An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for August 15, 2021

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

• Tweet—”Looking at Afghanistan I really wish we’d fallen victim to the classic blunder of never going against a Sicilian when death is on the line, instead.” Also tweet—”‘War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.’ General Smedley Butler.” Read War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Smedley D Butler—”Originally printed in 1935, War Is a Racket is General Smedley Butler’s frank speech describing his role as a soldier as nothing more than serving as a puppet for big-business interests. In addition to photos from the notorious 1932 anti-war book The Horror of It by Frederick A. Barber, this book includes two never-before-published anti-interventionist essays by General Butler. The introduction discusses why General Butler went against the corporate war machine and how he exposed a fascist coup d’etat plot against President Franklin Roosevelt. Widely appreciated and referenced by left- and right-wingers alike, this is an extraordinary argument against war – more relevant now than ever.”
• Robert Mitchell’s Cabal Fang Temple is now Heritage Arts.
• “Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magic To Present Exhibit Featuring Visionary Burt Shonberg’s Artwork.” Also “Beyond the Pleasuredome: The Lost Occult World of Burt Shonberg curated by BRIAN CHIDESTER at the BUCKLAND MUSEUM OF WITCHCRAFT AND MAGICK, Cleveland Ohio AUGUST 17 – NOVEMBER 1 2021.”
• Instagram—”Found out that someone made a fake antique grimoire page partially based on my “Evocation” art seen here. While I love creating art inspired by historical styles, please know that I am never seeking to deceive people! I don’t “antique” my prints & absolutely did not give permission for my original art to be part of a forged document. “Evocation” was created by me for Michael Howard’s CHILDREN OF CAIN published in 2011 by Three Hands Press. I still have a few signed & numbered prints pulled from the original woodcut available.” Also tweet—”Added bonus WTF, it turns out the forgery was donated to the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Bocastle. They recognized it & the others that came with it as fakes.”
• “Alejandro Jodorowsky interrogates the primal source of human desire. For Document’s Summer/Pre-Fall 2021 issue, the artist and filmmaker joins Donatien Grau for a Zen Buddhist conversational exercise expounding his transcendent worldview.”
• “Sympathy for the Devil — when Mick Jagger dabbled in the occult. The Rolling Stones’ singer went through a satanic phase, and this diabolic 1968 track was one of the results.” Oh! Haha! “In 1967, a manuscript of Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical novel The Master and Margarita was smuggled out of Moscow. A fantastical musing on Satan visiting the Soviet Union, it was heavily censored there. A publisher rushed out an English-language edition and Marianne Faithfull gave a copy to her boyfriend, Mick Jagger.” “The dilettante Jagger soon disavowed any interest in Satanism and moved on. Yet the ever-unconventional Richards remains less inclined to deny the spirit of The Stones’ dark, labyrinthine masterpiece. ”Sympathy…’ is an uplifting song,’ he has mused. ‘It’s just a matter of looking the Devil in the face. He’s there all the time. I’ve had very close contact with Lucifer — I’ve met him several times.'” Looks like this is a promo for or excerpt from 2018’s The Life of a Song Volume 2: The Stories Behind 50 More of the World’s Best-loved Songs [Amazon, Bookshop UK, Publisher, Local Library] edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley
• “How Compassionate is Stoicism? The need to return to a philosophy of love and kindness.”—”Although many people on the Internet confuse Stoicism with being unemotional and uncaring… the truth is that it was originally a philosophy of love.” Watch “How Compassionate is Stoicism? What happens if you combine #Stoicism with #kindness and #compassion?”
• “The Way Back Sessions Is Bringing the Phoenix Music Scene to YouTube“—”Even without the audience, Moeckel calls his time on WBS ‘as nerve-racking as being on stage. And [Carter] purposely created that. What was so universal during COVID was how much musicians needed to make music in order to communicate, how much we missed our audiences. It’s not really about the applause. It’s about connecting. And we were able to connect again. And so as a result for me personally, it felt very much like I was playing a recital.’ The show alternates blocks of songs with chat sessions, allowing Carter to help audiences get to know the bands. He has musicians shout out who they prefer, The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. He has them talk about their former bands, or their side projects. And he does his research to unearth some interesting details, like Prier’s membership in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, or Moons Birds & Monsters frontman Zackary O’Meara’s time in high school theater.” About “The Wayback Sessions: Arizona’s Premier LIVE Stream Music Venue.”
