“thespark” — Fediverse search results on home.social

October 22 and it was another unexpected sitting-outside-in-the-sun day.
The cat, a true master of social distancing, is channelling The Sparks: This table is just about big enough for the two of us.

Yah, that one: https://youtu.be/eUJ_ifjKopM?si=L1gIvE-q97qAfxdS

#October
#TheSparks
#Sun
#CatsOfMastodon
#SocialDistancing

#socialdistancing #catsofmastodon #sun #thesparks #october

Roberta Fidora @[email protected] · 2022-11-15 · 18:15 UTC

Squealed with delight picking up this old Sparks tour scarf last week but was wondering if anybody has any tips for improving the appearance of the foxing (looks like rayon and searched care suggestions are conflicting) or preventing it from getting worse? I think I can repair or replace the fringing.

Also, what the ‘L’ is going on with that spelling? 👨🏻🧑🏻🧣🪡

#Vintage #VintageFabric #Merch #Sparks #1970s #RonMael #RussellMael #TheSparksBrothers #Archivists

#vintage #vintagefabric #merch #sparks #1970s #ronmael

macspace ✅ @[email protected] · 2021-02-04 · 16:11 UTC

Are you bored with music? Would you like to try something that you most likely haven't tried?

You will probably hate them (their lack of commercial success shows that), but if you don't, you're welcome to join the fans of over 50 years of creativity!!

The band:
http://allsparks.com

The documentary of the band:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sparks_Brothers

#sparks #thesparksbrothers #music #bored #yearofsparks

#yearofsparks #bored #music #thesparksbrothers #sparks

Drama Tea @[email protected] · 2026-05-28 · 14:01 UTC

The Triple Echo of Time (2025) review

Down and out 41-year-old Zhao Zuo You travels back to the past to create a better life for himself. As “Xun Weilai” (Ma Tianyu), his goal is to persuade his 16-year-old self to take on a career path that would make him wealthier.

He deeply regrets caving in to his dad’s demands to study Computer Science and believes it’s the source of all his unhappiness.

He’s unhappy at his job, nearly penniless, about to be unemployed, and worse, in the future (it’s 2033), humanity has gotten so sick of digital life that they’ve turned their backs on all things digital and print media is making a roaring comeback and code monkeys are now the lowliest paid workers there are. (As a former print media worker, I’d like to be a part of this future, please!)

Pressured by life’s demands, including a very unhappy wife who threatens to divorce him every day, he decides that the best way out is to be a test subject: he’ll be the first person ever to travel back in time.

But then an unexpected twist: his 61-year-old self also travels back from the future to stop him from succeeding. What gives?

My thoughts

I was initially curious about the drama due to its high Douban score (it had an opening Douban score of 7.5 which rose to 7.7).

I was also curious about Triple Echo because this was also the drama that was the spark of an infamous incident on Weibo. The actor, Li Mingde, who was initially supposed to play the teenage Zuo You, had an epic meltdown on Weibo that made him the hot trending topic for weeks. This effectively nuked his career, especially after he smashed up a car and ended up in jail. (Real life, sometimes, is stranger than a C-drama.)

Ma Tianyu, the lead actor, and the production company were dragged in the mud due to this.

Everyone, admittedly, thought they were guilty, but like I said, it turned out that reality was crazier than a C-drama. I was actually amazed the drama saw the light of day after the insanity.

So, it’s really sad that this very original and poignant drama is thus buried, unpromoted, and unnoticed by most viewers. At least it got a high Douban score. Hopefully, it’ll have a “long tail” effect where more and more viewers will discover it in the future.

Now, let’s circle back to the show!

What surprised me about Triple Echo is that it’s actually a time traveling drama! However, warning: the sci-fi elements are just garnish (don’t expect it to make sense nor look particularly sci-fi).

Instead, the core of the drama is this message: If you have regrets in life, would you try to change your fate? Would your life be better married to a different partner?

I ended up binging 10 episodes in just two days. I slowed down somewhat towards the end, but I found the drama beautifully poignant.

Perhaps this is because I’m close to our male lead’s age, and can 100% understand his angst.

Which one of us has not thought that life would’ve been better if I had decided to major in something else?

What I love about Triple Echo is that it kept me guessing all the way. It has such a wonderfully written and solid script. It looks like C-dramaland still has good scriptwriters – if they’re allowed to, you know, WRITE, without interference.

Triple Echo expertly weaves the theme of how life can unfairly nuke your dreams despite you trying your hardest.

How friends and loved ones, who swore they would be by your side when life got hard, aren’t there as promised, and may even kick you when you’re down. Or that marriages that start in the full blossom of love are eroded by life’s challenges and pressures. Or worse, finding out too late that you have treasured the wrong thing in life.

