So I look up from Scarfolk Council at the supermarket and see this.

Who doesn’t miss the Cold War?

I had no idea Harry Clarke had done stained glass works.

Jeremy Duncan

http://publicdomainreview.org/2016/10/12/harry-clarkes-looking-glass///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Adam Thornton Paolo Greco Jeremy Duncan what are your plans for Garycon?

Spoilery discussion of the final episodes of Narcos…

Do not click if you’re still watching it.

No really, this is going to be about the end of season 2.

One more line I think and then it’ll cut off.

I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er dale and hill

OK, this should be far enough…

…

…

So.

How Christological was that ending? Is it just me, or did we get 40 days wandering in the wilderness (during which he stops and smells the roses, takes simple joy in life etc), a reckoning with a former disciple in the garden, a last-minute temptation and then finally sacrifice, after Pablo has come to a peaceful resolution with his path. In this context, actually, even his dream about becoming President is like the Devil showing him the world at his feet, although in this case it’s avowedly a fantasy.

Second point: for most of the series there’s a careful alliance between the story that’s being told and the historical record – we see the similarities and differences between the actors in our drama and the original political actors, shown in newsreel footage, and that distance is carefully maintained: we know that we’re not necessarily seeing things as they actually happened but (something like) a story filtered through the eyes of our DEA agent narrator. But for Pablo’s final days, who is the source? Pablo’s father is shown to be a man of few words, fewer narrative constructs, and absolute judgments. Gustavo learns almost nothing from his brief meeting over ice cream. Limon dies. So who is our witness to Pablo’s Final Seven Words?

That is a lot of funnels.

Used on a display at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY

http://www.museumofplay.org

…where they have ODnD supplements 1 and 2 under glass, together with 1st ed. Call of Cthulhu and a scene-setting suit of armour (chain, pot helm).

I’m not sure how to classify this model. I’m slightly afraid of calling it “folk art” and then finding an actual 1901 battleship with 7 funnels. Overall it doesn’t look quite right, to my far-from-expert eye. The radio antenna is spot on, though.

Academia finally catches up with DnD

https://www.academia.edu/28866119/Heritage_and_Violence//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

After a few years of the Beast Rabban, they’ll welcome Feyd-Ruatha as a saviour.

just spotted – Republican elephant with Trump quiff. Cannot decide if joke or not… which I guess makes it the perfect bit of campaign schwag.

ARE YOU BRITISH ENOUGH?

Can you trace your ancestry back to William the Conqueror?

– if so, you’re a bloody Frog. Get out.

Were all 16 of your great-great-grandparents British citizens, and have they kept their bloodlines clean since then?

– no Indians or other Empire scum! We’re talking proper rain-stopped-the-cricket-match British.

Can you sing Hearts of Oak? Can you avoid crying while doing so?

– no poncey harmonies or polyphony!

Are you from one of the dubious outer fronds of the British Isles, like Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Man, Lundy, Fastnet, Dogger or Liverpool?

– you’re probably some sort of Celt. Stay in your frond! Keep your bloody bagpipes out of England! Keep your hair under control for God’s sake!

Do you recognise that Chicken Tikka Marsala is a clean and proper original British invention?

– hang on, this one might be a trick question – does it mean the people who invented it were British?

why does my phone have a ka’aba emoticon?

when would I use it?

🕋

Civ question: to get the cultural victory, you have to overcome all the other players with your tourism/influence, right?

…does that mean, if a player has been eliminated, you have to bring them back from the dead?

Asking because I “liberated” Philadelphia for the previously expunged/defeated Washington and poof, there was Wash again, thoroughly disgusted with my warmongering ways and not a bit grateful for his resurrection (I actually had no hand in killing him the first time). And when I consult the Victory Progress screen it shows all the AI players I’ve defeated as people over whom I have no influence.

…so am I right in thinking that to get this victory I would have to give one city from each defeated player in trade to an existing other player, then conquer them and liberate them to bring the other players back?*

….I can live with that, but it’s a strange, strange idea.

* the same trick might work on City States to make them your loyal allies? I recently liberated Buenos Aires from Germany (I briefly wondered if BA was a “German city” and if this was some kind of Nazi sympathizer/Argentine nationalist joke) and it got me something like 100 influence points from them.

Plays Civ: “ha ha this is so biased and colonial but I guess you gotta have a forceful and forthright theory of history to make a video game out of it. So… uncomfortable kudos! Also good job on finding all those ‘great leaders’ to hang cultural differences on, that’s a neat game mechanic for explaining complex ideas.”

Reads NY high school history curriculum: “oh.”

(. . )

whatever the special magic was, that made my wife and my son fans of the Miss Peregrine books, it didn’t survive into the movie, which is a serviceable pre-holiday romp but little more.

Eva Green’s a bit subdued and models more than she acts – my biggest disappointment. Terence Stamp’s lovely, of course. Sam Jackson’s clearly having more fun than anyone else and if he interrupted people more, this would be his Jack Sparrow performance.

best laugh in Civ so far: if you have the Pentagon it makes upgrading your military units cheaper.

Second best laugh: to make Marines you need Penicillin. I suspect they have some Navy boys on the dev team.

this is what you’ve been looking for: exactly how the people who made Flapjack are related to the ones who made Adventure Time and Gravity Falls and so on.

Originally shared by Sarah Perry-Shipp

Family Chart of Storyboard Artists and Their Own Shows

http://pm1.narvii.com/6049/27aa6d354526e8ca92cfb3bed60d25e160b4ac80_hq.jpg//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Jason Kielbasa the fact that 100001091057100001 1 wants to join cult of the Tartary might be the most Tartary thing ever

That three characters meme got me thinking – not about describing myself (meh) but just about groups of 3 characters that would be great to mash together for NPCs.

…and now I can’t stop.

Pete’s Dragon is Edward Scissorhands for dogs.

Originally shared by Richard G

TIL the Society of the Rosy Cross founded an Egyptian museum in San Jose, in 1928.

On the one hand, this fills me with adventurous expectancy – how Weird Tales can you get?

On the other, what do you do, exactly, if you’re a respectable curator of Egyptian antiquities and you want to participate in broad scholarly debates and so on, if you work with/at this institution?

Their mission statement says they use trans-disciplinary approaches to increasing knowledge about the past, present, and future (emphasis added). They’re developing a Rosicrucian Alchemy Museum with a working Alchemy Laboratory with work stations for up to 12 students. Classes on plant and mineral alchemy will be presented by visiting alchemists and herbalists.

Of particular interest, perhaps, to trey causey Kenneth Hite

Have any of you guys been there? What’s it like?

http://www.egyptianmuseum.org///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

TIL the Rosicrucian Society founded an Egyptian museum in San Jose, in 1928.

On the one hand, this fills me with adventurous expectancy – how Weird Tales can you get?

On the other, what do you do, exactly, if you’re a respectable curator of Egyptian antiquities and you want to participate in broad scholarly debates and so on, if you work with/at this institution?

Their mission statement says they use trans-disciplinary approaches to increasing knowledge about the past, present, and future (emphasis added). They’re developing a Rosicrucian Alchemy Museum with a working Alchemy Laboratory with work stations for up to 12 students. Classes on plant and mineral alchemy will be presented by visiting alchemists and herbalists.

Of particular interest, perhaps, to trey causey Kenneth Hite

Have any of you guys been there? What’s it like?

http://www.egyptianmuseum.org///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

My daughter started watching this standard Disney billionaire family comedy thing called Jessie and as usual it has a foreign character who the other characters bully for laughs. This time he’s hilariously Indian and goes “great Ganesh I’m a human samosa” and shit like that. He has a pet giant monitor lizard and sometimes scratches like a monkey.

So. Then I found out Disney remade this series for Indian audiences as Oye Jessie and my mind was blown – how could they sell this Indophobia in India? Well…

The Indian character is now from Sri Lanka, where people have giant lizard pets, natch.

The obnoxious American kid doing the bullying here is now “very unhygienic” because he’s from Kolkata.

The recently-adopted “Ugandan” girl (here only showing African-American characterization… I leave that one as an exercise for the reader) is now a native of Mumbai, where Oye Jessie is set.

