basically I’m saying that Gatchaman and Hobbes are happy propaganda for some kind of Cthulhu Collective Monster -…

basically I’m saying that Gatchaman and Hobbes are happy propaganda for some kind of Cthulhu Collective Monster – once their wills have subsided they can become part of the Fiery Phoenix (or Leviathan) – godlike power, freedom from individual consciousness.

And Luke activates the treacherous poison long lying dormant in Vader – the Emperor took him in, made him an indispensable part of the Empire, but reckoned without this time-bomb inside him.

#whenattractfishgoespolitical

#declare

#lemongrab  

It must be possible to come up with an interesting game by deliberately confusing actors with the parts they play.

It must be possible to come up with an interesting game by deliberately confusing actors with the parts they play. Like in this Civil War thing if Doctor Strange got involved then Cap would end up facing two Sherlock Holmeses, one of which was also Smaug the dragon and Alan Turing.

I’m guessing Kevin Bacon and Michael Caine might be the biggest trump cards in this deck, but who would you have on your team? 3 musketeers actors only.

….right up front I think all Maggie Smith roles are improved by the realization that she’s secretly a witch.

Marvel Civil War: an outsider’s perspective

Marvel Civil War: an outsider’s perspective

Here’s the thing – Robert Downey Jr. has more charisma in his little toe than Evans, Hemsworth, Hiddleston and Pratt put together. And he’s playing the smart one.

And in a paladin vs rogue battle I don’t think I can bring myself to side with the paladin – too obvious.

Me, I’m with the charmed troll. And indifferent to the elf and dark elf. Wake me when the ent shows up.

I had one of those thoughts while thinking aloud on Clint Krause’s comments section that is almost certainly…

I had one of those thoughts while thinking aloud on Clint Krause’s comments section that is almost certainly complete bullshit but if it’s even a little bit right it would illuminate weird things in history. IOW a tempting but stupid hypothesis, terrible for a historian but maybe good for a novelist.

…what if the British government put ridiculous punitive duties on brandy, tea and other luxury goods in the 18th century in order to maintain the domestic shipping industry?

If the rate of return is too predictable – if profit margins drop too close to the point of not breaking even over the costs of repetitive risk, then only big players can afford to operate – those who can optimize their economies of scale and effectively command special rates from ports as monopoly or cartel suppliers. Fewer shippers inevitably means less shipbuilding and probably leads to rent-seeking on the part of shipping cartels.

But if a little smuggling, easily abandoned at need, can support a small shipping company, then that small shipper is encouraged to keep operating even if their ostensible bread-and-butter goods are making no profit at all.

High import duties have a clear effect on sale price (not necessarily 1:1 but you can manipulate that rate by more or less effective policing) so they generate a smuggler’s market, where the margin can be anything between the artificial duty-generated price and the costs to the shipper.

By hiking up duties on brandy, then, you not only incentivize local shipping industries, you also help control the price of grain and other staples.

….I could never understand the 18th/19th century Parliaments’ insistence on absurd 1000+% duties for particular luxury goods. At best I thought it showed that they must themselves be smugglers. But maybe they were buying domestic shipping security through sneaky subsidies.

/massive tangent: sorry if it’s not at all what you wanted

Not being a comics guy, I only just heard about Cloak & Dagger because they’re getting their own TV series.

Not being a comics guy, I only just heard about Cloak & Dagger because they’re getting their own TV series.

…..how is it possible that this has not yet been used as a poster for the male gamer = sex terrorist argument? Him: lurky, hoping his shyness makes him mysterious, can’t see his hands. Her: full-body booby shake, spray-on latex.

Was this actually intended as a critique of comics fandom from the beginning? He’s definitely Koothrappali (right down to the halted speech), she’s the image that Penny is perpetually supposed to undercut, I guess.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RobBush/posts/4MZFPpuzQyc

I’ll just leave this here

I’ll just leave this here

Originally shared by Jacob Hurst

I’ve been researching depravity over the past few days (for reasons), and while trying to find things that weren’t Roman I stumbled across some articles about Adélie Penguins. Turns out these dirty birdies utterly shocked and appalled some poor Edwardian researcher Dr. George Levick. So much so, that he wrote his notes of their sexual behavior in Greek so only the learned could read the sordid details. He printed a paper, but didn’t publish it, and after more digging than I expected, I was able to dredge up the whole text (not the raw notes, but his unpublished recap), and I share it now with you lovely individuals.

—————————-

ON their arrival at the rookery pairing takes place among the penguins, in the manner I have described elsewhere. Mated couples copulate very frequently; sometimes more than once a day, not only before the eggs have been laid, but for long after, and I have seen a cock copulating with a hen as she sat on her two eggs on the nest, and later, after the chicks were well grown.