• WortCunning: A Folk Medicine Herbal & A Folk Magic Herbal [Publisher] by Nigel G. Pearson—”This useful, pocket-sized book is presented as two books in one; in an intriguing ‘double-fronted’ format. The first side, A Folk Medicine Herbal, presents the medicinal herbal information and recipes as passed on to the author. He has complimented this material with the addition of the second, ‘reverse’ side of the book, A Folk Magic Herbal, giving the traditional magical uses for the same plants presented in the first.”
• “Democrats Should Pack the Supreme Court.” Excerpt from Pack the Court! A Defense of Supreme Court Expansion [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Stephen M Feldman—”The United States Supreme Court has numbered nine justices for the past 150 years. But that number is not fixed. With the Democrats controlling the House and Senate during the Biden presidency, they could add justices to the Supreme Court. But would court packing destroy the Court as an apolitical judicial institution? This is the crucial question Stephen Feldman addresses in his provocative book, Pack the Court! He uses a historical, analytical, and political argument to justify court-packing in general and Democratic court-packing more specifically. Republicans and Democrats alike profess to worry that court-packing will destroy the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as a judicial institution by injecting politics into a purely legal adjudicative process. But as Feldman’s insightful book shows, law and politics are forever connected in judicial interpretation and decision making. Pack the Court! insists that court packing is not the threat to the Supreme Court’s institutional legitimacy that many fear. Given this, Feldman argues that Democrats should pack the Court while they have the opportunity. Doing so might even strengthen the American people’s faith in the Court.”
• “Anthro-washing. On the rise, and limits, of corporate anthropology.” About Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Gillian Tett—”In an age when the business world is dominated by technology and data analysis, award-winning financial journalist and anthropology PhD Gillian Tett presents a radically different strategy for success: businesses can revolutionize their understanding of behavior by studying consumers, markets, and organizations through an anthropological lens. Amid severe digital disruption, economic upheaval, and political flux, how can we make sense of the world? Leaders today typically look for answers in economic models, Big Data, or artificial intelligence platforms. Gillian Tett points to anthropology—the study of human culture. Anthropologists train to get inside the minds of other people, helping them not only to understand other cultures but also to appraise their own environment with fresh perspective as an insider-outsider, gaining lateral vision. Today, anthropologists are more likely to study Amazon warehouses than remote Amazon tribes; they have done research into institutions and companies such as General Motors, Nestlé, Intel, and more, shedding light on practical questions such as how internet users really define themselves; why corporate projects fail; why bank traders miscalculate losses; how companies sell products like pet food and pensions; why pandemic policies succeed (or not). Anthropology makes the familiar seem unfamiliar and vice versa, giving us badly needed three-dimensional perspective in a world where many executives are plagued by tunnel vision, especially in fields like finance and technology. Lively, lucid, and practical, Anthro-Vision offers a revolutionary new way for understanding the behavior of organizations, individuals, and markets in today’s ever-evolving world.”
• “The Magic Box by Rob Young review – a spirited history of television. From spectral dreamscapes to The Year of the Sex Olympics, a lovingly researched history of British TV recalls the brilliant, the bizarre and the unworldly.”—”Were all programmes, broadcast on equipment probably less sophisticated than a pair of modern trainers, envisaged as much as seen? Rob Young’s The Magic Box, an exploration of British television from the late 1950s to the late 80s, seems to think so. It portrays its subject as an experimental educational centre that offered an alternative national curriculum. Television in those days harboured deviants. It was spectral, a dreamscape. This may have been inevitable: a key figure in the development of the cathode-ray tube was William Crookes (1832-1919) who was interested in spiritualism and also served as president of the Society for Psychical Research. (In 1890, he was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.)” About The Magic Box: Viewing Britain through the Rectangular Window [Amazon, Bookshop UK, Publisher, Local Library] by Rob Young—”A riveting journey into the psyche of Britain through its golden age of television and film; a cross-genre feast of moving pictures, from classics to occult hidden gems, The Magic Box is the nation’s visual self-portrait in technicolour detail.” And, you know, just added a stub page for William Crookes in Hermeneuticon.
