Starting a Cameron/Turkmenbashi watch.

When you declare that your country will be forever neutral in all future wars, some people think you might be being short-sighted, others praise your vision.

When you ban beards and close down the state TV channel for being “boring,” people look a little askance at you and wonder if you’re all right.

When you close all the hospitals and replace your country’s educational system with study of your own holy book and poems, those earlier eccentricities seem less funny.

So far Cameron’s supported censoring pop songs and let recording industry representatives into schools to teach about the evils of illegal copying, he was photographed biking to work and got very upset when the photo showed the car that follows the bike everywhere. That’s curious but not alarming.

Banning some specific kinds of porn without any evidence of harm or existing criminal activity? Current efforts to ban all psychoactive substances except alcohol, tobacco and caffeine, simply because they have an effect on people’s outlook and not because harm can be demonstrated? That’s really starting to look weird.

Trying to scrap the Human Rights Act? Promising to increase prisons and demanding mandatory prison sentences for carrying a knife? Deporting people for saying (admittedly awful) things? Not so funny.

http://www.oddee.com/item_90544.aspx//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

hi David McGrogan – I’m not calling on you in a public thread or anything, I’m just curious to get your read on this, because I’ve been against these guys for a long time and I might be simply blind to whatever could be good in their intentions.

I can see that there might be some substances that shouldn’t be freely available and I get that the suppliers of drugs have become very smart at mimicking the effects of extant drugs with new formulations that escape restrictions, but this whole approach just looks like an Onion parody to me and I suspect that I’m missing something.

Originally shared by Chris Handley

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/politics-blog/11645354/Theresa-May-wants-to-ban-pleasure.html

Madness

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/politics-blog/11645354/Theresa-May-wants-to-ban-pleasure.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

I am so glad I don’t live in the UK under the present government.

On the other hand, I feel like I should move back and take up a career specifically in trying to thwart the insanity of Cameron and his cronies.

The scary thing is that this completely ludicrous article is actually accurate. Not even in Saudi Arabia does one find such a thoroughgoing condemnation of sensory pleasure.

Originally shared by Chris Handley

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/politics-blog/11645354/Theresa-May-wants-to-ban-pleasure.html

Madness

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/politics-blog/11645354/Theresa-May-wants-to-ban-pleasure.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Neil Gaiman: there are things that people who like a genre are looking for in their fiction: the things that titillate, the things that satisfy. If it was a cowboy novel, we’d need the fight in the saloon; we’d need the bad guy to come riding into town and the good guy to be waiting for him. A novel that happens to be set in the Old West doesn’t actually need to deliver any of those things – though it would leave readers of genre cowboy fiction feeling peculiarly disappointed, because they have not got the moments of specific satisfaction.

I can’t say what other people want, but for me even in my very favourite settings that I feel don’t get enough attention a genre of action is exactly what I don’t want. I love it when the non-spy takes the wheel and stops the car and talks to whoever is following them. I find that titillating.

I don’t really understand what genre fiction is (as opposed to “literary fiction”), apart from an insulting term meaning that which will not help your pretensions at networking events.

OTOH I get awfully tired of books that are about how capitalist alienation is soul-destroying or sexual infidelity gives you a grown-up, worldly sort of guilt or how you have to make compromises and the thing most devastatingly compromised is self-recognition or any of the other commonplaces of that weird little genre called Literary Fiction.*

I guess I think of “genre” in terms of the categories of painting in the Paris Academie in the 1860s, where it was ranked far below uplifting, educational history painting. I hardly ever look at those history paintings. They are, in general, nearly worthless for learning the history of the events they depict.

Originally shared by Scott Dorward

This is a fascinating article in general, but one section really jumped out at me. It is all too easy to dismiss fantasy, SF, games and the like as juvenile pursuits, only good for escapist entertainment. They can, however, also be gymnasiums for the imagination. The example Gaiman gives here is wonderfully illuminating.

Neil Gaiman: You know, I was in China in 2007, and it was the first ever state-sponsored, Party-approved science-fiction convention. They brought in some people from the west and I was one of them, and I was talking to a number of the older science-fiction writers in China, who told me about how science fiction was not just looked down on, but seen as suspicious and counter-revolutionary, because you could write a story set in a giant ant colony in the future, when people were becoming ants, but nobody was quite sure: was this really a commentary on the state? As such, it was very, very dodgy.

I took aside one of the Party organisers, and said, “OK. Why are you now in 2007 endorsing a science-fiction convention?” And his reply was that the Party had been concerned that while China historically has been a culture of magical and radical invention, right now, they weren’t inventing things. They were making things incredibly well but they weren’t inventing. And they’d gone to America and interviewed the people at Google and Apple and Microsoft, and talked to the inventors, and discovered that in each case, when young, they’d read science fiction. That was why the Chinese had decided that they were going to officially now approve of science fiction and fantasy.

http://www.newstatesman.com/2015/05/neil-gaiman-kazuo-ishiguro-interview-literature-genre-machines-can-toil-they-can-t-imagine//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Shattering

Enchantment

For the duration of the battle, on a successful hit, the enchanted object (usually a weapon) will infallibly break and render useless any single non-magical object it strikes. Magical objects resist breakage on anything but a 1 on a d10. If the enchanted object strikes a person it does 1d8 damage in addition to whatever damage it would normally do.

If the weapon strikes armour it breaks a significant part of it, reducing the effectiveness of the armour by 1 AC or 1/3 of its total AC bonus, whichever is greater.

Paolo Greco this is so close to the art style I was thinking about for Castordaam that I’m wondering if it’s still worth it.

…..not that I would get to it for months anyway. Every time I think I might get a tranche of game-making time…… there’s an awful lot of real life to fit in.

Originally shared by Luka Rejec

http://hillcantons.blogspot.ch/2015/06/fever-dreaming-marlinko-going-to-bed.html

… there we go, full map, fully shared 🙂

http://hillcantons.blogspot.ch/2015/06/fever-dreaming-marlinko-going-to-bed.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Finally caught up with GoT. And GoT’s finally caught up with the promise it gave in the first shot of the first season – it’s undead time!

I’m puzzled by the change in budget though, between the Big Fight on The Wall last season and the Bigger Zombie Fight this time. Both involve extensive use of fire and destroying models/buildings, but the first must’ve spent a fortune on long, uninterrupted crane shots that tied the fighting together into a coherent narrative, while the second does all the History Channel tricks of blurry movement, fast cutting and close up moments where make-up and props sell the action. The result is evocatively chaotic but also disjointed and unclear.

I imagine they’re saving their fireworks for the season finale. And I’m glad it’s not me trying to direct it. Also I finally get why dragons = legitimacy. It’s nicely stated without being belaboured – everything dragon fire touches trumps undeath. 

trey causey I don’t know if you got my reply!

Yup, I’m too busy to get into any discussion of interactive vs. non-interactive fiction right now, much less one that’s framed in ahem unhelpful terms.

possible cure for the current coconut water craze?

Octopus takes coconut shell for a walk, sofa.

Relentlessly instrumentalist scientists assume it’s using the shell as a kind of portable fortress, which could be gameable in a Cephalopod Surprise! kind of way, but consider the alternative: what if it’s using the shell as a surrogate 60s supervillain womb-chair?

http://bit.ly/1JijOqK

Originally shared by Mindy Weisberger

Researcher observes and captures first evidence of octopus tool use, nearly drowns laughing. 

https://www.thedodo.com/octopus-carries-coconut-1178413280.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Keira Knightley plays a mathematical genius.

Also, Benedict Cumberbatch perfectly fits my stupid preconceptions about Alan Turing.

Most of the negative reviews of this film criticize its plodding direction and its handling of Turing’s homosexuality (ie choosing not to show it in favour of a loving portrait of mid-century homophobia). My sister in law thinks Cumberbatch is enabling bad film-making by giving stuff like this an air of gravitas it doesn’t deserve. I think it just might be a knowing pastiche of 40s-60s war film conventions – the presentation of various ugly sides of intelligence work is pretty much on the level of Hitler Channel docudramas.

But my 13 year old enjoyed it, and I think it was pitched just about right for him as an introduction to Britain in WW2 and the histories of cryptography, counter-intelligence and gay rights. Totally recommended if you’re 13 and know nearly nothing about any of that.

Also Mark Strong enables this stuff by selling it with absolute conviction and just the right amount of furrowed brow.

http://artforum.com/film/id=49926//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

I put on my wizard robe and hat.

I’m not a Harry Potter fan but I wound up reading the books aloud to my wife when she was pregnant and my eldest when he was the right age. No. 3 in particular is a cut above the fantasy average. And I really didn’t like the films when they came out except for 3 (Cuaron), which showed the way for all subsequent directors.

So I was not excited by the prospect of the Studio Tour experience… but seeing the props up close – and the gift shop – I suddenly got what they were doing.

That robe is better quality than my school uniform was. It’s made with complete seriousness to evoke… British school culture in the 1930s-60s. I suddenly understood that everything in the production design had the heft and tactile qualities of a mid-century Parker pen. The golden snitch could’ve been made by Parker (its metal feathers recall the flights on Parker’s arrow logo). The suits are all Gieves & Hawkes and the knitwear is pure John Lewis ca. 1955.

So now I get it… I still don’t love it. My tastes are more wild world out there than cup of tea and a digestive with my pot-scouring charms.

But in terms of production values I’m pleased that this is not Disney. It’s probably a waste. Maybe it would make more economic sense for that uniform to be as disposable as an Ariel dress. But it’s nice to know that someone is still concerned with feel.

Magic wands are my mother’s, assembled and photographed as such by my son. I guess they’re a path not taken in the source material that HP was reaching for. Period-perfect, but nonetheless reprehensible, is the inclusion of African masks in Borgin & Burke’s gallery of evil.

Welcome to the shop under the reading room where Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital.

I have a whole game waiting for one day when I can run things again about a transhistorical conspiracy war between Red and Yellow Palaces (essentially industrial/commercial vs. hieratic, Babylon vs. Egypt, Battersea Power Station vs. MI6 Vauxhall). When I started this hallucination 20 years ago I noticed that there seemed to be a schism in Red Palace between red (brick) and white (marble). Now it comes crashing in on me; white is the sepulcher. White is a cancerous cladding over Red – dead and respectable.

Finally saw an exhibition of Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin etchings. It was like coming home; everything I’d hoped.

…still a little corner of me lamented over the wiping technique. They were smeary and moody and that was clearly intentional, but I still wanted to be able to revel in all the detail.

http://butdoesitfloat.com/An-escape-into-the-realm-of-imagination//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

stray thought on reading Alex Schroeder’s comment:

I was looking for translations of the Hymn to Aphodite and found a page quite a few of them.

http://www.classicpersuasion.org/pw/sappho/sape01u.htm

I am reminded of the many translations of Laozi’s Tao Te Ching.

We tend not to give much credit to translators as authors in their own right, but if there is a crystalline clarity in the English of Sappho or Lao Tsu or Chuang Tsu or Babur it’s because of the training of a couple of generations of English literary stylists – Arthur Waley, Jane English, Wheeler Thackston – who finally decided that it was not after all necessary for all old non-European texts to sound like the King James Bible.

Not sure where I’m going with this except to say that there is now an established mode for historically important, often spiritual, writing and it originates in Anglo-American universities. There are probably implications for fantasy worlds but I’m traveling today so they’ll have to wait.

Not wanting to stink up Zak Smith’s thread:

It’s like Game of Thrones except everyone is bonobos.

And the inevitable:

it’s what happens behind the doors of corporate boardrooms. They all have like a Narnia wardrobe tucked between the interactive whiteboard and the whiskey cabinet. The Targaryens were Bell.

(OK, this one is a terrible twist ending, not an RPG setting)

Mike Davison sorry for holding you up. It’s been crazy times here. I’ll repeat my moves from last round if that’s ok…

dammit…

Incurring Joesky Debt: Pegggate, Fury Road and GoT(FO)

This post makes a blahblah blah noise. Long. Also spoilers.

So first Simon Pegg told Trekkies to fuck off, then he committed the cardinal sin of wondering if fantasy wasn’t a bit childish, then he blamed it all on Capitalism, Vietnam and Star Wars:

http://simonpegg.net/2015/05/19/big-mouth-strikes-again/

He’s… wrong on lots and lots of counts. Sometimes demonstrably (lots of bad and foolish films were made before Star Wars, some of them were popular), sometimes just because he engages in lazy stereotyping (Vietnam vets had to grow up too fast, their kids never grew up at all). In particular, I would like to see evidence of the military-entertainment conspiracy to keep us all infantile so we’re easier to control. That seems like him just not liking what the market keeps buying (which is often troubling – see Patrick Stuart on Wonder Bread: http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2012/03/monsters-of-incompetence-and-atomic.html ).