It is evident that in a vast rookery such as that, at Cape Adare, when comparatively few unmated birds are left, many of these, scattered in that great crowd, may seek one another for many days, and that some, perhaps, never meet at all.

Owing, no doubt, to the fact that the season had arrived when their sexual functions were at the height of their activity, and in part to the sights and sounds which surrounded them constantly, cocks were often seen whose passions seemed to have passed beyond their control. Sometimes we saw these birds, after walking some distance, apparently in the vain search for hens, stand motionless and rigid upon the ground, then stiffening themselves, assume the attitude and go through the motions characteristic of the sexual act, in some cases actually ejecting their semen on to the ground.

This, however, was the least depraved of the acts which we saw. Strewn about all Antarctic rookeries are the dead bodies of many hundreds of penguins, from the adult to the newly-hatched chick, which have succumbed for various reasons during previous years. Owing to the low temperature prevailing, these bodies are preserved in good condition for a long time, several years passing in many cases before they lose their fresh appearance, whilst many of those that have died the year before are still preserved in good plumage.

On November 10th, i.e. when the season was already a month advanced, I saw a cock engaged in the sexual act upon the dead body of a white-throated Adélie of the previous year. This took somewhat over a minute, the position taken up by the cock differing in no way from that of normal copulation, and the whole act was gone through, down to the final depression of the cloaca and emission of semen.

On returning to the hut I told one of my companions what I had seen, and to my surprise he at once said that he had on several occasions seen the same thing done to dead bodies along the ice-foot. Later on, this sight was by no means uncommon.

As the season advanced, the number of unmated cocks increased to a great extent, partly from the reasons already given, partly owing to the large number of homes now being broken up owing to accidental destruction of the eggs, depredations of Skuas, etc., and also in a large measure to the ravages of the Sea-leopards gathered in the sea in the vicinity of the rookery. These unmated cocks congregate in little “hooligan” bands of half a dozen or more, and hang about the outskirts of the knolls, whose inhabitants

they annoy by their constant acts of depravity.

I have said that cramp or some sort of paralysis occasionally attacks the penguins after they have been in the sea. One day I was watching a hen painfully dragging herself across the rookery on her belly, using her flippers for propulsion as her legs trailed uselessly behind her. As I was just wondering whether I ought to kill her or not, a cock, seeing her pass, ran out from the outskirts of a neighbouring knoll and went up to her. After a short inspection he deliberately copulated with her, she being, of course, quite unable to resist him. He had hardly left her before another cock ran up, and, without any hesitation, tried to mount her. He fell off at first, and then, desisting, stole two stones from neighbouring nests, dropped them one after the other in front of her, after which he mounted and performed the sexual act. When he had gone, the poor hen struggled on about twenty yards, and then another cock ran up to her, and was just going to do the same thing when a fourth came up and fought him, driving him away, and afterwards did as the others had done. After this, the hen, who now seemed much more lively, struggled on, and had gone about ten yards further, when no less than three more cocks gave chase, all trying to climb on to her at once, but this ended in a short fight, after which they went their several ways. The hen lay still, doubtless being much in need of rest and as the poor thing evidently knew her way, and was making in a straight line, I left her, deciding that she might recover if she reached her own nest. Commander Campbell, whom I called up, witnessed the above scene with me. Later on, I went out and found the hen again. She was much better, and able to stand up and hobble about on her legs. Her back, I am sorry to say, bore signs of further indignities, though she was for the time in peace.

When the chicks are young, the parents take great pains to keep them on their own nests, though occasionally they stray and lose their lives as a result. Very often they suffer indignity and death at the hands of the hooligan cocks, the waste of life resulting from this being very considerable. Frequently we saw strayed chicks sexually misused by these hooligans, some of them being crushed to such an extent that they died in consequence.

On one occasion one of the two chicks which were with their mother on a nest strayed away a short distance, and was at once caught by a hooligan cock, who misused it before the very eyes of its parent. The latter kept to her nest and the other chick whilst this took place, and when the strayed chick escaped from the cock and ran back to her, she would have nothing to do with it., pecking it whenever it attempted to return to the nest. Eventually it abandoned the attempt, and tried to get itself adopted by several other parents, none of which would have it, and it was so severely pecked that I was obliged at length to kill it to put it out of its pain.

The hooligan cocks seemed always to be on the watch for these strayed chicks, and as some of the colonies constantly had a little knot of these hanging about their outskirts, a chick, once it had lost itself, was almost certain to come to a speedy end in this way, should it not first be carried off by a Skua.

Later in the season, as I have said, a large number of homes were broken up owing to the death of one or other of their occupants. On the southern edge of the rookery, close to the ice-foot and away from the nests, was a stretch of basaltic shingle. This became the haunt of a number of desolate mates, a large group of whom were always to be seen there, standing or squatting on the stones.