• “The ebook at 50 — is the dream of a free, universal library fading? Project Gutenberg’s founder wanted unlimited access for all but his utopian vision has been eclipsed.”
• “BepiColombo skims past Venus“—”The joint European-Japanese BepiColombo mission captured this view of Venus on 10 August 2021 as the spacecraft passed the planet for a gravity assist manoeuvre.”
• “HKU geologists discover that the NASA rover has been exploring surface sediments, not lake deposits for last eight years.”—”In 2012, NASA landed the rover Curiosity in the Gale crater on Mars because the crater was thought by many scientists to be the site of an ancient lake on Mars more than 3 billion years ago. Since that time, the rover has been driving along, carrying out geological analyses with its suite of instruments for over 3,190 sols (martian days, equivalent to 3278 earth days). After analysing the data, researchers from Department of Earth Sciences, the Faculty of Science at HKU, have proposed that the sediments measured by the rover during most of the mission did not actually form in a lake.”
• “Perseverance Mars rover fumbled 1st sampling attempt because of ‘unique’ powdery rock, NASA finds“—”NASA’s Perseverance rover’s first sample collection didn’t go as planned due to trouble with a “unique” and unexpectedly powdery Mars rock. ”
• From the This Is Fine dept: “Asteroid Bennu has 1 in 1,750 chance of smashing into Earth, NASA says. But ‘we shouldn’t be worried about it very much.'”
• “Study takes unprecedented peek into life of 17,000-year-old mammoth.”—”An international research team has retraced the astonishing lifetime journey of an Arctic woolly mammoth, which covered enough of the Alaska landscape during its 28 years to almost circle the Earth twice. Scientists gathered unprecedented details of its life through analysis of a 17,000-year-old fossil from the University of Alaska Museum of the North. By generating and studying isotopic data in the mammoth’s tusk, they were able to match its movements and diet with isotopic maps of the region. Few details have been known about the lives and movements of woolly mammoths, and the study offers the first evidence that they traveled vast distances.” Also “Mammoth’s epic travels preserved in tusk. Chemical analysis of an ice age woolly mammoth’s tusk reveals the huge distances it travelled during its lifetime more than 17,000 years ago.”
• “49 million-year-old beetle looks like it was squashed yesterday. Paleontologists named the insect ‘Attenborough’s Beauty,’ after Sir David Attenborough.”—”A beetle that lived about 49 million years ago is so well-preserved that the insect looks like it could spread its strikingly patterned wing coverings and fly away. That is, if it weren’t squashed and fossilized. Wing cases, or elytra, are one of the sturdiest parts of a beetle’s exoskeleton, but even so, this level of color contrast and clarity in a fossil is exceptionally rare, scientists recently reported. The beautiful design on the ancient beetle’s elytra prompted researchers to name it Pulchritudo attenboroughi, or Attenborough’s Beauty, after famed naturalist and television host Sir David Attenborough. They wrote in a new study that the pattern is ‘the most perfectly preserved pigment-based colouration known in fossil beetles.'”
• “Neanderthals and Homo sapiens used identical Nubian technology.”—”Long held in a private collection, the newly analyzed tooth of an approximately nine-year-old Neanderthal child marks the hominin’s southernmost known range. Analysis of the associated archaeological assemblage suggests Neanderthals used Nubian Levallois technology, previously thought to be restricted to Homo sapiens.”
• “Study reveals how smell receptors work“—”In a new study, Ruta and her colleagues offer answers to the decades-old question of odor recognition by providing the first-ever molecular views of an olfactory receptor at work. The findings, published in Nature, reveal that olfactory receptors indeed follow a logic rarely seen in other receptors of the nervous system. While most receptors are precisely shaped to pair with only a few select molecules in a lock-and-key fashion, most olfactory receptors each bind to a large number of different molecules. Their promiscuity in pairing with a variety of odors allows each receptor to respond to many chemical components. From there, the brain can figure out the odor by considering the activation pattern of combinations of receptors. Engineers at Caltech and JPL have developed a material inspired by chain mail that can transform from a foldable, fluid-like state into specific solid shapes under pressure.” Also “‘Smart’ fabric that can stiffen on demand“—”The lightweight fabric is 3D-printed from nylon plastic polymers and comprises hollow octahedrons (a shape with eight equal triangular faces) that interlock with each other. When encased in a plastic envelope and vacuum-packed, it becomes 25 times more rigid and can hold up over 50 times its own weight. An example from popular culture would be Batman’s cape, which is generally flexible but can be made rigid at will when the caped crusader needs it as a glider. This next-generation fabric paves the way for lightweight armour that can harden to protect a user against an impact, protective gear for athletes, and exoskeletons that can help the elderly to stand, walk and carry objects.” Also watch “NTU Singapore scientists develop fabric that can stiffen on demand.”