The trouble with actual government conspiracies to subvert the media is, it can be really hard to tell what they’re supposed to be doing even when the evidence is right there (as in Jim Siegel’s work on Jakarta, linked below) because when the propaganda message works, its true believers choose to replicate it and mutate it in the process to their own ends. In the Jakarta case, a government cabal whipped up hysteria in the newspapers with grisly photos of anti-revolutionary crimes and started a snowball effect beyond their own control (worth a read, and not just for the bit where Siegel tries to psychoanalyze the entire mass of Indonesian people).

He’s clearly (trivially) right, though, when he says the more spectacle becomes the driving creative priority, the less thoughtful or challenging the films can become.

Then he praises Fury Road and Game of Thrones. No one could ever accuse Game of Thrones of being childish.

Well.

Let’s start with GoT. As Brendan S has pointed out,

http://www.necropraxis.com/2015/05/19/resonance-and-aimlessness/ it’s atmospheric and has a truly remarkable number of memorable characters (although not, perhaps, more than Orange is the New Black or Desperate Housewives). But apart from that, it’s a soap opera like Dallas, only it collapses the metaphorical massacres of business into big gouts of blood and beheadings.

Does GoT have moral ambiguity? Does it touch on meaningful themes? Does it seek to teach us things about the human condition and the harsh necessities of life in an uncivilized world?

Or is it just an endless parade of horrible people doing horrible things to each other? Was Tyrion’s speech about his bug-crushing cousin really actually about GRRM’s own writing as fans joked when it aired?

Have you seen City of God?

It’s really, really good. It tells several stories about memorable characters and it details, quite mercilessly, what it means to get mixed up in a Hobbesian war for control and revenge, even if you start out as a moral person, or a mellow one, or an ambitious and ruthless one whose success makes it hard to hold onto anything worth winning for.

I don’t think GoT scores very high on the City of God axis, personally.

So, finally, Fury Road. It’s a lot of fun. It contains a bunch of very well-directed action sequences, and as Alex Mayo and others have pointed out, it looks like it’s got a lot of stuff going on under the hood – little bits of world-building and background that suggest hidden depths.

But they’re pretty damn well hidden.

What’s up front is a long, running battle of the kind that made Mad Max famous, punctuated close to the end by a Big Gloom as a nod to 3-act structure, which turns the direction of the battle back around to its start.

As the plot-skeleton on which the whole film hangs, it’s so deeply pointless that I feel like it has to be intentional. I think I’m probably missing the fundamental thought behind it. Reviewers who have praised the movie seem mostly to have avoided talking about the extreme reduction of its plot.

We don’t know how Immortan Joe’s citadel came to be. We don’t know what the consequences of his death will be (although we can guess that they probably won’t be good). Max himself, who acted as a revenge protagonist in 1 and a catalyst in 2 and just occasionally as a hero-instigator in 3, here is… a helpful hitch-hiker? At the end of the film he certainly doesn’t want to know what’s going to happen next, which seems like a cue for the rest of us.

I’d say it’s pretty much exactly spectacular but not thoughtful. It certainly isn’t challenging, unless the challenge is to find meaning in it.

I liked it, in its way. The War Boy’s chant of I live, I die, I live again makes sense of his change of allegiance following his near-death experience at Max’s hands. The poignant death of the mother and baby contrasts interestingly with the unmourned deaths of the various road warriors. The art direction is (as it so often is) superb. But it’s no Road Warrior.

…and it comes with trailers for Terminator Revisited and Jurassic Park: didn’t we finally kill all these?

And it made me realize that if I want to see anything else, I have to stop buying this bread.

http://www.amazon.com/New-Criminal-Type-Jakarta-Counter-Revolution/dp/0822322412//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

“The ultimate purpose of architecture is to serve a general purpose.”

I really have to restrain myself from collecting these – things students write in exam papers – into a published volume. Sharing to a select group to protect the guilty.

The question in this case was “can a building have features that identify it positively as Islamic architecture? What might those features be?”

The paper never gets close to trying to answer that.

I must be very, very difficult to understand. I devoted a whole lecture to writing essays, researching journals online and identifying usable scholarly sources. In my lecture I specifically said “don’t make sweeping statements you can’t defend” and “don’t rely on tourist information – look for sources that cite their sources.”

So I get this:

“Every religion requires holy locations for people to congregate and worship. These sites differ in respect to their intended form of prayer. Islam is no different.”

and then a discussion of Kukeldash madrasa in Tashkent, based solely on 3 paragraphs on a travel agent’s site.

http://www.orexca.com/medreseh_kukeldash.shtml//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Really all I want is the Brom-and-Tyrion show. I’d settle for just the Brom show.

