“Fall Of The House Of Usher Trailer: Mike Flanagan’s Final Netflix Show Revealed. The Fall of the House of Usher trailer reveals creator Mike Flanagan’s final Netflix horror series, which is based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The first trailer for The Fall of the House Of Usher, based on Poe’s short story and his other works, has been released. The Netflix miniseries is created by Mike Flanagan, known for The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass. The Fall of the House Of Usher features familiar faces from Flanagan’s past projects, along with Mark Hamill.”

Also “‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ – Poster for Mike Flanagan’s Netflix Series Introduces the Family“—”Based on the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Mike Flanagan‘s final series for Netflix is ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ and it’s headed our way this Halloween season. The limited series from Intrepid Pictures is ‘based on multiple works from Poe,’ and Netflix recently announced that ‘Usher’ will premiere on October 12, 2023.”

Watch “The Fall of the House of Usher | Official Trailer | Netflix”

“She’s coming for them all.

In this wicked series from Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House) and based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, ruthless siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher have built Fortunato Pharmaceuticals into an empire of wealth, privilege and power. But past secrets come to light when the heirs to the Usher dynasty start dying at the hands of a mysterious woman from their youth.”

“Archaeologists have unearthed the oldest known wooden structure, and it’s almost half a million years old. The simple structure — found along a riverbank in Zambia — is made up of two interlocking logs, with a notch deliberately crafted into the upper piece to allow them to fit together at right angles, according to a new study of cut marks made by stone tools. Geoff Duller, a professor of geography and Earth sciences at the University of Aberystwyth in the United Kingdom, was part of the team that made the discovery in 2019. He said the structure, excavated upstream of Kalambo Falls near Zambia’s border with Tanzania, probably would have been part of a wooden platform used as a walkway, to keep food or firewood dry or perhaps as a base on which to build a dwelling. A digging stick and other wooden tools were found at the same site.” “That the wood has remained in place and intact for half a million years is extraordinary. And it gives us this real insight, this window into this time period … It’s completely changed my view of what people were capable of that time.” “The discovery challenges the prevailing view that Stone Age humans led a nomadic lifestyle … Kalambo Falls would have provided a reliable source of water and the surrounding forest ample food, perhaps allowing for a more settled existence.” “At the very least, they’re putting a huge amount of effort into this place” “The wooden structure has no real parallel in the archaeological record”—”‘Extraordinary’ structure has no real parallel in the archaeological record, scientists say”

Discovered 2019, published 2023: “Evidence for the earliest structural use of wood at least 476,000 years ago” —”Wood artefacts rarely survive from the Early Stone Age since they require exceptional conditions for preservation; consequently, we have limited information about when and how hominins used this basic raw material. We report here on the earliest evidence for structural use of wood in the archaeological record. Waterlogged deposits at the archaeological site of Kalambo Falls, Zambia, dated by luminescence to at least 476 ± 23 kyr ago (ka), preserved two interlocking logs joined transversely by an intentionally cut notch. This construction has no known parallels in the African or Eurasian Palaeolithic. The earliest known wood artefact is a fragment of polished plank from the Acheulean site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel, more than 780 ka. Wooden tools for foraging and hunting appear 400 ka in Europe, China9 and possibly Africa. At Kalambo we also recovered four wood tools from 390 ka to 324 ka, including a wedge, digging stick, cut log and notched branch. The finds show an unexpected early diversity of forms and the capacity to shape tree trunks into large combined structures. These new data not only extend the age range of woodworking in Africa but expand our understanding of the technical cognition of early hominins, forcing re-examination of the use of trees in the history of technology.”

Also

“Hominins built with wood 476,000 years ago. Understanding the timeline of technological developments sheds light on early societies. A remarkable finding in Africa of a structure made from shaped wood provides clues about our hominin relatives.”

“These ancient whittled logs could be the earliest known wooden structure. Stacked timbers dated to roughly 476,000 years ago show that ancient hominins worked with wood.”

Heretic’s Fork by 9FingerGames, from Ravenage Games. “Dear candidate, we are pleased to invite you to take up the position of manager of Hell. You will punish sinners by using our deck-building computer system to construct hellish towers capable of keeping the endless hordes of the underworld in check. Best of luck!”