How did it work out? The first 16 episodes of the season were aired one after the other every week until the series suddenly went on hiatus starting from February 23, 2014… The series’ current status is unknown as there have been no official announcements

Globalization is hard, apparently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw-70IjIbAU//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Adventure Time, 1930 edition

(aka The Land of Make Believe Map, from the David Rumsey Map Collection at Stanford)

Korea is the most hilarious power I’ve played in Civ V so far. Starting in a jungle, you can out-science everyone, so that when they come at you with swordsmen, you have medieval rocket launchers.

OK, so far so good so techno-fascist, well done you found murderous brainiacs.

Except those rockets keep being the weapon of choice right up to the radio era. People come at you with cannons, you rocket them. They come back with artillery and… if you know what you’re doing with the rockets, it doesn’t matter. Even gatling guns aren’t really better if you’re defending a fort.

Also their renaissance ironclad galley is the toughest ship until the actual ironclad. 

Originally shared by Chris Handley

It’s the Migou clearly.

http://gizmodo.com/pluto-is-emitting-x-rays-and-thats-really-weird-1786709072//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

my son spotted your blog being referenced in Sam’s Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours (Rogers Cadenhead, 2014).

You’re an example website to link to, alongside political commentator Juan Cole and comic book guy Mark Evanier and someone called Rafe Colburn, of whom I have never heard.

The book is full of miscellaneous factoids. I guess you’re one of them? It’s in Chapter 18: handling errors, which sounds ominous

https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Yourself-Hours-Covering-Android/dp/0672335751//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

this is like the 7th playtest of Tartary Mechawrestling and disturbingly after 4 hours nobody has yet blown up, nor has any giant fireball consumed the map. I honestly hadn’t accounted for this possibility. Maybe it needs to be more unstable?

…it definitely needs fewer moving parts and/or a physical mishap tracker, like the health markers in King of Tokyo.

much as I like Space 1889’s setting and Oenotrian freedom fighters (Greeks in red skins! Onion layers of colonial critique and Orientalism!) and even the hull designs of their sky galleons… the sail plans always felt like a failure of imagination – just taking a sea-ship and putting it in the sky (cf every damn flying (Disney) galleon ever, from Treasure Planet to Pan). How would this actually handle in a wind? Tip right over? Why no undersails, at least, or conical rigs or (probably most practical) kites?

How would you ever get that magical mix of lift and drag that allows you to sail across or even a little against the wind?

Originally shared by rig torok

Space 1889 Cover by © Fetsch

https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2016/01/05/tudor-ordnance-artillery-and-ballistics/

https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2016/01/05/tudor-ordnance-artillery-and-ballistics///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

The battle aboard the Pirate Ship continued this week. Many of the heroes aboard the ship were missing — injured and retreated to the longboat, while reinforcements arrived from shore on another boat. The Pirate Wizard used his scroll of Gust of Wind to knock some of the new attackers into the sea, while the outnumbered heroes on the deck retreated to join their comrades on their boat. The Druid used his Thorn Whip spell to pull the evil Wizard down to his watery doom and let the adventurers begin to rally and plan another assault on the Sea Ghost. It was too late however as the Pirate crew used the distraction to hoist the anchor and set sail away from the pursuing adventurers.

Glim, 4th Level Gnome Wizard – 4651 xp

Einar, 4th Level Half-Elf Ranger – 2917 xp

Felnar, 4th Level Human Figter – 2917 xp

Pituitar, 3rd Level Elf Fighter – 2589 xp

Dolph, 3rd Level Human Fighter – 2484 xp

Belladonna, 3rd Level Elf Fighter – 2439 xp

Melgron, 3rd Level Halfling Rogue – 1734 xp

Jemna, 3rd Level Dwarf Cleric – 1689 xp

Flora, 2nd Level Gnome Druid – 564 xp

Eldon, 2nd Level Gnome Druid – 450xp

Opal, 2nd Level Elf Wizard – 330 xp

Guest characters from our other campaign (Felan and Trikis) each gain +100xp.

http://stuartdraws.tumblr.com/post/149817417647/the-battle-aboard-the-pirate-ship-continued-this//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Tonight’s game picks up from where we left off last week with the battle aboard the Pirate Ship. At least one of the players from last week will not be returning, and I had the AC too low on a couple of the NPCs last week — so it’ll be interesting to see how that affects the 2nd part of this battle! 🙂

finished Stranger Things,

Spoilers ahead

da de da

wondering when the cut will strike

here we go

this must be enough surely…

…felt a little dissatisfied with the nostalgic approach, but that the incompleteness of explanation was reasonable. Still I wanted to know how our intrepid waifs got back out of the upside down, because that would probably tell me right there if the gate remained open. Which evidently it does, obscure but certain.

It did, however, remind me of a thought I’ve had before with CoC:

isn’t it weird how vulnerable we animals are to bullets? Like our whole bodies are rapid networks and interrupting any bit of us endangers the whole thing. Compare plants, or The Demogorgon. There’s really no good reason for other things to be similarly vulnerable, but we’re just that used to being the top predator.

I probably don’t want to bother with the inevitable second season unless they do something different. Although I will watch just about anything with those kids in it. Maybe doing bank heists.

Every time Cugel rapes someone it surprises me all over again.

And then I think of all the deaths he causes (usually not by his own hand) and lives he ruins and I think yeah, fits the pattern, I guess.

There’s an awful lot of monomaniacal people in The Dying Earth.

So the heiress to the Winchester Rifles fortune bought an unfinished house and just kept expanding it for 38 years, adding rooms, reworking the existing ones, and generally making a Zak Sabbath bricolage out of the whole thing.

It makes no sense, it obeys no obvious rules, but it’s made entirely out of familiar American house elements.

You know what it looks like? The product of rolling repeatedly on a random table. Add a window – where? Roll a 1: in the floor. How many steps for this staircase? 33. That carries it right up to the ceiling! So be it.

http://mobile.winchestermysteryhouse.com/#photosid

https://goo.gl/images/DAawrX

What scale should I use for a tactical hexmap/battlemat? How many feet to the hex and how do I measure hexes (distance between opposite sides or corners)?

Thinking of making some ship deck plans.

“Are you English? You have a lovely accent. Downton Abbey – I am downstairs, you are upstairs. I cook for you.”

ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY, YO

Obviously Duterte’s purging his opponents, camouflaged under a massive public massacre of mostly poor people. Standard dictator stuff.

Except this is an amazingly irresponsible low that even Hitler or Stalin never stooped to, and it’s hard to imagine how the state could ever recover from it. “Go ahead and murder people, our police won’t bother to investigate” is just about the most direct way to fail your state. Institutional paranoia and terror look kind of good in comparison.

Could it possibly be justified? Can the drug problem be so bad that a blanket call to vigilante murder squads is the only remedy? No. This has to be worse than any extant problem.

Originally shared by James Mullen

My initial reaction to this is “Jesus fucking Christ!”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-37172002//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

OK Scrap Princess cole long Jeremy Duncan and others: superheroes who should’ve been more famous… so far my kids have come up with;

Bat Peach

Barman

The Flush

Supperman

Fat Cat Rat Bat

The Lick

There is so much going on here I don’t even know what to think about it, but this detail caught my eye:

infected and noninfected subjects differ in their sexual behavior, fantasies, and preferences when age, health, and the size of the place where they spent childhood were controlled

Are we talking about cupboards under the stairs here? Or family income?

via Andres Soolo and yes, I’d like to see these results replicated, and then I’d like to pick apart the categories and assumptions and sample sizes and so on before I believe a word of it.

Originally shared by Scot Stevenson

In agreement with our a priori hypothesis, [Toxoplasma]-infected subjects are more often aroused by their own fear, danger, and sexual submission although they practice more conventional sexual activities than Toxoplasma-free subjects.

The media is going to have a field day with this. I’d really, really like to see this one replicated at least once.

http://evp.sagepub.com/content/14/3/1474704916659746.abstract//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Look upon our works and despair.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2016/aug/25/fallen-cities-artists-captured-ruins-kabul-rome-in-pictures?CMP=share_btn_gp//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Chris Kutalik I just have to show off my chaos monk socks

one of my many reasons for not having a flag is I would never know when not to fly it at half mast.

All finished now that I’ve added the sail!

so I got into this weird little farmstead thing where they have a modest geyser and the whole place is covered with wards against the evil eye. Like one on every rafter and 50 in every tree. Regularly spaced along the walls. I’m expecting Miyazakian shenanigans any minute, like eat nothing, don’t fall asleep. Everyone in sight at all times. And there’s 50s memorabilia lying around and a bunch of hula hoops.

And I think obvious trap. Concentric circles make you a target

Paolo Greco Steve Sigety Noah Stevens tikind

Paolo Greco apparently the Tennessee Fainting Goat doesn’t actually faint – full, tragic story on the placards.

There’s a whole slew of disciplines gathered under the heading of “writing” or “storytelling.”

Chabon’s descriptive passages, his imagery and turns of phrase, are dazzlingly wonderful. The characters are charming, serviceable, but not for falling in love with. The setting is controlled and evocatively sketched. But the architecture of the story – how it gets from cause to effect and scene to scene – is slipshod, vaporous. And this I think is where he betrays an attitude that adventure stories are basically unserious, despite his evident enjoyment of them.

He is also sentimental about elephants, like Saramago. It makes me want to write a story that’s sentimental about octopods.

I am quibbling. It’s delightful: read it.

http://www.khazaria.com/chabon.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Fishermans Wharf, San Francisco

Poppy Smoke Pokemon.

…like the Somme but candy coloured? Or like Saki’s Birds of the Western Front but without any relief from the exploitation?

http://pokemontabletop.com/over-there-a-world-war-one-pokemon-campaign-a-retrospective///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

I never reshare stuff like this but dammit I do support transgender rights and it’s a fight worth fighting.

People, you have no say over other people’s identity or genitals. Get over it. This is a human rights issue.

Originally shared by Gennifer Bone

We are not going away.  We will not be beaten.

If you support transgender rights, share this image.

this here is pretty damn great for $25 a magnum. Yeah baby not just twice the wine but in one bottle so you drink it all anyway!

Also VOC label makes me feel like I’m working while I drink.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company

so am I right in thinking that google just stopped supporting all the “make your own maps” stuff and therefore my Tartary map with comments about all the places marked on it is gone?

…if I’m not right in thinking that, does anyone know how to access that data?

I just got to the point where Civ stops dicking you about if you’re going for the military victory – enter modern age, make an ideology (order), get 2 ideological buffs:

erm… socialist realism (+2 happiness from each monument)

young pioneers (+1 happiness from each workshop, factory etc).

Happiness goes from -1 to +38. I guess we’ll be ending Carthage, then. No need to keep redistributing cities to enemies.

So that’s how it works. Sorry, Carthage, your idea of a world conference is charming but apparently the game no longer really cares about it.

…I worry that I’m boring everyone with my Civ posts, but there’s a lot to critique in there.

One thing it’s making me feel, which surprises me: I totally get why dictators are unimpressed with UN type activites – the proposals are all such bullshit and the idea that we can resolve our differences by peace because war is unthinkable… just isn’t true if you don’t find war to be unthinkable. The basic ideology of the UN is that whatever violence was already done is fine, now we just have to maintain the status quo and concentrate on non-zero-sum ways of growing. And whatever violence you did before doesn’t count, it’s numbers of delegates that matter.

…and my Genghis/Suleiman persona goes yeah, right.

Another thing: you know when you’re doing war right? When your military commanders write yearning romantic poetry about the good old days when men tested themselves against the enemy’s steel and you didn’t know which way the fight would go, and so every victory was glorious, as opposed to these latter, fallen days when war is an industry and you never even really face the enemy directly. Yeah, no. Never lose a unit, attack from farther away than they can respond, only use melee forces to occupy cities. Boosh. I genuinely hadn’t thought about that before.

first 7 jobs:

Worker

Warrior

Settler

Scout

Archer

Monument

Granary

“The lost system of Antediluvian magick—the tightest of all wiz biz.”

I wish I had the flair of Adventure Time when DMing

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yag7506aRiA//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

I’ve been neglecting this recently, but this is the official home of Counter-colonial Heistcrawl. It’s been going on for a while in one form or another. I’m currently trying to get it into the form of a game I can actually run.

how did I not know about Stasis Engine ?

I have an aversion to elves. My Aral Sea is full of stranded, scavenged warships and metal-eating slugs. But this here is tasty enough to make me rethink my preconceptions:

Nothing good lives on salt pans: almost nothing at all can. It’s a natural mummifier, a preserver and a killer at once. It is full of the brittle dead.

Originally shared by Stasis Engine

The Aral Sea was frightening me. So I thought I’d put some frightening elves there.