- マリウス.com
- Lucas Pope on making a Game and Watch–style demake of Papers, Please
- Abaroth’s World: “An eclectic mixture of my interests including models, optical illusions, historic buildings, roleplaying games, heraldry, puzzles and gardening.”
- The Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters “George”
- The Neglected Books Page, where forgotten books are remembered
- Diamonds Suck!
- Lochgarry’s Blog
- “ParaTheatrical ReSearch”: Some weird Italian bullshit of some kind going on here
- “The Spirit-Alembic of the Matreiyan Order of Hsien Tao: A non-religious Mystical-Science New Age Order”
- yip.pe: fun little paint tool thingy
Posts in EnglishPage 6
I have officially decided to become annoying and switch to Linux. I can tolerate many things from Microsoft, but i will not tolerate them taking away my vertical taskbars!
Lords of Misrule 2023 — let the misrule begin!
It’s been a long year. That’s the traditional thing to say, but honestly, it’s been quite a short year for me, and autumn has crept up without me even noticing. That can only mean one thing…
Io Saturnalia!
It’s time, once again, for our third annual Satyrs’ Forest Lords of Misrule, where in the spirit of the season, i put you (yes, you) in charge of the site.
If you write or put togeher something — absolutely anything* — and email it to misrule@satyrs.eu, come Saturnalia (December 17 to 23, for those who aren’t up to date on their Roman calendar) i’ll put it up on the site, on the blog and on its own dedicated permanent subpage, etched in stone for all to see.
As in years past, i ask only that you refrain from political polemics and anything that would get this noble forest in legal trouble. Other than that, the sky is the limit. A video essay on the occult implications of Gremlins 2? A rant about that new skyscraper that blots out the view of your favourite billboard? Anything goes. Whatever you — my lords of misrule — want.
You can submit your entries from today until the 16th of December, 2023. Have fun, and don’t be afraid to get weird with it!
— Xanthe
Gremlins 2 is the hardest i’ve laughed at a film in some time — a movie written and directed by cocaine.
I think i broke something when the smart gremlin started talking in a New Zealand accent.
A dispatch from Barnard Castle
Hello. I’ve been to the Bowes Museum. I thought i might tell you about it.
Housed in a gloriously incongruous French mansion in the small town of Barnard Castle1, it was built to house the art collections of the noble Bowes-Lyons — a family lucky enough to count the Queen Mother herself among their members.
Its collection lies largely parallel to the “main” visual arts: ceramics, fashion, textiles, furniture, and other such things which must account for function as much as form. Most of it plunges headfirst into the latter, a bit frilly even for my often anti-modernist tastes, but i did like this caduceus-adorned wooden cabinet:
The star of the show here is the Silver Swan, a gorgeous eighteenth-century automaton which preens and sways on a bed of glass water. Unfortunately, it’s broken, and the closest you’ll get to see it is its dismembered corpse awaiting restoration, so [raspberry noise]. You can, however, see their exhibition on its legacy, which houses a wonderful collection of modern animatronics made by crafters and tinkerers from all over the world, like this 10/10 pianist:
There are a few items which don’t fit into the above. They’ve managed to snag some real Goyas, Canalettos, and El Grecos. (Los Grecos?) They even have Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, somehow — i assume it’s on loan from London?
Information for visitors
- Admission: £15.50 for an annual membership; £13.50 for locals — don’t be fooled by the eye-watering £18 day ticket for shmucks!
- Address: The Bowes Museum, Newgate, Barnard Castle, DL12 8NP
- Accessibility: The museum has an accessible entrance and a lift serving all three floors.
- Getting there: Bus network’s fucked at the minute. Sorry.
?
Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XXIV
- Rudiments of curvilinear design
- woahhh
- The Hot Ones crew unveils Pepper X, the new world’s hottest
- The Economist has a lovely obituary for the Sycamore Gap tree — may it rest in peace.
- Two iceberg charts of surreal movies and strange films. I may have to watch, erm, all of these — especially Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, which keeps coming up in my dives into net-art history…
Yep, that one's going in my Rich Evans Folder (2.1TB)
Hope whoever felled the Sycamore Gap tree enjoyed whatever kicks they got out of destroying a centuries old piece of local heritage. Sick cunt.
The Sledgehammer projection
This post relies on some spiffy new browser features, and might not work on your machine. Apologies.
The Sledgehammer projection — named after the Peter Gabriel song — is a novel equal-area map projection designed to fill the same niche as the Winkel Tripel. A composite of the Hammer and Peters projections, it preserves area, gives both parallels and meridians pleasing curves, and with its pointed poles, it does not distort areas in far northern latitudes to the extent that flat-topped projections such as Equal Earth do. (I dare even say that it handles Antarctica alright.)
The exact formula, based on Strebe (2017)’s technique:1
To invert:
And, finally, an equation describing the outer boundary of the map:
An interactive version is available here. Happy mapping!
</hiatus>
Welcome back, ladies and gentlefolk! I’ve been trapped labouring in a Colombian salt mine for the past four months, but after a daring escape which my lawyers have advised me not to speak of, i’ve returned to safety to provide you all with yet more content®™.
Some links i’ve had sitting around gathering mothballs to start you off:
- One Adel Faure’s collection of ascii art
- Ted’s pawpaw page
- I am, admittedly, a big sop, but this 3D reconstruction of the city of Tenochtitlan made me cry a little. All the things we’ve lost!
- Tom Scott visits England’s first longbarrow in a thousand years — file under “Pagan interest”, of course; in general, i just love to see modern revivals of our ancient traditions
- See It. Say It. Sorted.
Looking at the Big Sky: the world in 2025
I was, tentatively, putting off finishing this until i’d gotten the relevant part of the main site in a working state. But, given that i’m rebuilding the whole thing from scratch, and i was itching to put it out there — behold! The world in 2025 of Looking at the Big Sky, a sci-fi alternate-history -type setting i’m working on. (It’s not particularly sci- at the moment, i’ll admit — this is just a stepping stone on the way to 2338.)
You can find the full resolution image here. Wordpress is just being something of a shit.
Hey, wanna see the most beautiful thing i’ve ever seen?
I don’t know if it’ll come across too well in photo form. I was lying on the grass, as one does, and lo and behold, there in the sky appeared what i could only describe as a double-backwards-double-rainbow:
I’ve never seen anything like it. Maybe that makes me a shut-in? I don’t know. Some quick prodding around revealed it to be not a rainbow, but a halo: a circum-zenithal arc, its iridescent colours made by the low sun’s light filtering through the icy clouds above.
The Sagrada Familia. The view from a Pennine peak. My home town from above, caught by pure chance on a flight to Turkey. The first sight of the Tyne Bridge down Grey Street. And now this. That’s the top tier — sights i’ll never forget in my life.
A minor pause
Hello. You’ve probably figured this out by now, but my personal life has been getting quite busy at the moment, and postings on the site will be taking a back seat until, hm, let’s say the end of June or thenabouts. Don’t call it a hiatus — it’s just a minor pause.
Please enjoy these filler photos in the meantime:
Mx Tynehorne’s link roundup, volume XXIII
- China’s reincarnation ban has found a Mongolia-shaped thorn in its side
- A visual book recommender — like a big map of the literary world, designed to simulate the experience of looking through a used book store. Wish there were something like this for films!
- Along the same lines, here’s Gnod, the “global network of discovery”… and i suppose there’s never a bad time to link to Every Noise at Once
- The State of Neocities — largely orthogonal to why i packed up ship for a proper host, but interesting nonetheless
- n
- Atlas Altera: “A Wealth of Nations”