What I’ve been thinking about
2022-10-09 ✢ tchotchkes ✢ updates ✢ website ✢ links ✢ A/V ✢ music ✢ gallery
The longer I use this website, the more uses I find for it. Currently typing up a few after-action reports for the first three sessions of my new Mothership campaign. Meanwhile, here are a few things I’ve been looking at.
In other news
- Reading: Julian, by Gore Vidal. First-person account of the Roman emperor who rejected Christianity and tried to re-instate paganism, already (in the book) a dying tradition. Good stuff.
- (Re-) watching: The 1979 BBC Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy series starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley. Not exactly the kind of spy thriller you might expect; I’ve seen faster-paced glaciers and most of each episode consists of quiet conversations where Smiley peers ruefully through his glasses at men who don’t bother to pretend they aren’t lying. I love it. This grim, heavy feeling of weariness and gloom and alienation soaks through the whole thing. Alec Guinness is fantastic, of course.
- See also: “What Watching”Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” Feels Like” by Daniel Lavery.
- The 2011 movie adaption is worth watching as well, although they have to cut out a lot of good stuff to make time.
- Playing: Not Disco Elysium! Not enough room for the download on my old laptop. Maybe if I get a new one next year.
Updated pages
- Lots of new things on the linkroll
- Added two new sections: one on podcasts and one on online shops (mostly independent businesses who curate an interesting selection of stuff).
Audio/Video club
(see related article below)
What’s good
- “Emily’s Illness: Diagnosis of a Song” by Phil Milstein. ““Emily’s Illness”, a forgotten 45 from late 1967 recorded by a 17-year-old non-singer named Nora Guthrie, is an overpowering musical force. In the three-minute span from its opening harpsichord down-note to its double-reverse coda, “Emily’s Illness” expands to occupy all attention, saturating its environment to the extent that music and listener are ineluctably fused into one unit.”
- Now for something completely different: all the scripts for 2019 miniseries Chernobyl free to download. Still the best TV adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft I’ve seen.
- Speaking of: Here’s a 1975 pastiche/parody of HPL by Jorge Borges. Apparently Borges thought Lovecraft was a second-rate imitator of Edgar Allen Poe.
- “Cooltholicism” at BDM’s Notebook. “If I were to say what I think “Catholicism” represents, trend-wise, it would be something like this: the desire to see something ascendent that is aesthetically lush, intellectually rigorous, ambiguously reactionary, and which, above all, people can’t get mad at you for.”
- Perfect Alignment by Dave Coggins over at The Contender. If you know me, you know this is exactly the kind of thing I’m always talking about: owning fewer clothes which last longer and you love more.
Gallery
Thanks for reading. That’s all for now. If you want to be notified whenever I post on the site, follow the RSS feed or subscribe by e-mail: