One of the best things about social media—like the Internet, too—is how many different phenomena you can witness if not first hand then at least in a secondary capacity; way more than would be possible in a regular human lifetime.
Case in point: the occultation of Saturn (i.e., hiding behind another object, in this case the moon) a few days ago.
The name and the first trailer for Star Wars: Episode IX were released last week, and both are tantalizing! Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker again seems to revolve around Rey:
Oh my goodness, her leap over the speeding fighter looks incredible! (Even if I can’t quite understand the decision to run with an extended lightsaber in your hand… Is anyone else reminded of running with scissors?) I’m also looking forward to seeing Poe and Finn questing, er, fighting the Empire together—I always appreciated the ease with which they became and remain buddies.
J.J. Abrams’s work has been bit of a hit or miss for me in the past, so at the moment I’m cautiously optimistic about Rise. It will, however, be remarkable to see the end of the nine-movie Skywalker story arc begun when I was a toddler.
A nostalgic tidbit: A New Hope was one of the first stories I remember reacting to and realizing that I really, really liked the stuff with space and robots and dragons and elves and whatnot. Ever since then, around the age of 11 or 12 or so, I’ve considered myself a science fiction and fantasy geek.
And now I kinda want to make myself a sleeveless, hooded tunic like what Rey is wearing underneath her wrap. It’s a really neat design. 🙂
December 20, 2019, seems so far, far away.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Looking very shiny! At just under 2 hours and chock-full of great actors—Nicholas Hoult, Lily Collins, Genevieve O’Reilly (Mon Mothma in Star Wars!), Colm Meaney, Pam Ferris and Derek Jacobi, among others—it sounds promising.
Image: Lily Collins as Edith Bratt and Nicholas Hoult as J.R.R. Tolkien, via IMDB.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Like the Stone Age twig horse I blogged about a few years ago, this ivory horse is rather magnificent:
Found in the Vogelherd cave in south-western Germany, it’s carved from woolly mammoth ivory with flint tools in the Aurignacian period, from 40,000 to 28,000 BCE.
Like other animal figurines found in the same layers, the horse appears astonighingly lively and graceful. I’ve done a little bit of wood carving in my life, and—like all sculpting—it definitely takes not just skill but also pre-planning. I can’t imagine what carving ivory with flint would be like, but I’ve no doubt there are quite a few tricks that go into it.
Whatever the use of the Vogelherd horse was, it’s clear that the maker(s) invested time and significant effort into making their art—a good indication that the creativity, dedication, and determination of the modern human do have deep roots.
Image: horse figurine from the Vogelherd cave via Wikipedia (Baden-Württemberg, Germany; c. 32,000-35,000 BCE; ivory)
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?
Northrend has some of my favorite areas in World of Warcraft. I love the music in Grizzly Hills, and both Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra have nice, varied environments. (Then again, Northrend also has one of my all-time non-favorites, too: Icecrown. So dark and spiky and empty, brr. But I digress.) Whenever I level a toon through Northrend these days, I visit all three zones, and pick and choose the rest as mood strikes me.
One of the Howling Fjord quests never gets old: Let’s Go Surfing Now lets you ride down an impossibly tall cliff standing on top of a flaming harpoon bolt. I took my Dark Iron Dwarf through there last night:
Whee! 😀
Of Dice and Dragons is an occasional feature about games and gaming.
Trappist monk Thomas Merton apparently was very concerned with silence and retreat from the world and its opposing force, that of engagement with the world and its ourward pull.
“Our real journey in life is interior. It is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts. Never was it more necessary for us to respond to that action.”
– Thomas Merton, 1975
Apparently this quote is from a collection of journal entries Merton made in Asia shortly before his accidental death during the trip.
Not being a philosopher or a spiritual person, I couldn’t tell you what I think of “the creative action of love and grace”. However, the conclusion I’m more and more leaning towards is that the most important thing in life is one’s internal growth and what external actions (hopefully positive or beneficial to others) stem out of that.
Merton, Thomas. “Serious Communication”: The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, eds. Naomi Burton, Brother Patrick Hart and James Laughlin, p. 29. New York: New Directions, 1975. Quoted in Brox, Jane. Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements if Our Lives. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019, p. 225.
Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.
It seems there are at least two big group missions: from trailer #2 the one that the team wears their pale armor for while epically slowwalking in the hangar (at the Avengers compound, I assume), and from the special look the one where they take the fight to Thanos wearing darker armor. Unless the trailers deliberatly lie, which they might.
Smaller sorties are implied e.g. in the scene where Tony and Steve shake hands and Cap tells Tony he trusts him; it looks like it either might lead to a confrontation or come at the end of one—you can just see emergency vehicle lights flashing in the background. We also see Black Widow and Hawkeye gearing up (seemingly in the quinjet, perhaps over Manhattan), Hawkeye running away from a fire blast in a tunnel, Rocket hanging onto War Machine’s shoulder ready to take anyone on, and Ant-Man jumping at a lever.
IMDB listsEndgame run time at an unprecedented 3 h 2 min. Even if the end credits take the now-usual 10 minutes, that leaves 2 hours and 50 minutes for the storytelling. There’s clearly a lot to go through: apart from numerous fights, flashbacks, and getting people regrouped, some from pretty far away, there’s some training, planning, and contemplating. (So much contemplating!)
For one, I am looking forward to Thor getting to use his honking big axe-mace, and for another, to how Captain Marvel fits into the lineup.
However, one thing absolutely baffles me—I assume there will be at least one stinger, since that seems de rigueur for MCU, but what it (or they) might contain is beyond me. Any guesses?
This post has been edited to correct a typo.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
They’re really not revealing much, are they. Clearly many (or all?) of the far-flung protagonists have found their way to Earth, and there’s A Plan(TM) in the works. I do hope they won’t overuse that swelling, epic music with choral vocalizing in the movie. As amazing as it can be, this trailer sure had too much of it.
But: WTH is going on with Tony Stark being plastered up, front, and center in these trailers? Did Robert Downey Jr. make a deal to have an at-minimum performance time in each MCU movie?? Is someone upset not to get their daily RDJ dose???
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Oh my, this is stunning: a DIYed bathroom floor lights up with tiny fiber optics stars!
Balrd at Instructables
The secret is to thread the fibers into the grout lines. Apparently, for safety, the light source needs to be outside the bathroom (or, I imagine, whatever the local code calls for) and, of course, you need to start with a bare floor or to demo the existing surface, so it’s not a quick project by any measure. The results are amazing, though.
