So try this, via Alley Twenty Six:

So try this, via Alley Twenty Six:

Montego Lei

1 oz. Campari

1 oz. Hamilton Black

½ oz. Beefeater

½ oz. Punt e Mes

½ oz. orgeat

¾ oz. lime juice

Shake; strain into snifter filled with crushed ice.

Garnish with mint bouquet & edible flower [they use a nasturtium].

This is not sweet. It slows me down after having drinks like, say, a Mai Tai. If you like bitter stuff, it’ll be your bag.

I don’t know exactly when or why the US decided education wasn’t really important.

I don’t know exactly when or why the US decided education wasn’t really important. I’m tempted to say it was with the end of the Cold War, but it might’ve been before.

Late attempts to staunch the bleeding – the recent surge in favour of promoting STEM subjects and careers – are piecemeal affairs. There are online courses and private schools taking advantage of the new focus, but basic issues like providing teachers who can afford to concentrate on teaching are too complex for public institutions to face. In short, teaching just isn’t taken seriously in the US (or the UK).

And if you’re outside an approved STEM field, you don’t even get lip service: arts and humanities programs are cutting back or shutting down everywhere, because the government, investors, and even some parents and students have decided they’re not important. Language programs are where I see the biggest ironies – we know the economy is globalizing, which this decade means that the hegemonic status of English is slipping. Does that mean we should teach more languages to be competitive? No money, don’t be silly. Some fields and aspirational institutions can get by without paying living wages – there are enough independently wealthy people around who’ll do it as a hobby. That was how it worked in the 18th century, after all. And following the 18th century model, that means that some fields (art, music, history, literature) will only be fitting subjects for the rich.

A lot of this is to do with having less surplus in the economy – or at least less of it that’s available to be applied to public goods. A lot of that is governments and companies prioritizing other things (old fashioned corruption, I suspect).

I have kids rapidly approaching the age of college applications. I’ve been thinking about which majors seem like good bets, which places offer good opportunities, just what exactly constitutes value for money. But now I’m going to start asking another question: how many of the faculty here can live on their teaching? How many are valued sufficiently by the institution that we can be confident they’ll be back next semester, in good enough health to provide proper instruction?

Originally shared by Michael Verona

We build the future on the backs of the homeless.

Sex work is one of the more unusual ways that adjuncts have avoided living in poverty, and perhaps even homelessness. A quarter of part-time college academics (many of whom are adjuncts, though it’s not uncommon for adjuncts to work 40 hours a week or more) are said to be enrolled in public assistance programs such as Medicaid.

They resort to food banks and Goodwill, and there is even an adjuncts’ cookbook that shows how to turn items like beef scraps, chicken bones and orange peel into meals. And then there are those who are either on the streets or teetering on the edge of losing stable housing. The Guardian has spoken to several such academics, including an adjunct living in a “shack” north of Miami, and another sleeping in her car in Silicon Valley.

[…]

…institutions also recognize the allure of part-time professors: generally they are cheaper than full-time staff, don’t receive benefits or support for their personal research, and their hours can be carefully limited so they do not teach enough to qualify for health insurance.

This is why adjuncts have been called “the fast-food workers of the academic world”: among labor experts adjuncting is defined as “precarious employment”, a growing category that includes temping and sharing-economy gigs such as driving for Uber. An American Sociological Association taskforce focusing on precarious academic jobs, meanwhile, has suggested that “faculty employment is no longer a stable middle-class career”.

Six-figure educations and minimum wage professors – where does all the money go?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/28/adjunct-professors-homeless-sex-work-academia-poverty//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

This is genius.

This is genius.

And terrible. It’s the sort of clever clever intellectual exercise I love as a joke but I can still see the weft of a deeply stupid nationalism waiting to be activated out of it.

Maybe I’m suspicious because this is exactly what Turkmenbashi’s government did to the Turkmen language in the 90s, “cleaning it” of Persian, Russian, Arabic and English “incursions.” Making the next generation unable to read the works of the countries next door.

Also, if you really want this, speak Dutch.

Originally shared by Frank Mitchell

For GMs or players who like to talk funny in character, I present Anglish.

Anglish is English stripped of its non-Germanic influences, primarily French, Latin, and Greek. If you’re in an alt-history where the Norman Invasion (1066) failed, or just want to pepper your speech with strange-sounding words, learn a few Anglish equivalents to our English.