Many of the hens made scoops in the shingle and lay in them, and though cocks repeatedly had sexual intercourse with them, no second attempt was made to form a home, and no nests appeared on the site of the scoops.

Here on one occasion I saw what. I took to be a cock copulating with a hen. When he had finished, however, and got off, the apparent hen turned out to be a cock, and the act was again performed with their positions reversed, the original “hen” climbing on to the back of the original cock, whereupon the nature of their proceeding was disclosed.

UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05764911 Date: 07/31/2015

UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05764911 Date: 07/31/2015

With fingers crossed, the old rabbit’s foot out of the box in the attic, I will be sacrificing a chicken in the backyard to Moloch…

https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/14333//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Am I the only one surprised to see a 3rd season of Penny Dreadful?

Am I the only one surprised to see a 3rd season of Penny Dreadful?

I thought the last few episodes of Season 2 bore all the hallmarks of a cancelled show wrapping up – the season threat being defeated early leaving room for ambiguous characters to be resolved and Feminist Frankenstein’s manifesto to be laid out (it looked to me like fodder for a complete season hastily set down in a couple of speeches). The final dispersal of the party seemed like a clear message that the story was being retired.

…now they’ll have to get the band back together again.

I really hope they find wolfman playing in a lunchtime mambo combo at a Holiday Inn.

2 chapters into Tim Powers’ Last Call and holy cow, it’s like his agent said “can you make this one a bit more Tim…

2 chapters into Tim Powers’ Last Call and holy cow, it’s like his agent said “can you make this one a bit more Tim Powers?”

Or possibly Tim himself is going “OK nerds, follow me, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.” I guess I know why Bugsy Siegel’s secret wife would be careful to go out partying all night when there’s a full moon, mayyybe.

Joseph H. Vilas 

…….ETA: following Zak Sabbath’s recent thoughts about Giftschranken, it occurs to me that Tarot cards might be an ingenious code scheme for undercover angels to smuggle news out of heaven. The actual message is presumably transferred from the angel mind to the reader’s mind via the dead drop of the cards, which have enough ambiguous symbols to accommodate an expressive language for the attuned while making confusing noise to the uninitiated. 

“Just as the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a boom in the supply of personnel to private military firms, a…

“Just as the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a boom in the supply of personnel to private military firms, a North Korean collapse could lead to thousands of former North Korean soldiers finding jobs in conflict zones around the world. Perhaps worse, North Korea maintains stores of weapons that rival (to scale) those possessed by the Soviet Union in 1992. These weapons could also find their way to conflict zones, perhaps in the hands of their former operators.”

http://thediplomat.com/2016/04/could-koreans-lead-a-future-generation-of-private-military-firms//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

goddammit! I can’t make this but I would really love to. If it were only a month later (shakes fist).

goddammit! I can’t make this but I would really love to. If it were only a month later (shakes fist).

Originally shared by Rob Bush

Hey, Googleplusland! (Especially those of you in Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and Ontario…)

 

I’m once again running the Watch the Skies Megagame in Erie PA! We ran this last November and it was a blast (especially for Jakarta, where the radioactive glow from the mushroom clouds still creates beautiful sunsets.) 

This time, it will be on Saturday, May 14th. 50+ players, 8 hours, Aliens, Politicking, blowing stuff up… What better way to spend a Saturday in May?

Tickets are on sale now.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/watch-the-skies-part-deux-tickets-24444399858//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

if you have any more details about the adventure I could tailor the mixology to it more closely.

if you have any more details about the adventure I could tailor the mixology to it more closely.

For now I’ll just state the the Restive Young Things down at the Squires’ Collective are currently drinking an insubordinate concoction they call Putsch Punsch, which throws together the dangers of fresh fruit juices and some backwoods liquor they’ve found loaded with nightshade roots. Inbibers can be recognized by their raucous singing and a definite lurch to the right.

The officers’ Stirrup Cup combines good, clean brandy with the salubrious influence of beef dripping and a healthy dollop of Madame Haruspice’s All-Maladies Tonick. It must be shaken for a full 7 minutes by a sweating guardsman to properly dissolve the suet, and topped at the last minute with champagne to disguise the peculiar foam, but members of the Guards’ Club insist that it’s worth the effort, being not only velvety smooth but also the key to a long life… at least as long as one might expect a life to last in the Guards.

Finally, the Toad-lick Cobbler is the latest fashion in the dancings and down-and-out Arts Cafes of the low city. Where to acquire the authentic article, complete with the fabled secretions of “seeing toads,” is a matter of frequent argument between self-styled experts and shameless hucksters in the warrens of the No Quarter. Wherever you find it, it is prepared the same way – in a pewter cup previously washed with cherry brandy (it has to be the very worst cherry brandy to achieve the proper effect). The ingredients plucked from behind the bar are sloshed rapidly into the cup, then the “toad’s tongue” – a red-hot poker – is inserted. The resulting whoosh of flame provokes cheers from all onlookers, along with chants of “buccal up, buccal up” until the drinker has downed the last smoking drops.

partly the idea of monsters trailing their young like kites, partly because the image looks like a Matthew Adams…

partly the idea of monsters trailing their young like kites, partly because the image looks like a Matthew Adams drawing.

Originally shared by Mindy Weisberger

“Get off my back!” Ancient arthropod tethered its young to its body with threads and trailed them like kites. 

http://www.livescience.com/54294-kite-runner-fossil.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

for fans of Declare.

for fans of Declare.

I guess this is all out now because the declassification horizon has reached the Philby documents – there’s a slew of related stories at the end of the article about Guy Burgess’s drunkenness and the history of homophobia in the intelligence services.

The video is almost completely useless and serves mostly to show how crude capitalist propaganda methods can become, now that education has been tamed. The text is better but more tantalizing than informative. I want to hear the whole thing – apparently on Radio 4 at 3pm today EDT if they don’t screw it up like they did this news piece.

Now at least I know which photo led Powers to write about Philby’s “pouchy, humorous face.”

“It’s a very dirty story but in this line of work we can expect our hands to get dirty.”

Originally shared by Paul Mitchener

Kim Philby, British double agent, reveals all in secret video – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35943428

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35943428//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

this. This is what my next adventure will be.

this. This is what my next adventure will be.

talking donkey sent back in time to steal a doomsday laser from a rogue Edomite

I don’t know yet if you are the talking donkey or if you have to stop the talking donkey or if you’re sent to guard the talking donkey, Terminator style. But I know this is happening.

#wampuscountry #uz #thatjeffrientsmormonthing

#goatsaresoplayed  

#wampusnephilim  

Originally shared by Luke Shiras

Also the docket for 2016 are the Universal Studios’ movie Balaam, which includes a talking donkey sent back in time to steal a doomsday laser from a rogue Edomite.

http://babylonbee.com/news/hollywood-announces-plans-to-create-even-more-inaccurate-terrible-bible-movies///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

In the interests of sufferin’ humanity, here’s how to make a bottle’s worth of the Pearl Diver Mix that I keep for…

In the interests of sufferin’ humanity, here’s how to make a bottle’s worth of the Pearl Diver Mix that I keep for all occasions (making Pearl Divers, natch, but also good for quick’n’lazy Mai Tais and superb in hot cider).

Adapted from Don the Beachcomber, via Beach Bum Berry and Doug Ford:

    14 oz Bacardi 8 rum

    7 oz El Dorado 12 rum

    5 oz Appleton V/X or “signature blend” rum

    2.5 oz Velvet Falernum

    0.75 oz Allspice Dram (St. Elizabeth/Haus Alpenz)

    3 oz clear honey

    0.5 oz cinnamon syrup (just steep cinnamon sticks in simple syrup for a couple of weeks – it works best if you pour the hot syrup over the sticks so they unroll a bit)

Now, if you really want to make a proper Pearl Diver’s Punch you should add 3 oz clarified butter right into this mix – I’ve kept a bottle like that for a couple of months without ill effects.

Then you blend 3.5 oz of buttery mix with 1 oz fresh orange juice and ¾ oz fresh lime juice and crushed ice while thinking about the complex instructions over here: https://cold-glass.com/2015/06/21/extra-effort-extra-reward-the-pearl-divers-punch/

…but I don’t really like leaving butter in the spiced rum because I don’t know how long it’s going to be hanging around, so I pour a bit of my mix off and add an appropriate proportion of butter a few days ahead of when I plan to drink the Pearl Divers.

First I was like “oh my God this is a near-perfect depiction of that Tartary thing I’ve been working on forever” and…

First I was like “oh my God this is a near-perfect depiction of that Tartary thing I’ve been working on forever” and I started hyperventilating and flapping like an anime schoolgirl.

Then I realised that all the reflections off the heroines are heart shaped.

AKB48’s anime series, courtesy of Paolo Greco

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG0KZSMoT1Y

Apparently either the time is absolutely ripe for Tartary or it’s all already happened and I just didn’t know it was…

Apparently either the time is absolutely ripe for Tartary or it’s all already happened and I just didn’t know it was going on.

– establishing shot: Bagger 288

– mysterious birdships un tank blockades to deliver pop dance routines to the huddled masses

– space people quell potential uprising with ultratech drones: party becomes battlefield using weapons nobody seems to understand

– our heroines are befriended by radioactive Pokemon.

This is absolutely the closest thing I’ve ever seen to my vision for Tartary.