Also “Work an office job keeping sinners in hell via tower defense in Heretic’s Fork. Deckbuilding roguelike tower defense with a menu-driven metaplot.”—”Among the shocking variety of roguelikes, deckbuilders, tower defenses, and deckbuilding roguelike tower defenses released in past years, recent release Heretic’s Fork stands out for me because the menu screen has the aesthetics of like a prototype of Windows 95 or whatever. That’s part of the game, too, because you get weird stuff that lives on your desktop and weird files to open and emails from your coworkers at your job where you keep ‘the endless hordes of the underworld in check.’ Which honestly whips butt, and I love it.”

“It one of the last sessions on the main stage at the annual political gathering of the Christian right, hosted by Perkins’s Family Research Council. And Perkins was giving his blessing to the movement’s most promising public face: the Christian parent. Holding back tears, Atterbery read from a printout the tragic story of how she had refused to accept her teenager’s gender transition, prompting her child to run away at the age of 16 and become homeless.” “Her child is now 23 and, Atterbery confirmed in an interview with me, unaware that his mother is sharing his story on a national stage to serve a fast-moving political project whose ultimate goal is to ban transition-related care for adults like him.” “In this narrative of good versus evil, of Christians versus demons, of the gender binary versus ‘gender ideology,’ it is not the transgender child suffering from homelessness who is the victim but the parent who rejects that child. The Christian right believes that parents like Atterbery are its greatest hope for political redemption in the post-Roe era.” “It’s not that these groups have stopped working on abortion—but with public support for abortion rights surging, they have good reason to deemphasize it in public. The rapid evolution was plain to see.” “That devotion to gender essentialism has always animated the Christian right; what’s new is the intensity with which it is now focused on trans people. And as that focus intensifies, the rhetoric itself is darkening. I lost count of the number of times speakers mentioned demons or the ‘demonic agenda’ they believe is at work on the left.” “This is how they hope to win: by convincing you that trans kids are our country’s most pressing political and spiritual problem, and by convincing Christian parents to isolate those children from schools and technology. If you are wondering why the Christian right is so focused on parental control, beyond the fact that they think it is a winning political message, consider that it is integral to the survival of their movement.” “To build power, especially now that it can no longer rally the base around abortion, Christian conservatives will not only have to keep hold of their own children; they will have to reach beyond the base. So, in the election to come, when you hear about ‘parental rights,’ know that message for what it is: the latest adaptation of a sophisticated political movement that is coming for your vote.”—”At the Vote Pray Stand Summit, Christian Parents and Their ‘Rights’ Take Center Stage. The movement that helped end Roe is embracing a political strategy that wraps the demonization of trans people in the innocuous-sounding catchphrase ‘parental rights.'”

“Five flamingos that showed up in Wisconsin to wade along a Lake Michigan beach attracted a big crowd of onlookers eager to see the unusual visitors venturing far from their usual tropical setting.” “‘This is huge. This is unbelievable,’ said Edelhuber, an avid bird watcher and photographer. The sighting was unexpected but not a total shock because of recent reports of flamingos in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania, said Ryan Brady, conservation biologist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Wildlife biologists hypothesized that the flamingos were pushed north in late August by the strong winds of Hurricane Idalia, the Journal Sentinel reported. The typical range of the American flamingo is Florida and other Gulf Coast states as well as the Caribbean and northern South America.”—”Flamingos in Wisconsin? Tropical birds visit Lake Michigan beach in a first for the northern state.”

“A University of Hawaiʻi-led discovery of an immense bubble 820 million light years from Earth is believed to be a fossil-like remnant of the birth of the universe. Astronomer Brent Tully from the UH Institute for Astronomy and his team unexpectedly found the bubble within a web of galaxies. The entity has been given the name Hoʻoleilana, a term drawn from the Kumulipo, a Hawaiian creation chant evoking the origin of structure. The new findings published in The Astrophysical Journal, mention these massive structures are predicted by the Big Bang theory, as the result of 3D ripples found in the material of the early universe, known as Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO). ‘We were not looking for it. It is so huge that it spills to the edges of the sector of the sky that we were analyzing,’ explained Tully. ‘As an enhancement in the density of galaxies it is a much stronger feature than expected. The very large diameter of one billion light years is beyond theoretical expectations. If its formation and evolution are in accordance with theory, this BAO is closer than anticipated, implying a high value for the expansion rate of the universe.'”—”Vast bubble of galaxies discovered, given Hawaiian name. The immense bubble has been given the name Hoʻoleilana, a term drawn from the Kumulipo, a Hawaiian creation chant.” [cache]