Like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser without Fafhrd.

Patrick Stuart possibly of interest to you following the “how lily-fucking-white was Europe” question – the trade in exotic persons from the 15th c to the early 20th:

http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/backgrounds/european-encounters#Closeencountersofathirdkind

…on the other hand, these are self-consciously exoticizing moves for the purpose of spectacle – there’s a small but growing body of knowledge regarding Africans moving around Europe around 1500-1800:

http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/black-presence-pre-20th-century-europe-hidden-history

and then there’s the whole muddled issues of Gypsies and Jews as “domestic others,” and skin tone as a marker of social class (whether you have to work in the fields under the sun or not), and where the exotic other begins – were Muslims from the Balkans European or not? etc.

http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/backgrounds/european-encounters#Closeencountersofathirdkind//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Went to see Carcosa Wacky Races, the movie. Remembered why I didn’t put a Drama System middle eight in it.

….You know, with the flamethrower guitarists and gasoline explosions – it’s all fun and games until someone drops to their knees in an emotional voiceover.

Respirator Joe does some goddamn Oscar-worthy staring, though. He stares right through the movie into the Terminator and Jurassic Park remakes.

There are some student papers that it physically hurts to read.

I have one student who has cited every single one of my lectures as a source and no other sources.

I have another who seems to be completely unfamiliar with the idea of a debate – if an academic has written it down then there’s no arguing against it, and if independently-collected data contradict that academic’s conclusions, then you just can’t do anything.

This is both lovable and useful. Especially the acting suggestions.

Henchperson(s): Scuttling hunchback w/ extensive surgical repertoire, ability to get anything at any time, questionable loyalty

Retinue: Animal skin-clad thugs w/ improvised weapons, no indoor voices. Fights constantly breaking out

Originally shared by Dunkey Halton

Vampire Generator

click here to make a vampire maybe??? General Aesthetic Decadent aristocrat. Lord Byron, Elizabeth Bathory, the Earl of Rochester Brutish cod-medieval warchief. Vlad Dracul, Ivar the Boneless, Khal Drogo Pale, obese slug-thing that never sees light. Baron H…

Oh!

Well OK then. Shipping error by my supplier, and it would cost something like $20 in shipping to sort it out.

…Looks like I won’t be comparing tasting notes on the Navy with you after all. I can’t say I’m displeased to get the Cuban instead, but.

Half-formed thought about race and class…

If your class is what you do, how you engage with the world, then maybe race is what you are*  how the world engages you – an ascriptive category that nonetheless determines NPC reactions and your saving throws. Something that isn’t active, that you can’t turn off.

Let’s try to think of a distinctive orientation to the world that isn’t already folded into DnD.

Werner Herzog.

So. Is Werner a class, a race… or an alignment? I don’t think he’s a class – if I ask “what would Werner do (about this dungeon challenge)?” I don’t get anything useful. If you allow Werner Herzogs in your game, how do you handle them mechanically?

*the trouble with this kind of statement is it doesn’t help us decide anything at all.

Now I’ve started this thought it won’t let me go. Improbable Race and Class combinations.

Angel thief

Owlbear cavalier

Illithid barbarian

…

In the interests of Science! I made some orgeat using the Blasphemously Easy instructions previously published (almond milk, sugar, almond essence).

I felt the difference was negligible in my Lost Spirits Mai Tai – if anything, in a side-by-side comparison I actually preferred the one made with Monin.

So I said I’d do it and I did.

Redrum Oni

1/2 Lost Spirits “Polynesian” Rum

1 Campari

2 dashes orange bitters

5 dashes Peychaud’s bitters

Ice, stir.

…the rum seems to largely cancel the bitterness of the Campari and allow the sweetness to shine through. Which is extremely weird.

Actually pretty nice, but still sweet. Curious what a sour rhubarb syrup might do here.

I’m somewhat worried about what my phone’s autocompletes say about me. D always leads straight to D&D – fair enough. But if I want to write “tangent” it suggests Tanjang (port) or Tangere (from Rizal’s great novel Noli mi Tangere), and if I try to write Noli it gives me Nolet’s (gin). Never, y’know, a common word.

If I let it guide my hand I get to see the point of view of the year of the most beautiful girl in the morning and the first half of the best thing about being able to see my baby sister just asked if the government has been in my head hurts so bad but it would have been in my room for improvement of my favorite part of the best way for me I was in my life is so much.

Has anyone around here read this guide to the science of drink-mixing?