Originally shared by Paolo Greco

AKB48 has an anime. They fly around on their FF7-like starship and fight crime the Fun Police with heart-wands/cattleprods and giant robots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG0KZSMoT1Y//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

so that’s why I have +source material in my feed.

so that’s why I have +source material in my feed. A ready explanation for the oddball and limited spellbooks of Vancian magic…

Originally shared by Source Material

When the Marduk Project started, it was a lark. A few employees in the archaeology department added a half dozen religious texts to a deep learning database just to see what would happen. We were surprised that it so readily identified similarities between various ancient and modern rites. Not only did the system detail concrete lineages from alchemy back to Egyptian and Babylonian myths – some we knew about, some we didn’t – it found direct links between almost all of the world’s religions, myths, and philosophies. Soon, we were adding as much digitized esoteric material as we could find and Marduk was cranking out commonalities between modern religious ceremonies, alchemical recipes, and ancient magical rites.

Then Dr. Prasad added physics texts and, well, that was that. Marduk’s output switched to gibberish equations for about a week, what’s now known as the anti-Copenhagen calculations. We were considering shutting it down when Marduk suddenly generated what it claimed was a lead to gold transmutation recipe.

Dr. Valk gave it a shot just to see – and it worked. 

It took just a few hours and it worked. As department head, I ordered everyone out of the computer lab and destroyed Dr. Valk’s notes myself. My plan was to lock down the system until we could get permission to completely wipe the entire system. The implicates were just too great. 

Dr. Valk came back to the lab before the University board was convened. She had keys. By that time, Marduk had generated an additional 400 spells. Dr. Valk saved the spells from system memory to text files in the main directory and she copied those files to a thumb drive. Then she left, never to be seen again.

Whatever she’d planned, it obviously didn’t account for competition. Dr. Valk’s technical expertise was average, she knew enough about the lab’s computers to use them. She was most likely unaware that every file in that main directory was publicly accessible on our research website. Between 5 pm Tuesday and 8:30 am Wednesday, when IT noticed the heavy bandwidth, Marduk generated another 3900 working magic spells and placed them on an unsecured web server. 

IT terminated access to the server Wednesday morning, but by then it was too late. The folder had been linked on Reddit, Facebook, RedRanger, Desker, Orbitron, pretty much everywhere. Dozens of reshare sites appeared with copies of the files and we had no way to stop those. 

Pandora’s box had been opened. The world finally had working magic.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601066/software-that-reads-harry-potter-might-perform-some-wizardry//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

It’d be interesting to see them do this not instead of, but parallel to the current government, in a game.

It’d be interesting to see them do this not instead of, but parallel to the current government, in a game. 

Originally shared by Eric Duncan (Dragonsong)

From a private share.

http://thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis

http://thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

ITHACA, BITCHES PERSONS WITH DIFFERING SOCIAL PRIORITIES

ITHACA, BITCHES PERSONS WITH DIFFERING SOCIAL PRIORITIES

Originally shared by Eli Fennell

As one of the few survivors of this breed in the wild (especially in Florida), I’d be glad to help them adjust. If enough of the new population can mate with their wild counterparts, it might help them evolve the resistance they need to survive.

#TheOnion #Satire #NormalIsTheNewInsane

http://www.theonion.com/article/scientists-slowly-reintroducing-small-group-normal-52632//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

reading the Smaug/Bilbo exchange for my daughter – it’s the most Vancian thing Tolkien ever wrote.

reading the Smaug/Bilbo exchange for my daughter – it’s the most Vancian thing Tolkien ever wrote. Vance avant l’heure.

Have you considered the difficulty of getting the gold back home? Down the mountain? Cartage? I don’t suppose your dwarf friends discussed that when they offered you a fourteenth share.

Smaug’s murderhobo logic is impeccable.

Seeing Crouching Tiger again, I am even more amazed at how this film has been generally misunderstood as a martial…

Seeing Crouching Tiger again, I am even more amazed at how this film has been generally misunderstood as a martial arts romp. It’s clearly about a bunch of hard lessons regarding growing up and finding your place in the world and taking responsibility and so on. But I saw Iron Monkey and a bunch of other flashy wuxia things touted as “this year’s Crouching Tiger” and every single one lacked its intelligence and heart. And from the trailer I’m pretty discouraged about CT2, Sword of Destiny (it’s really not about the sword, guys. The sword is about dedication).

This scene right here is about balance. Master Li is demonstrating the poise and patience the young hothead needs to learn. But she’s got a head full of legends and short unfinished sentences about how to live.

this is pretty much what randomized Pokemon feels like

this is pretty much what randomized Pokemon feels like

Originally shared by Archaeology & Arts

Easter is coming….

Rabbit riding a hound holding snail of prey. Marginal decoration from the Pontifical of Guillaume Durand, Avignon, _France_before 1390 (Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, ms. 143, fol. 165r). 

