If AI continues to be treated as transformative work, there should also be a valid case to kill licensing requirements for sampling music. After all, there you’re literally using small clips of someone’s music or similar to make undeniably new art.

The gif? That’s from terminator 2, not transformers, and is an incredibly well-executed effect for the time. It’s also missing the part where the actual effect happens.

Well, let’s give torpedoes to the orcas then.

And by some miracle, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Panzer II felt more spacious inside. It’s baffling how cramped modern SUVs and especially crossovers are compared to their external size.

Our relatively small VW ID.3 is more spacious inside than most small-to-mid crossovers in Europe (e.g. Renault Kadjar/Nissan Qashqai, Volvo XC40 etc.). It’s still a lot smaller in external dimensions, and actually fits to parking spots.

Tomorrow: Georgian script and Ogham.

Here my European brain was thinking the two sets of counting and alphabet meant two counting in two different languages and systems and listing two different alphabets like Cyrillic and Greek…

I should learn to read things through before jumping to conclusions.

Good point with the barrel, truth is probably somewhere between the barrel and a can. After all, there’s also pönttö, both vessan- and linnun-, which again are on the smaller side. I kinda love how much nuance and double meanings there are in especially the spoken language.

True meaning can only be grasped with enough exposure.

Didn’t we also have some Vickers six-tonners at the start? Next to useless by then but probably could penetrate at least a BT-5.

Edit: now that I think of it, a canister probably fits quite well between the sizes of can and barrel. But to me it would then be a closed container, which a pönttö doesn’t necessarily have to be.

They’re an interesting thing to say the least. Finland had a lot of wood gas generators in use during WWII as what limited petrol we had went towards the war effort. Other substitute fuels were used a lot as well, e.g. pine turpentine which we had a lot of as it’s a side product of refining wood into pulp.

It’s a relatively efficient system, and burns quite cleanly in the engine (as soot and other contaminants are filtered out by the generator). Though they’re quite dangerous, since wood gas is mainly pure carbon monoxide. The amounts they produce are so high that leaks or topping up the generator can cause carbon monoxide poisoning even when outside. In Finnish we actually call the generator häkäpönttö, which in English would be a carbon monoxide can (häkä colloquial Finnish for carbon monoxide, pönttö a colloquial Finnish word meaning a can, container, carton or someone dumb in a usually non-derogatory way – closest equivalent in English would be dummy).

Yes, performance fees were, and still are a thing. That’s why there are separate streaming services for playing background music in e.g. restaurants and malls, which have licences that cover that use case. You can’t just use e.g. Spotify even if you pay the appropriate fees separately, at least where I’m from (Finland). Same goes for playing TV and radio in the background – if it’s specifically as background noise or e.g. TV at a bar you typically need separate licencing on top of the one used by the channel itself for distribution. Might be different in the US for example, but copyright laws tend to be quite similar across countries (unfortunately).

The smooth jazz in malls part is likely a lot due to the (historically) overwhelming market share of the company Muzak. They were the pioneer of background music in commercial environments and got a strong enough presence in the market that their name ended up a generic one. AFAIK they’re still a large player in the business.

Mall music basically ended up as its own genre due to Muzak and how big it became, and started influencing other media as well. As an example, the style was referred to in the soundtrack of the first Sims game in the buy mode, where it brought with it the feeling of rampant consumerism and buzz of purchasing new stuff. At least according to this video essay on the subject, which in my mind makes its point quite convincingly. (the relevant part from 11:46 onwards re-watched the video and the relevant part actually starts at approx the 5 minute mark, but the video is altogether quite interesting)