Should I be reading this or Kevin Liu’s Craft Cocktails

http://www.amazon.com/Craft-Cocktails-Home-Contemporary-Crowd-Pleasers/dp/0615766382/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1431449294&sr=1-2&keywords=science+of+cocktails

or Gary Regan’s Joy of Mixology?

http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Intelligence-Science-Perfect-Cocktail/dp/0393089037/ref=pd_bxgy_325_text_y//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Want.

Also: save vs. hypnosis.

You have found a ridiculously cute little kitten in the ogre’s lair. It mirrors what you do like it really wants to learn from you. Whatever it’s doing right now, it’s completely engrossed in it… and so are you. There’s something very slightly odd about it but you can’t quite put your finger on it.

Originally shared by the_skinny _drummer

Oh

Sir Mawes’s second round

Shield high, base

lean right, FP

lean left, CP

overthinking with int 6. He’s toast, I tell ye.

arguing about Lost Spirits at another site (see the comments for some classic nerd fighting talk).

http://inuakena.com/spirit-reviews/rum-review-lost-spirits-navy-rum/

My wife tried the Polynesian neat over the weekend and didn’t like it at all – I agreed, got her a Barbancourt, which she liked a lot, then made her a Mai Tai with the Polynesian. Her eyes lit up at the first taste. “OK, this is how you drink it.”

It’s funny to think that maybe a year ago I would’ve been skeptical about spirits that are good for mixing but not for drinking neat. More open mindedness is indicated, I think. OTOH it also makes it a lot harder to review or rate things.

This is some Martha Stewart level shit here.

Rhubarb syrup. 1 cup sugar, 1 cup water, 4 cups chopped rhubarb. Seethe it up on the stove for half an hour, strain, cool and bottle. Delicious, slightly sour, wondering how it works in lieu of the old lemon juice and sugar combo for cocktails.

Also: it turns out a rum negroni (maybe a Ladeireira) is nice enough but not as interesting as the original or the boulevardier. Still, perfectly enjoyable:

1 aged rum

1 campari

1 punt e mes

2 dashes angostura bitters, 2 dashes orange bitters

Ice, stir, drink. Alarm David McGrogan maybe.

Finally: I am thinking of starting a collection called “J*su* *u*k” or maybe just “things that make it hard to move back to America.” Which of the following photos falls in that category is left as an exercise for the reader.

…yes, I know the Chapman brothers are British.

Adam Thornton thanks so much for the shirt- I shall wear it when proposing truly ill advised drinks. And then people can just point at the shirt and I will know I’ve gone too far.

Hahaha Adam Thornton that is a thing of beauty! I particularly like the way you’ve subverted the YMCA logo there.

Everyone should have a RECOMMENDATION: NEGRONI T-shirt.

Well, at least David McGrogan should have one.

TONIGHT: experimenting with rum negroni. It’s probably a terrible idea but the Boulevardier works so well.

HERPETOLOGICAL SHAMANIC SYMBIOSIS:

Snake gets visions from licking toad, renders prophecy.

Toad gains authority from live snakeskin headdress/cloak, issues laws for all toadkind.

WIN WIN.

In other news, I kinda hate how collections work. But I like the idea of you guys choosing which filters to subscribe to. But I hate sorting things into just one category. And I hate asking you to choose your filters again because you already maybe opted out of the cocktails circle, for instance.

Originally shared by null

This happened today. My Uncle saw this snake eating a toad on my Mom’s front porch. My husband sat out there taking photos and video. We knew the snake had bitten off more than he could chew ;). The toad was breathing and moving his feet every now and then. Eventually the snake tired and the toad must’ve gave a big kick and he jumped out of the snake. He was ok and hopped away!! …and everyone said the toad was a goner when I said let’s get him out!!! Pretty damn cool and gross. Happy Mother’s Day Mom. Haha Joe P

Joseph H. Vilas feeding your unhealthy obsession:

http://www.alcademics.com/2015/02/dunder-and-dragons-making-rum-at-lost-spirits-distillery-.html

which also has stuff on dehydrating liqueurs in order to rehydrate them with Everclear. Hm.

…also trying to find any information on their whiskeys

http://www.drinkhacker.com/2012/07/20/exclusive-preview-lost-spirits-distillery-seascape-peated-american-whiskey/

http://www.drinkhacker.com/2012/09/02/review-lost-spirits-leviathan-i-cask-3-heavily-peated-american-whiskey/

http://www.howtodrinkwhisky.com/lost-spirits-umami/

…it looks like the reviews around the web are for single test barrels he’s produced, and he’s taken a sharp left turn into rum just recently. Intrigued.