One of the coolest Easter bunnies we found across the internet

#easter2016   #easterbunny   #manuscript   #Medieval  

hi Reynaldo Madriñan, sorry to bother you, my son is asking me for anime recommendations and I’m not the best…

hi Reynaldo Madriñan, sorry to bother you, my son is asking me for anime recommendations and I’m not the best reference! He liked Overman King Gainer and I’m trying to remember the way over the top giant robot series you mentioned…

He’s pretty into the scratchy magic/tech frontier so he might be a good customer for Break!! He’s into Sword Art Online and Nausicaa and D.Grey-man. Can you give him any pointers?

Acquiring some St. George absinthe got me to try this riff on Donn Beach’s Pearl Diver

Acquiring some St. George absinthe got me to try this riff on Donn Beach’s Pearl Diver

wash glass with absinthe

shake:

2 Pearl Diver rum mix*

1 blood orange juice

1 lime juice

garnish tbd

* after much experimentation this has become my favourite spiced rum. I mix up a bottle at a time and sometimes use it for Mai Tais, Zombies, all sorts. Follow the recipe at Doug Ford’s Cold Glass:

https://cold-glass.com/2015/06/21/extra-effort-extra-reward-the-pearl-divers-punch/

but omit the butter (sorry Donn!) and if you’re using St. Elizabeth allspice dram then put 3 times as much as the listed deGroff’s.

The juice + sweetness + absinthe is magical. 

I’ll have to start a new collection for gameable astronomy.

I’ll have to start a new collection for gameable astronomy.

So apparently Saturn’s rings and inner moons are probably debris from when its old moons crashed into each other. Less than 100 million years ago. And the canyon on Tethys is likely a tidal rent.

#SpaceWarMeansSpaceRefugees

#CatsChasingBalls

Originally shared by Winchell Chung

http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/press-release/moons-saturn-may-be-younger-dinosaurs//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Gameable:

Gameable:

Pluto probably has an ocean of liquid water deep inside it.

Also:

the surface of Pluto’s informally-named Sputnik Planum, a massive ice plain larger than Texas, [that’s the bright “heart” people picked out on the first photos] is devoid of any detectable craters and estimated to be… no more than 10 million years old.

While on Charon the great equatorial expanse of smooth plains… informally named Vulcan Planum (home of the “moated mountains” informally named Kubrick and Clarke Mons) is likely a vast cryovolcanic flow or flows that erupted onto Charon’s surface about 4 billion years ago…. likely related to the freezing of an internal ocean that globally ruptured Charon’s crust.

So Charon suffered a cataclysmic ocean freezing event and cracked, but Pluto stays whole, except from a rupture 10 million years ago that iced over.

#SpaceWarMeansSpaceRefugees

#helloYuggoth

Originally shared by Paul Scott Anderson

http://planetaria.ca/2016/03/pluto-revealed-five-new-science-papers-highlight-discoveries-new-horizons///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Leaving the Opera in the Year 2000.

Leaving the Opera in the Year 2000. Albert Robida, 1882, via the Public Domain Review [ http://publicdomainreview.org ]

…I think I’ll adopt these shrimpface platforms as my Barsoomois flyers. Although I still love Gino d’Achille’s flying Venetian taxis [ http://bit.ly/22wlgjG ] and Robert Abbett’s charming little motor-launch [ http://bit.ly/1UN3hPV ]

Also, for the Cock-floppers of Barsoom crowd, here: have some minis

[ bit.ly/1MmlXVb ] that also pick up on Mars’s lower gravity. (NSFW, obviously)

I’d been steadily losing interest in the new season of Game of House of Cards because its ridiculousness had been…

I’d been steadily losing interest in the new season of Game of House of Cards because its ridiculousness had been completely overtaken by the actual American political situation – the gravest problem for satire.

But as of episode 5, it seems to have caught up again. Now my main worry is that it’ll lose the thing that keeps it distinct from The Sopranos.

From a conversation with kreg Mosier tonight.

From a conversation with kreg Mosier  tonight. Almost think this is my design philosophy for AM Tart or much of what interests me to write.

The thing about the ’80s is that having lived through it as a child, IMO, you are in some ways psychically scarred by it. The levels of excess and deprivation that happened were kind of crazy. Then you get into Raygun and Thatcher and the decline of unions and what that would entail in the upcoming years. 

It is a weird collage of wealth and horror.

Beware of modern dance battle thugs contesting the Bollywood strangle hold of acceptable real life sing battles with…

Beware of modern dance battle thugs contesting the Bollywood strangle hold of acceptable real life sing battles with consequences that the police will have to deal with.

http://kron4.com/2016/03/15/cops-warn-residents-of-men-challenging-others-to-rap-battles//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Weird things about Pokemon other than the whole setup:

Weird things about Pokemon other than the whole setup:

1.The gender politics. On one hand, your rival is supposed to be a jerk to make you want to beat him. On the other hand, saying “I assumed you’d be male” is being a jerk to female players.

