An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for April 7, 2021

Here’s a variety of notable things I’ve recently found that you may also be interested in checking out:

• Tweet thread: ‘So hang on – if European Pagans didn’t actually celebrate the Spring Equinox, then why do we think they did?’ Ultimately because of Edward Williams, aka Iolo Morganwg, who invented the idea that the Druids had festivals on the Solstices and Equinoxes and passed it off as fact.”
• Gumroad, a platform for creators, which appears to be especially good for writers, is doing a new thing today: via tweet “We’re covering fees for the entire day today; 100% of all sales will be going to our creators.” The only person I know off hand that’s on Gumroad is Lilith Saintcrow, but I’m sure there’s others to check out. Presumably they might do this again, so I’ll try to keep track and note if there’s other creatives on the platform who are in the general subject matter of the library.
• Via email—”The Fiddler’s Green Leaflets Exploding the Tangerine and The Place of the Song-Dream are back in fresh printings and shipping now.”
• “32 Short Lucubrations by John Coulthart.”—”In the following, the amazing and revealing 5-page story (click on the images and enlarge) created by the amazing British artist and designer John Coulthart for the Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book (Abiogenesis Press) to celebrate Moore’s 50th birthday in 2003.”
• “Thieving Witches: Book Piracy is Theft.”—”It’s rather disheartening to find out that many of your fellow Witches are thieves, and thieves with no remorse.” Although, I’m sure OTO would take issue with the comment that all of Aleister Crowley’s works have entered the public domain, at least not in the US.
• “17 Factual and Fictional Books About Space Exploration.” Mentions Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons, Babalon, and that bastard that stole the boat, about Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher] by John Carter
• Rebel Witch: Carve the Craft That’s Yours Alone [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher] by Kelly-Ann Maddox—”A truly contemporary take on how to be a witch, Rebel Witch is an antidote to the cookie-cutter witchcraft agenda that gives a new perspective on the craft, asking each reader to create a powerful, personalized practice that taps into the current mood of female empowerment and spiritual rebellion.”
• “What is Nation of Islam? How The Cult Was Shaped By Drew Ali, Fard, Elijah, Malcolm X and Farrakhan.” Mentions Hermetic Library Figure Noble Drew Ali and Form Moorish Science Temple of America.
• “Behold a Pail of Horsesh*t: The truth behind William Cooper’s influential conspiracy theories.” Excerpt from Adam Gorightly’s Saucers, Spooks and Kooks: UFO disinformation in the Age of Aquarius [Amazon, Bookshop]—”From flying saucer crashes to underground alien bases, a number of modern mythologies have come into being since the advent of the UFO era in the 1940s. But how much of these myths is real, versus being the invention of either government agencies or deluded conspiracy theorists? Saucers, Spooks and Kooks provides an eye-opening survey of the history behind these stories, and the individuals promoting them.”
• “Alena Jones on Naming—and Valuing—the Work: Toward a Definition of Contemporary Bookselling.”
• “For As Long As There Have Been Printed Books, There Has Been Marginalia: Meaning in the Margins: On the Literary Value of Annotation.” From Annotation [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher] by Remi H Kalir and Antero Garcia—”An introduction to annotation as a genre–a synthesis of reading, thinking, writing, and communication–and its significance in scholarship and everyday life.”
• “Gabrielle Bluestone on Billy McFarland’s Evil Genius for Pure Hype: Wet Hot American Scammer: Revisiting the Magnificent Failure of the Fyre Festival.” Excerpted from Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We’re Following [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher] by Gabrielle Bluestone—”From former Vice journalist and executive producer of hit Netflix documentary Fyre comes an eye-opening look at the con artists, grifters and snake oil salesmen of the digital age—and why we can’t stop falling for them.”
• “Kim Taylor-Foster on the Cultural Impact of the Wachowskis’ Now Classic Trilogy : The Gospel of Neo: How The Matrix Paved the Way for the Marvel Universe.” Excerpted from Why We Love The Matrix [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher] by Kim Taylor-Foster—”Rediscover all the reasons you love The Matrix with this unique guide to the cult 90s sci-fi classic, filled with trivia, essays, and behind the scenes looks at characters, production, and so much more.”
• “Paradoxes of Defence.”—”He that will fight when he is armed, will not fight when he is naked: is it therefore good to go naked to keep peace? he that would fight with his sword and buckler, or sword and dagger, being weapons of true defence, will not fight with his rapier and poniard, wherein no true defence or fight is perfect: are these insufficient weapons therefore the better, because not being sufficient to defend us in fight, they force us into peace?” About George Silver’s 1599 Paradoxes of Defense.
• “After Homosexuality.”—”Sexual Hegemony, an ambitious retelling of the history of capitalism through the politics of gay sex, arrives just in time to help dissuade us of the idea that we have reached the end of gay history.” About Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher] by Christopher Chitty—”In Sexual Hegemony Christopher Chitty traces the five-hundred year history of capitalist sexual relations by excavating the class dynamics of the bourgeoisie’s attempts to regulate homosexuality. Tracking the politicization of male homosexuality in Renaissance Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, and London between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as twentieth-century New York City, Chitty shows how sexuality became a crucial dimension of the accumulation of capital and a technique of bourgeois rule. Whether policing male sodomy during the Medici rule in Florence or accusing the French aristocracy of monstrous sexuality in the wake of the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie weaponized both sexual constraint and sexual freedom in order to produce and control a reliable and regimented labor class and subordinate it to civil society and the state. Only by grasping sexuality as a field of social contention and the site of class conflict, Chitty contends, can we embark on a politics that destroys sexuality as a tool and an effect of power and open a front against the forces that keep us unfree.”
• “Born to Rewild: Jeff VanderMeer on What It Means to Restore Your Own Little Part of the World.” In part, about Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher]—”From the author of Annihilation, a brilliant speculative thriller of dark conspiracy, endangered species, and the possible end of all things.”
• “A Translator’s Masterpiece. Hillel Halkin’s lifetime of thinking about language, Zionism, and writing pays rich dividends in his ‘indispensable’ new collection of essays devoted to the writers who created modern Hebrew literature out of nothing.” About The Lady of Hebrew and Her Lovers of Zion [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher] by Hillel Halkin—”A number of major Hebrew authors, writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had a huge impact on the evolution of the modern Hebrew language and on the emergence of Zionism as a his­toric force in Jewish life.”
• From the “It is an heretic that makes the fire, Not she which burns in’t” dept: “The Case Against Shakespeare. The Bard has had 400 years in the limelight. It’s time our academic obsession came to an end.”
• From 2019: “Botanical illustration pioneer goes from obscurity to online.”—”Dating back to 1826 and brimming with meticulous descriptions and vivid watercolor illustrations, Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s manuscript, “Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba,” never saw print in her lifetime despite her attempts at publication. Nearly two centuries later, the lush life she captured can now be admired and downloaded from HathiTrust, where it was shared by Cornell University Library.” “In March 2018, Cueto found a catalog entry for Wollstonecraft’s manuscript, and in October he and Judy Russell, dean of university libraries at the University of Florida, flew to Ithaca. Cueto and Russell have been collaborating on gathering and preserving Cuban heritage materials, and they have been championing Wollstonecraft’s work. Very little is known about Wollstonecraft, said Cueto. She was born Oct. 29, 1791, in Rindge, New Hampshire, and was married to Charles Wollstonecraft, the brother of author and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft and uncle to Mary Shelley, author of ‘Frankenstein.'” Online at HathiTrust: Specimens of the plants and fruits of the island of Cuba by Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft.
• “Spectra: The Poetry Movement That Was All a Hoax. In the experimental world of modernist poetry, literary journals were vulnerable to fake submissions.”
• “‘He Trusted the Author’: Remembering Giancarlo DiTrapano.”—”Gian never lost writing. Now I know it’s too easy to lose. In his passing it’s wild to see how much time Gian spent with all of us fuck-up writers, trying to not let us lose it too.”
• “Soviet TV version of Lord of the Rings rediscovered after 30 years. Film posted on YouTube delights fans with its rudimentary sets and ludicrous special effects.”
• “Latest EmDrive tests at Dresden University shows “impossible Engine” does not develop any thrust. Dresden (Germany) – After tests in NASA laboratories had initially stirred up hope that the so-called EmDrive could represent a revolutionary, fuel-free alternative to space propulsion, the sobering final reports on the results of intensive tests and analyzes of three EmDrive variants by physicists at the Dresden University of Technology (TU Dresden) are now available. Grenzwissenschaft-Aktuell.de (GreWi) has exclusively interviewed the head of studies Prof. Dr. Martin Tajmar about the results.” Also “Scientists Just Killed the EmDrive. After failing critical thrust tests, the ‘impossible’ engine has proven to be just that.”