See “Ho’oleilana: An Individual Baryon Acoustic Oscillation?“—”Theory of the physics of the early hot universe leads to a prediction of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) that has received confirmation from the pairwise separations of galaxies in samples of hundreds of thousands of objects. Evidence is presented here for the discovery of a remarkably strong individual contribution to the BAO signal at z = 0.068, an entity that is given the name Ho’oleilana. The radius of the 3D structure is 155h^-1₇₅ Mpc. At its core is the Boötes supercluster. The Sloan Great Wall, Center for Astrophysics Great Wall, and Hercules complex all lie within the BAO shell. The interpretation of Ho’oleilana as a BAO structure with our preferred analysis implies a value of the Hubble constant of 76.9^+8.2_-4.8km s^-1 Mpc^-1“

“Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O’Connor for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.”—”Ig® Nobel Prize Winners (2023)”

See, from 2018, published 2020: “The the the the induction of jamais vu in the laboratory: word alienation and semantic satiation“—”Jamais vu is a phenomenon operationalised as the opposite of déjà vu, i.e. finding subjectively unfamiliar something that we know to be familiar. We sought to document that the subjective experience of jamais vu can be produced in word alienation tasks, hypothesising that déjà vu and jamais vu are similar experiential memory phenomena. Participants repeatedly copied words until they felt ‘peculiar’, had completed the task, or had another reason to stop. About two-thirds of all participants (in about one-third of all trials) reported strange subjective experiences during the task. Participants reported feeling peculiar after about thirty repetitions, or one minute. We describe these experiences as jamais vu. This experimentally induced phenomenon was related to real-world experiences of unfamiliarity. Although we replicated known patterns of correlations with déjà vu (age and dissociative experiences), the same pattern was not found for our experimental analogue of jamais vu, suggesting some differences between the two phenomena. However, in daily life, those people who had déjà vu more frequently also had jamais vu more frequently. Findings are discussed with reference to the progress that has been made in déjà vu research in recent years, with a view to fast-tracking our understanding of jamais vu.” “Jamais vu is a memory phenomenon related to the experience of déjà vu – often operationalised as the very opposite: i.e. finding subjectively unfamiliar something that we know to be familiar (Brown, 2003; Moulin, 2017). The term comes from the French ‘never seen’. Descriptions of this experience in daily life arise when processing or experiencing faces and places (such as the fleeting sensation that a well-known person looks different or strange, or temporarily finding a familiar environment novel). It can also arise for procedural acts such as playing a musical instrument or driving a car: one can be performing a repetitive act and suddenly have a sense of the complete loss of fluency. Perhaps the most common example is with spelling of words. Very occasionally with familiar words, we have the (usually brief) sensation that what we have written is unaccountably wrong, or that the written form of a word looks strange or peculiar.”

Also “Jamais vu: the science behind eerie opposite of déjà vu“—”repetition can do something even more uncanny and unusual. The opposite of déjà vu is ‘jamais vu’, when something you know to be familiar feels unreal or novel in some way. In our recent research, which has just won an Ig Nobel award for literature, we investigated the mechanism behind the phenomenon. Jamais vu may involve looking at a familiar face and finding it suddenly unusual or unknown. Musicians have it momentarily – losing their way in a very familiar passage of music. You may have had it going to a familiar place and becoming disorientated or seeing it with ‘new eyes’. It’s an experience which is even rarer than déjà vu and perhaps even more unusual and unsettling.”

“Professor Daniel Schwemer, head of the Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Germany, is working on the cuneiform finds from the excavation. He reports that the Hittite ritual text refers to the new idiom as the language of the land of Kalašma. This is an area on the north-western edge of the Hittite heartland, probably in the area of present-day Bolu or Gerede. The discovery of another language in the Boğazköy-Hattusha archives is not entirely unexpected, as Daniel Schwemer explains: ‘The Hittites were uniquely interested in recording rituals in foreign languages.’ Such ritual texts, written by scribes of the Hittite king reflect various Anatolian, Syrian, and Mesopotamian traditions and linguistic milieus. The rituals provide valuable glimpses into the little known linguistic landscapes of Late Bronze Age Anatolia, where not just Hittite was spoken. Thus cuneiform texts from Boğazköy-Hattusha include passages in Luwian and Palaic, two other Anatolian-Indo-European languages closely related to Hittite, as well as Hattic, a non-Indo-European language. Now the language of Kalasma can be added to these.” “Being written in a newly discovered language the Kalasmaic text is as yet largely incomprehensible. Daniel Schwemer’s colleague, Professor Elisabeth Rieken (Philipps-Universität Marburg), a specialist in ancient Anatolian languages, has confirmed that the idiom belongs to the family of Anatolian-Indo-European languages. According to Rieken, despite its geographic proximity to the area where Palaic was spoken, the text seems to share more features with Luwian. How closely the language of Kalasma is related to the other Luwian dialects of Late Bronze Age Anatolia will be the subject of further investigation.”—”New Indo-European Language Discovered. An excavation in Turkey has brought to light an unknown Indo-European language. Professor Daniel Schwemer, an expert for the ancient near east from Würzburg, is involved in investigating the discovery.”

