Hey @amazon we know there's a lot of drama about @neil-gaiman right now, but we still want to see Good Omens Season 3 and Anansi Boys. Please do not cancel/shelve these projects.
Also, we are anxiously awaiting release of Good Omens Season 2 on DVD.
Thank you.
cc: @primevideo
Donald Trump wants you to know that he knows nothing about Project 2025 and also that he opposes several of the things in it.
Which sounds just about exactly on point for Donald Trump.
Thank you bill waterson for everything
Yeah, sorry.... Didn't realize how dark that sounded. So
June 21-28 2024
Bonus: President Biden's efforts to forgive more student debt through his administration's SAVE plan hit a snag this week when federal courts in Kansas and Missouri blocked elements the Administration also suffered a set back at the Supreme Court as its efforts to regular smog causing pollution was rejected by the conservative majority in a 5-4 ruling that saw Amy Coney Barrett join the 3 liberals against the conservatives. This week's legal setbacks underline the importance of courts and the ability to nominate judges and Justices over the next 4 years.
where's that masterpost of quotes that have no right going as hard as they do. I'd like to submit "Protagonism is best left to teens and the insane"
Pros of reading authors you don't agree with:
This 19th-century multi-tool from Germany has 100 different blades and a .22-caliber five-shot revolver.
This knife could be described as the Mother of all Swiss Army knives. If you count the miniatures inside the tortoise shell handle covers, it has 100 “blades.” They include pocket knife blades of every style imaginable, a serrated blade, two dagger blades, several different types of shears and scissors, an auger, a corkscrew, two saws, a lancet, button hook, cigar cutter, tuning fork, pens and mechanical pencils, mirror, straight razor, and a functional .22-caliber five-shot pinfire revolver. The one modern convenience it doesn’t seem to have is a bottle opener, but the bottle cap as we know it wasn’t invented until 1892. Source : National Museum of American History
(cc: @petermorwood )
"...and a functional .22-calibre five-shot pinfire revolver."
But of course. A non-functional one would be - unlike all those knives - pointless. ;->
For comparison, here's the largest Swiss Army Knife, the aptly named "Giant".
I'd like to propose a fictional situation, and I hope you'll weigh in if interested. Let's say a portal opens in modern times, and a single champion of any age, wearing appropriate garb and armor, and a period-accurate weapon, steps out. Assuming no firearms are present, what, in your professional opinion, would be among the most dangerous armor/weapon pairings to exit that portal and face our fictional protagonist(s)?
If we're looking for more specific situations like terrain, let's assume this happens three times: once in the forest with wide clearings but dense underbrush, once in a room with tight corners and obstacles, and once in a mine with good lighting and long but narrow corridors.
First off, I'm not a professional...!
(1) A forest with wide clearings and dense brush: a lightly armoured man-at-arms (mail or brigandine on body, maybe a plackart on the lower abdomen and plates on limbs or at least arms, also some sort of helmet, non-enclosed for good peripheral vision) carrying a late medieval longsword or possibly Swiss sabre, and full Talhoffer / Lichtenauer / dei Liberi training in how to use it.
(2) A room with tight corners and obstacles: either the aforesaid lightly armoured man-at-arms, carrying a short Messer and once again with full training in how to use it OR an unarmoured man with a smallsword and full training in how to use it for combat, not just fencing - so, basic training by Angelo and lethality polish by McBane.
(3) A mine with good lighting and long but narrow corridors: peripheral vision and "nimble" mobility are much less of an issue, so full plate armour with unnecessary equestrian bits left off, carrying a pollaxe (poleaxe) and with full training in its use from "Le Jeu de la Hache" (Axe-play) and possibly an arming sword and dagger at the belt for backup.
That's today's answer, tomorrow's or next week's might differ in some or all respects, and I'm going to be interested to see what others suggest. ;->
HTH!
obsessed with this silly tiger
Every time I see this I get echoes of something.
Hey there Neil. So sorry to bother you, but I need to genuinely ask, how do you handwrite and are able to read it after yourself? I have this trashy notebook where I write when I can't do it on my laptop, but my thoughts are faster than my hand and the writing always turns out absolutely horrid and most of the time I'm just unable to read it after myself. Thank you, have a lovely day.
Fountain pens. Ballpoints and pencils leave me unable to read what I wrote. Fountain pens I can read my writing.
There's something about writing with a fountain pen that's just better. However, they keep running up against "everyone knows" notions.
That may be because "everyone" thinks you have to write in at least cursive if not full-on copperplate with curly bits. Not so. You write the way you always do, except that the fountain pen lets you do it with less effort because the nature of the beast means you need barely press pen against paper to make your marks.
Okay, the ones that fill from bottles of ink do have the potential for mess, but accidents are accidental, not standard procedure. The ones that fill using plug-in ink cartridges - the commonest method, used even in some Very Expensive Pens, like this set - aren't messy at all.
Yes, they can be expensive (in fact they can be ridiculous) but I've posted a couple of times about cheap fountain pens which work just fine for me. I've got several, including a couple of Pilot disposables which wrote so pleasantly that when they ran dry I didn't dispose, I refilled.
*****
The most expensive pens in our house right now are:
All of which means they're more valuable in a non-bank way than "expensive", though I wouldn't want to replace DD's Mont Blanc, whose price then IIRC was less than a quarter what it is now.
*****
Any on-line pen store - Cult Pens, Goulet Pens, Jet Pens etc., etc. - is able to sort their entire product list by "Price: low to high".
They can do it the other way too, with results likely to provoke a short sharp intake of breath. Most of the pens at that end of the scale aren't for writing with; they're for collecting, possessing or just an investment that happens to be pen-shaped.
*****
On the few occasions when I have to write with a regular biro (ballpoint) it now feels like scratching out the letters with a nail - and here for fairness I'll reiterate a good word to Pilot G-2 gel pens, which are as convenient as biros but write with a lot less pressure.
Still not as lightly as fountain pens, though.
*****
The only place I usually write with a pencil is in the bedside notebook, because ink, liquid or gel, isn't safe near sheets, duvet-cover and pillowcases (voice of experience, it never completely washes out). That goes double when blearily scribbling some write-it-down-now-or-forget-it-forever thought which woke you up at Oh-Dark-Thirty.
Regular HB pencils are getting too faint for me (younger eyes may not have this problem) and while soft leads - 2B and up - are darker they're also prone to smearing, which is OK for art but less so for writing, especially the late-night scrawly kind.
In addition they sometimes - not always, but usually when it's least desirable - do that carbon-paper trick of printing their writing on the facing page.
If both facing pages are written in dark but overly soft pencil, this can become a confusion of blurry overwritten letters that do nothing for clarity of information which, given when and how it was written, might be none too clear to start with.
All this is IMO, so YMMV and probably does. :->
Happy fox
follow your dreams at a sustainable pace
Actual roman epitaph for a dog
humans are the same
I’ve seen this one doing the rounds a few times (and it makes me cry every time I see it), but was curious about the original Latin text, so I did some digging: it’s a shortened version of CIL 10, 00659, a tombstone from Salernum (modern Salerno, Italy). (source; CIL is the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum).
Portaui lacrimis madidus te, nostra catella,
Quod feci lustris laetior ante tribus.
Ergo mihi, Patrice, iam non dabis oscula mille
Nec poteris collo grata cubare meo.
Tristis marmorea posui te sede merentem
Et iunxi semper manib(us) ipse meis
Morib(us) argutis hominem simulare paratam,
Perdidimus quales hei mihi delicias.
Tu, dulcis Patrice, nostras attingere mensas
Consueras, gremio poscere blanda cibos,
Lambere tu calicem lingua rapiente solebas,
Quem tibi saepe meae sustinuere manus,
Accipere et lassum cauda gaudente frequenter
And here’s my translation:
Wet with tears I have carried you, our little (female) dog, just as I did in happier times fifteen years earlier (lit. “three periods of five years). For myself, Patrice, now you will not give me a thousand kisses nor will you be able to lie lovingly around/against my neck. I have sorrowfully placed you, merit-worthy, in a marble tomb and I have joined you always to myself in death, as by your cleverness you matched a human. Alas, we lost such pleasures for myself! You, sweet Patrice, were accustomed to join us at our table, to beg charmingly for food (while sitting in our) laps. You were in the habit of greedily licking our cups with your tongue, which my hands often held for you. Frequently and joyfully (you) receive a weary one with your (wagging) tail...
tl;dr: this dog was named Patrice and was very, very loved. (another translation with some glossing of the text.)
STOP MAKING ME CRY ON PUBLIC TRANSIT DAMMIT
There are more Roman epitaphs with wording like this, showing each time how much those dogs were loved.
And yet...
And yet I wonder how often, during those dogs' lives, their humans went to the Games to be entertained by watching things happen to other animals and humans that they would never dream of doing to their pets.
Humans are a bundle of contradictions.
