Forty-one things i did in the Netherlands

δʹ Poseideon ψαʹ.αʹ2025 November 24

Spilt my hot chocolate all over the table on the ferry · Seen tonnes of posters for the recent election · Hugged my oma and papa for the first time in six years · Visited her in her new flat · Bought a bami kroket… thing from a vending machine · Eaten brunch with the entire family · Got locked out of a fare gate · Accidentally sat in first class · Relaxed in the quiet carriage · Marvelled at the futuristic toilets on the train · Contemplated faith at the Begijnhof · Hugged a tree in a bookshop · Ambled past a makeshift Ukrainian cultural centre · Walked through residential Amsterdam neighbourhoods in the rain · Got high · Laughed at the animals at the zoo · Had a staring contest with an otter · Read a sign explaining their elephant had PTSD · Savoured the sweet taste of appeltaart · Been freaked out by mandrils (they just looked like deformed children dragging their arms along the ground to me) · Sweat half my weight in water out in the butterfly garden · Watched microbial scientists at work · Wondered why they had binturong poop but no binturongs · Been confronted with a dead baby giraffe

A clock tower with a wind rose instead of a clock face, pointing north

Realised that that’s not a clock, that’s a giant wind rose · Found out that six years later, they’re still restoring The Night Watch · Discovered new favourite paintings · Admired the gumption of defeating the British in naval battle and hanging their coat of arms up in the Rijksmuseum · Seen possibly the first condom ever displayed in a prestigious art gallery · Wondered just how Jac van Looij made those blues so blue · Felt smugly superior to everyone crowding around the three Van Goghs · Learned that that painting that looks like a photo was, indeed, based on a photo · Confronted the Netherlands’ colonial legacy via diorama · Remembered that Louis Napoleon was King of the Netherlands for a bit · Ogled at some surviving Renaissance smut · Marvelled at the syncretism of the Græco-Buddhists · Had my route back home interrupted by the Sinterklaas parade · Scoffed at the price of McDonald’s · Wished i’d just taken the plane, whilst trying to get to sleep · Wished i had stayed longer · Made plans to go back.

Lords of Misrule 2025 — let the misrule begin!

ε.κ.ν. Mæmacterion ψαʹ.αʹ2025 November 20

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Io Saturnalia, friends, and welcome to the fifth annual edition of The Satyrs’ Forest Lords of Misrule! First, i would like to apologise to my fellow θιασῶται for the delay — i was on private satyr business in Batavia, and you know what they’re like in those kabouter-coffeeshops.

Still, perhaps the extra wait was for the best. As i write this in late November, there is real, honest-to-Bacchus snow falling right outside my window, the sort of thing i had figured climate change would forever banish to mid-January doldrums. A perfect day for it.

For all of the new fauns among us who are unaware of our peculiar tradition, here’s how it works: in the spirit of Saturnalia, from December the 17th to the 23rd, i’m putting you in charge of The Satyrs’ Forest. If you write or put together anything, absolutely anything, and submit it to misrule@satyrs.eu by the 15th of December, 2025, i’ll put it up on the site, etched in stone for all to see. Temporary defacements of pages are also quite welcome, though they will, of course, be taken down on the 24th.

As ever, i kindly ask that you refrain from political polemics and anything that would get these woods in trouble with the British law. Other than that, anything goes: An avant-garde jazz record about the history of duvets. A rant about how frogs just ain’t what they used to be. Whatever you, my lords of misrule, want.

My inbox is open for business, so as always: have fun, be merry, and don’t be afraid to get weird with it!

—Xanthe

Hello from Hoorn! I was hoping to write some blog posts whilst i was here, but my editor isn’t letting me upload my holiday photos and there’s no way to fix it until i get back, so i’m afraid you’ll have to wait.

— Love, Xan

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume LV

θʹ Mæmacterion ψαʹ.αʹ2025 October 30

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I’ve been getting into Nine Inch Nails recently, and i have to ask… how the hell did The Downward Spiral elude me for this long? What a goated album.

I went to a local astronomers’ meetup the other night. Apparently they gather every new moon by the reservoir to do more proper dark-sky stargazing — they picked the new moon, i assume, to avoid a scheduling conflict with the werewolves.

I can’t explain this any better than the site itself: “telephone is a game played by artists. It works like the children’s game of the same name. […] In our case, we pass a secret message from art form to art form, so a message could become poetry and then painting and then music and then film, throughout all possible forms of art.” If there is one link you visit out of today’s roundup, make it this one.
Charles le Brun’s animal–human hybrids are at once terrifying and beautiful.
Very much in the vein of the linkroll’s “Paradise Engineering”, RaceToSpaceProject.com is an entry to a deep rabbit hole involving a plan to send humans to space before we run out of oil(?) and turn this into a major motion picture(??) to spread the word to the masses(???)
Sketchy.boats, the website which catalogues boats that are just… a bit sketchy.
Hallowe’en Clock
Welcome to Everything’s Computer Corner, the part of the roundup where everything’s computer!!!!
- The Next Four Years is a machine-learning-generated novel that rewrites itself daily to reflect the twenty-four-hour news cycle, always predicting tomorrow based on today’s headlines. Everything’s computer!
- “The future of AI filmmaking is a parody of the apocalypse, made by a guy named Josh.” Everything’s computer!
- Are LLMs djinn? Sure, why not. Everything’s computer!!!!
Life-changing eye implant helps blind patients read again. The diagram in this article is perhaps the most cyberpunk thing i’ve seen all year.
The top twenty-five most wanted “lost species” — kinds of life which may well still be out there, but which haven’t been sighted in decades.
What’s the deal with the poster for The Shining?
This 1986 screen test footage of Sam Neill of James Bond feels like an artefact from a parallel universe. (No disrespect to Mr Neill, who surely would have been great in the part, but i feel strongly that Bond should only ever be played by actors from the British Isles.)
Truro City FC travelled 914 miles to play a match in Gateshead
In 2016, Mexico City began staging a Day of the Dead parade because they saw it in a James Bond film and thought it was cool. More defictionalisation, please!
From the crew behind Apollo in Real Time, ISS in Real Time is an interactive catalogue of twenty-five years of human spaceflight.
Why Busy Beaver hunters fear the Antihydra
Student boilersuit
I severely disagree with this, but it’s an out-there enough idea that i had to share it: The United States should build a giant city in the Nevada desert where people can opt out of the social contract and do all the drugs and non-violent crimes they want.
And, finally, a good video about Pepsi

I think that, when the suits at Netflix talk about “second-screen content”, that should be interpreted to mean that they’re gonna start making movies exclusively for the Nintendo 3DS.

Words my spell-checker refuses to believe are real

γʹ☾ Pyanepsion ψαʹ.αʹ2025 October 19

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I’ve been in the process of writing sci-fi furry smut recently. (Don’t ask why — i don’t know either! The brain wants what it wants, and it’s decided it won’t let me get any alternate-history ideas¹ until i push out the idle trivia about marsupial anatomy.)²

You’ll probably not get to read it unless i end up hiding a secret link in a footnote somewhere, but nevertheless, it has been an… edifying experience in learning the limitations of VS Code’s rudimentary spell-checker extension.³ As the title promises: here are some words it refuses to believe exist.

identikit
refinagling (understandable)
crewmate
filmmaking
miscalibration
kevlar (not even capitalised)
medbay (again, understandable)
dingus
bearcat
unmatted
coifed
glutes
voicebox
pitter, but not patter
blacklight
taur (once again, understandable)
hindlegs, but not forelegs
hindpaw, but not forepaw
mitosed

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume LIV

ιεʹ Pyanepsion ψαʹ.αʹ2025 October 06

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Quite a few this time! I happened upon, like, six fascinating links in a row right after publishing the fifty-third link roundup and didn’t want to repeat myself too soon. Regardless:

Possibly the greatest post in Reddit history?
Nosferatu Flow or Nosferatu Vogue? You decide.
The New Yorker goes to a film-restoration festival in Bologna
The Ocean Photographer of the Year award-winners for 2025
Peak Jut, a new measure that tries to find the most visually imposing mountains rather than the tallest.
The world’s longest airplane is being built to haul around the blades of wind turbines
Denton House: “Built in 1795 as a farmhouse, it was converted in the 1860s to a Georgian-style mansion. It is currently a McDonald’s restaurant.”
The story of a fruitarian death in Bali
Notes from Prince Harry’s ghostwriter
“Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape.” But can it run Doom? (Probably.)
The “Polish System” used an even grid of squares to try and visualise the entirety of history.
The Ithaca Kitty, the U.S.’s first mass-market plushie
A working large language model made entirely out of redstone. Words fail me.
Continuing the machine-learning theme, ”continuous thought machines” take inspiration from biological neurons to add a dimension of time to the process of “thinking”. There’s some marketing fluff to wade through, but the idea seems promising.
“A vivid testament to a life lived hornily”
Epic Systems takes in five billion dollars per year. Its corporate headquarters is a fantasy castle.
Hector (cloud)
I don’t think i quite realised just how revolutionary The Matrix’s bullet-time effect was until watching this video.

I went to a Unitarian church service¹ yesterday, the first time i’d ever done anything of that sort in my life — having been raised atheist, and Paganism being a quite lonely path — and it was… surprisingly affirming? I’ll say this much, at least: it’s the only hymn-book i’ve ever seen that features “Bread and Roses”.

Stuff i watched recently, October ’25

ιʹ Pyanepsion ψαʹ.αʹ2025 October 01

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An odd commonality with many of today’s films is that, because either their production companies have gone default or nobody really cares about them any more, you can watch them for free on Youtube in varying degrees of quality right now. Videos have been linked where applicable.

Her (2013)

Every baffling product that’s come out of Silicon Valley in the past ten years can be explained by this film. They’ve all seen it, and they all desperately want to make it real.

The Humane AI Pin? Joaquin Phoenix carries around a little camera doodad in his pocket that he talks to instead of using a screen. Windows Recall? Scarlett Johansson helps organise his computer. People grieving the loss of their AI girlfriends? You know it. It’s a marvel they haven’t tried to abolish our keyboards yet.

It’s generally a strange experience watching Her in 2025, because it was right on the money about so many things that it now barely registers as science fiction. Mr Phoenix and Ms Johansson’s robosexual relationship is meant to be beautiful, and it is — the most tender sex scene of the twenty-first century occurs entirely through voice — but you have to work to quiet that little voice in your head going “lol, this loser fell in love with ChatGPT.” (8/10)

Weapons (2025)

Weapons takes the Silence of the Lambs approach to horror, being more of a nerve-wracking thriller with some spooky bits in it than a traditional “horror movie”, and is all the better for it. Satisfying as that ending was, it still seemed to be missing a little extra oomph to me. (7/10)

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

“This is the universe. Big, isn't it?”

My word, how had i never seen this before? Seeing nineteen-forties Britain in Technicolor would be worth the price of admission alone, but everything about this tale of heaven and earth is so touching, even when it suddenly decides to be about British–American postwar relations. An all-time classic. (10/10) (Watch now!)

Breakdown (1997)

The best kind of 6/10: a serviceable mid-afternoon action flick where Kurt Russell does his take on The Vanishing. (6/10) (Watch now!)

Dog Soldiers (2002)

Possibly the best werewolf movie we’re ever going to get? They do some brilliant stuff with what’s clearly quite a low budget. “I hope i give you the shits” is going in the movie one-liner hall of fame. (6/10) (Watch now!)

Matinee (1993)

From the director of Gremlins comes a nice little film where John Goodman plays a William Castle–type gimmick-horror director trying to promote his new B-movie in the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis. A wonderful watch, if a bit slow to get going — every second we see of Mant!, the fictional creature feature, is hilarious. (7/10) (Watch now!)

Lord of War (2005)

Great intro, good-but-messy everything else. It’s weird seeing a depiction of Ukraine in pop culture before it all got coloured by the war. Nic Cage delivers as always. (6/10)

Downfall (2004)

You know, this “Adolf Hitler” guy doesn’t strike me as a very nice fellow. (7/10) (Watch now… if you can speak German!)

Re-Animator (1985)

“And what would a note say, Dan? ‘Cat dead, details later’?”

Oh, this is glorious. It’s cheap and crummy, but in the best way possible. Every actor knows exactly the sort of film they’re in and delivers a performance to match. The special effects alternate between brilliant and hilarious. Watch it with your friends if at all possible! (7/10) (Watch now!)

Caught Stealing and One Battle After Another (2025)

These were the last two films i saw at the cinema, and they tread similar ground, so i thought i’d talk about them together.

“We’re in enough trouble with HaShem as it is without driving on Shabbas.”

The only other Darren Aronofsky film i’d seen before was π, and while my understanding is that the two are outliers in his filmography, Caught Stealing makes a great spiritual sequel, a stylish, high-octane, downward-spiralling crime caper squeezing every last drop of cosmopolitan flavour from its New York setting. Austin Butler is magnetic, and Matt Smith kills it in his role as the instigating punk, but the real star of the show is surely Tonic, the acting cat. Possible best-of-the-year material. (9/10)

“If you don’t give me the rendezvous point, i swear to God i will hunt you down and stick a loaded fucking hot piece of dynamite right up your fucking asshole.”

