#went to the library and got the shipping labels printed

[50000bears]

The tasks are complete!! I was very brave about them too

[tabbyphobos]

Book Review: Mistaken Reality by Traci Hunter Abramson

TL;DR: Bin it.

Today I finished reading Mistaken Reality by Traci Hunter Abramson. I’ve been reading it for two weeks, with a sizeable break to play Sims since I hated it so much. But it’s really easy to just pick up and not finish books, and that’s how I got into a reading slump last year, so I’m making the effort.

I got this book from the library when I went to print a shipping label; my OCD declared it the next book to get. I had already tried it in the past and thought the opening was bad, but like I said, I wanted to make the effort and try to see if there was any diamond in this rough.

Mistaken Reality is labelled as Christian, but I wouldn’t call it that. Clean thriller is what I would put in my spreadsheet if I was to have my own copy. It’s halfway to cozy, if it wasn’t for the sheer number of government agents in the story.

The story starts off with a woman named Hadley going to dinner with her boyfriend and some of his work friends, like his boss. They unceremoniously break up almost on the spot over something that if you had been dating for six months, you would have talked about by now. Anyway, she goes to the bathroom to cry when an FBI agent named JD comes in and tells her she needs to leave and that the restaurant is being evacuated. They get out just seconds before a car bomb goes off outside.

If you thought the plot of the story is a whodunnit, you’d be wrong. They already know who done it: an international criminal named Rabell that they know is also into human trafficking. How do they know this? They got a tip outside the scope of the story, making it seem like you are accidentally reading a book two-plus, but you’re not. This is a standalone.

In the first three chapters so many government agents from the FBI, CIA, and others are introduced with almost identical voices and hardly any description that they are mentally interchangeable. It’s only later on that there is some difference, and really only in who’s married to who. Two of the characters are basically gone for 80% of the book after being introduced.

One of the agent characters leaves the country midway through the book to go on a semi-related mission that feels like a non sequitur until the book’s climax, leaving the reader wondering why they should care about Kelsey and her team of SEALs that refer to each other by their first names (government types are usually all last names) and point blank ask her her real name even though she’s two or more layers undercover. AND SHE TELLS THEM. FOR A PRAYER. What, was it not going to work unless she gave the guy leading the prayer her real name that’s been kept Top Secret for safety reasons? I half expected him to betray them all. And once they finish the mission, the book is only about two-thirds through.

The rest of the story is detective stuff, but since they know who, and even how, they just need a motive, I guess? Even though this guy is a known human trafficker that they are trying to get in custody for reasons unrelated to the bombing? It devolves mostly into trying to find out when and how he can be found.

Here’s the saving grace: the climax of the book actually feels climactic and actually has some tension. It’s not just a romance dressed up as a thriller with a side of military operations at that point. It actually grabs the reader and holds on. Too bad it took 200+ pages to get there.

Would I recommend giving it a shot? No. I’m just glad I didn’t have to pay the $17 it’s priced at for the displeasure of reading it. Bin it, and use your public library, even if it has some stinkers in the stacks.

[callboxkat]

Statement of Patton Sanders

Author’s note: Anon, this is probably not what you meant, but, hey! Here you go!

Summary: Statement of Patton Sanders regarding a series of accidents. Statement recorded live from subject, February 7th, 2021, by Logan Sanders—no relation—Head Archivist of The Magnus Institute, London.

(Necessary bg info: The Magnus Institute is an organization that takes and investigates statements about paranormal experiences. Jurgen Leitner is a character who collected books with supernatural powers.)

Warnings: This is a The Magnus Archives AU, so if you’ve listened to that you should know what to expect. Body horror (cut off fingers, broken neck), nondescriptive vomiting, blood mention, food mention. Child abuse, sort of. It's in a story in this story. No character death or villain characters.

Word Count: 3289

Original prompt:

Writing Masterpost!

Ao3 Link

@badthingshappenbingo​

...

“Hey, we have the same glasses.”

“Yes, I suppose we do—Do you need help with the chair? Oh, you’ve got it.”

Patton and the other man sat down on opposite sides of a desk. He was a weary-looking, bespectacled man who couldn’t have been much different in age from himself, although slivers of premature gray were visible in his hair.

The man—an archivist, he’d introduced himself as—leaned forward to turn on a tape recorder. It seemed a little old-fashioned, but it certainly did fit in with the overall vibe of the place (recording on a laptop would have probably felt out of place), and Patton didn’t mind. This would be much easier than hand-writing his entire statement.

The archivist cleared his throat. “Statement of Patton Sanders regarding a series of accidents. Statement recorded live from subject, February 6th, 2021, by Logan Sanders—no relation—Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins.”

Patton shifted in his seat. The archivist sat across him, looking at him expectantly. The tape recorder lay innocently on the desk between them, the tape inside slowly turning with a quiet tick. They sat in the basement of the oft-mocked Magnus Institute. They were in an office, but even here the walls were lined with bookcases, stacked with boxes upon boxes, each of them, it appeared, filled to the brim with folders, or with cassette tapes. Other peoples’ statements, presumably. Patton wasn’t sure how he felt about that. His story just being one of hundreds more, maybe thousands, in those boxes.

“Do I just… start?” he asked.

The archivist adjusted his glasses. “Yes, please.”

He nodded, swallowed, and even before he’d fully decided where to begin, he spoke. The words came surprisingly easily.

“I used to work at a library in my home town, back in the US. It’s a little town in Florida, almost at the border with Georgia, pretty near the coast. I don’t… I don’t work there anymore, of course. But at the time—this was about three years ago, back in 2017—I was there most days.

“One day we got this book in the return bin. It was weird. Not one of ours. It didn’t have a title that I could see, but there was a label on the inside cover. It was a bit smudged, but the last name was Leitner. I don’t know if it belonged to them, or if that was the author… I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, I guess.”

He noticed that the archivist suddenly seemed very interested in what he was saying, even leaning forward to hear.

“I was about to move the book over to the donations bin—I figured that’s what it was, you know, just a book somebody didn’t want, and decided to give to us rather than throw away, and got the wrong bin by mistake. But… I don’t know. Something about it just drew me in. I have no idea what; usually I go more for cookbooks, or crafts stuff, or um, lighter fiction. Not… that.”

He tried for a weak smile, but the archivist didn’t seem open to humor. Which Patton have once found awkward, but now it was almost a relief. He wasn’t sure how to make his story funny.

“So I took it out of the return bin, and I put it on my desk, instead. I was busy right then, but when I had a free moment, I sat down to take a look at it. It was old and worn, and like I said, there was no title. But it had this… weird feeling to it. Something off about it. I didn’t like it at all. But it was like I had to open it.

Patton sighed, glancing away. Suddenly, he felt on the edge of tears.

“And I made the biggest mistake of my life, and I opened that book.

“It was a story about a child who keeps refusing to do his chores. His mom would give him things to do, and the kid would say, ‘Yes, I’ll do them!’ but then as soon as the mom leaves, he’d drop the broom or whatever and run off to play with his toys instead. And as time goes on the mom gets more and more tired of this, because she has to do all the chores he doesn’t want to do.

“So, she takes him aside, and tells him sternly that he has to do his chores, or there would be consequences. And of course, he doesn’t listen, because he’s a kid.

