i want to like kim kelly, i think she does great work overall, but she just published a very starry-eyed piece on emperor that allowed their lead singer to totally disclaim his bandmate murdering a gay man. kim…you can't do that…not now…

Norrrrrthurrrr og neeethurrr. Both ths are pronounced like the th in then. Roll ya Rs.

Yup. It's hilariously easy to smuggle weed here. Airport security is a joke.

I live in Iceland, and I gotta tell you, you guys went to the wrong place.

Iceland likes to boast that all Icelandic bands sound different because you have to sound different to stand out, but this is such a small pond that anyone vaguely competent with a synthesizer or an an acoustic guitar can get a spot headlining a night at Airwaves. Most Icelandic music is very good technically, but it…

There was an NPR interview with two people writing political fanfiction a couple months back. And eh. This is nothing new. Rahmbamarama, punditfic, politslash, Hamilton, Paul Ryan rosary cock bondage…it happens.

"Best buds"? They're married, William. Sufjan's best buds are St. Vincent and Beyonce. Sufjan dumped Bon Iver as a buddy after he badmouthed Beyonce - as Sufjan says, "What Have You Ever Done For Young Girls Except Inspire A Bunch Of Them To Do A Better Job Of Singing Skinny Love Than You Ever Did." Drake's a little…

Half my family are white South Africans and I have white trash Afrikaans-speaking cousins who are annoyed that Die Antwoord didn't continue with the biting social commentary inherent in their earlier work, exemplified by featured rapper Wanga's anti-traditional circumcision/pro-safe sex verse in Evil Boy.

There is fan fiction about this moment, because of course there is.

https://grapevine.is/cultur… An English-language Icelandic newspaper translated what he's saying. The most important part is "Go into the box! Go into the box! EMMI! Ahhh… Yes… yaaaaa… yaaaaaaaaa… JAAAAA… JAAAAA… Jarghaah…"

http://archiveofourown.org/…

I think my favorite political fanfiction this time around is the one where Bernie Sanders feeds an intern to crossroads demon Ted Cruz in exchange for winning the primary. This is hardly as creative.

Other people who give a fuck: Kyle Kallgren/Brows Held High Guy. He has a master's degree in film and does videos about things like Brecht's alienation effect and postcolonial African cinema. And he's hilarious.

Diamanda gets a lot of shit for her gimmick, and I understand why, but I find it kind of impressive how she's kept it up for years and has enlisted all of her friends and her wife in making it ever more whacked out. Plus I love that she will straight-faced review, like, cartoons about horses fucking birds and…

Todd's been consistently great ever since he was on Youtube. He's never laugh-out-loud funny for me, or at least he's not in videos that aren't the Worst of 1976 ("Where's the ego in pretending to speak for the ENTIRE CONCEPT OF MUSIC? It's like when I tell people I'm Jesus! WHERE'S THE EGO IN THAT?!") but he's funny…

Todd is a terrible pianist and will freely admit to this.

it's a perfectly cromulent word

Oh, buddy. I sat in an intro class where it was 20% declared medieval/renaissance studies majors and 80% LARP club weirdos who occasionally showed up in garb. It was horrifying. The professor also taught my Latin seminar and she'd come into the three-hour seminar saying she never wanted to hear the words "but in…

Fuck this, honestly. Fuck The Getty, which should definitely know better. I have a goddamn degree in medieval studies and Game of Fucking Thrones has [hyperbole alert] ruined my life. Game of Thrones is not medieval and the desperate glomming on to it by medievalists and medievalist-adjacent entities for hits and…

A few weeks back I saw Benjamin Bagby perform Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon, accompanied by a lyre he had built himself. It was one of the more fascinating things I've seen in my life. I believe he, or Sequentia, have a collection of reconstructed Ottonian-era hymns running around. Super cool.