Links Two
ORIAS by Michael Bukowski
The above picture comes from Seventh Church Ministries your go to place for Clark Ashton Smith limited edition fanzines, MR James reprints with art prints inside, and what-not. And by “what-not” I mean a ton of cool shit.
The Strange New Vocabulary of Korean Factory Workers: This is a 7 minute documentary about working conditions in 70s and 80s Korean factories alongside an explanation of the slang that arose in response to the workers’ lives. If you’ve got the time click the link. It’s worth it. (Via The Atlantic)
Some Links
From the beginning, the coexistence of the diverse groups that gravitated around D’Annunzio had been difficult. There were the citizens of Fiume and the Italian troops (the arditi, the carabinieri), but also Bolsheviks who rushed to the city (in a Moscow speech, Lenin said he and D’Annunzio were the only authentic revolutionaries of Europe); anarcho-syndicalists; futuristic, fascist Dadaists; and oddities like the curious war hero Guido Keller, whose mascot was an eagle, who slept naked in the tops of trees, and who was one of the new commander’s main lieutenants.
From a Cabinet Magazine article by Reinaldo Laddaga about Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 1919 capture of the city of Fiume reads like something straight out of a China Mieville Bas-lag novel: A City for Poets and Pirates. It’s a fascinating read and worth checking out.
216 Words for emotional states that don’t exist in English. I have had the occasional schnapsidee myself.
When I say ‘my armor,’ what I really mean is a spreadsheet I used to analyze every piece of armor my character wore. Each piece of gear—the helmet, the chest piece, the chainmail legs—altered my character’s powers. My goal was to increase the amount of ‘Haste’ he had without giving up too much mana.
From Alex Golub’s artcile on The History of Mana: How an Austronesian Concept became a Video Game Mechanic . . . now I’m not going to say I’ve ever had a spreadsheet set-up for my D&D characters, but I will say I’ve known some people who have.
Some Links
Do you like links? I like links. I like having neat and interesting stuff pointed out to me. I like being shown towards articles I would never have found otherwise.
The internet is a big place. Why not let other people read bits of it for you?
When I started this blog I thought of it being a bit of a scrapbook, a place to put down random ideas, pictures, and notes. Earlier this week I asked a friend to send me the link to an article he told me about over a year ago, and the thought occurred to me that maybe I should keep track of those. Plus sharing a note of such things might be worthwhile.
So here we are…
Teaching: Just Like Performing Magic: Teller (the silent half of the comedy team Penn & Teller) talks about his experiences teaching high school Latin. Things to crib here if you’re an ESL/EFL teacher and want or get to design your own curriculum.
The Significance of Plot Without Conflict: A bit about the kishōtenketsu style of story telling. I think there’s a critique of this style of story telling, just as there’s one of Campbellian heroes with a thousand faces, but knowing it’s out there is pretty helpful.
Return of the Mercenaries: Since I live overseas near a US military base, I’ve had a chance to hang around with contractors working for the Department of Defense. All of them have been tech guys, but the stories they tell of their friends who are involved in combat operation makes your average mercenary sound like a combination of a prima donna ballerina and a viking berserker.
Twitter Weird Science Facts: I’m glad these are back. I had my wife in stitches telling her about FDC Willard, the physicist cat. And we both agreed that badger/coyote hunting teams sounded like the scar-faced gangsters of the animal world. Beatrix Potter was right!
The Swincar E-Spider: “Ferdinand, I must ride.”
The Forgotten Heroines of Pre-Code Comics
If you like pictures like these, and who wouldn’t, you might want to check out Saladin Ahmed’s tumblr where he’s been posting stuff he’s dug up from the Digital Comics Museum. Go there. Check it out!
Weird Rubbish?
Sarah Rees Brennan has a longish post on having been a fan fiction writer.
When someone is traditionally published after writing fanfiction, they get treated like trash, both by people who think fanfiction is weird rubbish and by people who themselves like to write and read fanfiction.
You can read it here. I post it for my own edification mostly, since my fascination for fan fiction remains ongoing.
Now With Extra EPIC Flavor
Over at Beneath Ceaseless Skies autarch-in-chief Scott A. Andrews compiled a list of EPIC stories in response to a twitter comment about something or other. My story “Of Shifting Skin and Certainty” got a nod for its use of drugs EPICNESS, which is kind of nice because that story is nearly five years old now and like most (of my) short fiction gets published to silence before being wheeled out to a walled-in garden where it can expire without upsetting anyone.
Anyway, if you like drugs EPICNESS maybe you’d like to check it out. There’s even an audio podcast of it for you deviants into that sort of thing.
And if you’re not into any of that kind of thing maybe you’d like this article on advanced mathematics with Legos in a washing machine.
Go Here, Look At This
It’s Roald Dahl week over at Mounds and Circles for those of you who might care. (General light-NSFW warning for the occasional boob and crude peen drawing over at M & C.) The neon line-sketch portrait of Dahl in their header is pretty neat, and the write-ups of Tales of the Unexpected are amusing, but the real good stuff are the illustrations from Dahl’s books — like these for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that look like they were done by R. Crumb, but were done by Faith Jaques instead.
Yesterweird 