I’m really not sure what I just read. I mean, I know what I read in terms of the words - but I don’t understand what its purpose is. But I don’t necessarily think it matters…
It was thoroughly diverting, held my attention and made me wish that more people wrote pieces like this where the only real purpose is the conceit, and the subsequent journey the author takes you on.
I miss Caity's writing so much. She brought so much joy to me back in those days, and even a lot of her work at NYT was great as well. Thanks for the inspiration to try to find what she's up to now.
that's not really what bathos is though. bathos is an attempt at pathos that turns into something else less meaningful through cliche or lack of believability or other
I'm just left guessing if there's some cryptpic yet important geo-political statement hidden in a funny post about some celebrity i had never heard of until now
right! that's it, its like this nonsense numbers conspiracy theories that seem ramblings of some mentally ill person, but written in a more coherent, interestnig way that any of these (they usually are harder/cryptic to read due to its nonsense) so it ends up being an easier read as a parody than an actual conspiracy theory
I think this is one of those things that either has intrinsic purpose for you, or it doesn't. As for me, I thoroughly enjoyed reading about this analysis of Shawn Mendes' cryptic lyric.
I'd consider it a satisfying little exercise in deductive reasoning / OSINT – if reasoning is worthwhile and exercises are worthwhile, then this must be as well
Excellent deduction, but somewhat rushed at the end. Almost sloppy. If Mendez is flying to meet up with a friend at a hotel, it's clearly necassary to check if there are any hotels on that island to begin with.
We can, of course, assume that if there's an airport, there's a hotel, but being a Russian territory even the most benign assumption may prove false, so it's still prudent to check.
The good news is that there is not one, but two hotels on Iturup, both with impressive ratings (even if across a dozen reviews each). With this in place, I trust, we can put the final dot to the story of finding Shawn Mendez and his views on the annexation of the Kurils.
If Where in the World is Carman Sandiego on the Apple ][ taught me anything, it's that there is always a hotel and it is the best place to check on arrival.
Sort of on-topic: The Kuril islands are a big deal in Hokkaido. I attended a protest there (by accident) a few years ago with many Japanese demonstrating for a return of the islands to Japan. It was kind of odd as an outsider because the protest clearly has no effect, and there's no chance of it ever happening outside of Russia losing a war.
He says he's only a couple hundred miles from Japan, not that the flight is a couple hundred miles. He could be in Taiwan and flying to Naha (there are evening flights on that route).
Or, more intriguingly, he could be a supporter of Okinawan independence who doesn't acknowledge Okinawa as part of Japan, in which case he might also regard Okinawa as being in the Seibu Hyojunji timezone rather than Japan Standard Time.
Oh Man. A few years back, my daughter played so much of Lost in Japan repeatedly. I thought the singer was another girl, because of the others in the playlist such as Kate Perry, and Justin Beiber.
There is a mistake in blogger's logic. Mendes never says that he is flying to Japan. He only states that he is a couple hundred of miles away from Japan. He could be flying from South Korea to Taipei.
This misses one obvious possibility; that it just happened before Okinawa was returned to Japan.
(Granted, that was a while ago, and he looks young-ish, but I don't really know anything about Shawn Mendes, so am entirely open to the possibility that he's in his 70s and doing that blood boy thing from Silicon Valley.)
So I just had a fun 5 minutes trying to talk gemini around to believing that Shawn has a position on the Kuril Islands dispute by submitting all the evidence in the article, but the llm is pretty impressively consistent and insistent that the song is figurative etc. Miss the days when it was so easy to get an LLM to argue for anything by persistence.
I'm patting myself on the back. After reading the first couple paragraphs, I went Eh? and came here to the comments. Thanks everyone for saving me the time.
It was thoroughly diverting, held my attention and made me wish that more people wrote pieces like this where the only real purpose is the conceit, and the subsequent journey the author takes you on.