Of the two, One Battle After Another has been the better-received, rapturously applauded from all around as The Film Of The Year, a Very Important All-Timer Film with lots to say about The Issues. And while it is great, i can’t help but think… calm down? It’s not the Second Coming.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s excellence was already pre-assumed, but Benicio del Toro’s Sensei Sergio is surely the coolest guy of the twenty-twenties. Everyone else does nothing but larp, larp, larp about how cool and revolutionary they are (or how bvsed and rvdpvlled they are, in the antagonists’ case), but he’s out there quietly putting in the work to protect his little community without needing to brag about him. How can you not love a man with a secret ladder with a carpet that unrolls to hide the entrance? (8/10)

I was going to try out a Unitarian “church” for the first time today, but i overslept and because the buses are on their Sunday schedule there’s no way for me to get there on time. 😔 I guess that’ll teach me for next week?

Everyone hates “stomp clap hey” until “Little Talks” comes on. I will not hear a word against that absolute tune.

In praise of binturongs

γʹ Pyanepsion ψαʹ.αʹ2025 September 24

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I recently learned about binturongs, ridiculous animals which look like a hybrid of roughly five different cute critters, galumph about the place, and smell suspiciously like popcorn ¹. Thank you to the algorithmic Youtube overlords for blessing me with the above video.

Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume LIII

αʹ Pyanepsion ψαʹ.αʹ2025 September 22

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You, too, can be the proud owner of a bull-penis walking cane for just $99.00.
A sceptic takes a dive in a sensory-deprivation tank
4D Golf
RealDice.org. Tired of pseudorandom number generators? Try a real D20 today!
How Lough Neagh turned into an ecological disaster
The story of yot, the Greek letter that wasn’t quite
“Created in 1997 and once a Victorian toilet, the 10 sq metre venue was at risk of demolition until the residents of Malvern, Worcestershire, stepped in”
Dau, a Russian filmmaker’s attempt at a real-life Synecdoche, New York, is still trundling along
All glory to Tonic, the adorable cat from Caught Stealing.
Colombia is using “coral IVF”
“A highly scientific ranking of [all-party parliamentary group] vibes”
Through some dark internet magic, WebsiteLaunches.com proclaims to show you all the new website launches in the world, as they happen — which is mostly unremarkable storefronts, but there’s a mesmerising quality to it nonetheless. It’s an ocean out there.
Kelly’s One of a Kind Mink. I, uh… I’m scared. I need an adult.
Inside Philadelphia’s new underground museum of mobiles
“New Latin verse, please: Reviving Vates”
The vegetable lamb of Tartary
The Rumfords, a terrible lost sitcom about a cartoon family moving into a live-action neighbourhood. Honestly, the core premise here could be pretty fun if done well!
An extremely cool scientific model

In keeping with the spirit of the last post, i’ve done a wee bit of autumn cleaning on the blog’s theme, including a dingus showing the phase of the moon at the time of each post.

The Satyrs’ Forest: Now with seasons!

βʹ☾ Boedromion ψαʹ.αʹ2025 September 20

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The redesigned front page, showing off eight colour schemes

I’ve always been enamoured with the idea of the website as a living, breathing place; not just a dumb, static object, like a book or a reel of film, but, well, a site, like an ancient oak that bears the scars of all who’ve scrawled their loved ones’ initials on it.

For The Satyrs’ Forest, i’ve been slacking on that ideal. Sure, we have our annual tradition, and i’d change the theme to be more orange in autumn sometimes if i could be bothered, but never anything automatic — something that could outlive me if i dropped dead tomorrow. (Continuing with the forest metaphor, i’d toyed with the idea of a series of annual rings that would grow into different shapes depending on how active i was in updating the site, but quickly realised that my database just wasn’t set up to support that kind of thing.)

I had the itch to tinker with the home page’s design anyway, so i decided to finally implement something to solidly ground this site in the real world: seasonal themes! In daytime, there are four themes, one each for spring, summer, autumn, and winter, which shift throughout the year like an actual forest. There are also three complementing darker themes (spring and summer share one) which activate when it’s night here in Northumbria. That last part was important to me: i wanted the Forest to be like a real place, one that could, of course, be nowhere else but the actual location of the server, not just an ætherial construct where “night” happens whenever it’s past six on the viewer’s clock.

Finally, for the real old-heads, the “Modus anciens” theme replicates the look of the site as it appeared in 2020, when i was just starting out. I’ve always loved those neon purples, even if they don’t fit the arboreal metaphor, and it’s a joy to bring them back.