See that old guy looking in the window of the gym saying “heheh, this is gym is great! It’s full of women!” Feminist or peeping tom?

Randomizing the trainers makes for great diversity in body types. Somehow every last biker in my randomized Leaf Green has wound up with a female name.

2. every laptop you see lying around is “full of complicated words and numbers that don’t mean anything,” perhaps supporting Scrap Princess’s contention that actually the whole rest of the world is withering away under the regard of The Pokemon, which acts like a dependency-forming drug on the collective psyche. In general, the machines seem to be made in the spirit of 1966 Batman – it’s not clear that they do anything other than provide flashy wall decoration.

3. It is deeply destabilizing to meet the game design team in a building that’s currently being threatened by Team Rocket. Where are the boundaries? This isn’t just fourth-wall breaking, it’s a two-way street of representation. What are Game Freak trying to say?

4. You can walk right up adjacent to people who are supposed to be standing guard against you without them noticing – it’s only when you are directly perpendicular to them that they register your presence. Is this some kind of metaphor about human consciousness? Should I be thinking about Edward deBono or Zhuang Zhou? It’s definitely not accidental.

Resharing this not for the politics or the identity positioning but for a linguistic note: both the full article…

Resharing this not for the politics or the identity positioning but for a linguistic note: both the full article and, more pointedly, Yonatan’s summary can be used as definitions of the term butthurt. The article could be shortened considerably by saying Trump appeals to the butthurt.

What a wonderfully economic language English can be.

Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger

This is a short but interesting article on the origins of Trump’s popularity. It highlights an important point: while economic issues make people more open to outsiders who want to “overturn the system,” the root of his support isn’t economic at all, but social and cultural. The “liberal elites” who people rail against aren’t economic elites, but rather social ones. That is, a lot of the people from whom he is mining his followers are “people who believe they… deserve to be at the center of American life and culture,” and who see a culture which instead of treating with respect and deference, often treats them with mockery.

This is a very important point to understand, especially for those who would reduce politics to simple economics. People ultimately value their self-identification very profoundly, often even more than their physical survival. When this is threatened, it can animate extremely violent passions.

Alas, when the self-identification is based on one’s identification relative to others — as in, “at least we’re better than those bastards” — then the risk of implosion is far higher, since sometimes those bastards end up not playing the role required by your script. The result is inevitably powerful conflict.

via Jennifer Freeman 

https://www.salon.com/2016/03/14/the_payback_candidate_trumps_campaign_is_for_conservatives_seeking_revenge_on_everyone_they_think_disrespects_them///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

round my way we used to call this an Aviation.

round my way we used to call this an Aviation… before Rothman & Winter brought Creme de Violette back to the US market and confused everyone.

Originally shared by Alex Scrivener

2 oz. Old Tom gin

¼ oz. maraschino liqueur

¼ oz. fresh lemon juice

2 dashes Regan’s orange bitters

Tools: barspoon

Glass: rocks

Garnish: brandied cherry and an orange twist

Combine ingredients in an ice-filled rocks glass, stir to combine and garnish.

http://imbibemagazine.com/casino-old-tom-gin-cocktail///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Paolo Greco I want to do a refugees funnel game: dodge racists, bureaucracy and the slow-burn lack of opportunities…

Paolo Greco I want to do a refugees funnel game: dodge racists, bureaucracy and the slow-burn lack of opportunities for the honour of being demonised by chancer politicians! Chance cards include assassinate fascist loudmouth (slows bureaucracy, increases the tensions index), blackface liberal “allies” (trivialize your political pressure efforts, convince media the problem’s “solved”) and less important than kitteh gifs.

for Brendan S

for Brendan S

Significant Look

1.5 Broker’s Gin

0.5 green chartreuse

0.5 lime juice

0.25 Luxardo maraschino

…so this is a second try at the autonomically definitive Last Word. I like it a lot better, but I still don’t feel it’s the last word in Last Words.

When I get to that point it’ll be called Mic Drop.

Finished Emerald, suffered self-loathing. Started Leaf Green, all is well again! (hm)

Finished Emerald, suffered self-loathing. Started Leaf Green, all is well again! (hm)

On this randomized run I’m trying to form a party just of starters – an NPC is offering to trade me a Charmander for some other thing I may or may not find. I also started with Chikorita and then captured a Meganium and a Grovyle, which you’d think would be really grass-heavy but not with the randomizer it isn’t.