“So the next day, takes him aside again, and tells him again to do his chores, and he continues not to. And it continues like that for ten days. But on the tenth day, the mom trips on the broom that the kid left in the middle of the floor, and she hurts herself. Very, um… very badly. She… breaks her neck. But she gets up off the floor, and her neck is all… it’s bent at a 90 degree angle. And there’s blood on the floor. I remember that page very vividly. Most of the book was in black ink, with some—” He made a face, “—illustrations. In the picture on that page, the blood was red.

“So, the mom… she goes to the kid, her neck all wrong, and she tells him, ‘You’re going to clean until your fingers fall off! Which… he does. She makes him clean, and clean, and clean. He has to scrub the floor, and when he finishes, she makes him start all over again, and again, and again. And, one by one, his fingers just… fall off.”

Patton was silent for a moment.

“On the last page of the book, there was a handprint. It wasn’t printed, you know, with ink. It was stuck in with a dark substance. I like to think maybe it was chocolate or something… but I doubt it. The weirdest thing about it, though, was that it had no fingers.

“When I closed that awful thing, I looked up, and it was dark outside. I’d apparently been reading for hours. I want you to understand—this wasn’t a big book. Maybe twenty pages, tops. And I’d found it near the start of my shift. I have no idea where all that time went, or how I didn’t notice it passing. Or why no one came in to disturb me. It’s like no one came to the library that entire day. I lived in a small town, like I said, but it wasn’t that small. We usually had people trickling in and out, even on slow days. Retired people who needed something to do, school kids doing homework, you know. You have a library here, you should understand, even if yours is more, uh… specific. So, it was really strange that no one had come in at all.

“Anyway, it was a horrible, horrible book. It was like someone set out to write a kids’ book about why they should do their chores, but instead of that, it was this nightmare version. I really didn’t want to add it to our library. Where would you even put a book like that? So I didn’t put it in the donation pile like I’d planned. But I also didn’t seem… able to just, like, get rid of it. I couldn’t just throw it away. Not because it was old and weird and maybe worth some money, no, more like… I don’t know. I just couldn’t do it. It’s hard to explain. So I put it in my desk, went home, and tried to forget about it.

“I’ll admit that, at the time, my apartment—my flat, you call ‘em here—wasn’t the cleanest back then. And thinking of that book, I kind of wanted to clean it. But also… I really didn’t. Thinking of that book made me very aware of the mess, but I kept thinking of that kid and the way his fingers just fell off, one by one, with that horrifying mom with her broken neck just watching, and then that handprint in the back of the book.

“I thought maybe whoever owned the book last, that Leitner person or whoever, put the handprint in there as some kind of joke. Just tilted up their fingers so they didn’t touch the page, to make it look like they didn’t have any. But I guess I kinda doubted that, even then.

“I made dinner that night, fed Jim and Pam—they’re my cats—and I left the plates in the sink to clean the next day.

“In the morning, they were stacked on the counter, perfectly clean. I tried to tell myself maybe I’d cleaned them and forgot, or maybe the cats had…. Somehow bumped them, and licked them clean, and it had just coincidentally looked purposeful. I don’t know. Pam liked to jump up on tables.

“I’d almost put it out of my head when the doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting any visitors, but sometimes a couple of my friends would drop by at random, so I might not have thought much of it, except that my cats suddenly started acting different. Scared. They were hissing, and they ran off to hide. That wasn’t like them at all. …I didn’t answer the door.

“A half hour or so passed, and I figured whoever it was was probably gone, so I went to peek out the front window. Sure enough, whoever it was… if there ever even was anyone out there… was gone. But there was a box sitting on the welcome mat. Plain cardboard, no shipping label or address or anything.

“I should have left it alone. It probably wouldn’t have changed anything, but… who knows.” He let out a heavy sigh. “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t leave it alone. I looked around, I wanted to make sure no one was there. No one was, as far as I could tell, so I opened the door.

“The box was small, maybe 6 inches long, a little less tall and wide than that—err, I’m not sure what that is in metric. Maybe like… 15 centimeters?”

The archivist waved him off. “It’s fine.”

“Sorry. So the box was small, and it was very light when I picked it up, which was honestly a bit of a relief at the time. I could practically hear one of my friends, Virgil, screaming at me about mail bombs. He’s a pretty cautious guy. Now I think maybe he had the right idea.

“I thought maybe the box was empty, even, until I stepped over the threshold and… and I uh, felt something rolling around in there.”

He shuddered at the memory.

“I brought it into the kitchen and opened up the box. Inside was… inside was a single, human finger, cut off just below where the joint would have been on the person’s hand.

“I felt sick. I was sick. I barely made it to the trash can. I remember my cats still didn’t come back to see what was going on, which was unusual for them. Normally they were very nosy little guys. It was like they knew something was very, very wrong. I don’t blame them for staying away.

“I called the cops right away, of course. Or, as soon as I’d calmed down enough to dial the number. I mean, course I did. Someone had dropped off a finger at my door.

“The lady on the phone was very nice, but I don’t think she believed me at first. Or maybe she just couldn’t understand what I was saying. I was a little upset, obviously. Eventually, though, the police did show up. They took the box, asked me some questions, and they left.

“That night, I was in the kitchen, cleaning the dishes, trying to forget the whole thing. I was almost done, but then, somehow… the garbage disposal turned itself on. Something wrong with the wiring, they told maybe. I was so surprised that I dropped the plate I was holding, and the stack of dishes shifted, and somehow, my hand ended up… my finger went down the drain. Into the garbage disposal. It all happened so fast. One second I was just washing a plate, humming the intro to Steven Universe, and the next….

“I scrambled to turn it off, but it was too late. I grabbed a dish towel and drove myself to the hospital in a panic. Only remembered later to send someone to look after the cats.

“They couldn’t save my finger, even if they had tried. There wasn’t anything left to save.

“A week later, I got another package. Left at my door, just like the last one. Identical to the first, but this time it was a different finger. Maybe from the same hand, but it wasn’t like I looked at it long enough to know for sure. And I’m not a doctor. I called the cops again, and they came. They weren’t much help. They poked around a bit, talked to the neighbors, and told me to get a security camera. I did do that.

“I was very careful that day, remembering what had happened last time, even though I knew it was ridiculous. What, some crazy person leaves a severed finger on my doorstep, and that somehow makes me lose my own in a freak accident? …But I was careful, anyway. And nothing happened that day. But the next morning, when I went to go to work… I slammed the car door shut on my finger.

“It kept happening. The same plain cardboard boxes left at my door. The camera always seemed to cut out when they were delivered, although once I swear I caught a glimpse of a silhouette. It looked… wrong, though. Maybe it was a tree casting a shadow or something. No one’s head looks like that.

“I stopped calling the police, eventually. They didn’t help. Just asked the same questions, swore they were doing all they could, and left. I stopped opening the boxes, too. I tried throwing them out, burning them, kicking them into the gutter. I went to stay with my friend Virgil, but the box found me there, too. I moved twice. It didn’t seem to matter. Every week, a box would show up, and within a day or two, even if I never even opened my front door or looked at the box, I’d lose another finger. Until….”

Patton looked down at his lap, where his hands sat. Where each finger should be, they instead ended in neat little stubs just after the knuckle. They were remarkably even, considering that he’d lost each one in different ways, in different weeks. One after the other.