• A “maniac” robot in the brain delivering drugs. What could possibly go wrong? “Tiny ‘maniac’ robots could deliver drugs directly to central nervous system. A new study investigates tiny tumbling soft robots that can be controlled using rotating magnetic fields. The technology could be useful for delivering drugs to the nervous system. In this latest study, researchers put the robots through their paces and showed that they can climb slopes, tumble upstream against fluid flow and deliver substances at precise locations to neural tissue.” I was promised drouds and tasps. They didn’t tell me they’ve also be autonomous drug-pushing robots.
• Cthulhu sneaking around delivering drugs in the body evading immune responses too? Sure, why not. “Dendrimers: The tiny tentacles shown to evade our immune response. Tiny synthetic particles known as dendrimers avoid detection by our immune system and could help develop a new way to deliver drugs into the body without triggering a reaction.”—”The dendrimer is a chemically-created molecule with tentacles branching out in a highly-symmetrical structure around a central core. The research describes how dendrimer tentacles arranged incredibly closely to each other – less than one nanometer apart – avoided detection by the complement system, part of our immune system.”
• Scientists tweak daddy long legs genes to create daddy short legs. Genetically engineering the leggy spiders could help unlock the secrets of how they develop such long gams in the first place.” This is kinda horrific. Also “The genome of a daddy-long-legs (Opiliones) illuminates the evolution of arachnid appendages.” They basically engineered a Star Trek style teleporter accident on them.
• Tweet thread—”A whalefish was spotted last week with ROV Doc Ricketts!” “Whalefish have rarely been seen alive in the deep, so many mysteries remain regarding these remarkable fish. With each deep-sea dive, we uncover more mysteries and solve others.” Also watch, from 2020: “Explore the midnight zone with deep-sea biologist Bruce Robison.” Whalefish are weird.
• “Scientists Discover Not 1, But 2 New Dinosaur Species In China.”—”What’s better than a giant, plant-eating dinosaur? Two dinosaurs, of course.”
• “Study reveals missing link between high-fat diet, microbiota and heart disease“—”A high-fat diet disrupts the biology of the gut’s inner lining and its microbial communities — and promotes the production of a metabolite that may contribute to heart disease, according to a study published Aug. 13 in the journal Science. The discoveries in animal models support a key role for the intestines and microbiota in the development of cardiovascular disease, said Mariana Byndloss, DVM, PhD, assistant professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The intestines, she noted, have been relatively understudied by scientists seeking to understand the impact of obesity.”
• “Metabolism Changes With Age, Just Not When You Might Think. Researchers have precisely measured life’s metabolic highs and lows, from birth to old age, and the findings might surprise you.”—”Pooling and analyzing energy expenditures across the entire lifespan revealed some surprises. Some people think of their teens and 20s as the age when their calorie-burning potential hits its peak. But the researchers found that, pound for pound, infants had the highest metabolic rates of all. Energy needs shoot up during the first 12 months of life, such that by their first birthday, a one-year-old burns calories 50% faster for their body size than an adult.” “An infant’s gas-guzzling metabolism may partly explain why children who don’t get enough to eat during this developmental window are less likely to survive and grow up to be healthy adults. ‘Something is happening inside a baby’s cells to make them more active, and we don’t know what those processes are yet,’ Pontzer said. After this initial surge in infancy, the data show that metabolism slows by about 3% each year until we reach our 20s, when it levels off into a new normal. Despite the teen years being a time of growth spurts, the researchers didn’t see any uptick in daily calorie needs in adolescence after they took body size into account. Midlife was another surprise. Perhaps you’ve been told that it’s all downhill after 30 when it comes to your weight. But while several factors could explain the thickening waistlines that often emerge during our prime working years, the findings suggest that a changing metabolism isn’t one of them. In fact, the researchers discovered that energy expenditures during these middle decades – our 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s — were the most stable. Even during pregnancy, a woman’s calorie needs were no more or less than expected given her added bulk as the baby grows. The data suggest that our metabolisms don’t really start to decline again until after age 60. The slowdown is gradual, only 0.7% a year. But a person in their 90s needs 26% fewer calories each day than someone in midlife. Lost muscle mass as we get older may be partly to blame, the researchers say, since muscle burns more calories than fat. But it’s not the whole picture.” “For a long time, what drives shifts in energy expenditure has been difficult to parse because aging goes hand in hand with so many other changes, Pontzer said. But the research lends support to the idea that it’s more than age-related changes in lifestyle or body composition. ‘All of this points to the conclusion that tissue metabolism, the work that the cells are doing, is changing over the course of the lifespan in ways we haven’t fully appreciated before,’ Pontzer said. ‘You really need a big data set like this to get at those questions.'”
