The PAC Dance Team from Walden Grove High School in Sahuarita, Arizona, went above and beyond in their Marvel Homecoming Assembly Dance performance:
“Marvel” Homecoming Assembly Dance by ThePac Walden Grove on YouTube
Based on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the performance recaps the story of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.
You go, kids! 😀
Found via File 770.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
On their forums, Blizzard shared a list of features that aren’t bugs in the recently re-released Classic version of World of Warcraft. The list has been out since May this year, but not being a special friend of the vanilla rendition I only came across it now.
Browsing through promptly hurtled me back to reminisce over things we’ve since lost. Oh, boy—some things on the list I couldn’t even remember!
Here are some of the things, not all mentioned on the list, that I absolutely wouldn’t take back:
I’ve come to enjoy the increased player character animation when looting or interacting with quest objects, so that’s nice. The graphical upgrades are also lovely, even if it took me time to get used to some of the new face designs. The new terrain and environmental design I’ve already talked about elsewhere. Finally, a few pragmatic details I love to bits in modern WoW include mass looting and the Flight Master’s Whistle. Wouldn’t change them for the world!
What about you? Chime in with your favorites, features you love to hate, or both.
Image via PC Invasion.
Of Dice and Dragons is an occasional feature about games and gaming.
Emmy Award winning screenwriter Andrew Davies has adapted Jane Austen’s last, unfinished work Sanditon into an 8-episode series. To my knowledge it hasn’t been adapted for the big screen before, so this is rather a big thing!
Here’s the trailer:
Sanditon Preview by Masterpiece PBS on YouTube
Among the big names in the production are Rose Williams as Charlotte Heywood (e.g. in Medici) and Theo James as Sidney Parker (the Divergent movies, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, among others). Anne Reid as Lady Denham is also a well-known career actor (I mostly remember her from Doctor Who “Smith and Jones”—the Judoon on the moon episode).
I heard through the grapevine that Davies will move entirely away from Austen’s material after the first half of the first episode. Wow, that’s soon! I did already notice a number of character names not found in the book in the IMDB listing. I hope Davies will not go overboard, though; I’ve seen a number of his adaptations, and he can be a bit of a hit or miss for me.
The U.S. release set to 2020. Can’t wait!
Found via Frock Flicks.
This post has been edited to update a removed link to video.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Did you know that Aztecs created floating garden islands on swamps to feed 200,000+ people? I didn’t before now.
An article by Lynette Townsend for the Museum of New Zealand descibes the structure of the chinampas:
“These ingenious creations were built up from the lake bed by piling layers of mud, decaying vegetation and reeds. This was a great way of recycling waste from the capital city Tenochtitlan. Each garden was framed and held together by wooden poles bound by reeds and then anchored to the lake floor with finely pruned willow trees. The Aztecs also dredged mud from the base of the canals which both kept the waterways clear and rejuvenate [sic] the nutrient levels in the gardens.”
Apparently the chinampas were separated by channels, and canoes were used for transport. In addition to food crops and flowers grown, fish and birds drawn to the chinampas were caught for food as well.
What an incredibly smart feature to engineer! It also strikes me as a fantastic (no pun intended), pragmatic thing to adapt into a SFFnal world.
Found via Ultrafacts at Tumblr.
Images: models by artisan collective Te Mahi via Museum of New Zealand / Te Papa Tongarewa.
The Visual Inspiration occasional feature pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?
Arkady Martine wrote at Tor.com on disaster stories and human behavior, noting a pattern on concentrating on the catastrophic and awful. That, however, has been proven a myth, at least initially:
“Humans do not, under the pressure of an emergency, socially collapse. Rather, they seem to display higher levels of social cohesion, despite what media or government agents might expect… or portray on TV. Humans, after the apocalypse, band together in collectives to help one another—and they do this spontaneously. […]
“Humans all over the world display this behavior after disasters. They display it consistently, no matter what kind of disaster is happening or what culture they come from.
“What really happens after an apocalypse? Society works better than it ever had, for a brief time.” [original emphases]
– Arkady Martine
Yay, us! We did evolve as and still are highly social creatures.
Now, how long this century’s phenomenal technological change takes to alter that and in which ways remains to be seen. I have high hopes of our curiosity and drive to engage with others, however. That may be a bit funny for a huge introvert to say, but there it is. 🙂
Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.
The story of Rani Lakshmibai, Queen of Jhansi, is not a new one and has been both written and filmed before, but the 2019 movie Manikarnika is the first I’ve heard of her. Apparently she was one of the leaders of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 / the First War of Independence against the British East India Company in northern India after the death of her husband, the Raja of Jhansi.
Manikarnika – The Queen Of Jhansi | Official Trailer | Kangana Ranaut | Releasing 25th January by Zee Studios on YouTube
Phew—the trailer’s even bloodier than the one for Tomiris. (I wonder whether it’s a Game of Thrones effect—the popularity of that bloody show begetting other series with high liquid velocities?) Apart from that, the two trailers and/or stories seem to share a remarkable amount of basic similarities, yet are set thousands of kilometers apart. An interesting coincidence.