“After that, it finally stopped. My hands healed as much as they ever would, and I went back to work—I still don’t know how I kept that job—and I found that book in my desk. I tried to throw it out, but I couldn’t make myself let go of it. I tried to feed it to the paper shredder, but I couldn’t make myself rip out the pages. Eventually I just threw it across the room, and it landed neatly in the pile of donated books. Apparently, it would have let me just… add it to the collection. But I couldn’t let other people read it—What if the same thing happened to them? So I took it home with me.

“I did try to get rid of it on the way there. I stopped by the river, a dumpster… I tried to set it on fire. Imagine trying to get a lighter to work like this. I couldn’t follow through with any of them, though, and not just because of my hands. The book wouldn’t let me. Or I wouldn’t let myself. I don’t know which it was, really. Maybe I was afraid something worse would happen if I managed to destroy it. I don’t know.

“I locked it away. Buried it where I couldn’t see it. Still, it was like it was calling to me, telling it to hold it, to read it, to place my own hand over that awful handprint. It was driving me crazy. The cats wouldn’t go near the room it was in.

“I tried to ignore it. To forget about it. For a while, I thought it was working. I was still constantly aware of where it was, but it got easier to ignore.

“Then, one day, the doorbell rang. It was another box. Inside was a single, severed toe.”

A silence stretched between them, yawning between Patton and the archivist. The tape recorder ticked on. A tear rolled down Patton’s cheek. When he continued, his voice was choked.

“I will never forgive myself for what I did next, but I couldn’t go through that again. Please don’t judge me. I know it’s unforgiveable. But you can’t understand what it was like, not if you’ve never been through something like that.  I knew it was the book by now, that was doing this to me, and I had to be rid of it. I still couldn’t destroy it, but I could… give it away. So I went and I got the book, and I wrapped it up as best I could, and I wrote ‘DO NOT READ’ on the package in capital letters. And I gave it away. I don’t know who I gave it to, and I don’t want to know. I drove across town, stopped at a random house, and stuffed the book in their mailbox. I can only hope they never read it.”

Patton let out a shaky breath. “It worked.”

The archivist’s face was impassive.

“After that was all finally over, I decided I needed to get out of there. Not just out of the town, but as far as I could get. I had family in the UK, and one of my friends studied abroad here and loved it, plus you guys speak English, so it seemed like as good a place to go as any. So I moved. Nothing else has happened since. I don’t have any fingers, but at least I have all my toes, and I’m rid of that awful book. I’ve tried to forget the whole thing, which as you might imagine, is a little difficult, but I try. Still, when one of my coworkers mentioned this place—I work at a shop now, restocking at night, so I don’t have to see the customers—I decided to come. I just want to be rid of this story. So… if you guys can track down that book, stop it from hurting anyone else, please do.” He clenched his hands, as well as he could. “I don’t want its weight on my mind anymore. It’s done enough to me.”

He fell silent.

“Statement ends,” said Logan. The archivist leaned forward and turned off the tape recorder. “Thank you for coming in. You can leave the way you came. Roman, my assistant, will take down your details. We might contact you if we need further information. Do you, by chance, remember the address of the house where you left the book?”

Patton shook his head. “No, I… I didn’t want to know.”

Logan nodded slowly. “Alright. Well… we appreciate your time.”

“I hope my statement… ah, comes in handy,” Patton joked weakly. He almost smiled at the gobsmacked look on the archivist’s face, the most emotion he’d shown the entire time Patton had been there. And then, he got up, and he left his story behind. He’d given it away to someone else, and he was done with it.

[canyouhearthelight]

The Miys, Ch. 43

The one where Sophia’s administrator is officially hired, and an odd story about black cats features.

Or, “Sometimes the real world is as weird as fiction”

For all that I joked about books being my truest, most lasting love – after all, who still loves the same thing in their thirties that they loved when they were three? – life on the Ark kept me so busy that I was ashamed to admit I did not know where the archives were.  However, I was always willing to learn more about the ship and take the chance to meet new people on the way. As such, I tucked the promised tomes into a satchel and decided to walk there, using my datapad as a map. A little voice somewhere on processor four, where my conscience and good will toward people tended to be, told me that travelling on foot would give people the chance to see that I wasn’t afraid, despite what happened.  Maybe it would help make them less afraid.

That was three hours ago.  Both of my shoulders ached from swapping the bag of books back and forth over the course of my idiotic trek. I was sweating slightly, and somewhere along the way I decided that the ‘little voice’ at the beginning was not, in fact, my conscience or belief in people, but instead came from processor five, home of Bad Decisions. I was completely certain of this, because the same voice had been telling me for the past thirty minutes to burn the books anyway and just be done with it.

To my relief, my datapad indicated that the door in front of me was my destination. Unlike most common areas on the Ark, this door was not labelled in any way that a human could interpret.  Early on, Miys made it very clear that the doors were, in fact, marked by the architecture and gave back a specific echo when hit with a certain frequency – one that humans could neither hear nor create without technical assistance.  I took a moment to straighten my bearing and run a hand through my frazzled hair before approaching the den of my soon-to-be administrator.

Alistair Worthington was nowhere in sight, but what I did see compelled me to let out a confident and completely dignified squeak.  Books.  Hundreds and hundreds of real, tangible, paper books.  The smell of ink and glue invaded my lungs like the most intoxicating drug ever created.  I don’t know what I had been expecting when I imagined there being an ‘Archive’ on the ship, but this wasn’t it.

This was a library.  One like I hadn’t seen since I was a kid.  Every shred of exhaustion and frustration vanished from my body as I trailed my fingers gently over the spines on the shelves.  I honestly wanted to cry from the sheer sensation of being reunited with a long-lost friend.  You can keep your hymns, your prayers, and your sermons, I thought. This is the most religious experience of my life.

My reverie was shattered painfully by the sound of a throat being cleared behind me. “Miss, please don’t touch the – Oh. Councillor Reid.” Worthington’s face snapped from stern to surprised when I turned on him, not even bothering to wipe the tears from my face.

Without a word, I untangled myself from the satchel I had been carrying and held it out with one hand. When he just glanced at it in confusion, I shook it. “Your books. I promised I would bring them myself, and I try to always keep my word.”

After only a split second of additional hesitation, the man before me showed the only spec of emotion I had seen in our brief encounters by eagerly snatching the bag from me and digging through it like it held everything he ever wanted. Ah, I thought, arching a brow. So you are human, after all.

“There are two missing.” He actually sounded disappointed.

Shaking my head, I tried to wrap my Councillor bearing around me. “No, there aren’t.  Antoine Costa decided to keep Love in the Time of Cholera, since it was made here on the ship and the source does not negate the fact that it is his favorite book. Tyche Reid did agree to donate two of her graphic novels to the archive, but made a personal choice to keep Blankets, as is her right.”

With a sigh, he nodded in terse acceptance. “I suppose I can learn to live with that.”

“Archivist Worthington, there are fifteen books in that bag.  None of the books that were donated or reclaimed were found to have Baconist propaganda, so that is all of them beside the two which were kept by their rightful owners,” I pointed out in frustration. “Besides, I carried those down here, on foot.  It took me three hours. The least you can do is show an ounce of gratitude.”

He was clearly unimpressed, if the flat look he pointed at me was any indication. “For honoring our agreement and delivering them yourself, yes, I am grateful. However, I did not ask you to foolishly make that trek without the use of a transport, especially not when you are still recovering from your attack if I remember correctly. How you convinced your over-protective sister to even allow this – “

“Tyche does not ‘allow’ me to do anything, Mr. Worthington,” I cut him off icily. “I am a grown woman, and I am capable of making my own decisions.”

“That does not mean they are intelligent decisions, apparently,” he grumbled. “You clearly have more sense than this, I am baffled why you decided to walk down here.”

He had me there. After an awkward silence, I decided to change the subject. “Where did the rest of these come from?” I asked, running a finger along the edge of a shelf. “I know they aren’t confiscated.”

“I brought them from Earth, mostly,” he breathed with a nod. “Maybe three months before I arrived on the Ark, I stumbled across an old book store. Imagine my surprise when I saw that, somehow, it had not been broken into, the books not used for kindling.”

“You may as well have found Atlantis while you were at it,” I replied, not even half joking. In ten years, I had only found one or two books that were in sufficient condition to still read them, and more gutted and burned libraries than I wanted to remember.  Book were paper, paper made good kindling. Sadly, religious texts burned the best, since they were usually printed on thinner paper.  College textbooks were a close second.

Clearing his throat, he continued. “When I woke up on the Ark, I insisted that either the books come with me, or I go back to Earth.  Books are history, I explained.  And those who fail to learn from history…”

“Are doomed to repeat it,” I finished with a nod. “I completely agree, and I’m sure Tyche would agree with your determination.  She managed to talk Noah into bringing the pets and genetic samples of the wildlife.”

“It is an Ark,” he conceded. “Would be a shame if we left the fauna behind. They did not ruin our world, after all.” He glanced away with a familiar haunted look. We all had ghosts, it seemed. Shaking his head vigorously, he seemed to snap out of whatever memory he was stuck in. “I’m just glad she did not bring any actual mice.  They destroy books like nothing else.”

“No mice, just a cat,” I reassured him with a small smile.

“Ah, yes. Mac.” Worthington wrinkled his nose slightly. “A bit cliché, isn’t it? A witch having a black cat?”

“Ooo, someone never asked about the cat,” I sing-songed. “He’s shared, for starters. Mine, hers, and apparently the entire ship’s.  But he’s also part of a long-standing tradition, one that goes back further than I can probably tell you.  It’s unrelated to the witch thing, although that seems to be tradition, too.”

“Most people find black cats to be bad luck,” he sniffed, making it clear that ‘most people’ probably equated to ‘superstitious idiots’ in his mind.

I shook my head and chuckled. “Not my family, not by a long shot.  Black cats always seem to find us, and we always seem to have at least one.  No idea why, but I can’t remember a time when a woman in my family didn’t own a black cat.” A glance showed that the archivist was waiting expectantly. “When I was three years old, my family lived in California.  Tyche wasn’t even born yet.  Someone dumped two newborn kittens on our doorstep, a tabby and a black one. Smokey and Dragon.  Mom went that day and got the formula and bottles to nurse them, and we kept them until we had to move across country.  Then we were adopted by strays, first in Arkansas, then in Washington… When we moved back to Arkansas for the last time, not a week after we moved in, a gorgeous long-haired black tom showed up on our doorstep. Shadow. He was already grown, and half feral, but he always came back to our house.  Not long before he vanished for the last time, one of our other cats, Monster, had a litter of kittens.  Nearly every one was black.  The girl, Onyx, was our next black cat.  Then I went to college, Onyx died of a very venerable old age, and on my way to class one day, a kitten screamed at me from an engine block.  I fished him out, and that was the original Machiavelli.  Mac is his grandson, by the way.  Mac stayed with Tyche, and I ended up with first The Dread Pirate Timmy, and then Nicodemus. There were other cats, but always at least one black one.”

As I told the story, I had been walking along the edge of the room, trailing my fingers along the tops of and down the spines of the books.  I glanced over my shoulder to see Worthington’s head tilted and a strong look of thought on his features. “My family is heathens,” I clarified. “As far back as we have a family tree.  You have to look really hard to find any major Abrahamic religions in there, and there’s not a drop of noble blood in our veins unless you count the Vikings.”

“Vikings were quite noble,” he muttered, still lost in thought.

“Maybe that’s why we never bought into the whole ‘black cats are bad luck’ thing,” I shrugged. “Cats are cats. They eat vermin, they make good companions. Self-sufficient, not very needy. So. I need to know that you’ll get along well with Mac.”

“Wait.” He shook his head again before taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “What? Why would I need to get along with your cat?”

I turned to fully face him, wide grin on my face. “Because, Mr. Worthington,” I flicked the file toward him from my datapad with a flourish. “You, sir, are my new Administrator. Congratulations.”

Finally losing all his composure, he started sputtering. “You – you cannot be serious.  Did any others even apply?”

“Over a hundred, actually,” I confirmed, enjoying myself. “Forty made it past Xiomara Kalloe. Seventeen survived a second, deeper background check.” No need to mention Derek. “You, however, were the only one with a recommendation letter from my sister.”

“She doesn’t even like me,” he argued.

“Not in the criteria for the position, fortunately,” I explained. “And you’d be surprised.  You aren’t afraid of her, which is significantly more impressive than you seem to realize.”

“You have clearly never taught teenagers,” he responded wryly. “Nasty little shits, they can be.”

I continued, trying not to laugh. “You’re determined, which is something she understands. But probably the most important is that you were the first person who I encountered after what happened on Level One who didn’t treat me like either a hero or a helpless victim.  You saw me as a Councillor, expected me to act like one, and trusted my judgement.”

“I argued with you,” he pointed out.

“Do you not want the position?” I asked, arching a brow at him. He stopped arguing. “Even the fact that you argued with me is a point in your favor, not against it. You argued reasonably, logically. The disagreement was not with me personally, you were simply trying to get me to understand both sides of the debate.  I’m not infallible, I’m human. I can be wrong, and today proves it.  I can’t have someone assisting me who will agree to whatever I say just because I’m the one saying it. That way lies madness, despots, and the End.”

“I was really the best candidate?” he asked, still skeptical.

“I wasn’t part of the deliberations, so I can’t answer that honestly. But I do know that you were the one that my sister and I most approved of, based on what we knew of you.  And the Council agreed on your appointment unanimously. Which means Grey Hodenson also decided, after what I understand was weeks of deliberation, that you were the best for the position.  If that does not speak volumes as to your qualifications, I really don’t know what else would.”

“Huh.”

“Like I said, Administrator Worthington, congratulations.”

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[tolkienillustrations]

Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth

YOU GUYS. I SAW IT!!! OH MY GOD IT WAS AMAZING. YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND. I saw Tolkien's handwriting WITH MY OWN TWO EYES!

Some context: the largest exhibit of Tolkien art and manuscripts ever available to the public is showing at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York and it's open until May 12. You have to buy tickets there (you can’t buy them online), so I recommend getting there first thing when it opens.

I spent a little over an hour in the exhibit. I don't know how long you'd have to be in there before you were forcibly removed, but an hour actually felt like a good amount of time. I mean, let's be real, I wanted to camp out in there and never leave—but I did get to see everything and take my time. If you can't make the trip, never fear! They've published a book on the exhibit and you can get it online. 

Okay, so. The exhibit was AMZAZING. They did such an incredible job. I wanted to let out continuous Nazgul shrieks of excitement the ENTIRE TIME but I think that's probably not acceptable in museums. 

