Tarquin 'Howling Mad' Holmes

Ah yes, the Dex alternative to Hayek's Bastard Sword.

#MedievalSky #histmed #histSTM #smallpox #measles #EpiSky Two PhD positions at @exeter.ac.uk.

"I'm going to the one place not corrupted by multiculturalism - DEATH!" (that or the Mountains of Madness)

"Now this candidate is not local, but THIS candidate is TOO local..."

It was unsuccessful, not least because most of its jokes revolved either around the Franco-Prussian War and the Alsace-Lorraine question or the works of Karl Kautsky.

Pierre & Bismarck was a thinly veiled 1990s knock-off of The Odd Couple but with two early 20th century European immigrants, a brusque conservative French writer & a German trade unionist, resentful of his parents' nationalism, living in the Dakota Hotel, New York.

I did figure Cushing maybe for Necrons given the amount of Hammer Horror films he was in, but probably actually also Empire here. Not sure for Wells, but maybe Eloi- sorry - Eldar.

Which factions though?

On the Birth of a Son By Su Tung-Po Families when a child is born Hope it will turn out intelligent. I, through intelligence Having wrecked my whole life, Only hope that the baby will prove Ignorant and stupid. Then he'll be happy all his days And grow into a cabinet minister.

this is recognizably the same genre of joke as Su Tung-Po a thousand years ago

The people who want you to believe trans people pose a conundrum to societal or legal functions are people who ALSO want to disrupt or control such things as adoptions, marriages, religious practices, inclusion and physical norms, and access to healthcare and healthcare choices for US ALL.

Labour apparatchik suggesting the other parties "Stay humble" before his own gets wiped out in the May council elections.

That rumoured At the Mountains of Madness adaptation has taken a strange turn from the original source material.

It's actually Trump being led into the frozen wastes of the afterlife by the ghost of the last Greenlandic great auk.

The thing is, in such a situation groups with stronger positive social bonds will tend to be larger & more successful than whatever ramshackle coalitions sociopaths can put together. In such a world (in-group) empathy is strength, not weakness.

(On clothing in bed in a cold room, it does make a big difference sleeping alone vs. being able to share body warmth as to how much you need, but re: stripping off you definitely want to wait until you've warmed up in bed & not before!)

We later in our 20s spent a winter at a large farmhouse on Exmoor (where it does go below 0) that was only heated by a log burner downstairs, & whilst the chimney was close to our bedroom upstairs, it was still bloody freezing much of the time.

First flat wife & I lived in had very dysfunctional night storage heating, so didn't turn on & used a space heater instead. But we had benefits of (a) being on South Devon coast where it rarely got very cold, (b) being above a travel agent who lured winter customers with near-tropical ambience.

Welcome to 3% Friday

A black and white springer spaniel roundly half slouches on a sofa with eyes directed at the camera.

"There are no nouns in the hypothetical Ursprache of Dlög... there are impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes... "The round hound rolls along the ground" would be written "hlör u fang uppuppuppus blö", or, to put it in order: "alongward, upon the grounding he houndly rolls".

*Although a lot of things that are implicit in the end of the original four books are made more explicit in The Urth of the New Sun.

Something something corridors of time something something something complete

(Besides, the reason people shouldn't read the Eddings' works isn't because they were bad writers, it's because they were child abusers)

I think a lot of this kind of characterisation is also just rooted in contempt for genre & ignorance of the fact that whilst tropes can lazy, they are also (a) ubiquitous, including in 'literary fiction', (b) popular because useful tools on which to hang narratives.

(Now Donaldson is much more clearly engaging with Tolkien's mythic high fantasy)

Eddings was an English literature major & openly said he was aping Campbell but a lot of the time was actually satirising or subverting generic fantasy tropes as much as following, so if anything he can be seen (along with, e.g. Stephen Donaldson) as part of an earlier wave of pulp deconstruction.

"Finally I have my Nobel Peace Prize", he proclaims at the store front, holding up a bag of frozen petit pois.

We're six months away from "Trump invades British frozen food aisle in search of Lebensraum, finds hash browns"

Which fave album gives the worst vibes and why is it The Final Cut (incidentally one I do like)?

(Content warning: ICE violence)

At around 1:40 this afternoon, I witnessed federal agents with ICE and CBP arresting a US citizen after hitting her car from behind, and then kneeling on the head of a legal observer in the snow, preventing breathing and bloodying their face.

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below!
Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage