Edwardsiella andrillĂŚ, a rare sea anemone discovered in 2013 that lives clinging onto the bottom of the Antarctic
ice sheet.
Iâm sure youâve all seen WPlace.live by now, which has become an unexpected internet sensation, and
it was on my list when i first found it (back when it seemed to be used only by
Brazilians)⌠but, eh, itâs lost its luster. Too much spam, too much brigading. There was a nice
period at the start where everyone in the Holy Land was keeping to their side of the Green Line. Tel
Aviv, Nazareth, Gaza, Jerusalem, Bethlehem â all beautiful. Now itâs just a giant mess. Anyway!
Links.
Protoweb, a service hosting old versions of
websites for retro computers to access.
StoryTerra is an interactive map of stories (films,
books, games, &c.) that take place in a certain place and time. A bit laggy, and there
are a few omissions from whatever algorithm theyâve used to categorise it, but still fun to
explore!
Raspberry Shake, a decentralised network
of Raspberry Pi-based seismometers that anyone can join.
Gen Z isnât powerless against technology.
Thereâs a lot of doom and gloom about around my generationâs poor relationship with the
computer, and while it has merit, i found this article a refreshingly optimistic
counterargument.
A supercut of characters in
TV and movies going, âWhat are you gonna do, shoot me?â and getting
shot.
The ultimate Xanthe-bait: A
group of medical scientists conjectures that the mythic feminising effects of Salmacis pond,
sacred spring of Hermaphroditos, may have been very real and a
result of the presence of mycoĹstrogens. (via
Linkfest)
I donât know whose dumbfuck crawler is responsible for this, but whoever it is, can you
please calm down? I welcome robotic visitors1, but they donât have to be so hyperactive. I promise you the data will still be there tomorrow.
Edit: The tidal wave has stopped, but i have started logging botsâ User-Agents
just in case whatever that thing is comes back. I hope theyâre happy with themselves.
Edit #2: Well, that was quick. Theyâre back⌠and theyâre not even using a âbotâ
User-Agent to identify themselves! Thatâs just bad manners.
Edit #3: Iâve implemented a basic rate-limiting system with a limit fast enough that it wonât
affect my biological readers. Fingers crossed.
Sit tibi terra levis, Jacobe Lovell. Iâll be busting out my copy of
Lost Moon in his honour.
Last time on âStuff i watched recentlyâ, i covered
four thriller films. Today, weâre back to our normal farrago of
assorted genres â and i must warn you, itâs been quite a while since iâve seen some of these,
starting withâŚ
The first act of this presumably final entry in the Tom Cruise Tries to Kill Himself series
consists of a clumsy, torpid recap of every attempted Cruisicide so far, interspersed with clips
from past films1
and people talking up Tom Cruise as The Most Important Boy In The World. But, as soon as Tramell
Tillmanâs beautiful visage shines upon the Imax screen, weâre shocked back to life, and the ensuing
setpiece â a palm-sweating scamper aboard a collapsing nuclear submarine â may well be the best,
tensest, and invigoratingest this franchise has ever brought us. (7/10)
Wes Craven dares to ask the unaskable: What if, in Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis wasnât a
complete imbecile who canât even hold onto a knife for more than five seconds? Nancy Thompson enters
into the pantheon of sensible horror protagonists by doing everything right, up to and including
hiding a second instant coffee maker underneath her bed.
The special effects are the star of the show here, from spandex walls to bottomless tubs, lifting up
some shonky performances (Johnny Depp acts circles around everyone else in every scene heâs in) and
a truly abysmal ending. With a premise like that, itâs not hard to see why it became such a
sensation. (6/10)
âEvery species can smell its own extinction. The last ones left wonât have a pretty time with
it. In ten years, maybe less, the human race will just be a bedtime story for their children. A
myth, nothing more.â
John Carpenter knocks it out of the park again in this bizarre, prescient downwards spiral of
metafictional cosmic horror. In an era of deepfakes, diffusion, and dripped-out popes, it can seem
as though fiction and reality are merging. What happens when we as a society can no longer tell the
difference? If you believe In the Mouth of Madness⌠itâs not going to be pretty.
(10/10)
âHello, Alex. Itâs Danny. The studio wants to make another 28 Days Later sequel. Any ideas?â
âHm⌠What if we made it a touching coming-of-age story about coming to terms with the inevitability
of death in a working-class North Eastern family?â
âWhat?â
âWe can make it about Brexit too if youâd like. An island of strangers, and all that.â
ââŚâ
ââŚâ
ââŚIâll get Young Fathers on the line.â
âGood, good. Youâve still got that pink Motorola Razr you shot the first one on, right?â
âAfraid not. Iâll have to use an iPhone instead.â
The town crier came up to me and shouted, âHear ye, hear ye! Superhero movies are good again!â So i
gave James Gunnâs Superman a shot, and what do you know? He was right.
Mr Gunn kicks off his newborn cinematic universe by cannonballing straight into the deep end. The
Superman experience is akin to starting a long-running comic at issue #387, in the best way
possible. Superman has already been doing his thing for three years. Lex Luthor has a pocket
dimension and Vladjamin Putinyahu has promised him his own personal settlement in Gazkraine.2
Mr Terrific is there. Whoâs Mr Terrific? The greatest character ever, thatâs who. Absolute cinema.
(8/10)
I forgot my Itch.io password in the move over from Windows to Linux, so the recent Steam sale was my
first time in ages playing the GOAT platformer. Iâm proud to say i
finally beat The Farewell (and got the moon berry) legit. Fuck that comb room.
(10/10)
Yeesh. I wanted to like this â âautistic robotsâ is a favourite trope of mine â but my sense of
humour and its just did not get along. A great example of how every show on Apple TV+ just looks
fake. (3/10)
There was a moment when i thought this was going to deliver the most singularly insane twist ending
in cinematic history. It didnât. So what weâre left with is a miserable film about horrible
fundamentalists kidnapping horrible college students and going up against a horrible
ATF agent. Kill me now. (2/10)
What a palate cleanser! Danny Boyleâs first film gives him the template heâd perfect with
Trainspotting soon after. Thumping techno tunes, a perfect mix of comedy and tragedy, and
Ewan McGregorâs boyish face. (Plus, an incongruously spacious sitcom apartment.) You simply
must see this, if only for the novelty of Christopher Eccleston with a full head of hair.
(9/10)
The vibes are immaculate; the story not so much. This is a lean two-hour-long 6/10 thatâs begging to
become a plump and juicy two-and-a-half-hour 9/10.
That said, when the Four are heading to space in their sleek pulp-futuristic retro rocket ship, and
the Human Torch gets smitten with the Silver Surfer⌠thereâs a lot i can overlook. A good half of
these points are just down to swish art direction and a
triumphant score: (6½/10)
Unfortunately, due to the Online Safety Act, i have decided to become an Annoying Privacy Guy. I
already use Linux, so iâm basically 50% of the way there â i just have to develop Opinions on
VPNs and Monero.
Wow. Iâve really done fifty of these, huh? (More than that, really â i didnât start numbering them
until i was already a good few in.) Well, uh⌠hereâs to fifty more.
Periodisation, the splitting of history into neat ânâ discrete temporal chunks, is a time-honoured
matter of debate among historians. Where are the boundaries? Why are they where they are? Can
periodisation even work in a global context?
Today, i will answer none of these questions, nor even attempt to seriously tackle the subject. For
this is not a post about where the ages of man truly start and end. It is a post about how my brain
reacts when it sees a year number and thinks âoh, yeah, thatâs in⌠uh, that part of historyâ. Whatâs
ancient? Whatâs mediĂŚval? I dunno, but my subconscious sure does!
Left to right: the
Palace of Minos, King
Ur-Pabilsag, the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro
The invention of writing is as good a time to start the clock on âhistoryâ as any, so
circa 3500 BCE it is. Itâs probably unfair to have a giant chunk
of nearly three thousand years â as long as the entire rest of history â all by itself, split into
nothing else, but when was the last time you saw an exact date in the negative four-figure
range?
This is the good stuff. Iâve chosen to start the clock not at the founding of Rome but at the
(probably semi-mythical) date of the first Olympics, because Ancient Greece has always been cooler
than Ancient Rome. (I canât take a language where â¨v⊠is pronounced /w/ seriously.)
