A collection of writings, images, and curation
I just backed this. It looks great. I’ve liked occult western TTRPGs for a while. A couple of years back, I took a setting, High Noon Under The Demon Sun, created by Jack Guignol over on Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque, and ran it via octaNe, a great rules light system. It worked really well and the players seemed to have fun.
Ran across this today.
Life imitates Akira: the NSA’s fear of psychic nukes
The section concluded with a note that there had supposedly been a successful demonstration of “telekinetic power” in a Soviet military sponsored research lab, and the alleged discovery of a new type of energy “perhaps even more important than that of Atomic energy.”
An article dissecting a 1977 NSA memo speculating about psychic powers. With the above quote, please notice the words “supposedly” and “alleged” and “perhaps”.
 | Also, for instance, one of the sources cited in the NSA memo was a scientist who’d worked with Uri Geller. For more on Geller and the fringes of the intelligence/military world, I recommend the book, The Men Who Stare At Goats by Jon Ronson, which is a great non-fiction book on some of the weirdness of the late 70s American military. Suffice it to say, that Geller is/was a very talented fake/grifter. |
Recently went to this exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I found it to be incredibly inspirational. These are people who had to create, who were driven to create. Their circumstances (uneducated or rural or sometimes insane or sometimes all of the above) really didn’t allow them to think about commercial success. They were not stopped by lack of materials. They just did art. Whenever they could. On whatever material they could obtain. In whatever medium they could use. All the time.
The inspirational part is precisely that. This exhibit inspired me to create. Just fucking kick it in the head and start writing again. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in online shit, Twitter threads about how to self-promote, about how to get published, it’s so easy to forget that the point is to create. For me, the point is put the words on the page. And this exhibit reminded me of that essential fact.
If you were into science fiction or the paranormal, “you’d eventually butt up against Ong’s Hat,” said David Metcalfe, who runs social media for the University of Georgia Business School, and edits Threshold: Journal of Interdisciplinary Consciousness Studies. When he discovered Ong’s Hat as a teen in the late ‘90s, said Metcalfe, “It was popping up on chat boards and message boards, it would bleed into your life.”
Ong’s Hat: The Early Internet Conspiracy Game That Got Too Real
Oh man, no shit…
Fuck, do I remember this. Completely formative early Internet experience. There I am, working in the dot.com world, late 20s geek who’s lucked into a corner office in a skyscraper at Universal Studios working for a guy who’s convinced the South Koreans to fund an early web community site. And I’m spending the day clicking around the early web (blink tags!) using Netscape. I run across this website. And it leads me down the rabbit hole. Montauk. Hakim Bey (who I think I had already run across via various other esoteric web sites, maybe Sterling talking about TAZ). The Pine Barrens themselves.
Then, just a few years ago, I ran across this book. It brought back all the memories. That never to be recovered rush of those first discoveries when the Internet was young. I don’t think that I believed all the Ong’s Hat stuff was true, but I have to admit that I was sad after I read this book and found out it had all been a couple of guys fucking with me and everyone else.
A little bit of the magic went out of the world.
When these images ran across my feed, I thought they might be stills from an 80s Fassbinder movie. And they have a nicely Ballardian sense of anomie, I like the empty tables in the restaurant. Loneliness with a Nagel gloss.
Actually, they’re part of a brochure for an Estonian hotel, mid to late 80s, pre-collapse of the USSR. Because of its proximity to Finland and the rest of the Baltic money, Estonia had a few more options, late Soviet empire times.
More images can be found here, on the C86 Tumblr.
The challenge was macros. The venue was the the flower garden out back. I like lizards, sue me.
Photos were edited with this music, the deepest dubglitch, glitchstep, tasty tasty bass drops.
This is for one of my best friends. An article I found on the history of alewives.
By the 1500s, the church had had it with alewives. They were usurping the structures the church had been using to strip women of their agency and autonomy for over a thousand years. Land ownership? Nah, alewives just needed a cauldron. Husbands? Nah, alewvives didn’t need any land. Alewives were perfectly capable of making money without men. They were, quite literally, destroying the patriarchy with their beer.
So go forth and destroy the patriarchy! Drown it in your beery goodness!
Also, going to toot my own horn here, but my historical spy thriller features a London alewife who knows much more than she lets on…
Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England
Despite these obstacles, some women did secure licenses, especially licenses for alehouse-keeping. … Yet the women licensed to keep alehouses in the sixteenth century and later constituted not only a small minority of licensees but also a small minority of a particular sort: they were almost invariably widows.
Judith Bennett