As you enter, the title of the exhibit is painted on the wall to your left: Tolkien, Maker of Middle-earth, and it says the same thing in Elvish! Inside, each section has its title written like that! The entrance to the exhibit is a larger-than-life hobbit hole, and through it you can see a giant print of Tolkien's watercolor of the Shire covering an entire wall.

The museum was packed. You don't understand—it was so full of people that we were literally shuffling along in a line the whole time I was in there. Which sounds annoying, but it actually meant that I got to stare longingly at each picture or manuscript for a long, long time without being rushed to keep moving.

The first section was about Tolkien's family, his childhood, how the countryside where he grew up inspired him to create the Shire, and how his mother encouraged his interest in philology. It was really cool to see one of her letters, and her handwriting looked almost just like his! Then there was stuff about how he met Edith, and photos of them, and a picture of their gravestone, which bears the names Beren and Luthien. I'M NOT CRYING, YOU'RE CRYING.

Next we moved on to the section about the Hobbit, and there was another floor-to-ceiling reproduction of one of Tolkien's paintings, this time the one of Smaug and the treasure. And then we went around the corner and I saw THE FIRST EDITION OF THE HOBBIT, AND A WHOLE BUNCH OF TOLKIEN'S PAINTINGS ALL HANGING ON THE WALL.

It was that version of the Hobbit with the green cloth cover, you know the one. Let me say something about this green: it is SUPERB. Like the most perfect green you have ever seen in your LIFE. It's a little grey, but not quite sage green—still very bright. It was so pretty...I wanted to snatch it out of the glass case and possess it for myself. Mine. My own. At this point, needless to say, I had already devolved into a Gollum-like creature intent upon hoarding the entire contents of the exhibit.

It was surreal to see Tolkien's illustrations up close. You know they're beautiful, you know they're amazing, AND THEN YOU SEE THEM. They are real! There they are, hanging on the wall! You can actually see the paint on the paper. They're not very big, but the detail is INCREDIBLE. The colors are perfect. I can't believe I saw Tolkien's painting of Rivendell WITH MY OWN TWO EYES. I've looked at that painting so many times over the years! And that was just one of them—they also had Hobbiton, and Smaug and the treasure, and the Eagle eyrie, and Bilbo on the river, and pen and ink drawings for the Hobbit, and the beautiful dust jacket he designed (!!!), and next to each one it said stuff about what art materials he used, and when he created them, or how he came up with the idea.

Next we went to the section on Lord of the Rings, which also had Tolkien's original cover art for the three books, and MORE illustrations, and Elvish calligraphy! And letters! And maps! And timelines! And plot notes! And it was at this point that I completely lost my mind. I mean, to be fair, I lost my mind years ago, and yes it was because of Tolkien, but that's not the point. Because in front of me. WAS. A MANUSCRIPT. IN TOLKIEN'S HANDWRITING. AND IT SAID:

Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden! Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter! Spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

GUYS, I STRAIGHT UP DIED!!! But that’s not even all... because I was looking at THAT ENTIRE PAGE FROM THE RETURN OF THE KING! It's just... that whole page... in Tolkien's handwriting! WHAT?! WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT WHAT WHAT and it said that Tolkien thought this was one of the most m‌oving passages in the book! It IS! IT IS!!!!! HOW DID HE KNOW I FELT THAT WAY. HOW DID HE KNOW

And there was one of the first maps of Middle-earth he EVER drew—one that he used throughout the years he spent writing the books—cobbled together from different pieces of paper, with faint notes on it in pencil, and ink stains, and ash stains from his pipe!

And I saw the Ring poem, written over and over in Elvish in different colors and styles, and the script is SO! BEAUTIFUL!!!!!  And there was a page of notes in which Tolkien meticulously worked out how far hobbits can travel in a given period of time, relative to humans, to make sure the distances traveled in the book were realistic! THAT'S ADORABLE.

Then we went to the part on the Silmarillion, AND I SAW TOLKIEN'S FIRST MAP OF BELERIAND!!! With his notes on it! AND THEN I SAW HIS PAINTING OF TANIQUETIL! AND IT'S SO BEAUTIFUL IN REAL LIFE! HOW DARE HE?! You can actually see a much smaller Elvish ship in the distance—not just the larger one in the foreground—and you can really see Tirion! YOU CAN SEE IT! Never have I ever wanted so much to transport myself into a painting.

YOU GUYS, there was a detailed Elvish language tree that I had never seen before, not even in pictures. I freaking love language trees!!!!!!!!!!!!! And there was a page Tolkien wrote in VERTICAL ELVISH?!?!?!?!?!?! WHAT?! But this is PRE-TENGWAR ELVISH! Like...he wrote Elvish like you'd write hiragana. I knew he was inspired by Japanese and Chinese art for some of his paintings but I had NO idea he wrote Elvish like that!

And the exhibit explained how this whole world he created was meant to be a mythology for England, because he loved Norse myths, and Germanic myths, and Celtic myths, and Beowulf and the Kalevala, but he wanted England to have something like that—and I already knew this, of course, but it was pretty incredible being reminded of it in the middle of a museum exhibit about Middle-earth because he wanted to create a mythology for England and HE SUCCEEDED! Now his mythology is known all over the world, and it’s translated into hundreds of languages, and it's in museums like sculptures of the Greek gods, with things labelled in the languages he invented... HELP! I love Tolkien so much! I HAVE ASCENDED TO ANOTHER PLANE OF EXISTENCE 

In conclusion, this exhibit was SO WORTH IT, SEE IT IMMEDIATELY!

But lest you think it’s only for Tolkien-obsessed lunatics who have read the Silmarillion multiple times and taught themselves Tengwar, it’s not! The signs next to the pictures and manuscripts did a really good job explaining things, and the friend I went with—who is closer than I am to being a normal human—really enjoyed the experience too. So even if you’re a fan of the movies but haven’t read the books, or you’ve never even seen the movies, go see it while it’s still there! Before I stage an elaborate heist

[chapmanrestoration]

From a earlier post gillows dining table restored now with better photographs,

Every antique furniture enthusiast has heard of the name Gillows, due to the very high standard of craftsmanship and unique design of the pieces of furniture they constructed. Robert Gillow was the founder of Gillows and began cabinet making and finishing furniture from 1731 onwards after he had finished his apprenticeship as a joiner and cabinet maker. He actually became a Freeman of Lancaster in the year 1728 and went into business partnership with George Haresnape. He had two sons who joined him in his business Richard and Robert. These two sons expanded the business to London to where many of the wealthiest buyers lived and this is where the firm quickly got recognized to be one the best cabinet makers of their time. In the 1740s, Gillows chartering ships to import mahogany from the west indies and Jamaica and this is why the timber used was of such good quality as it was old slowly grown solid woods, woods you cannot see in today’s marketplace.

Gillows not only used timbers such as solid mahogany, but unusual veneers and painted designs such as japanning. They often made upholstered chairs, so had their own upholsterers and cabinetmakers.

Amazingly not only did the produce there own fantastic designs but they also used other well known designs such as Chippendale, Sheraton and Hepplewhite. They also were creators of unique furniture like the trou-madame, a ladies version of a billiard table. It invented the extending telescopic dining table, the revolving top library table and secretaire drawers.

The Davenport desk was one of their most famous inventions, a small ladies desk first produced for captain Davenport. Gillows also made linen presses, chest of drawers, small occasional tables all the way to coffins. This lead to them becoming one of the richest families in England of the time.

The firm continued as Gillows until the early 1900s. They had overtime diversified to offer the complete interior design for your home from furniture, metalwork, stained glass, wallpaper, upholstery bespoke pieces including cabinet work for some larger homes, Libraries and offices.

Towards the late Victorian era finances were becoming difficult with the new influx of mass produced furniture and so they joined together with Waring of Liverpool. In 1903 Waring took over Gillows, and the brand Waring & Gillow was borne. They diversifies again into not only quality furniture but also the luxury ships liner market. This went on for quite a few years but it didn’t last long enough as the market place changed again and unfortunately the company went bankrupt. It was then taken over by Maple & Co, to become Maple, Waring and Gillow, three major cabinet makers throughout history joined together from large greatness down to a small firm but it was not to last.

What to look out for when searching for a genuine Gillows piece of furniture.

Unfortunately a very large portion of Gillows furniture was not stamped so you see many pieces associated to Gillows, due to the style, and design. The Gillows stamp can sometimes be seen under table tops, on the top edges of drawers, on the back legs of chairs or sometimes the signature would be written in pencil under drawer linings by the cabinet makers of the firm. You can look in the Gillows books to see the names of cabinet makers to reference with their signatures. The earliest marks were in the form of a printed label ‘Gillow and Taylor’ and this is very rare to find as they would rip or fall off over time. ‘Gillows Lancaster’ stamp was seen from the 1780s up to around the 1850s/60s, when it was changes to ‘Gillow’. In the 1860s, the mark consisted of a capital L, and a serial number with Gillows Lancaster could be seen. Late Victorian pieces produced the stamp ‘Gillow & Co’ and then Waring & Gillow along with a small brass plate. sometimes it can be seen on brass fittings such as locks.

[blastoisemonster]

Shantae (Unboxing Pictures)

Quick! What's the most sought after cartridge for the Game Boy library? Actually, the Pokèmon main games might be much more popular, but their millions of copies sold worldwide also make them relatively easy to search for, therefore their prices, usually, don't reach astronomic values. Then there's Shantae: developed by WayForward in 2002, it showed up on shelves when everyone was waiting for the Game Boy Advance, and the cart, even if it advertised enhanced gameplay for the upcoming Nintendo handheld, was unfortunately mainly for a soon-to-be obsolete console, so pretty much no one bought it. Then the collecting mania sparked, and a lot of people realized there weren't many copies of Shantae around. It became a diamond in the rough, a priviledge only a few could afford in their collection; the carts reached thousands of dollars in value, and for a while I think the general idea became that if you owned a copy, you were pretty much done. Kinda like Nintendo World Championship for the NES.

During my initial years of collecting I was probably influenced by this general hysteria and thought that a copy of Shantae would've been the only solution to add value to my own collection; I wasn't even curious about the game itself. Of course, the EBay prices were highly prohibitive and even reproduction carts, assembled in an hideously amateurish manner with their red opaque shells and home-glued labels, went for hundreds of euros. Moreover, the price tags also attracted a bunch of ill-meaning sellers that started flooding the market with absurdly expensive counterfeits. In the end, my wallet responded with a strict no; I realized there were some things I could just never have, and instead focused on collecting games I actually wanted to play or was curious about; then my collection reached and surpassed a hundred carts, so Shantae wasn't that important anymore.

Fast forwarding to 2020, I came to know about Limited Run Games; not sure about their whole origin story and all, but they're sort of an indipendent publishing house focused on distribuiting physical copies of digital-only titles, or indies, or retro games whenever they get a licence for it. They mainly produce current-gen stuff, but when it comes to retro titles they do offer to print on old carts, and their whole schtick is that every single sale is limited, so once the orders are all closed for a particular product, it doesn't come back in stock anymore.

You know where this is going: during that summer I discovered LRG was going to sell, in partnership with WayForward, several Shantae products, among which a GBC version. Price was only 50$! It had to be mine. So yes, it is a repro cart and not the real deal. However, since LRG is indeed a game publisher and the original developers were involved, I felt that their product would've resulted much more professionally assembled and faithful to the original cart than the homemade "red shell" versions on EBay. Furthermore, while 50$ is not exactly the definition of spare change, it was definitely a much more affordable expense than several hundreds or a thousand. In the end, this looked like the only time I could ever effectively add Shantae to my Game Boy collection, so I preordered. The carts were supposed to be produced in September and ship a few weeks after; since I'm across the pond, I already took for granted there was going to be quite a delay with the delivery, so I said to myself "I'd better forget about this until November".

However, November came and went and no one who paid for a Shantae cartridge (I followed a collector community that also ordered a lot from LRG) recieved their copy: as a later email recieved at the start of 2021 stated, there were some production delays and GBC Shantae would have probably started showing up in mail boxes after April. What upsetted me greatly is that while we were having this delay, LRG was also taking orders for new deals almost weekly xD my inbox got flooded with their newsletter arriving even several times a day, while I was hearing nothing from the thing I had actually bought, except that I had to wait even more.

Fast forward to this June and finally, after 9 months of wait, this package gets delievered to the door of our studio. ...Except that this time I was miles away at my parents' place! Had to wait until I got home after summer vacations to unbox it, take the due pics, try the game out and put an end to this whole ordeal. Oh yeah, and I could finally cancel my newsletter subscription to LRG!

[cindaay]

Today I

went to the dentist (my hygienist told me that although I was only the second person she’d seen today, that she was awarding me the Clean Teeth Award)

went to the library to print a shipping label because my printer is out of ink

mailed a package

went to the gym and used three machines I normally do not

came home and got stoned and took a nice hot shower

cleaned my room (it was a total disaster and I even vacuumed)

made dinner (because I cant trust anyone else in the house to cook something that actually tastes GOOD)

started painting my nails at 10:30

and now I am tired and I want to go to bed (or at least tuck in and watch a little TV first) but I have to wait for my nails to be bone dry first to avoid The Smudge.

I’ve also been communicating with a cute boy [from Tinder, but, lets just move on from that] so that’s kind of nice.

Today was okay.

[swipestream]

Sensor Sweep: John Carter Miniatures, The Metal Monster, Carcosacon, Call of the Wild Art, Robot Man

RPG (Modiphius): The John Carter Swords of Mars miniatures line is made up of 32mm scale high quality multi-part resin miniatures which come complete with resin scenic bases. The Swords of Mars campaign book includes a set of rules to play out battles involving squads and heroes, fighting across moving airships, desolate ruins or the beautiful palaces of Barsoom.

  Writing (One Last Sketch): A long while back, I wrote a short essay called “Writing the city” that I never published, yet the misgivings that went into that essay keep stirring my brain. The main question is this:

  In literary criticism of fantasy, why are long descriptions of the natural world and farmland or villages often labeled as boring, but when China Miéville fills page upon page with adjective-laden descriptions of architecture, this passes without comment, or even gets praise?

  Art (DMR Books): Fifty-five years ago today, Wayne Francis Woodard, better known as “Hannes Bok,” died in poverty. He was friends with, and had his work admired by, the likes of Ray Bradbury, A. Merritt, August Derleth, Farnsworth Wright and others.

I must confess that I’ve always been ambivalent about Bok’s art. While I find some of his work truly excellent, I consider much of it average or even poor.

    Fiction (DMR Books): It’s fascinating how the paths we take in life shape who we’ll become and what we’ll leave behind, when–on that fateful day–we’re blasted by the emerald lightnings of The Emperor’s Guard at the Pit of the Metal Monster.

For me, the dregs of life will be a room full of books.  For A. Merritt, luckily for us, it was his wonderful novels, few tho’ they may be, and the short stories and poetry he crafted during a relatively short lifetime.

But, whereas the ashes of our mortal clay will be scattered before the feet of the Metal Things

    Fiction (Gardner F. Fox): This is book #011 on the list of 160 books that Gardner Francis Fox wrote from 1953 to 1986. I will not be working on

Blank bookcover with clipping path

books in the order as Mr. Fox wrote them. I am doing the book cover designs based on when the transcribers who are assisting me, finish one. As they complete a book, it will be the newest release, so it will get a new book cover design. I also have to go back and replace the photo-bashed covers I made when I first started The Gardner Francis Fox Libraryin 2017.

  Conventions (William King): So that was Carcosacon and it was a lot of fun. A bunch of us drove up from Prague to Czocha Castle for a weekend of games, panels and live action roleplaying all dedicated to the Cthulhu mythos. We got there on Friday morning, checked in and were gaming by one o’ clock that afternoon in a library that looked like something from Dennis Wheatley complete with a secret doorway hidden in a bookcase that swung out to reveal a spiral staircase up to yet another gaming room. I thought there never was a better setting for a Call of Cthulhu session but I was wrong, and I’ll get to that later.

  RPG (Sorcerers Skull): Gygaxian Esoteric Planes: Places that often bear the names and some of the characteristics of various historical conceptual realms but are more defined in their characteristics. They are inhabited by supernatural beings that tend to behave like mundane beings, the only difference being “power.” Geography tends to be more important than in conceptual realms; planes can be mapped to a degree, and travel along associated terrain may be necessary.

Reviews (Don Herron): Our resident expert in everything Arkham returns to review a new (if repurposed) book on the fabled press. John D. Haefele certainly burst fully-formed on the scene with his A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos, but he’s done a ton of stuff on the subject, most recently a run of articles appearing in Crypt of Cthulhu. See his Amazon page for a thorough list of books, chapbooks, monographs, web and print surveys. He knows the turf.

        Cinema (Superversive SF): Can the story take a place on a bus rather than on a space ship without being fundamentally different?

Outland, an obscure movie starring Sean Connery at the low point of his career, cannot be set on a bus, but it most definitely did not need to be placed in space. It is, no pun intended, fully grounded in the traditional western genre in the theme, plot and pacing. There are even shotguns. Lots of shotguns. In a pressurized environment. All that’s missing is the tumbleweeds. We do get treated to the sight of some gyrating balls of… something, but the less said of those the better.

      Gaming (Rampant Games): In case you haven’t figured it out, I am a Virtual Reality enthusiast. I’ve been looking forward to the coming of consumer-level Virtual Reality since the early 90s. I expected it a lot sooner than it got here, to be honest, but I’m glad it’s here now. I love that I get to work with it as part of my day job. Anyway, I have been willing to sink a bit of cash into it this hobby… to the extent that I pre-ordered a Pimax 5K+. Offering about the highest resolution out there and 170+ degrees of field-of-view, it seemed like a game-changer for PC-based VR.

    Cinema (Men of the West): First, the good: As you would expect from any sort of Peter Jackson flick, it has gorgeous F/X. The visuals and modeling for the various vehicles and aircraft are marvelous. The colorizing to help set the tone, the costuming, etc., are all spot on. The acting was decent. The set design was pretty cool. The basic premise for the story was decent if absurd (mobile cities on treads?), with an interesting twist on the post-apocalypse genre. They had a fun dig at the near illiteracy of today’s people in the “screen age” (showing iPhones, etc), saying “they didn’t write much down.”

  Author Interview (Superversive SF): What does superversive mean to you? Superversive is the building of things never seen before to heights unreached. It builds where others have torn down, and gathers together all good things to be made into something greater and more wonderful than they were before. Where before one might find a blasted heath, one finds a garden growing by the Grace of God.

  Review (Fantasy Literature): As I mentioned in my review of Gray Lensman, Book 4 of E.E. “Doc” Smith’s famed six-part LENSMAN series, that installment, although it followed its predecessor, Galactic Patrol, by mere seconds storywise, was actually released over 1½ years later; 20 months later, to be exact. Book 5 of the series, Second Stage Lensman, would follow the same scheme. Although the events therein transpire just moments after the culmination of Book 4, readers would in actuality have to wait a solid 22 months to find out where author Smith would take them next.

        Art (Northwest Adventures): Jack London’s The Call of the Wild was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post from June 20 to July 18, 1903, only five years after the Stampede of 1898. It was an instant classic and the quintessential novel of the Klondike. The five-parter was accompanied by illustration from two artists, Charles Livingston Bull (1874-1932) and Philip R. Goodwin (1881-1935). Bull was hitting his stride, illustrating books for Charles G. D. Roberts as well as magazine covers but Goodwin was only 22 and just starting out on his career that would include illustrating Teddy Roosevelt’s book on hunting. The two artists together is a nice blend of Bull’s stylized poster art (which remind of Kay Nielsen’s fairy tale art) and Goodwin’s realistic dog forms.

  Art (One Last Sketch): No other imagined world has generated as much illustration as The Lord of the Rings. Considering the sheer amount of artistic material to draw from, however, even before the live action adaptations came out in 2001, we already had a consensus “look” for Middle Earth in John Howe and Alan Lee’s paintings. Why the collective consensus for what Middle Earth should look like coalesced around these two has a host of factors, one being how prolific they were, how often they appeared on book covers and ancillary material, and the last being their obvious skill.

  Fiction (Pages Unbound): You may have some familiarity with The Silmarillion and seen these newer works being published that are part of it. But maybe you are not sure where they came from, or how they fit in to the larger work. Here is the scoop: you can pick up any one of the three separate works from The Silmarillion that have been released as standalone volumes and enjoy it on its own. They are The Children of Hurin, Beren and Luthien, and The Fall of Gondolin. Some say the reading order should be publication order, but you would not be wrong to read Beren and Luthien first.

  Obituary (Washington Post): George Stade, a Columbia University literary scholar who became an early champion of “popular” fiction within the academy and worked as a critic, editor and novelist, most notably with the grisly satire “Confessions of a Lady-Killer,” died Feb. 26 at a hospital in Silver Spring, Md. He was 85.

  Tolkien (Alas Not Me): The Mouth of Sauron’s encounter with the Captains of the West in The Lord of the Rings has been reminding me of the Green Knight’s visit to King Arthur’s court in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The initial set-up is quite different, naturally.  The Green Knight comes in uninvited without any introduction or explanation — the reader is thus in the same boat as members of Arthur’s court — whereas Tolkien gives us some backstory on the Lieutenant of the Tower of Barad-dûr when he comes out in response to the heralds’ challenge.  The Green Knight arrives alone on a color-coordinated steed that seems an ordinary animal except for its hue, but the poet hints the knight himself might possibly be supernatural (“Half etayn in erde I hope þat he were”).  Intriguingly, the similarly color-coordinated fellow who approaches Aragorn & Co. is almost exactly the inverse, i.e., a living man on a possibly supernatural mountm

    Sensor Sweep: John Carter Miniatures, The Metal Monster, Carcosacon, Call of the Wild Art, Robot Man published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

[ryanjamessalmon]

2/9/2017 - 9:01pm - Waiting Can Fuck You Up

A couple weeks ago I was at Fat Tongue Studios and my friend put me onto this Red Bull Music Academy that was happening in Berlin the fall of 2018. Its a 2 week long event where musicians from around the world are brought together to collaborate and learn from people who do shit in the music industry. It was obvious to me as soon as I saw the information booklet that this was something i was supposed to pursue. I had to fill out an application and send it in before September 4th so i had time. I waited a bit so I could have some more music to submit since I needed to provide them with some of your work as well as an application that I had to fill out. I waited for a while then uploaded my music and filled out my contact information and basic shit like that. Then i waited longer because i had to print out the longer application that had to be filled out and mailed in physically. I waited until the night of September 1st to print out the application at the studio because I didn't have convenient access to a printer. Then I waited to fill out the app until i got home so I could do it in blue pen. Then when I got home at 6am I waited until I woke up to fill out the app so I would be more into it and not just go through it to get it done.