Left to right: the Vienna Dioscurides, Emperor Justinian, the Arch of Ctesiphon
I think most people generally have a decent idea of where the boundary between the Middle Ages and
the modern day lies â somewhere around the end of the fifteenth century â but the line between
antiquity and mediĂŚval times has always been fuzzier, and iâve never been sure where to draw it.
After Julian died in 363, his successor was the last to rule over the empire undivided, the
classical pagan relative tolerance of âanything butâ giving way to the mediĂŚval Christian doctrine
of ânothing exceptâ. Itâs hard for me to fully accept what historians call âlate antiquityâ as
firmly set in either era, so here it sits as its own weird little thing.
Left to right: an Aztec tlacochcalcatl, the Bayeux Tapestry, the Baghdad House of Wisdom
The rise of Islam as a conquering force cements in stone the end of any vestiges of the classical
era; where Christians start their calendar at the birth of Jesus, Muslims have their epoch at the
year that Muhammad and his followers fled Mecca for Medina, which seems a useful line in the sand.
Left to right: Columbus arrives in the Americas, The Night Watch, Akbarâs court
If ever there was a single date that parts The World Before and The World After, a horrible
axis mundi on which history turns, Columbusâ arrival in America was it. Two parts of the
world which had been isolated for millennia1
were suddenly, irreversibly welded together, bringing untold riches and untold destruction. So much
was gained, and so much more was lost. Entire cultures were snuffed out in the pursuit of sugar, and
from their ashes new ones grew. Itâs hard to imagine what world we would live in without the
Santa MarĂa.
Left to right: the industrial revolution, Napoleon returns from Elba, the Meiji restoration
Thatâs not â1776â as in the American revolution, or even â1776â as in Adam Smith, but â1776â as in
the year James Watt sold his first steam engine. At the start of this era, Manchester was a modest
town of perhaps no more than fifty thousand people. By its end, it had ballooned to a heaving
industrial city of seven hundred thousand. That about sums it up: for all the wealth made
by colonial plunder, this was the age where humanity truly began to prosper.
My natural impulse was to start our current age of history at 1945: the end of the war, the start of
decolonisation, the thundering beginning of the atomic age⌠but, thinking about it, itâs all about
what feels like history. Iâm not sure me and someone from ancient Greece would have much in
common to talk about â nor someone from mediĂŚval France, or even Victorian London. But around the
1920s, a switch flips. They have cars. They have fridges. They have films, and radios, and fascists.
I get the sense that a Paris cabaret girl and i share a society, a common world and ethos, in a way
that people from before the war just didnât. You could pluck her out of history and place her down
in 2025 and, though she may be shocked at first, sheâd adjust within the week. The interwar period
is, to me, the beginning of ânowâ.
Iâve done some fairly interesting things this month, and had planned to write posts for each of them
â but, for whatever reason, none of them provided that particular spark to me. Maybe they just
didnât seem that interesting to explain to you, the reader, or maybe i didnât know what to say about
them except the obvious.
Nonetheless, it would be a shame for these events to pass into the annals of my journal without
telling you about them. So! Hereâs a brief summary of my unblogged July thus far.
I toddled off to Shildon to visit Locomotion, the local
branch of the national railway museum. Itâs the birthday of the railways, and thus boasts a
disproportionate selection of anorak arcana â alas, you canât go in the trains, but you get
a pretty good look at the inside of Queen Alexandraâs royal train car, the erstwhile Birmingham
maglev, and, most proudly, Stephensonâs Rocket.
Locomotion also provides a lot to geek out about for any heraldry nerds.
Beamish1
has been newly crowned
Museum of the Year, so there was no better time to check it out. I hadnât properly explored their new fifties town
yet â the chippie and the old houses are wonderful, but the record store, crammed up the stairs,
across an anachronistically modern mezzanine, and down a grey corridor, leaves much to be desired.
Nitpicks about balcony design aside, itâs as great as ever, and, somehow, well worth the ÂŁ33(!!!!!)
asking price.
Finally, just yesterday, i went off to an Elbow concert hosted in a ruined mediĂŚval priory by the
sea. Belting out âOne Day Like Thisâ in the fading dusk light with five thousand other people
standing on the same hallowed ground where monks tried to figure out where baby eels came from is a
top-ten human experience.