On the other hand, Manikarnika looks incredibly gorgeous! According to IMDB, it’s already available—the release date is given as January 25, 2019—and Amazon offers streaming versions in Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil with a selection of subtitles.
The bloodiness makes me really apprehensive, though. I’m in for more humane stories at the moment, but I think I’ll have to keep Manikarnika in mind.
Found via Frock Flicks.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Redemption in Indigo was Karen Lord’s first published novel. It won a number of awards and nominations, including the 2011 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature.
The description from Lord’s website reads:
“Paama’s husband is a fool and a glutton. Bad enough that he followed her to her parents’ home in the village of Makendha, now he’s disgraced himself by murdering livestock and stealing corn. When Paama leaves him for good, she attracts the attention of the undying ones—the djombi—who present her with a gift: the Chaos Stick, which allows her to manipulate the subtle forces of the world. Unfortunately, a wrathful djombi with indigo skin believes this power should be his and his alone.”
Redemption in Indigo has been called a contemporary fairy tale, a mix of Caribbean and Senegalese influences (chapters 1-3 are based on the latter), and a story of adventure, magic, and the power of the human spirit, complete with trickster spiders.
I found Redemption in Indigo intriguing and refreshing. Since it pulls from such different traditions than my native northern Finnish ones, I did occasionally have to consciously stop and adjust my expectations (like I did when I was reading Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death).
Anyway. Paama’s humor was a delight, slightly sarcastic at times, and I’m definitely a fan of well-crafted sarcasm (like Jane Austen’s). Her bit-of-a-dumbo husband Ansige cannot control his appetite, with consequences bordering the ridiculous. Lord also made some interesting structural choices which nod towards oral storytelling traditions.
The most enjoyable feature of the novel, however, was how seemingly small scale beginnings (a wife walking out on her husband) actually turned into life and death siatuations, and, yet, that wasn’t turned into a DRAMATIC OMG IT’S THE END OF THE KINGDOM / EMPIRE / WORLD (again)TM story like so many western fantasy novels tend to be. Lord’s subtle telling just rolls smoothly on, forcing the reader to pay attention. I had more than one “Wait, what?” moment… Which, to be explicit, is a good thing!
Dr. Lord is a Barbadian ownvoices author, editor, and research consultant. Visit Lord’s website for more.
Image by Eppu Jensen
ICBIHRTB—pronounced ICK-bert-bee—is short for ‘I Can’t Believe I Haven’t Read This Before’. It’s an occasional feature for book classics that have for some reason escaped our notice thus far.
Apparently, there is a Kazakhstani movie on the historical female leader Tomyris of the Massagetae, and we also have a trailer with English subtitles:
TOMIRIS – Official trailer (HD) (English subtitles) by SATAIFILM on YouTube
We know for sure that Tomyris fought Persians in the 500s BCE, but as far as we know she did not unite all the people of the steppe as the movie claims. Well, it wouldn’t be the first movie to play fast and loose with history.
At this writing, IMDB only has the most rudimentary information and gives the year 2019 for release. Director Akan Satayev’s credits include a dozen or so writing and producing projects, mostly local and directed at a decidedly non-English-speaking audience.
It’s possible, then, that Tomiris will also remain outside of the Anglo-American market. I, for one, would find that sad, for the production looks really interesting (although I could do with a little less blood flying around).
Come to think of it, I should have a look to see if I can find any movies of ancient Persia or thereabouts. Anything you can suggest would be welcome!
Found via Helsingin Sanomat (NB. Finnish only).
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Idle browsing brought me to CD Covington’s article at Tor.com about linguists and the movie Arrival, which is based on Ted Chiang’s short scifi piece “Stories of Your Life”.
“A linguist’s job is to think about language and how it works. Linguists enjoy that and often have conversations about which dialect features they personally have, or sometimes they develop entire research articles around something they overheard on the bus. This is what we do. Not everyone thinks about how language works or is even interested in the subject. So it’s not surprising that Weber is frustrated because he doesn’t think there’s any progress happening, when Dr. Banks knows she’s made considerable progress.” [original emphases]
– CD Covington
Yup—I can attest. I take such geeky, unabashed pleasure over thinking and talking about my favorite linguistic features…! 🙂
(Find my posts about Arrival here.)
Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.
Another adaptation of the hugely successful tv series Game of Thrones is out. Embroiderers at the Ulster Museum and the Ulster Folk Museum produced a 77-meter long textile in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry.
Originally the embroidery depicted events, locations, and story from seasons 1 through 7, but in June 2019 further panels depicting season 8 were due to be added.
The R-rated tapestry was on display at the Ulster Museum earlier this year, but the exhibition page and a few small photos are still up on their website.
While we loved the production values for the show and the intricacy of the writing, we stopped watching after season 3 due to the upsetting amount of violence. I do confess, however, that this project really tickles the textile history geek part of my brain!
Found via Helsingin Sanomat (NB. Finnish only).
Images: Embroiderers at work by Paul Faith / AFP via Helsingin Sanomat. The others: Tourism NI via National Museums Northern Ireland.