When I woke up at 11am September 2nd I sat down and started filling it out. It was 3pm and I realized that mail places would probably be closing around 5. I looked it up and found a fed ex that was open until 6pm so i finished the rest of my app as fast as I could. It was 4:10 or something and i finished it and decided to wait and shower before leaving. Then it was 5pm and I was walking out the door with my bike getting ready to bike 5 miles to my old college to print out the photos of myself i needed for the submission. I got there in 22 minutes (going as fast as I could basically) and found out the library closed at 6pm. I went in and tried to print out what i needed as fast as I could but i ended up walking out of the library at 5:43pm. I biked to fed ex and got there at 6:50 only to find out that they were already done sending out packages for the night. It was okay because 1.) I must have dropped one of the photos I printed out at the library because I didn't have it with me and 2.) There was another fed ex 2 miles away that was open 24 hours. So i casually biked back to the library to grab the photo i had dropped there but turned out the door was locked. 5:56pm. It was cool bc i figured id just print it out again at the 24 hour fed ex. It was DePaul’s welcome week so they had free pizza and hot dogs in the quad so i went and chilled for a second to get free food (nothing is free, i learned this later in the day). Then I biked over to fed ex and the lady showed me how to print out the photo i needed. Then i went to the counter to ship out what i needed and the faukvjing lady said that “their whole system is down and they cant print out any labels to send what i needed.” the whole. Fed Ex. System was not working at all. So i walked out and sat on my bike for maybe 10 minutes just being frustrated and thinking. Then a lady walked up and pointed out the clouds in the distance that looked like a storm was coming in. She was right.

I pulled up directions on my phone for the 9 mile bike ride to the studio and hit it. I already felt like i was running from the rain so i was going fast. i was going strong and the weather was looking good. I pulled around the bend at Lakeshore drive and I stopped to look at the the storm in the distance mixed in with the sunset. I took a picture then kept going. I pulled up to an overpass and felt one rain drop waiting for the green light. As soon as i got out from under the over pass it was raining enough to make me take off my headphones. 3 minutes later I pulled over and stopped under a building because it was raining too much to keep going. 2 miles from the studio. It was pouring and there wasn't anything i could do. All I could do was ask for it to stop raining so i could go to the studio in the clear. I got nothing.

So I waited.

After maybe 15 minutes It looked like it slowed enough for me to scoot down the street to a train stop where i could take the rest of the way to the studio. I bought my ticket and waited for the train to come, but when it finally got there it paused for another 15 minutes at least because someone had jumped off the train or something. The whole train waiting because of one person. Then it finally went and I transferred to the next train that I had to wait for while 2 trains that weren't mine rolled up before mine. My train came and i got to my stop that was 2 blocks from the studio. When i came out of the station, it was done raining and I bike less than a minute to the studio clear of rain.

I guess thats the nature of waiting. When choose you wait the times that you dont have to, then you are gonna be stuck waiting the times that you desperately need to go. Basically, next time I have the choice to wait and put something off until later, I’m gonna be reminded of when all I wanted to do was go and all that i could do was wait. Waiting is a dangerous game because if you say yes to it while its convenient for you, you're saying yes to waiting when its least convenient too.

[son-of-a-duck]

May 13, 2017

I went from having the most glorious plans of sleeping in this morning to getting a massive cramp in my right calf muscle at 8:00AM on the dot.  Talk about a “good” way to be instantly woken up. And I was reminded of it throughout the day every time I took a step. It was pretty great.

I made a private Facebook group today and invited the librarian who just left, the librarian I do homebound with, and the teen librarian. I thought it would be the best way for all of us to keep in touch as a group.  Granted, three of us still work at the library, but I think the group is important for all of us.  So I made it.  I also had fun making the cover image, which has a picture that says “Sarcasm: Now Served All Day”, on top of a background that is a picture of a card catalog.  I like it.

The rest of the morning and early afternoon kind of got away from me. I spent more time trying to figure out how to get up to twenty-five dollars on my JetPens order to get free shipping.  I keep picking stuff and then changing my mind.  Maybe by June I'll have it sorted out.

I ran on the elliptical for awhile, took a nap, and eventually got ready, made lunch, loaded up my car, and headed out.  My first stop was the mall so I could buy a book and a gift card for my Mom.  They have such a long checkout spiel at the bookstore.  Thankfully I was close enough to the guy in front of me that the lady knew I had heard it all and gave me the abridged version.

On my way to my Mom's house I stopped to get gas and finally cleaned the bugs off my windshield.  When I got to my Mom's house I realized I forgot to bring my laptop, so I started a load of laundry and ran back to my house to grab my laptop.

The first thing I did when I got back to my Mom's house was eat lunch.  I think it was like three o'clock at this point, probably after.  I was hungry.  Then I  printed off a return label for the date stamp.  It showed up last night, instead of on Thursday like it was supposed to, forcing me to buy another one.  Now I just need to find the time to drop it off at UPS.

I finally finished watching Young Guns and I've gotta say, I'm not a fan.  It may be because I watched it over the course of a week on my lunch breaks, but it just didn't do anything for me.  The flow of the movie and the storyline seemed off.  And the peyote scene lasted way too long.  I'm cool never watching it again.

I also watched the last half of The Avengers and the first bit of Olympus Has Fallen.  Both are more entertaining than Young Guns.  

My laundry was finally done around 7:30PM and I was able to head home to make dinner.  I made my first Blue Apron meal, which was stir fried wonton noodles with bok choy and radishes.  It came with shiitake mushrooms but I gave those to my Mom because I generally not a fan of mushrooms and I wasn't feeling that adventurous tonight.  I was a little bit though because I never would have thought to use bok choy or radishes.  The radishes were marinated in rice vinegar, another thing that I doubt I would have ever tried, but it worked out.  And to finish it off I added cashews and furikake seasoning, which is a combination of sesame seeds and seaweed, among other things.  And surprisingly, it was pretty tasty.  I would make it again.  And thankfully I would eat it again because I have leftovers.

Right after I got home my friend and his dad stopped by for a little bit.  As I was finishing the dishes and cleaning up after dinner my friend came back over and we watched several episodes of Master of None.  We inadvertently watched the first episode of the first season but then switched to the second season and watched the first three episodes.  I had only ever seen the last ten minutes or so of the first episode of the first season but want to actually watch the show at some point because I like Aziz Ansari.

It is now somehow two o'clock in the morning.  Good grief.  I need to record my audio journal.  And then, hopefully, I will go to bed and sleep in a little bit.