Last weekend i found myself with an unexpected glut of downtime, and i figured iâd put it to good
use by crossing four films, all thrillers, off my âto-watchâ list. I went into most of them
essentially blind: for two out of the four, i had no idea what the premise even was, and for one of
the remaining two i guessed incorrectly. Without further ado â hereâs what i thought of each.
What i âknewâ going in: Nic Cage tracks down the creators of a child porno.
The celluloid macguffin is, blissfully(?), merely a teenage snuff film rather than a full-on porno â
for the best, given they occasionally show snippets of the thing and i doubt Joel Schumacher wanted
to be put on a list.
Regardless: Mr Cage is our greatest living actor, and, this being the nineties, he
goes âfull Cageâ in
a gloriously grimy thriller that sinks him into the depths of Los Angelesâ erotic underworld. Also
featured is a disconcertingly young Joaquin Phoenix1
and Peter Stormare as a comically evil crossbow-wielding porno director. The third act gets pretty
over-the-top, at times nearing John Wick territory. But thatâs fine by me: i
like over-the-top! Itâs better for a film to go out with a bang than to die with a whimper.
When this came out, it was slammed by reviewers, and it still only sits at a six out of ten on all
the major movie-buff websites. I hesitate to invoke the word âunderratedâ, so often misused, butâŚ
come on. The only assumption i can make is that it that the critics still held a grudge against Mr
Schumacher over Batman and Robin, and that, four years after Showgirls,
Eight Millimeterâs frank sexuality was still considered too much. Bah.2
They wouldnât know kino if it hit them in the face. (8/10)
What i âknewâ going in: I thought it was going to be about a really, really old man.
Itâs not. Iâm willing to say Frailty, a directorial effort by Bill Paxton (of all people)
ostensibly starring Matthew McConaughey, is good, even if it is mostly told through flashbacks (and,
ergo, a child actor doing much of Mr McConaugheyâs heavy lifting). But the twist veers things so
sharply and so suddenly into a supernatural direction that the audience deserves a bit more time to
take in the ramifications. And since for most of the film the viewer has been focussing not only on
a child actor, but the wrong child actor, by the end of it i still felt i didnât really
know Mr McConaugheyâs character â which is a problem when weâre talking about our alleged
protagonist! (5½/10)
What i knew going in: Stephen King adaptation about a crazy fan who traps the author of
her favourite book in her bed and demands he write Glup Shitto back in.
This is the only one i had a solid grasp on going in, since itâs hard to avoid learning about by
osmosis. Great in concept, great in performance, great in script⌠but i could never quite shake off
the fact that i was watching a psychological horror film from the director of
The Princess Bride. (7/10)
What i âknewâ going in: Denis Villeneuve. Jake Gyllenhaal. Hugh Jackman. Iâm in.
Probably the best thing iâve watched all year. Itâs a punishing watch, but, my god, the talent on
display from all cylinders is like nothing else. Behind the camera you have Denis Villeneuve, right
in the middle of his transition from QuĂŠbĂŠcois dramas to Hollywood blockbusters, and Roger Deakins,
the legendary cinematographer who shot Fargo and No Country for Old Men.3
In front, you have a powerhouse ensemble cast of actors who could all easily carry a film by
themselves. Hugh Jackman! Jake Gyllenhaal! Viola Davis! Paul Dano! David Dastmalchian!4 A
masterpiece through and through â i hope we might some day get to see the original
NC-17 cut, censors be damned. (10/10)
Internet Roadtrip! Think of it like
Twitch Plays PokĂŠmon for Google Street View. Last i followed it, the chatâs plan was to
make its way to Canada no matter what, and it appears theyâre now balls-deep into Nova Scotia.
Godspeed.
Heavyweight.cc: âAll of the gravitas, none of the feesâ.
âUnparalleled misalignmentsâ: pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words
in the other. For example: father figure and dad bod, or
mass extinction and weight loss.
Happy pride month to the
g0ys
â thatâs G-zero-Y, a Brazilian
subculture of men who are attracted to men, but spur anal sex and donât consider themselves gay
or bisexual. Good for them.