For bonus points, use Middle English syntax and pronunciation. No one will understand you.

http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_leaf//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

This is a private message regarding Paolo:

This is a private message regarding Paolo:

….I genuinely don’t know what to do this time. I’ve known Paolo for years and he’s a good guy. I’ve seen Zak bully people for years and I find it credible that he’s continued to mess with Paolo after Paolo blocked him. This time, for the first time, for me, it’s personal and I feel like I should do something, but I don’t know what.

I totally agree that the answer is not a crusade or high horses (that’s how we got to this point, too many damn Lone Rangers), but I don’t want to just be a bystander, to let it happen without speaking up. I think there’s a real problem and I think I’m not the only one who feels like enough is enough, so… I understand the feels going around.

The more excitable people get, though, the more depressing the come-down when it all blows over, again.

My son’s high school curriculum has firmly embraced Gunder Frank and is teaching that China was the center of the…

My son’s high school curriculum has firmly embraced Gunder Frank and is teaching that China was the center of the world economic system before the 17th century.

Good.

………but it’s making a bunch of dodgy claims along the way.

Is it really true that the advent of gunpowder broke the power of the aristocracy in Europe by knocking down local castles? Hmmmmm up to a point but I have a bunch of star-shaped cannon fort plans that suggest the transition was expensive and painful but not overnight bourgeoisie. And who drove those cannons around, right up to Napoleon?

Was the compass not important to Asian traders? Maybe not as important as it was to Europeans, but on one hand, we’re told that Chinese traders already knew the way to the Spiceries, on the other, that Muslim traders spread quickly and changed the markets throughout the Indian Ocean oecumene partly using the compass. Sooooooo…. no you must decide: compass good or compass bad?

And none of that’s as harmful to understanding as the idea of modern nations being projected backwards, and making decisions as interested historical actors. So we’re told that gunpowder was good for Europeans because it ushered in Capitalists and helped Europeans spread into the Americas, Africa and Asia, and that it was bad for China because it helped the Mongols swipe their territory and overcome the Great Wall.

But then what;’s Mongol China? Are we saying gunpowder didn’t revolutionize China because it wasn’t in the hands of someone we call a Chinaman?

It wouldn’t surprise me: I’ve already learned that my son’s course splits sea mechants up into “Chinese,” “Indian” and “Muslim.” So what that does to a Chinese Muslim like Zheng He I don’t know.

I’ve been limping toward a post on Tim Powers’s monsters for a while, but I always have one more book to read before…

I’ve been limping toward a post on Tim Powers’s monsters for a while, but I always have one more book to read before I can do the topic justice.

Is anyone else on this trek with me? Does anyone even know what I’m talking about? Kenneth Hite?

So now I’m finishing up Medusa’s Web and it turns out… it’s not quite the same monster as in Declare and/or Stress of Her Regard but it’s right in the same constellation of ideas. So close, in fact, that these all might be the same monster refracted through different observers.

And of course much of the time it doesn’t really behave like a monster at all, more like just a set of routines that people can’t leave well enough alone.

Features:

1. looks like a mundane thing – rocks, squiggles, whirlwinds/cloudy gusts

2. behaves like a wave form – can be destructively interfered-with, subjected to double slit experiments, reflected/refracted into prisons etc.

3. kind of intelligent and motivated but mostly on the level of “I eat you now” or “we remove threat.”

4. impossibly ancient/eternal.

5. possessed of or manifested through “spin” – more literally than quarks, less literally than actual whirlwinds.

6. capable of bestowing great gifts on humans but only to their destruction, because the kinds of people who want the gifts and are willing to pay the price are uniformly assholes.

7. kinda vampiric, or psychic-vampiric, or full-on blatantly vampiric.

So far the only books I’ve found that don’t participate at all in this pattern are the first Powers books I ever read: Anubis Gates and Drawing of the Dark.

on the uselessness of medieval pictures of dragons:

on the uselessness of medieval pictures of dragons:

“I found that dragons, as shown in the old pictures, were just plain goofy… done by a sculptor or painter to fulfill the function needed by the art piece that was under way — basically a one-purpose dragon. If the dragon were shown in the air, for example, it would look very nice; but there would be no explanation of what this dragon does when it’s not in the air. Or, if it were shown on the ground, it would be this amazing ferocious thing, and it would have little bitty bumblebee wings…”

…what changed in our aesthetics?

I suspect 3 things:

1. universal education in biology and mechanics has reinforced a modern aesthetic of “naturalism,” where we feel like we know roughly what it might take to keep something airborne. I imagine our collective prototypes for this are small birds and aeroplanes.

2. the age of dinosaur discoveries and/or increasing secularism might have made us think of dragons as animals rather than demons. For a supernatural entity, out-of-scale body parts might increase rather than decrease the horror, lending an uncanny wrongness to the proportions that destabilizes our assumptions about the creature’s abilities.

3. children’s book illustration, where things are often made squatter and more bubble-like to show that they’re cute/non-threatening/just for fun. I don’t know exactly when chibi came to mean suitable for pre-schoolers or who’s responsible (Disney? Warner?) but it’s within the last century and now it’s the standard, anything that uses those proportion cues is instantly and lazily ridiculous. Round things that you can see all of are reassuringly graspable. When film directors want to make something scary they have it frame the scene and bleed off the edge (in the celebrated example of Alien, the moment you get to see the whole monster is widely cited as the moment it loses its mystique).

But the one-purpose dragon – that’s an interesting idea. One with tactical implications. Or, what if it could shape-change between scenes – a legless amphiptere in the air, a wingless wyrm on the ground? What if it were always just what it needed to be for this moment – squeezable enough to slide under the door, strong enough to carry off the cart, broad enough to block the gate? As a demon or genie, why shouldn’t it be?

Originally shared by Michael S (chgowiz)

Say what you will about the CGI wizardry that went into creating Smaug or the dragons from GoT… but after reading what was done to bring Vermithrax Pejorative to life, I still think that 1980s dragon is still the gold standard. It’s also relevant in that I’m preparing a Ral Partha Great Fire Dragon figure for painting… and Vermithrax is likely to be my model for coloring.

https://monsterlegacy.net/2013/04/14/vermithrax-pejorative-dragonslayer/

Ral Partha figure: http://ironwindmetals.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=7010

https://monsterlegacy.net/2013/04/14/vermithrax-pejorative-dragonslayer///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Hey – I know you experimented with having multiple profiles on G+, did you ever figure out a way to have…

Hey – I know you experimented with having multiple profiles on G+, did you ever figure out a way to have posts/comments from one forwarded to the other, or anything like that?

I’m sidling toward getting something published and I probably don’t want my personal/work email attached to my G+ face that everyone uses, so I’m wondering if there’s some way I can migrate my current traffic/circles across to another account – one that I could quietly shut if I had to.

Jacques Cousteau proposed building cities under the sea.

Jacques Cousteau proposed building cities under the sea. There are arguments in favour of it, especially in the event of climate change or stripping of the ozone layer.

Still, I immediately think of post-apocalyptic explorers finding the abandoned shells of these subaqueous cities and going “so they were air breathers who returned to the depths, even though that meant they had to live in a bubble?”

“Decadent!”

http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/issues/22/ideas-of-living/766/conshelf-ii?utm_source=ENnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017-09-25_newsletter//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

The Khan of Khiva goes art house (until 0.54, when he decides to stop teasing you all and just gives you the peacock…

The Khan of Khiva goes art house (until 0.54, when he decides to stop teasing you all and just gives you the peacock dance).

My faith in G+ is restored. Thank you Mark.

Originally shared by Mark Hunt

Now for your Monday dose of Gonzo.

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

There is a debate regarding who wrote Captain Charles Johnson’s Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates,…

There is a debate regarding who wrote Captain Charles Johnson’s Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, the source out of which 90% of the pirate genre is built. Some people say it’s not that surprising we know nothing else about Johnson because nobody was keeping good records in the 1730s. Other people say it’s actually Daniel Defoe because it’s too well written to be anyone else.

Either way, as the book that launched a 300 year pop culture love affair with Blackbeard and all the other Caribbean pirates, it’s clearly one of the most influential works of English letters. So my question is, is it the most popular example of popular history ever, or the most enduring example of historical fiction? Or both/something else?

“There’s been a stigma attached to these flying humanoids, that they’re a harbinger of something bad to come…”

“There’s been a stigma attached to these flying humanoids, that they’re a harbinger of something bad to come…”

https://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2017/08/09/theres-been-a-record-number-of-flying-humanoid-sightings-over-chicago-this-year

https://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2017/08/09/theres-been-a-record-number-of-flying-humanoid-sightings-over-chicago-this-year//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Listening to Carmina Burana, eating buknade, it occurs to me that I’m really glad I’m not living in the Gothic…

Listening to Carmina Burana, eating buknade, it occurs to me that I’m really glad I’m not living in the Gothic Revival. Because although I admire quite a few Gothic Revival works, wanting things to be more medieval is stupid.

I’m also kind of glad not to be living during that shock of the new high modernism moment, but really Gothic Revival is the bullet I’m glad I dodged.

what’s your position on uncircling Greg Gorgonmilk?

what’s your position on uncircling Greg Gorgonmilk? I just caught up with his Captain America/Nazis/violence threads and, while I’m not in the “punch a Nazi for American Freedom!” camp, and both those threads were dumpster fires, I also don’t want to ditch him because of stuff other people in his corcles said.

That stuff he said to More en was stupid and wrong, though.

My first Massaman curry paste!

My first Massaman curry paste!

…Massaman means Muslim in Thai. Thailand’s Muslim minority is concentrated mostly in the south, around the ithsmus of Kra. They have a pretty diverse cooking tradition. So how come there’s a “Muslim” curry style?

When the Thai king decided there must be an official national cuisine in the late 19th century he adopted Bangkok street food as the basis for the national style. And just one reprentative dish from the Muslim minority made it into the royal cookbook, to be reproduced in books distributed around the kingdom and taught to chefs who would spread Thai food abroad.

So now “Muslim” is a flavour.

The Lego Batman Movie is, quite genuinely and without reservation, the best movie I’ve seen this year.

The Lego Batman Movie is, quite genuinely and without reservation, the best movie I’ve seen this year. Certainly the best comedy I’ve seen in several years. Unreservedly the best Batman movie since 1966. Except possibly the Heath Ledger one, but I haven’t seen that yet.

The batdogmech bit alone is worth the price of admission.

I had zero interest untilI saw this bit, without sound, on the aeroplane. And then I watched like 7 forgettable, formulaic movies on the flight. Man the general standard right now is bad.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VFk5LBW_EBc//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Reading Ulan Dhor, in which our pseudo-medievalish hero goes to an ancient city, wakes up the sleeping ultratech…

Reading Ulan Dhor, in which our pseudo-medievalish hero goes to an ancient city, wakes up the sleeping ultratech “mage” Rogol Domedonfors and starts a genocidal civil war.

So damn LotFP.

Also so replete with “applicability” and satirical spirit that I suspect it’s a roman a clef – which would let it off the hook of being kinda a big pile of incidents with only the slenderest connecting thread (I’m waiting to get to the end of the collection before passing judgment on that).

Is Rogol Domedonfors in fact Robert Moses? He’s a classic Oz wizard who prefers his own architecture to the people who are supposed to live in it.

look this is just a thought, but…

look this is just a thought, but…

what if there’s life on Saturn?

How much damage/contamination can Cassini do?

https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/radioisotope-thermoelectric-generator/

How mad would we be if some alien jerks crashed it into us as a “clean” disposal method, because they didn’t want it littering uo the sky and thought they could learn something from the descent flare and impact crater?

Originally shared by John Hattan

So Arnold K. started a discussion about combat damage being determined by margin of success and:

So Arnold K. started a discussion about combat damage being determined by margin of success and:

1. several games do that

2. if every combat round is a contested roll and damage is the delta between participants’ roll results then you can just mod the roll with:

+ skill

+ init bonus

+ weapon bonus

+ armour (it makes it harder for them to hit you and improves your ability to wade in and hit them)

OK so far so simple.

BUT I like the feature of Pokemon combats that they take multiple rounds and you can learn how strong your enemy is and actually do tactical planning based on that.

What if:

if you give up your ability to strike this round, you can double your skill/init bonus? That makes you (possibly) much harder to hit.

And in return, you get to know your enemy’s roll result. Not what they rolled on the die but roll + bonuses total. So if they roll a really high number and you manage not to take the damage b/c you gave up your strike, then you now know how dangerous they are and can decide what to do about that.

What if sides in a mass combat can do this, too (provided they maintain discipline/morale)?

In Liane the Wayfarer, Jack Vance offers an amazingly prescient portrait of the Internet Sexist Troll:

In Liane the Wayfarer, Jack Vance offers an amazingly prescient portrait of the Internet Sexist Troll:

“Behold, golden witch, here is Liane. He has come to welcome you to Thamber; and he offers you his friendship, his love …”

….Liane entered the hut and lunged for the girl, but twenty thin shafts darted out, twenty points pricking his chest. He halted, eyebrows raised, mouth twitching.

“Down, steel,” said Lith. The blades snapped from view. “So easily could I seek your vitality,” said Lith, “had I willed.”

Liane frowned and rubbed his chin as if pondering. “You understand,” he said earnestly, “what a witless thing you do. Liane is feared by those who fear fear, loved by those who love love. And you—” his eyes swam the golden glory of her body—”you are ripe as a sweet fruit, you are eager, you glisten and tremble with love. You please Liane, and he will spend much warmness on you.”

“No, no,” said Lith, with a slow smile. “You are too hasty… how have you gained the right to my love?”

“Absurdity!” stormed Liane. “Look at me! Note my perfect grace, the beauty of my form and feature, my great eyes, as golden as your own, my manifest will and power … It is you who should serve me. That is how I will have it.” He sank upon a low divan. “Woman, give me wine.”

……An odd creature, the golden witch. But, indeed, she was worth some exertion, and he would make her pay for her impudence.

Richard G You had mentioned the other day about no religious group (including Buddhists) being stranger to…

Richard G You had mentioned the other day about no religious group (including Buddhists) being stranger to inflicting violence or pogroms. Here’s a pretty horrible case of how worse it can be

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/textbook-example-of-ethnic-cleansing–370000-rohingyas-flood-bangladesh-as-crisis-worsens/2017/09/12/24bf290e-8792-41e9-a769-c79d7326bed0_story.html?utm_term=.ea892e046757

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/textbook-example-of-ethnic-cleansing–370000-rohingyas-flood-bangladesh-as-crisis-worsens/2017/09/12/24bf290e-8792-41e9-a769-c79d7326bed0_story.html?utm_term=.ea892e046757//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

One for Casey G.: the vicissitudes of war, featuring privateer George Walker.

One for Casey G.: the vicissitudes of war, featuring privateer George Walker.

In 1744, when war broke out with France… [Walker] was offered the command of the Mars, a private ship of war of 26 guns, to cruise in company with another, the Boscawen, somewhat larger and belonging to the same owner. [The Boscawen was a recently French frigate, originally called the Médée]

They… fell in with two homeward-bound French ships of the line, which captured the Mars after the Boscawen had hurriedly deserted her. Walker was sent as a prisoner on board the Fleuron. …[Walker] was landed at Brest as a prisoner at large; within a month he was exchanged, returned to England, put in command of the Boscawen, and sent out in company with the Mars, which had been recaptured and re-bought by her former owners.

…the Boscawen, a weakly built ship, iron-fastened, almost fell to pieces; Walker managed run it ashore at St Ives on the north Cornish coast on 24 November 1745.[2] He was almost immediately offered a larger command. This was a squadron of four ships — King George, Prince Frederick, Duke, and Princess Amelia – known collectively as the “Royal Family”, which carried in the aggregate 121 guns and 970 men.

This is my latest internet time-waster.

Originally shared by Casey G.

This is my latest internet time-waster. Just clicking around the alphabetical list will get you something interesting immediately.

I quickly found these:

Striking the Flag

https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/s/striking-the-flag.html

General Mess Manual and Cook Book 1902

https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/g/general-mess-manual-and-cook-book.html

Diversity, Inclusion, and Equal Opportunity in the Armed Services 2016

https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/d/diversity-inclusion-equal-opportunity-armed-services.html

The Constitution Gun Deck

https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/c/the-constitution-gun-deck.html

https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

It has become trendy to denigrate the iconic, conical martini glass.

It has become trendy to denigrate the iconic, conical martini glass.

Here’s the thing: there are many reasonable arguments against it as a piece of drinking technology.

But it also has style. When it first appeared it promised a sleek new mechanical world. Its unnaturalism was the point. It said “this is no ordinary drink.”

And even today, when it’s everywhere and used for everything, it still signifies a particular kind of commitment to the ridiculous, to hedonistic pleasure without fear.

You don’t like the martini glass? That’s OK. But if I make you a martini, it’ll be straight-up in a straight-edged cone, like the Robot Maria and Geoffrey Sonnabend intended.

http://www.mjt.org/exhibits/delson/oblisci.html

Originally shared by Alex Scrivener

The Champagne coupe, it’s often said, was originally inspired by the curves of Marie Antoinette’s breast. That’s to say, it was something natural and nurturing. But then came the 1920s and the stem grew upward and thinner, the bowl flat-sided and broader across the top. The modern Martini glass is nothing if not unnatural. It appears to have been invented by someone in a white lab coat who was comfortable using the word “hypotenuse” in casual conversation.