All heartaches we can relate to. I think everyone can relate to the premise of this drama: life is full of regrets that can eat at you.

Although I wasn’t impressed with Ma Tianyu’s acting before, I thought he was a really good character fit here; he was even hilarious sometimes.

And I suppose if anyone could pull off pretending to be a 20-year-old transfer student, he could! The man is AGELESS.

Admittedly, the drama slowed down quite a bit towards the end and I got impatient. However, the ending brought tears to my eyes and it made absolute sense! It was both poignant and very just, making the ending a satisfying one.

Spoilery thoughts

Click to reveal The three versions of Zuo You meet.

One scene I’ll always remember is when middle-aged Zuo You, Xun Weilai, finds the younger self of his dad outside in the snow, crying, “I can’t find it”.

When Weilai asked what he was trying to find, it turned out to be the magazine that teen Zuo You was writing. Dad had shredded it and tossed it out of the window in a fury.

Afterwards, regretful that he had hurt his son so badly, he tried to find the pieces of the magazine in the snow and in the rubbish, but the rubbish collectors had already taken it away.

This scene, among so many, brought tears to my eyes. Every Chinese kid and parent would have had moments like these, when an overly strict parent hurt their kid deeply in an effort to discipline them. However, rarely would any Chinese kid hear their dad or mum breaking down and being honest about their mistake like that.

There are many poignant moments like these, and this is what makes this drama gold for me.

Conclusion

A heartfelt, original time-travel story about a man confronting his past selves. A gem, though sadly hard to access. May productions like these continue to produce good works.

Do watch it, it’s on YouTube. Here’s the playlist with good English subs

Some of you would be interested to know that the team behind The Triple Echo of Time is also the one behind the indie, Bilibili sensation An Ancient Love Song. AvenueX has a good video on the background of what made An Ancient Love Song so special.

Story: Unique, poignant and kept me guessing all the while
Acting: Good, but not ground-breaking
Camerawork: Good! None of the idol drama silliness with filters and too-bright lights

Final rating: 4 out of 5

#4Stars #CDrama #CDramas #China #ChineseDrama #Fantasy #SciFI

#4stars #cdrama #cdramas #china #chinesedrama #fantasy

MLB News @[email protected] · 2026-05-22 · 23:41 UTC

MSU baseball’s postseason run ends in Big Ten quarterfinals https://www.rawchili.com/mlb/706131/ #Baseball #BigTen #BigTenTournament #MajorLeagueBaseballPlayoffs #MajorLeagueBaseballPostseason #MasonEdwards #MichiganStateBaseball #MLB #MLBPlayoffs #MLBPostseason #MSU #SouthernCalifornia #TheSpartans

#thespartans #southerncalifornia #msu #mlbpostseason #mlbplayoffs #mlb

Petra A. Bauer @[email protected] · 2026-05-17 · 19:15 UTC

Ich hatte erfolgreich verdrängt, wie emotional das Finale der 3. #TedLasso Staffel war, das eigentlich als Serienfinale angelegt war. Die können da doch nicht einfach #FatherAndSon drunterlegen 🥹
Wir müssen jetzt noch ein knappes Vierteljahr auf Staffel 4 warten.
Hatte ich erwähnt, dass die Castingfrau #TheoPark, die dafür einen Emmy gewonnen hat, die Schwester einer Kollegin meines Mannes ist? Sie hat uns in NYC ein bisschen von den Emmys erzählt (sie war mit), und wie kalt es da war 😅

#theopark #fatherandson #tedlasso

The Networking Nerd @[email protected] · 2026-05-13 · 16:16 UTC

OpenClaw Ruined AI and It Makes Me Happy

The biggest AI story of 2026 isn’t the growing need for electrical power or the ridiculous way the market sold out for RAM based on a letter of intent to acquire. No, the biggest AI story of the year so far is how a scrappy little project completely upset the AI apple cart. OpenClaw (nee ClaudeBot, nee OpenMolt) set the world on fire. And it destroyed how people were trying to direct AI. I’m sitting over here giggling about it.

Round The Clock

The basics of OpenClaw are simple enough. You have a system of agents that do things. It can read your texts or email and triage the flow of information. It can send you a text summary of the news or the weather every morning. But it can also be configured to monitor things as they arrive to deal with them on the fly. That’s where the real narrative shift has happened.

When you open a browser window to talk to an LLM you are creating a session that has a finite time limit. You are saying that you are going to work on a project for a specific period of time and that’s that. Once you complete your task and you go back to whatever you were doing that’s the end of the conversation. More importantly, that’s the end of the token consumption. Because these models use tokens as method for creating words or code you can think of them as the resource that AI lives and dies by. Not unlike vespene gas from StarCraft.

When you have an agent that’s running constantly, it acts like a real person. It doesn’t consume resources in orderly sessions. It is bursty. It might be idle for hours and suddenly consume thousands of tokens when something comes in that requires a complex chain of tasks. It’s not unlike when someone gets a sudden burst of creativity and spends the next week racing to complete their task before the spark is gone. Now imagine that whole process is burning tokens as the agents dispatch their work.

The idea might not give you pause but it scares the hell out of the AI companies. Because unpredictable consumption destroys their carefully planning projections. Those ideas of data centers being built to deal with demand next year get wrecked when the projected demand shows up now and is distributed unevenly. Finance markets hate unpredictability. And those same finance markets are the ones backing this AI boom.

The Fringe Fails Us All

The other side effect of OpenClaw is the way that companies are racing to do more. Before it was just getting OpenAI to write your term papers or edit an email for tone. Now people are democratizing coding and writing their own apps to handle tasks they thought could never be automated or turned into software. Users have never felt more free.

Providers, on the other hand, are scrambling. Those same carefully curated token consumption projections go right out the window when users start burning more and more tokens because they feel empowered to build more. As more entry level users find out that Claude Code and Codex can help them build a workout app or a recipe tracker they are increasing the token burn rate. That might be something that could be managed by increasing capacity slowly. But they aren’t the real problem here. It’s the power users.

When power users figured out how to unlock parallel development pipelines and dispatch agents to write code blocks they significantly increased their token consumption. This wasn’t helped by the industry’s attempt to shift the discussion around tokens to reward those using AI the most by putting up leaderboards to highlight people burning through the most tokens. This created a culture of “tokenmaxxing”, which has to be the dumbest name I can think of which naturally means it stuck. The idea of rewarding people on a specific metric means that people will game that metric to look good. Tokens went from being burned at a steady rate to being consumed like fuel for some magical fire that cannot be quenched.

Providers panicked. Suddenly the people paying $20/month for Claude Code were burning thousands of dollars worth of tokens building apps with all the tokens they could find. People were thrilled by the creativity but the people running the GPU farms on the back end were worried. If the power users are burning through tokens this fast, what happens when the rest of the world decides to do the same? That’s when you saw the pushback. People were hitting walls of token utilization in hours and told to come back tomorrow. Users were also hitting limits on monthly allocations. The providers were working feverishly to upgrade the hardware as quickly as possible. Eventually, we hit the conclusion that everyone wanted to avoid but knew was inevitable: usage-based pricing. Not surprising considering anyone that has ever tried to offer anything unlimited quickly had to implement limits because people really can’t help themselves. Now we’re facing rumors of coding being moved to the hundreds-of-dollars per month tiers because it’s just too taxing for the infrastructure we have currently built out. Who could have possibly foreseen telling everyone that AI is the way of the future and everyone needs to embrace it could cause a shortage of resources?

Tom’s Take

It turns out that not being ready for the beast you have unleashed is exactly what the AI companies deserve. They got caught flat footed when the always-on agentic system that was a natural outgrowth of their ambitions forced them to look at how their infrastructure is being used and consumed and the numbers didn’t add up. They wanted people invested in the idea of using AI to build everything and then hopefully, like Uber and AirBnB, they could raise the rates and retire to some island. Instead they realized that people are voracious when it comes to exploiting technology for their own gains and now they are in a race to catch up because the little lobster made them look silly. Don’t mind me. I’m just going to be over here laughing while the tech geniuses of the world get exposed by shellfish.

#AI #OpenClaw

#ai #openclaw

The Delete Bin @[email protected] · 2026-05-11 · 16:30 UTC

Talk Talk Play “Such a Shame”

Listen to this track by ever-evolving synthpop meets art rock concern Talk Talk. It’s “Such a Shame” a single from their 1984 record It’s My Life, their second. That album put the band into the international mainstream, with this song being only slightly less high-profile than its title track. “Such a Shame” represented the band’s third number one single in the European charts and a top 20 hit in the U.S. As popular as it was, this song reveals a progression from where the band began on their first album that had found them on a decidedly more straightforward commercial pop trajectory.

A part of the shift by 1984 was a change in lineup. Talk Talk were a trio by this time, after their synth player, Simon Brenner, left the band. Their core sound is still in place by It’s My Life. Mark Hollis’ distinctive lead vocals are right up front. Paul Webb’s fretless bass is still a prominent texture as is Lee Harris’ drums. But they supplement that sound with more varied textures including piano and acoustic guitar to give the songs greater dimension and with a lusher overall effect.

This shift toward greater sonic depth is also in large part thanks to producer Tim Friese-Greene’s spacious and cinematic approach. The decision to bring in session musicians to fatten up the arrangements also made a significant impact on how the album came out. With that, creative head Hollis and producer Friese-Greene launched a new era for Talk Talk as a recording entity working within a highly disciplined and incrementally experimental creative framework. They dedicated themselves to making albums defined by fine details rather than as the products of a standard pop group set on topping the charts.

“Such a Shame” reflects some of their best results that came out of this sonic auteur methodology. Before they journeyed away from radio-friendly pop singles entirely later in the decade, this song lives in a middle ground between finely crafted art rock and accessible pop. It made the numbers as a charting single. Yet it also hinted at much deeper and darker themes that go beyond standard pop music subject matter.

This shift in approach aligns perfectly to Hollis’ impressionistic lyrics and mournful, soulful lead voice on this song. He sings an internal monologue of conflict and compulsion based on his reading of the 1971 cult novel Dice Man by George Cockcroft. The author writes under the pen name Luke Rhinehart who is also the main character.

The novel is the story of a man who hands over his life entirely to chance at the roll of the dice to determine his decisions. Initially, the gambit is a method to help get the man out of the rut of his boring and predictable life. But it takes a dark turn as the practice of rolling the dice becomes a repeating pattern of its own that demands obedience to the result, no matter how destructive it is. This helps to explain the sleeve art for the single that depicts a scorpion rearing up on a set of dice.

Talk Talk singer and creative principal Mark Hollis. image: Dr. Space

The themes in the novel and in the song touch on the nature of free will, morality, social obligations, and the nature of identity itself as it’s defined by the choices we make. “Such a Shame” isn’t an essay on these subjects. As with most of Hollis’ songwriting, his lyrics are sparse and deal in emotional impressions rather than in absolutes. What “Such a Shame” does do is capture a sense of detachment and resignation. But there is also a another force in this song that works against the premise of compliance with what is coldly random: doubt.

The dice decide my fate
That’s a shame
In these trembling hands, my faith
Tells me to react, I don’t care
Maybe it’s unkind that I should change
A feeling that we share
It’s a shame …
~ “Such a Shame” by Talk Talk

This song finds the narrator questioning why they feel so compelled to give up their will to chance, or why they seek to fool themselves into thinking that this is not simply an abdication of moral responsibility. It also hints at a vital truth: not all decisions represented on the faces of a die should be considered as being of equal moral weight. Like all decisions, either immediate or predetermined, we can’t escape our own biases, our ulterior motives, or the darker sides of our natures.

In “Such a Shame”, it’s only hesitation and doubt about the narrator’s own motivations that gives them pause to be aware of this eagerness to change; rolling the dice again and possibly departing from the feeling that we share to stay connected to others. It’s the doubt that exists outside of that self-imposed and rigid system that serves as the spark of hope to counteract how destructive unexamined obedience to anything can be. It’s not a shame if it can be avoided by doing the right thing. Faith in a bad system is undone when a healthy dose of contemplation and doubt circumvents it.

Released in the significant literary year of 1984, the nature of will, obedience, authority, and moral responsibility was top of mind for many. This single from Talk Talk doesn’t serve as a primary text to unpack the ramifications of that. But on closer inspection, it hinted at conversations that individuals and societies must continue to have in our own era, ignoring them at our peril; what is our relationship to the decisions we make and those made by those in authority over us by extension? Who is responsible for the outcomes and who pays the costs incurred further down the road?

These questions remain to be all too pertinent today in an era when obedience is considered a virtue and mandatory requirement even over clear thinking and morality that stand in opposition to it. In these times, we need to doubt what the powers that be demand. As it was in 1984, we can’t trust the outcome to a passionless and resigned roll of the dice.

For more on how the It’s My Life album represented the beginnings of a stylistic shift for Mark Hollis and Talk Talk, check out this article on classicpopmag.com

For more on George Cockcroft and The Dice Man, check out Who is the Real Dice Man? from The Guardian. The piece outlines the plot of the novel and the real-world phenomenon of dice culture that it helped inspire. But it’s also an exploration by journalist Emmanuel Carrère as he visits the novel’s author to determine how close Cockcroft is to the character he created.

Enjoy!

#80sMusic #artRock #MarkHollis #progressivePop #Synthpop #TalkTalk

#80smusic #artrock #markhollis #progressivepop #synthpop #talktalk