• “AI could detect dementia years before symptoms appear. Artificial intelligence could spot the early signs of dementia from a simple brain scan long before major symptoms appear – and in some cases before any symptoms appear – say Cambridge researchers.”
• “Ultrasound Remotely Triggers Immune Cells to Attack Tumors in Mice Without Toxic Side Effects“—”Bioengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a cancer immunotherapy that pairs ultrasound with cancer-killing immune cells to destroy malignant tumors while sparing normal tissue.”
• “Swimming robot gives fresh insight into locomotion and neuroscience. Thanks to their swimming robot modeled after a lamprey, EPFL scientists may have discovered why some vertebrates are able to retain their locomotor capabilities after a spinal cord lesion. The finding could also help improve the performance of swimming robots used for search and rescue missions and for environmental monitoring.”
• “A robotic fish tail and an elegant math ratio could inform the design of next- generation underwater drones. University of Virginia School of Engineering researchers uncover the secrets of highly efficient swimming at varying speeds.”—”What if you want your underwater vehicle to travel fast through miles of ocean, then slow down to map a narrow coral reef, or speed to the site of an oil spill then throttle back to take careful measurements?” “When designing swimming robots, a question that keeps coming up for researchers is how stiff the piece that propels the robots through the water should be made. It’s a hard question, because the same stiffness that works well in some situations can fail miserably in others.”
• Material Inspired by Chain Mail Transforms from Flexible to Rigid on Command.
• “Scientists Just Simulated Quantum Technology on Classical Computing Hardware“—”Lurking in the background of the quest for true quantum supremacy hangs an awkward possibility – hyper-fast number crunching tasks based on quantum trickery might just be a load of hype. Now, a pair of physicists from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and Columbia University in the US have come up with a better way to judge the potential of near-term quantum devices – by simulating the quantum mechanics they rely upon on more traditional hardware.”
• “Expensive trips to the edge of space could have big effects on the atmosphere” —”For these billionaires, success would mean many more civilians taking similar pricey journeys for this rare view of Earth. But, with the limited passenger capacity for each flight and the environmental impacts from launch emissions (which could worsen extreme climate-related weather events), this burgeoning “space tourism” industry isn’t sustainable.”
• I mean, this is what they could be doing, but don’t; which is why they need to be taxed into a near death experience: “MacKenzie Scott’s Money Bombs Are Single Handedly Reshaping America. A Bloomberg News survey accounting for $4.3 billion in 375 grants to nonprofits reveals for the first time how the philanthropist is directing her charitable might.”—”One email about a $15 million gift, suspected of phishing, sat unopened for a month. Several others about a $20 million pledge went ignored by an assistant, who thought the nondescript sender was fake. The recipient of another memo, promising millions more, turned to their lawyer, who said it was likely a scam. All of those big-fortune messages, and hundreds more like them, were not only legitimate, they came from the same source: a team working on behalf of MacKenzie Scott, fourth richest woman in the world — and, increasingly, the most powerful and mysterious force in philanthropy today.” Hold on. BRB. Checking my spam folder.
• Classon Smart Helmet—”A helmet like you’ve never seen before – built by you. The Next Generation of Safety. Gesture Activated Turning Lights. … Front Camera. … Automatic Brake & Running Lights. … Help Us Build The Smartest Helmet On The Road. Join Beta Program.”