…

The Martini glass became the guest that wouldn’t leave. Its size continued to grow, as if overfed on Spanish olives, until the glass became obese. The 12-ounce versions were preternaturally top-heavy and unstable even when parked, easily toppled by a boisterous laugh or an errant knee. A full Martini glass on a small table is Chekov’s gun waiting to be fired in the third act.

As the glass grew larger it became ever more unwieldy to maneuver, the result of an uncompromising geometry. The steep side angles ensured that the liquid’s surface area grew disproportionately as the volume increased. This meant that even minor tremors escalated into major sloshing events, the bane of every server attempting to navigate across a crowded bar with a full tray. Bringing a full glass to one’s mouth was a process fraught with tension.

http://imbibemagazine.com/martini-glass/

late thoughts about Game of Thrones and Westworld

late thoughts about Game of Thrones and Westworld

I’m up to ep 3 of the latest season of GoT, so spoilers follow, but please don’t spoil me!

1. it looks to me like someone other than George is writing the plot of GoT… I had this feeling last season too, because I think I see a moralizing bent (pride comes before a fall, dramatic irony) and more obvious consequences coming through, stuff that’s is familiar from every other TV thing ever but which was refreshingly absent from GoT in particular. When I see Madboy Greyjoy having too much fun all over the set I just know he’s going down hard.

….so this is a gamer’s observation. I hear GoT started out as GRRM’s GURPS campaign (hence the dwarf, the animal companions and that one player who chose a witch advisor). And the cheerful amorality of the first seasons looked exactly like a long-running wargame with really attentive players. But the last couple of seasons it looks like meaningful drama has taken over from the semi-randomness of the RPG, and that means a smaller, more predictable set of surprises, more moral content (see above) and stupider principals. Yeah, sure, you just arrived in Westeros and you don’t have a proper spy network set up, classic invader’s problem. DO YOU NOT HAVE AN AMAZING INTEL-GATHERING SPY PLANE ADVANTAGE? “Oh noes their army was not at home.” PERHAPS YOU COULD’VE KNOWN THAT or partnered with someone who did. In short, the Tyrells deserve to die if they can’t notice that the people they just betrayed have mobilized against them. And Denise deserves to fail if she can’t do basic scouting.

2. oh my parade of respected British character actors. Pryce was nice in the previous season, but now we’ve got Broadbent and the guy who plays Mycroft and Billy Bones and every shot I’m like “oh hai.” Distracting. Did everyone have to get in before it closed?

3. Westworld must’ve been totally different to write this time around, since the entire audience has now spent hundreds of hours playing MMORPGS. And of course it’s a little bit about that, still a lot about machine consciousness, quite a bit about consumerist cringe.

But it’s also about the principal-agent problem – Ed Harris, representing the corporation than runs the park and the most committed class of player, winds up being one of the central conflicts of the story (although he never lets on about being conflicted). Because what he wants as a player is not at all what the corporation wants as a steward of a property (and GoT faces similar conflicts – the optimal investment strategy is a series that keeps running as long as it’s making money, not a limited engagement with an ending, which is much more satisfying as entertainment). And Bob gives him what he wants in order to stiff him (possibly literally). Is he pleased? Does he fulfill his destiny and escape the cycle of incarnations? Maybe kinda under the surface panic?

I’m back from my travels!

I’m back from my travels!

So… what day works for you to play CCH? Tuesday again? Monday or Wednesday? Jeremy Duncan after your 2 weeks are up?

10pm EDT (half an hour later than it used to be).

Story so far: you’ve totally screwed up a summoning and are back on the beach where you started, with a bissu priest and some croc companions and some wild rumours about Chinese shenanigans in the islands.

wait, is that actually the ex-president of Mexico trolling the current president of the US by Youtube video and…

wait, is that actually the ex-president of Mexico trolling the current president of the US by Youtube video and calling him a turd?

Man.

1. Presidential wrestling video trolling added to Tartary

2. where do we go from here?

Originally shared by Michael Moceri

This is amazing.

I like the cover of the fake issue of Time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ukv9v7IGZw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ukv9v7IGZw//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

there are no poor people’s movements

there are no poor people’s movements

indeed. There was quite a campaign against them in the US from the 19th century on. Arguably that’s the core reason for maintaining the world’s most expensive army.

But Jonathan’s post also makes me consider the whole setup of the “easy mode” argument. The idea that life is a competitive game and the victory tokens are dollars. It’s a worldwide phenomenon but a peculiarly American ideology.

And it occurs to me that this is truly Trump’s appeal. He has no class, no redeeming features, no talents. He’s not clever or educated or better than anyone who sees him, just richer. The message here is not America’s Got Talent, it’s Deal Or No Deal.

The attraction of Trump is that he started farther down the track than you but anyway he won. And it’s the same track, and whatever he did you can do (or more) and whatever he won you can win too, because he is not equipped to enjoy anything other than that shiny suitcase full of gold at the top of the podium right there in front of you.

You can look at him and know that if he can do it, you can too. Although you might have to kill some people to get that first million. But that’s OK – once you’ve got it, you just run. No consequences as long as you keep getting richer.

Originally shared by Jonathan Tweet

You’ve probably seen this before: the lowest difficulty setting for life is “straight white male”. For me, it’s a shining example of how the left diminishes the importance of economics. The lowest difficulty setting should “wealthy straight while male’. I can think of three reasons that the left talks around economics this way.

First, sexual orientation, ancestry, and gender are about identity in a way that socio-economic status is not. There is no “Poor Lives Matter” movement, no movement of poor people trying to get wealthy people to own up to their wealth privilege. “Wealth” gets left out because it doesn’t trigger emotions the way identities do.

Second, economics is about trade-offs, and morality prefers absolutes. We can agree that racism is absolutely wrong, but once you get into economic policy everything is messy.

Third, a wealthy straight white man can “atone” for his orientation, ancestry, and gender with emotional fervor, but he can only really atone for his wealth by sharing it. He can’t change his orientation, ancestry, or gender, so it’s sufficient to have a conversion experience and to become woke. But the wealthy man can change his wealth, if he wants to. He doesn’t bring up wealth because he knows where that road leads.

I see the same thing in my Unitarian church where there’s a campaign to really come to terms with white supremacy. There are sermons, processing circles, teach-ins, etc. A cynic might see the effort as an attempt to drum up so much fervor that everyone feels woke and engaged, without asking the congregation to actually fork over cash or to prioritize any action over our own plans for our congregation. In a multicultural workshop, we were told that the “magic sauce” for whites is to consistently remind ourselves of our unearned privilege. That formula works great for my congregation. We can all be aware without any challenge to our comfortable lifestyle.

MLK started a poor people’s campaign before he was assassinated. Now Rev William Barber of N Carolina has picked it up again. So far, no one seems to have noticed.

Imagine that a poor black homosexual girl has just been born in America, and you can wave your magic wand to change one thing about her to give her the best shot at a comfortable life. Would you make her a poor black homosexual boy? A poor white homosexual girl? A poor black hetero girl? I’d make her a rich black homosexual girl.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

I hardly ever read magazines and don’t like driving (even/especially with a stick).

I hardly ever read magazines and don’t like driving (even/especially with a stick). Which means I miss out on writing like this.

It’s a long piece and starts prosaically, but when the Porsche cranks into third it suddenly comes on song:

If you don’t carefully bend the car into a corner, pinning the nose with the middle pedal, the car seems to bob and sniff, burning speed by sliding the front tires or just kind of gliding around beneath the limit. But if you solve the puzzle, the car leads with its hips. You paint it through the landscape in smeary little drifts. The taillights move on a throttle lift or even a breathe, faster than a slew but slower than a snap. And the huge traction mean a slide is always fixable with more throttle.

Originally shared by Robert Rambusch

Word of the Day: homologate

Not a scandal involving Macaulay Culkin

Use it in a sentence?

I’m glad you asked.

http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a10379935/why-moms-suv-is-quicker-than-a-million-dollar-le-mans-winner/

http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a10379935/why-moms-suv-is-quicker-than-a-million-dollar-le-mans-winner///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

You’ll see this reshared a lot today.

You’ll see this reshared a lot today.

My takeaway concerns the chaotic state of humanities research – a consequence of its not being taken really seriously by most academic institutions.

1. There is no universal archive – you have to hunt for the content everywhere, often in unindexed, unpublicised private collections. Imagine if the sciences suffered in the same condition – or read a book about 16th century proto-scientific research because that’s what it’s like. Google tried to improve this but has been hamstrung by IP law.

So the insights you need are probably just not known to you or anyone you might ask because they’re unindexed in the wrong building.

And that’s before we get to the issues of language and separate intellectual traditions.

2. Humanists continue not to work in teams because the incentives of academic promotion tell them not to. When we say “the Voynich Manuscript has remained a mystery for decades” it’s maybe not obvious how

haphazard and fragmentary the efforts to decode it have been. This guy who finally did it semi-accidentally turned himself into the right sort of Renaissance man through decades of opportunistic zigzagging:

I first came across the Trotula in an eighteenth-century printed edition in Latin some years before I began my research on the Voynich manuscript, as I browsed through a private library (I had worked in the book department at Christie’s in the 1970s).

IE if he hadn’t worked for an auction house, sorting first editions by cash value as they surfaced briefly from the obscurity of rich collectors’ living rooms, he wouldn’t have seen the key to deciphering this vellum investment portfolio.

Research institutions try to buy these texts and make them available but budgets are limited and it’s a full-time job just knowing what’s out there. And the people who should really be identifying this material – the best prospectors who can recognize the gold – are tied up in the treadmill of publish or perish, hunting for funding, justifying their seats one conference at a time and most of all having to know everything, not learning from each other except through what’s published – ie what’s already a coherent story, already a body of work, already categorized as useful to a certain publishing field.

In short, by failing to universalize the archive and failing to combine skills we’re continuing the Voynich tradition – keeping things mysterious that could be plain.

Originally shared by Wayne Radinsky

The Voynich manuscript, “the most mysterious manuscript in the world,” which appeared to be written in some language that wasn’t any known language, has finally been decoded. It’s a reference book for health remedies for women in the medieval period written in Latin but an unusual script. “The foldout diagram of nine illustrated spheres found in the Voynich manuscript proved the key to understanding it. The Voynich manuscript has been digitized by the Beinecke library, and this allowed me, at maximum magnification, to take a patchwork pencil tracing of the entire sequence of nine spheres.”

“Medieval lettering is notoriously fickle: individual letter variations, styles and combinations are confusing at the best of times. I recognized at least two of the characters in the Voynich manuscript text as Latin ligatures, Eius and Etiam. Ligatures were developed as scriptorial short-cuts. They are composed of selected letters of a word, which together represent the whole word, not unlike like a monogram. … It became obvious that each character in the Voynich manuscript represented an abbreviated word and not a letter.”

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/voynich-manuscript-solution///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

This thing does two things: (1) generates a terrible Cthulhu-asura from a previous aeon; (2) turns its corpse into a…

Originally shared by Zedeck Siew

This thing does two things: (1) generates a terrible Cthulhu-asura from a previous aeon; (2) turns its corpse into a horrible colonial-fantasy mine – because god-meat would make valuable raw material.

~

Part 2 is the mine stuff. Results in a kinda-dungeon set inside a dead god. Also generates drama. I rolled:

” Day-to-day operations are left to Arnuvar san Shar, scholar and awful fop – gold hand fan, cloak of gold-ring mail, and gold slippers.

Arnuvar glides. A jinn in disguise. Hates the Jinn Prince, but spell-bound to exaggeratedly declare loyalty. Command Limb, at will. Also Purify Air, at will; five random spells; and a squad of foremen in gilt armour.

Bamboo trestles criss-cross the dig site. A big iron box sits by its lip. Chained to the ground, watched by heavily-padded guards – the box shudders.

You hear happy gurgling like a just-drained sink. Undines, imported from a distant land. Their water jets cut stone and steel.

Coolies line up in front of the change house. They are many, gore-crusted, and unwell. They are fanatical. They feast on the god they are defiling. They have made a religion of it. Their diet lets them perform miracles. “

Plus some simple encounter tables:

” Down in the mine, you stumble in the stink. It is like offal stuffed into your mouth, stuck up both nostrils. The darkness ahead is:

Accordioned. Tract lined with villi. Easy to get your feet caught.

And then you hear:

Liquid sounds, like when you swallow spit. Undead leukocytes, still fighting off foreign infection. “

http://zedecksiew.tumblr.com/post/165049073076/the-god-mine-part-2

(I’ve been reading Veins Of The Earth again. And also stuff about tin mining.)

http://zedecksiew.tumblr.com/post/165049073076/the-god-mine-part-2//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js