• “When Did Life First Emerge in the Universe? We don’t know, but we could try to find out by searching for it on planets orbiting the very oldest stars.”
• From the Don’t Skip Leg Day dept: “450-million-year-old sea creatures had a leg up on breathing. First evidence of trilobites’ bizarre breathing organs uncovered.”
• “Tattoo made of gold nanoparticles revolutionizes medical diagnostics. Color changes of gold nanoparticles under the skin reveal concentration changes of substances in the body.”
• “‘Brain glue’ helps repair circuitry in severe TBI. Reparative hydrogel mimics the composition and mechanics of the brain.”
• “Artificial photosynthesis devices that improve themselves with use. ‘Our discovery is a real game-changer. I’ve never seen such stability.'”
• “Finding From Particle Research Could Break Known Laws of Physics. It’s not the next Higgs boson — yet. But the best explanation, physicists say, involves forms of matter and energy not currently known to science.”
• “Narooma on NSW south coast revealed as a hot spot for global ocean warming.”—”A University of New South Wales study has found that the waters off the NSW far south coast have warmed at more than three times the global average.”
• “Egypt to announce new archaeological discovery in Luxor on Thursday. The library’s Zahi Hawass Center for Egyptology will make the announcement, in cooperation with the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, in the Habo area of Luxor.”
• From the Piraña in a Tux dept: “‘Chaos of clicks and sounds from below’ as 70 orcas kill blue whale.”
• “Prior to the Chicxulub impact, rainforests looked very different. Plant fossils from Colombia show a turnover from conifers to today’s forests.”
• “The Amazon Rainforest Now Emits More Greenhouse Gases Than It Absorbs. Climate change and deforestation have transformed the ecosystem into a net source of planet-warming gases instead of a carbon sink.”
• “I’m Still Living with the Longterm Effects of a Disease that Now Has a Vaccine.”
• “The year that’s still breaking our hearts.” Mentions William Butler Yeats, and quotes the poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree.
• “What does the Canucks’ COVID-19 outbreak mean for the rest of the NHL season?.” Also tweet: “What I hope Vancouverites take from #Canucks outbreak: – P.1 variant is a whole new beast. – It’s here, spreading + tough even on pro athletes. – P.1 ripped through a workplace with strict protocols, a huge PPE budget and daily testing in days. Be safe.”
• “The Perfect To-Do System Is Not Just Around the Corner.”—”There’s no getting out of this fact: these apps are all going to take more constant input from you than you’d wish for. They don’t take away the need for some amount of self-discipline to use them effectively.”
• “I Called Off My Wedding. The Internet Will Never Forget. In 2019, I made a painful decision. But to the algorithms that drive Facebook, Pinterest, and a million other apps, I’m forever getting married.”
• “Facebook Lets Chinese Government Run Genocide-Denying Ads.”
• From the High and Mighty Oracle dept: Quasi-intentional collective surrealist and dadaist masterpiece Yahoo! Answers is closing. “Yahoo Answers, a Haven for the Confused, Is Shutting Down. People used Yahoo Answers to ask weird questions, seek help and make jokes. But the service offered ‘real human reaction, for better or for worse,’ one longtime observer said.” Also Yahoo Answers was the most earnest place on the internet. An extremely sincere, extremely harebrained epicenter of juvenile interests.” Also “One of the web’s pioneers will be wiped from the internet in May.” Also “Yahoo Answers to end as Trump fans see plot to ‘silence conservatives’. ‘Should Trump buy Yahoo to prevent Answers from being shut down?’ user asks.” Also watch “A glimpse into the wonderful world of Yahoo! Answers.” Welp. There’s always WikiHow or *cough* Reddit.
• “A Good Day for the Open Web.”—”Today the Supreme Court resolved a decade of copyright litigation by supporting interoperability and openness, ruling that reimplementing an API by copying its declarations is legal fair use, even (or perhaps especially) when you’re building a competitive service.”
• Watch “The Invention That Made Streaming Video Possible.”—”The early days of online video were plagued by low resolution, stamp-sized video, and unbearable buffering times. But one day that all changed. In the late 90s one breakthrough technology revolutionized streaming video, setting the foundation for the era of Netflix.”
