In other news
2022-09-01
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✢ updates
✢ A/V
✢ music
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✢ magic-is-a-heady-wine
✢ tchotchkes
First thing: Maya at maya.land uploaded a response to one of my RPG posts! Go read it, it’s very good. I don’t have webmentions or anything set up (I’m not even sure they work on blot), so I only saw this just now when I spotted it in her RSS feed.
And of course the urban fantasy counterpart would be set in the 90s, done in ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper, and the gazette would be a lofi photocopy zine.
I love ’90s urban fantasy, even though in my head it’s always set in London for some reason. Too many Vertigo comics growing up, I guess.
Still working on a format for these short update posts. I want to have a place where I collect all the links I’ve found lately, but each post feels a bit thin if it’s only links and nothing else. Most of the RPG blogs I follow (see linkroll) in particular are good about including something interesting with every post. Maybe it would be better to post more often with fewer links and more commentary?
In other news
- Reading A Canticle for Liebowitz. 1959 novel about Catholic monks post-nuclear apocalypse. Story spans several millennia as civilisation rebuilds and slowly falls victim to the same old mistakes. Very good book. Very much worth reading before you know too much about it.
- Watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Graduate with friends and re-watching Mad Men (they’ve never seen it before). On a 60s kick lately I guess.
- Downloaded Disco Elysium. Ready to find out if it’s as good as people say it is.
- Thinking about setting up a note-taking system with Obsidian or similar. No idea where to start with this one.
Site updates
- Added to the Linkroll. Mostly newsletters.
Audio/Video club
First saw this lecture a few years ago; found it in my bookmarks and found myself watching it all the way through again. Stewart Lee is always good value. Also worth watching for the bit where he says he doesn’t know what an “app” is.
Tchotchkes
- Nürnberger Handschrift GNM 3227a on Wikipedia. Late 14th century manuscript which seems to be a scribe’s commonplace book. Lot of material on mediaeval combat, so the HEMA guys are all over this, but also plenty of notes on alchemy, medicine, magic tricks, fireworks, recipes, &c. &c. Whoever compiled all this stuff must have been a lot of fun.
- Umberto Eco talks about lists. “How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.”
- Three-dimensional model of electricity consumption in Manchester, 1951 to 1954. “The model consists of about three hundred cards with square-cut stepped edges in an enclosure of chrome steel uprights, mounted on a wooden base, with a handle at each end.”
- How To Develop Good Taste, Pt. 1 at Die, Workwear. Derek explains how “our judgments are not neutral or objective, but rather rooted in social identity and meaning”. A good antidote to the tone of a lot of fashion writing online, which sometimes makes it sound like there’s something called “good taste” which is objective and eternal. At the end of the post he quotes Tania Sanchez, the perfume writer, to describe the “trajectory” you might go through when finding out your own taste. Well worth reading even if you’re not into menswear.
- Trends are dead. “The problem, so to speak, isn’t cottagecore, night luxe, or the concept of micro-aesthetics. It’s the fact that modern consumers are bombarded with a neverending stream of inconsequential trends to take note of — marketing vessels for products that fit into a paradigm devoid of meaning.”
- St. Petersburg paradox on Wikipedia. Makes me think of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.