Also intrigued by this review of the Bohemian Bonfire whiskey:

Each sip confronts you with two hours worth of tumble weeds, senseless dueling on dusty boardwalks and people getting kicked in the stomach by horses. DRINK AT YOUR OWN RISK

http://www.howtodrinkwhisky.com/lost-spirits-bohemian-bonfire-59/

….actually, I’m going to recommend that guy’s reviews to Adam Thornton too. Especially his notes on McFadden’s Irish Spirit –

Nose: An unsupervised five year old cranking out crayon pancakes with grape soda for his collection of stuffed animals. Malty vinyl, like a decade old Trapper-Keeper full of stale crystal malt. Stony raisins with toasted shellac. Coffee cakes glazed with graham cracker scented interior paint. Isopropyl rubbing alcohol and butterscotch marching across a Canadian hellscape in pursuit of an old lady wearing too much perfume.

Palate: Hits of that flavor grape soda acid leaves in your mouth after a sip coupled with bitter prednisone. Unflavored gelatin. Unmalted barley. Especially boozy and fake. It has a thin, solventy mouthfeel and lots of chemical signature stalked by a mildly smoky finish.

This stuff is creepy. I took my first sip and woke up shoeless on a park bench 20 minutes later with a raging case of pinkeye and no recollection of how I got there. If you’re looking for a passive-aggressive Secret Santa gift for that whisky-drinking loudmouth you work with, this is it.

http://www.howtodrinkwhisky.com/category/4-risky/ #illadvisedcocktails

http://www.alcademics.com/2015/02/dunder-and-dragons-making-rum-at-lost-spirits-distillery-.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

The Americans seems to be The Riches, only with the warring sides safely tucked into a nostalgic past. When the inevitable confrontation comes it will involve the usual weapons, because it concerns usual combatants – countries and their spy-soldiers, the struggle of ideologies hidden away in the bellies of Leviathans.

Out of the two, The Riches was the one that could potentially deliver real class war – the one that might pull in unexpected weapons and tactics because nobody really knows how to fight or punish such combatants. What if The Riches were found out? What would the people do, the ones they had fooled, destabilized? It was impossible to predict. The Americans would just be imprisoned, executed – society has already devised the apparatus to make them safe, if only they can be identified.

Except, of course, that The Riches got canceled after 2 seasons, and even before that it was quite clear the writers were never going to let it decisively unravel or deal with the fallout.

…no spoilers please

final lecture prepared. Subject: What architectural historians don’t mean when they say “Islamic architecture.”

Man, the canon is limited and purblind.

It’s nice to see someone demystifying prior attempts to demystify European intellectual hegemony.

Or, to put it another way, just because the Islamic contribution to science and technology has been systematically denigrated and ignored by the West, while Europeans have long claimed to have invented nearly everything… that’s not actually an excuse for claiming that all that prior art is actually Islamic.

As a handy rule of thumb, everything you thought was invented in the US in 1900 was actually already in use in Britain in 1800, the Netherlands in 1600, Italy in 1450, Baghdad in 900, and China in 2000BC.

http://wikiislam.net/wiki/How_Islamic_Inventors_Did_Not_Change_The_World//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

So today Google’s reminded me of Nellie Bly and her investigative report 10 days in a mad house, which is some alarming way to start your day. Imagine being roped to a bench and regularly drenched with ice water, and having to fight the rats for your rotten meat.

…I guess unaccountable power never really changes. Although Bly’s account of the mad-house is made harder to read by her account of sometimes feigning madness and sometimes testing to see if people think she is sane:

The new nurse, Miss Scott by name, came to me and said, rudely:

“Take off your hat.”

“I shall not take off my hat,” I answered. “I am waiting for the boat, and I shall not remove it.”

“Well, you are not going on any boat. You might as well know it now as later. You are in an asylum for the insane.”

Although fully aware of that fact, her unvarnished words gave me a shock. “I did not want to come here; I am not sick or insane, and I will not stay,” I said.

“It will be a long time before you get out if you don’t do as you are told,” answered Miss Scott. “You might as well take off your hat, or I shall use force, and if I am not able to do it, I have but to touch a bell and I shall get assistance. Will you take it off?”

“No, I will not. I am cold, and I want my hat on, and you can’t make me take it off.”

“I shall give you a few more minutes, and if you don’t take it off then I shall use force, and I warn you it will not be very gentle.”

“If you take my hat off I shall take your cap off; so now.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly#Asylum_expos.C3.A9//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

POLITICS HERE TOO BUT NOT ELECTORAL REALLY. ALSO ABOUT PORN LEGISLATION SO YOU MIGHT WANT TO MOVE ALONG, CAREFULLY WATCHING THE PAVEMENT.

So both the major parties in the UK want to make adult verification mandatory on porn sites. Despite that fact that most such sites fall entirely outside the UK government’s jurisdiction.

I can only imagine that this is a tactical move in a long-term strategy to increase web filtering by British ISPs, begun in July 2013 when Cameron tried to “nudge” Brits into accepting filtering by forcing ISPs to offer it – apparently the take-up on that nudge was about 8%.

This time the claim – backed by junk data from marketing company OnePoll – is that children fear becoming addicted to porn. This Wired piece has a pretty good go at laying the nonsense out but even it cannot resist Cameron’s language, which seems to burrow under any attempt to debate this stuff openly and honestly:

Research carried out by Bristol and Central Lancashire universities between 2013 and 2015 found that 39 percent of boys in England aged between 14 and 17 watched pornography on a regular basis. More and more children are growing up with warped views of sex

Speaking anecdotally from my time in a highly respectable rural public school in the 80s, I imagine that teenage boys are now watching internet porn on a regular basis because it’s marginally less risky and easier than sneaking magazines out of WHSmith’s or raiding their dads’ stash behind the boiler. Porn was not exactly difficult to acquire back then – it was circulated like prison cigarettes. Which is to say, outside the view of would-be panopticist politicians. But that’s not the critical point here: see how Wired’s James Temperton cuts straight from reportage to unsupported opinion piece:

[study gives figures on boys’ porn-watching habits.] More and more children are growing up with warped views of sex

1. Citation needed.

2. Define warped views. What are unwarped views? Were children getting them back in the (insert decade here)? Well, which decade, actually? The repressed 50s? Swinging 60s? Jimmy Saville’s 70s or 80s? Maybe the E decade or the ASBO era?

It’s fun to note that pubic shaving, which seems to have been popularized by porn, is reportedly now so common that boys might repeat John Ruskin’s alleged reaction on first undressing his wife

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2014/jul/06/john-ruskin-repulsed-by-wifes-pubic-hair

but that doesn’t really support espousing some fantasy of a return to what John Major memorably called Victorian values.

http://drmatthewashton.com/2011/03/25/great-mistakes-in-politics-no18-john-major-goes-back-to-basics/

Porn still carries a guilty stigma – maybe guiltier now that it can be casually assumed that pretty much everyone is familiar with it. But what is the exact problem? It doesn’t seem to be that kids are having sex younger – at least that’s not the problem being raised here. Is it the demystification of sex? It seems very unlikely that actual loss of innocence can be the cause of anxiety – maybe the loss of the adults’ ability to pretend that their kids are innocent?

Maybe it’s simply that Cameron’s marketing gurus have told him that exciting voters’ sense of sexual conservatism tends to increase their conservatism overall. Maybe there’s a demonstrated link between the fear of being Scarlet Lettered and voting Tory.

Originally shared by Grim Jim

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-05/01/pornography-general-election-2015

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-05/01/pornography-general-election-2015//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

It’s weird seeing at a long remove where your mental structures come from.

When I was about 10 my brother was obsessed with Dire Straits, so I heard a lot of it and I came to love their stuff too – none of it more than Telegraph Road, which I still find to be head and shoulders above the rest of Love Over Gold. Here I am 30 years or so later rediscovering just how well I know those tunes, and it occurs to me:

I’m a pretty strongly materialist historian, but I wouldn’t say my orientation was strictly Marxist. The guy who introduced me to the contingencies of historical development and the power of infrastructure, of spent money as an persistent actor in capitalist markets – my first theorist – was probably not Marx but Knopfler. In this one song I see an account of the rise and fall of blue collar America, the inexorable, crisis-driven logic of industrial capitalism, and the ways the whole expanse of history – its injustices and survivals in spite of it all – are compressed into the ever-running present.

…and then they throw it all away with the meaningless genre doodling of Private Investigations and the schoolboy snigger of Industrial Disease. Ah well. Sometimes his head’s in the guitar, I guess.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd3btVhwr48//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js