• “‘Ouija’ ESP8266 Programmer Planchette. ESP, you say? Why not make an ESP8266 programmer that looks like a beautiful “talking board” planchette… and is also wearable?”
• “Go read this story on the real history of NFTs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the whole thing started as an art project.”—”The current NFT boom might be a fork in the road if enough people want it to be. We can use technology to benefit artists and compensate them for their work — we can take the path less traveled. The only question is: will we?” Also “Exclusive: The first-ever NFT from 2014 is on sale for $7 million plus.”
• Lost Tapes of the 27 Club—”As long as there’s been popular music, musicians and crews have struggled with mental health at a rate far exceeding the general adult population. And this issue hasn’t just been ignored. It’s been romanticized, by things like the 27 Club—a group of musicians whose lives were all lost at just 27 years old. To show the world what’s been lost to this mental health crisis, we’ve used artificial intelligence to create the album the 27 Club never had the chance to. Through this album, we’re encouraging more music industry insiders to get the mental health support they need, so they can continue making the music we all love for years to come. Because even AI will never replace the real thing.” [Spotify, YouTube] Also “‘Lost Tapes of the 27 Club’ used Google AI to ‘write’ a new Nirvana song. All in the name of mental health awareness.”
• “Supreme Court’s pro-Facebook ruling could unleash “flood” of robocalls. Robocall systems aren’t “autodialers” if they don’t generate random numbers.”
• The Emoji Story: You should never have this much fun learning about Unicode. “800M people could use a period emoji right now. How many people are talking about broccoli?” Also watch the trailer. Also The Emoji Story—”Emojis are a worldwide phenomenon, with some arguing that these smiling poops and heart-eyed faces are on the verge of actually becoming their own language. Who, if anyone, is in charge of this new global digital language?”
• “Children Beating Up Robot Inspires New Escape Maneuver System. Japanese researchers show that children can act like horrible little brats towards robots.”
• “The cesspool of the internet is to be found in a village in North Holland. Hosting In the village of Wormer, there is a data centre run by two men from The Hague. For years they have been under investigation by the authorities in connection with cybercrime, malware and child pornography on their network. But that has not deterred the two men.”
• “Pro-Trump whites afraid of being replaced attacked the Capitol. That’s a race riot. Let’s call what happened on Jan. 6 what it was.”
• “Why Satanic Panic never really ended. The collective fears that consumed the US in the 1980s and ’90s are still alive and well — all the way through QAnon and beyond.”
• Watch “Trump’s War On Jon Bon Jovi Could Smash His Empire“—”Donald Trump’s football beef with Jon Bon Jovi could totally end up screwing the Trump Organization.”
• “Trump used dark patterns to trick supporters into donating millions more than intended. “Asking for forgiveness is easier than permission” was one saying of the man in charge.”
• “The Politics of Epistemic Fragmentation. How the illusion of consensus was always a power play, and what to do now that it has shattered.”
• “Remembering Is Resistance.”—”Confronting painful pasts gives society an opportunity to change. This is why those invested in the amnesiac status quo fight against memory.”
• “Cult Capitalism.”—”To understand how NXIVM’s members went from the pursuit of professional success to facilitating and enduring horrific wrongs requires examining the world of contemporary business from which the cult emerged.” “There’s a thrill—and a warning—in looking at the people who got suckered and abused in NXIVM. We are not them, but there are moments when we hear things that remind us of our meditation apps or our corporate-bonding sessions or the humanitarian promises of our favorite brands. In the NXIVM story, we see these shiny surfaces rupture, and peer at the human misery that keeps them churning.”
• “How Inequality Distorts Economics.”—”The growing global concentration of wealth has made basic data on household savings, the trade deficit, and overseas assets increasingly unreliable.”
• “The Plague of Historical Amnesia in the Age of Fascist Politics.”—”In the age of neoliberal tyranny, historical amnesia is the foundation for manufactured ignorance, the subversion of consciousness, the depoliticization of the public, and the death of democracy. It is part of a disimagination machine that is perpetuated in schools, higher education, and the corporate controlled media. It divorces justice from politics and aligns the public imagination with a culture of hatred and bigotry. Historical amnesia destroys the grammar of ethical responsibility and the critical habits of citizenship. The ghost of fascism is with us once again as society forgets its civic lessons, destroys civic culture, and produces a populace that is increasingly infantilized politically through the ideological dynamics of neoliberal capitalism. The suppression of history opens the door to fascism.”
• “Canada: water spirit is no monster – he’s sacred and ours, say First Nations. Ownership of the Ogopogo legend has renewed discussions over the appropriation of traditions and the challenges Indigenous nations face to reclaim their culture.”
• WitchTok: how the occult became big online. ‘The pandemic has proven a fertile moment for the magical, and it is finding a home on social media’” Includes interview with Georgina Rose.
• “Egalitarians are more aware of inequality Some of our disagreements about inequality come from people’s failure to notice it.”
• “The Unsettling Surveillance of Anti-Asian Racism. The rise of assaults on the elderly, captured on security camera footage, raises questions about policing and what really keeps people safe.”
• “Philanthropy and the ‘Jewish Continuity Crisis’.”—”The values driving Jewish institutions have been marked by philanthropy’s entanglement with American capitalism.”
• It’s a salty whine, but reminds me of the famous billboard outside Seattle connected to the Boeing Bust. “Will the last high earner to leave New York please turn out the light.”
• “How Duolingo created a Yiddish course with a secular scholar and Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn.” Also “You Can Get a Free Bagel for Ordering in Yiddish This April. Popular language app Duolingo has partnered with bagel shops in five cities for the giveaway.”
• “‘Eliminate Every Superfluous Word’ Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s new documentary, Hemingway, dramatizes one of the great revolutions in the history of American literature.” About “Hemingway – The Myth. Uncover the man behind the myth of one of America’s greatest and most complicated writers. Hemingway from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick premieres April 5, 2021.”
• “The forgotten director who gave us The Force, inspired 2001, and changed film. You may not know this Canadian documentarian, but Stanley Kubrick and George Lucas sure did.”
• “Netflix Keeps Betting on the Teen Corner of the Sherlock Holmes Cinematic Universe. Breaking down the streaming giant’s new series, ‘The Irregulars,’ which is part ‘Stranger Things’ and part ‘The X-Files’:
• “A Witcher’s Pain. How Geralt’s journey with chronic pain is helping me with my own.”
• “The Jewish Roots of Old Bay Seasoning. Oy Bay! Become seasoned on the history of America’s beloved spice blend.”—”Old Bay is more than just your favorite spice — it’s a story of the discrimination that Jewish immigrants faced, their perseverance against such hate, and their contribution to the American identity and kitchen.”
• Watch TANK’s Shellshock—”TANK “Shellshock” (featuring Dani Filth from Cradle of Filth) From the BAPHOMET Motion Picture Soundtrack”, and the movie Baphomet is due to release digitally and physically on June 8.
• Watch The Dee Sanction: Nor Rhyme, Nor Reason.” An actual play of The Dee Sanction by Just Crunch Games—”The Dee Sanction is a tabletop role-playing game about serving Queen and country in the late Tudor period. While kingdoms vie for power and the Church splinters under the pressure of reform, folklorish creatures emerge from enforced hiding seeking revenge against those who imprisoned them. As magic and creatures of the supernatural proliferate throughout the land, Queen Elizabeth passed an Act Against Conjurations, Enchantments and Witchcrafts in 1563, making the punishment for acts of magic severe. In 1564, John Dee and Francis Walsingham convinced the Queen to pass an amendment to the Act — The Dee Sanction — permitting the practice of magic in defence of the realm. You are an Agent of Dee, not out of choice, but out of some twisted sense of self-preservation. Somewhere between conscription and penance, you work for Walsingham and Dee to make amends, with a faint hope that you can use your talents to earn your pardon and absolution. You can see the light at the end of the tunnel. If only you can outrun the shadows of your past and the horrors of the present…”
• “The Lizzie Borden Murder House Has a New Owner. When does tragedy become a tourist attraction?”
• “$500,000 Jefferson Davis chair stolen in Selma will be a toilet unless Confederate group hangs banner, email claims.”—”The banner bears a quote from Assata Shakur, a Black Liberation Army activist wanted by the FBI for the 1973 murder of a New Jersey state trooper: ‘The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives.’ White Lies Matter said it had already delivered the banner to the UDC.”
• New crowdfunding starts sometime today: MST3K: The Next Chapter.
• “It’s Okay to Be Terrible.”

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