…so I finally  have a use for an everstone. Because I really don’t want that Bayleef turning into another Meganium: right now they’re totally different types, learnsets etc.

this is more like Charlie’s cranky irritant list of stuff he’s found in SF books but it’s still worth a read because

this is more like Charlie’s cranky irritant list of stuff he’s found in SF books but it’s still worth a read because

(a) I totally want to game in worlds that do many of these things

(b) turning them on their heads may produce interesting results.

You can use handy black holes and neutron stars to make handbrake turns in space

Yisssssss

Primitive (non-WEIRD) people are stupid and unimaginative

WEIRD people accept and embrace change and innovation; non-WEIRD people reject both

Colonies are usually modelled on WEIRD 1950s cultural norms

…Charlie? Guess where and why these books were written.

Originally shared by Hank Harwell

This looks promising: Charles Stross started a list of Space Opera Cliches.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/03/towards-a-taxonomy-of-cliches-.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

gameable event.

gameable event.

Portent? God’s wrath? Atlantis and the trumpet heralding its refugee crisis?

What if, in fact, there is a great scream all through nature? What are the PCs going to do, knowing only that some calamity has happened, but not knowing what or in which direction?

Originally shared by Lea Kissner

Wait But Why has, in their typical way, flooded us with interesting information, this time on sound. Read the whole thing, but the Krakatoa part is especially mind-blowing. Literally.

The 1883 Krakatoa volcano eruption: I’m overwhelmed by the amount of things I need to tell you about the Krakatoa. Let’s do bullets.

Krakatoa is an island in Indonesia, and the eruption happened on August 27, 1883.

The eruption completely annihilated the island, sent an enormous amount of debris 17 miles (27 km) high into the sky at half a mile per second.

It also caused one of the most deadly and far-reaching tsunamis in history. In total, the eruption killed 36,000 people.

But the most amazing thing about the eruption was its sound. It made arguably the loudest sound on Earth in modern history.

It was so loud that the shockwave extended far enough to rupture the eardrums of sailors 40 miles away.

100 miles away, the sound was still 172 dB, enough to permanently destroy someone’s ears or even kill them. Wherever you are, think of a place that’s about 100 miles (161 km) away. Now imagine something happening there that causes a sound so loud where you are that if you were screaming at the top of your lungs directly into someone’s ear when the sound hit, they wouldn’t be able to hear that you were doing it. For comparison, the Saturn V launch sound was at 170 dB 100meters away. Krakatoa was higher than that 100 miles away.

The sound cracked a foot-thick concrete wall 300 miles (483 km) away.

The sound was heard all the way in Australia (where it sounded like a distant canon ball being fired) and even as far away as Rodrigues Island, 3,000 miles away. 3,000 miles away. I’m currently in New York. Imagine if something happened in California or in Europe that I could hear in New York. I can’t even.

After the sound eventually got far enough away that humans couldn’t hear it anymore, barometers all over the world were going nuts for the next few days, as the sound waves circled the Earth 3.5 times.

Finally, you know the famous painting The Scream? Well you know how the sky’s all red for some reason? The sky is red because the painter, Edvard Munch, was inspired to paint it after seeing the Krakatoa-caused red skies all over the Western Hemisphere in the year after the eruption.

It was a big eruption.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/sound.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

So every few months someone pipes up with “no but what’s the point of the OSR really?

So every few months someone pipes up with “no but what’s the point of the OSR really? Where’s the creativity? Aren’t you just doing the same thing again and again?”

Well, my son’s recently started DMing for his schoolmates. Unfortunately he takes after me when it comes to planning ahead, so he’s always going “dad, do you have an adventure I can use?”

And so far he’s run Roger Giner-Sorolla’s putatively non-violent Egg of the Gazolba, bit.ly/1p58M0d

Luka Rejec’s Deep in the Purple Worm, bit.ly/1LOMvyc he’s improvised some things off Paolo Greco’s Chthonic Codex bit.ly/24OoDRI

and he’s planning to run Joesky and Ramsey Dow’s Forgotten Chambers bit.ly/1YrWg7g

Yesterday it was “oh I forgot I need a bunch of magic treasures because they broke into the wizard’s library.” So I sent him a dozen links to Jason Sholtis’s Dungeon Dozen and the D666 starting equipment table from Chthonic Codex. And the Links of Wisdom treasure page, of course bit.ly/1UPY1eF and finally Erik Jensen’s Wampus Abecedary bit.ly/21jkpNl

They had to stop playing, they were laughing too hard. They had to let 3 more players join them, too.

And my point is, almost all this stuff is free, and what’s not is remarkably cheap in pdf. You can get it right off the internet. And there are hundreds of people still pouring out this extraordinary, generous fountain of  creativity.

“But the core rules are really just reprints of DnD, I can’t understand why you’d keep rehashing this obsolete old game.”

I’ll let you into a dirty little secret:

he’s never even bothered to read the rulebook.