• “Researchers take step toward next-generation brain-computer interface system“—”Most current BCI systems use one or two sensors to sample up to a few hundred neurons, but neuroscientists are interested in systems that are able to gather data from much larger groups of brain cells. Now, a team of researchers has taken a key step toward a new concept for a future BCI system — one that employs a coordinated network of independent, wireless microscale neural sensors, each about the size of a grain of salt, to record and stimulate brain activity. The sensors, dubbed “neurograins,” independently record the electrical pulses made by firing neurons and send the signals wirelessly to a central hub, which coordinates and processes the signals. In a study published on August 12 in Nature Electronics, the research team demonstrated the use of nearly 50 such autonomous neurograins to record neural activity in a rodent.”
• “What science tells us about reducing coronavirus spread from wind instruments. Performers and researchers collaborate to learn the risks and how to lower them.” Tweet—”You’re less likely to catch COVID-19 if you stand in front of a tuba player than if you stick your head into a tuba’s bell.” Um. Okay. Thanks. Useful information, I guess. For someone. Someone not me. But, sure.
• “This Pro-Trump Lawyer Was a Rising ‘Stop the Steal’ Star. His Firm Erased Him. In the months since Trump’s failed coup, government documents have further revealed the extent of attorney Kurt Olsen’s behind-the-scenes crusade to try to keep him in power.”
• “The spectacular implosion of Mike Lindell. Even sympathetic allies are distancing themselves from Lindell now.”—”Josh Merritt, aka ‘Spider’, hired by Lindell to find election fraud, now says Lindell sold his adherents a bill of goods when he claimed he had data proving vote-switching by China-backed hackers. ‘We were handed a turd,’ he said.”
• “Surf Instructor Dad Killed Kids Over QAnon ‘Serpent DNA’ Fears: Feds. Matthew Taylor Coleman, accused of killing his two young children with a spearfishing gun, confessed he believed he was ‘saving the world from monsters.'” Also “California dad killed his kids over QAnon and ‘serpent DNA’ conspiracy theories, feds claim. Authorities say Matthew Taylor Coleman confessed to murdering his two young children in Mexico and told investigators he thought they would “grow into monsters.'” Also tweet—”Conspiracism is the perpetual search for a hidden foe. And one is always found among the helpless.”
• Can’t even trust Snopes now! Tweet—”Snopes is retracting over 50 stories and suspending the editorial duties of one of its founders after this absolutely blockbuster @shootingthemess investigation. Wow.” Also “The Co-Founder Of The Fact-Checking Site Snopes Was Writing Plagiarized Articles Under A Fake Name. ‘You can always take an existing article and rewrite it just enough to avoid copyright infringement.'”
• “GOP Strategist Arrested for Underage Sex Trafficking. The feds just arrested wealthy Republican strategist and occasional Fox News guest Anton Lazzaro on five counts of underage sex trafficking.”
• “Six problem-solving mindsets for very uncertain times. Even the most inscrutable problems have solutions—or better outcomes than have been reached so far. Here’s how the best problem solvers crack the code.”—”1. Be ever-curious … 2. Tolerate ambiguity—and stay humble! … 3. Take a dragonfly-eye view … 4. Pursue occurrent behavior … 5. Tap into collective intelligence and the wisdom of the crowd … 6. Show and tell to drive action …”
• “Secrets of mysterious Welsh ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ stone starting to be unravelled“—”The distinctive burial structures are believed to have been the inspiration for the ‘stone table’ that features in CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series.”
• Letters of the Damned: Mork Borg x Quill—”Letters of the Damned is a supplement for Quill that immerses the player in the dark fantasy world of MÖRK BORG. Take on the roles of the Damned Sovereign, Eldritch Scholar or the Dirge Poet, among others as you use your abilities and cunning to craft letters as part of a five scenario campaign. Attempt to create a ritual, taking care to choose the right ingredients; charm yourself into a cult to destroy its leader, use diplomacy to avert war in Blighthold and use dark alchemy to try resurrect a companion.” “In Letters of the Damned you, the player, solve challenges through the written word.” See also Quill: A Letter-Writing Roleplaying Game for a Single Player [Itch, DTRPG]
• “Kingdomino is turning an ancient game piece into the next hit board game franchise. A preview of Kingdomino Origins with designer Bruno Cathala.”—”Today, some consider dominoes in the same category as blocks and other children’s playthings. But the objects date back to 13th century China, where they were originally a kind of playing card used in many different games. Later, dominoes appeared in Italy in the 18th century. They’re still a common tool used to play many different kinds of folk games today. ‘Everybody knows dominoes, because it reminds you to your [childhood],’ Cathala said, ‘but for me — for me — I never played a domino game which was interesting to me. So it was a good way to use this game component to create something.’ The result was a game that focused on creating landscapes on the table.”