Seeing a post that you know a mutual will like and reblogging it to add enrichment to their dash like giving a tiger in a zoo a cardboard box
Thanks
huh i didn’t realise that was an actual thing
You didn’t?
My dude
It is Such a Thing
I’m so excited to introduce you to it
hi sorry s'cuse me but were NONE OF YOU GOING TO TELL ME ABOUT BLACK BOOKS OF HOURS???
LOOK AT THIS MAGNIFICENT GOTH-ASS SHIT
EGADDDDDDD
THE IRON-COPPER SOLUTION USED TO DYE THE PAGES WAS SO CORROSIVE THAT THERE ARE VERY FEW SURVIVING EXAMPLES
THESE BOOKS WERE LITERALLY TOO METAL TO LIVE
The 15th Century invented dark mode.
Old Pencil Sharpener in Action
Old Tech is fascinating, though the exposed moving blades on a couple of them is slightly alarming.
I still remember the pleasant smell of an entire class's pencils being sharpened before the start of a lesson, with one of these.
In a classic example of "If It Works, Don't Change It", that picture is of a 1950s-60s model, while this one is brand spanking new.
This little Faber-Castell gadget cost me about €6,00, is enough for my limited needs and still (depending on the pencil) produces that new-sharpened smell, just not as much of it.
But anyone who Must Have a more expensive sharpener can always source a mint-condition antique like this:
It's also a Faber-Castell, and yours for just €770,00 plus shipping.
Um. Nope?
For a couple of seconds I thought I'd seen that car in a movie...
...but the Rolls in "Goldfinger" doesn't have a black top to its bonnet.
Apparently the Goldfinger car has had a repaint and now does indeed have a blacktop bonnet - along with (shudder) whitewall tyres, more correctly "tires" since AFAIK it resides in the USA.
Here it is at the "Skyfall" premiere.
This may be the reason why the Corgi toy also has a black bonnet and whitewalls...
...but Corgi also managed to mess up the colour of their Goldfinger Aston Martin DB5 despite getting it right on the box.
The claimed reason was that a toy car finished in silver looked like unpainted bare metal. If that's so, why was a later reissue of the toy done correctly?
The black-bonnet whitewall Rolls is probably just another flub in research. Like the first-edition toy Aston Martin, it's certainly not an accurate model of the car in the film, as demonstrated by this long shot showing both of them.
*****
My 10th-birthday treat in 1966 involved Dad taking me and a bunch of school chums to see "Goldfinger", among my presents afterwards was one of the Corgi Aston Martins and Dad, bless him, took exception to such an expensive toy being the wrong colour.
How expensive?
This ad (again showing the correct colour) gives an Old-Money price of 9/11, which is just a penny off ten shillings. Back then I got a shilling a week pocket-money, so it would have taken 2½ months of saving - and doing without sweets, ice-cream, comics etc. the whole time - to buy one myself.
That kind of expensive.
So one day when I was at school Dad took it to a friend who did automotive resprays, and when I got home that afternoon it was waiting for me, repainted in proper dark silver. My possibly rose-tinted memory says its respray was not only the right colour at last, but overall a better paint job than the original out-of-the-box toy.
I had great parents, and kudos to the guy who took time out of his workday to do a kindness for a kid. :->
Side-note; at 10 years old I didn't ask - but have occasionally wondered since - how a man who used paint sprayers meant for full-sized cars did such a fine job on something that could rest on the palm of his hand. Maybe he had a small airbrush for detail work? One of those unresolved mysteries...
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A mystery resolved while finding the images for this post was that the Rolls in the video had indeed been in a movie, one seen and all but forgotten except for that itch of recollection.
It was the star of "The Yellow Rolls-Royce", black bonnet and all...
...though without whitewalls, which would have been too, too utterly utter for any motor-car owned by the Marquess of Frinton, as played with slightly constipated nobility by Rex Harrison.
Once I knew what I was looking at, I realised the last second of the video even shows the film's poster propped against its front bumper.
Beside being yellow and black, both cars had "Sedanca de Ville" bodywork by Barker. This was a Know Your Place style where the passengers had a roof but, except in bad weather, the driver didn't.
It lasted longer than I thought: this example by James Young is from 1965.
By pure coincidence both films came out in 1964, but as this post demonstrates, one is rather more memorable than the other... :->
SHERLOCK HOLMES (1984 - 1994) ↳ 4x05 | The Bruce-Partington Plans
“I knew you would not shrink at the last,” said he, and for a moment I saw something in his eyes which was nearer to tenderness than I had ever seen. The next instant he was his masterful, practical self once more.
