece on the different attitudes people have towards recipes. In the last few weeks I’ve been experimenting with different versions of brewing hibiscus tea (cinnamon trumps mint for me), making Mexican rice (rice is something I never know how to cook right), marinating eggs and cooking Japanese curry. Can’t wait to try making tepache, which I can only describe so far as pineapple kvass (by the way, the BBC featured an article on Lithuanian kvass or gira, putting in the same category as kombucha).

5. Speaking of the BBC, I’ve been really enjoying its latest true crime podcast called Stalked. It’s produced by Georgia Catt, who’s behind another “searching for a mysterious person” podcast I really liked — The Missing Cryptoqueen, so you know you’re in for a wild ride.

6. One of the reasons I find Stalked so interesting is the role forensic linguistics plays in the investigation. On that matter, here’s a fun paper by researchers from the University of West Cape in South Africa on the subject of the involvement of linguists in courts. A short snippet from the article:

   Take the case of Kinsey v. State (2014), where a defendant argued that a 😉 constituted consent. The court wasn’t having it, ruling that a does not equal a legally binding agreement.

7. Google might be an Evil Corp, but sometimes it makes little fun games. Like the Rise of the Half Moon, which you can play in your browser and get to learn the names of different phases of the lunar cycle.

8. Back before grannies in neighbourhood markets started slinging homemade kimchi, people in Lithuania ate Korean-style carrots. We still do, but I always wondered what this side dish, which always reminded me of school cafeteria, had to do with Korea. Apparently, it was a dish adapted by Koreans deported by the Soviet government from the Far East to places like Kazakhstan, where napa cabbage was rare, and carrots were abundant.

9. Continuing my exploration of Latin American authors, I read Lorena Salazar Masso’s This wound full of fish (Esta herida llena de peces). It’s a melancholic yet life-affirming read until the last 5 pages of the book where the protagonist is looking for her adopted son’s decapitated head in a church that just got assaulted by some fighters. It’s good they don’t put content warnings on books yet (although, apparently, some publishers do).

10. Musical parody is a risky genre. Spoof songs usually land flat, and no, I’m not a Weird Al fan. But Kyle Gordon is just brilliant. The guy does parodies of specific genres/tropes, and his takes on nu-metal, British rap, pop punk and other styles encapsulate the very essence of what he’s making fun of.

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it! Recommend Fictitious to a friend or foe, buy me a coffee, and simply share something cool you’ve recently learned with me by answering this email.

Till next time,

Oleg