• “Can We Ever Look at Titian’s Paintings the Same Way Again? Great is what this art is, yet it raises doubts about whether any art, however ‘great,’ can be considered exempt from moral scrutiny.”
• “New ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ Live-Action Cast Looks Different From Last Time. M. Night Shyamalan’s 2006 remake of the beloved Nickelodeon cartoon was criticized for whitewashing the original characters.” “‘I realized I couldn’t control the creative direction of the series, but I could control how I responded. So, I chose to leave the project,’ DiMartino wrote in a lengthy August 2020 blog post. He added that ‘whatever version ends up on-screen, it will not be what Bryan and I had envisioned or intended to make.'”
• Watch “Guest Host Sarah Silverman on Vax Mandates, Bisexual Robin & Greatest Plague Facing Our Nation“—”What’s next with this stuff? Before kids can go to school, they’ll have to get a shot for polio and diphtheria. Tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, hepatitis B. Oh, wait, they already do that.” “I think there should be specific bars that we let the unvaccinated keep. Like Dave & Busters. Or Cabo Wabo.”
• By the by, the intro and extro of Marvel’s What If …? series on Disney+ is the Twilight Zone / Outer Limits mashup I didn’t know I needed. Also, Captain Carter!
• Tweet thread—”24 years after “Chasing Amy”, Kevin Smith has finally figured out what lesbians really want: specifically, a jacked-up Lena Headey and a muscle queen Sarah Michelle Gellar in melee combat. (also, Mark Hamill. the gays love Mark Hamill)”
• “Alex Proyas Is Developing a Dark City Series And It Could Answer a Lot Of Questions“—”The setup suggests a million questions that don’t need answering within the framework of the movie, but could be explored in a series that looks at the creation of this wild experiment.” “Proyas gives no hints about what such a series might focus on, or how it may or may not connect to his recent short film, ‘Mask of the Evil Apparition,’ which is also set in the Dark City universe. But this is a rare care where something like an origin story might actually be fascinating.” “Proyas’s “Mask of the Evil Apparition” is currently streaming as part of the Popcorn Frights Festival.” Mask of the Evil Apparition.
• Also, how did I not know about this before? “Exclusive: Taika Waititi’s Animated ‘Flash Gordon’ Movie Is Now Live-Action. John Davis and John Fox are producing the sci-fi film, which will harken back to the original comics.” Also tweet—”Launch your Flash Gordon™ RPG campaign now so you’re ready for the upcoming live action feature film from Taika Waititi!”
• “SATAN’S SERVANT: The Horror Film Made By Teens For $2000. While their peers are making 30-second TikToks, these 18-year-olds just dropped their first feature on streaming.”
• Watch “I found the heaviest distortion pedal and used it on harp“—”Prepare yourselves, djentlemen. Nepenthes by Electrofoods is the heaviest distortion pedal I could find, and today we’re trying it out on not one, but two harps. The Electrofoods Nepenthes makes the harp sound like a BEAST~.”
• Online screenings of The Green Knight, another wild A24 movie I’ve mentioned before, available on web, Apple TV, and Roku. “An epic fantasy adventure based on the timeless Arthurian legend, The Green Knight tells the story of Sir Gawain (Dev Patel), King Arthur’s reckless and headstrong nephew, who embarks on a daring quest to confront the eponymous Green Knight, a gigantic emerald-skinned stranger and tester of men. Gawain contends with ghosts, giants, thieves, and schemers in what becomes a deeper journey to define his character and prove his worth in the eyes of his family and kingdom by facing the ultimate challenger. From visionary filmmaker David Lowery comes a fresh and bold spin on a classic tale from the knights of the round table.”

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