“All roads lead to Rome—and apparently so do all male thoughts. Across social media, women have been encouraged to ask the men in their life how often they think about the Roman empire and to record the answer. To their surprise (recounted in videos posted all over TikTok, Instagram, and more), many men purport to think about the Roman empire quite a bit.” “These men could surely learn something from Cullen Murphy. An Atlantic editor at large and the author of the 2007 book Are We Rome?, Murphy has spent decades thinking about the Roman empire. His work focuses on all of the analogies between ancient Rome and the modern United States, and what, if anything, the analogies portend. ‘The comparisons, of course, can be facile,’ he wrote in a 2021 magazine story reopening the question. ‘Still, I am not immune to preoccupation with the Roman past.'”—”The Brain of a Man Who Is Always Thinking About Ancient Rome. Cullen Murphy wrote a book on the Roman empire—and sees parallels everywhere.”

Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Cullen Murphy.

“What went wrong in imperial Rome, and how we can avoid it … The rise and fall of ancient Rome has been on American minds since the beginning of our republic. Depending on who’s doing the talking, the history of Rome serves as either a triumphal call to action—or a dire warning of imminent collapse. In this ‘provocative and lively’ book, Cullen Murphy points out that today we focus less on the Roman Republic than on the empire that took its place, and reveals a wide array of similarities between the two societies (New York Times). Looking at the blinkered, insular culture of our capitals; the debilitating effect of bribery in public life; the paradoxical issue of borders; and the weakening of the body politic through various forms of privatization, Murphy persuasively argues that we most resemble Rome in the burgeoning corruption of our government and in our arrogant ignorance of the world outside—two things that must be changed if we are to avoid Rome’s fate.”

Also

“Why Are So Many Men Obsessed With the Roman Empire? A new meme shows men are way more into ancient history than we realized. Mike Duncan — host of the popular podcast ‘The History of Rome’ — explains why.”

“Ask your husband how often he thinks about the Roman Empire – the answer might surprise you. Social media has been a source of wonder and amusement this week as a viral post revealed the hidden obsession of men the world over… ”

“Are Men Obsessed With the Roman Empire? Yes, Say Men. Women are asking the men in their lives how often they think about ancient Rome. Their responses, posted online, can be startling in their frequency.”

… Meanwhile, here’s what’s at the library if you search for “Roman Empire”

The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Karl Ove Knausgaard, trans Martin Aitken.

“From the internationally bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard, a sprawling and deeply human novel that questions the responsibilities we have toward one another and ourselves—and the limits of what we can understand about life itself

In 1986, twenty-year-old Syvert Løyning returns from the military to his mother’s home in southern Norway. One evening, his dead father comes to him in a dream. Realizing that he doesn’t really know who his father was, Syvert begins to investigate his life and finds clues pointing to the Soviet Union. What he learns changes his past and undermines the entire notion of who he is. But when his mother becomes ill, and he must care for his little brother, Joar, on his own, he no longer has time or space for lofty speculations.

In present-day Russia, Alevtina Kotov, a biologist working at Moscow University, is traveling with her young son to the home of her stepfather, to celebrate his eightieth birthday. As a student, Alevtina was bright, curious and ambitious, asking the big questions about life and human consciousness. But as she approaches middle-age, most of that drive has gone, and she finds herself in a place she doesn’t want to be, without really understanding how she got there. Her stepfather, a musician, raised her as his own daughter, and she was never interested in learning about her biological father; when she finally starts looking into him, she learns that he died many years ago and left two sons, Joar and Syvert.

Years later, when Syvert and Alevtina meet in Moscow, two very different approaches to life emerge. And as a bright star appears in the sky, it illuminates the wonder of human existence and the mysteries that exist beyond our own worldview. Set against the political and cultural backdrop of both the 1980s and the present day, The Wolves of Eternity is an expansive and affecting book about relations—to one another, to nature, to the dead.”

Also

“Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Novel for Our Precarious Times. ‘The Wolves of Eternity’ wrestles with conflicting worldviews in a tale of intersecting lives.”