Good grief! Either I haven’t been paying attention, or there really is a whole slew of SFFnal trailers out in the past month for me to blog about and comment on. Here we go…
The end cap for the dinosaur park franchise(s), Jurassic World Dominion, puts together characters from the original trilogy and the sequel trilogy. And dinos, of course:
I was surprised to learn the movie takes place four years after the preceding one; it will be interesting to see how the writing team will have figured humans and dinosaurs might coexist. It will also be very nice to see some of the older characters, and I hope there will be less time spent on my least favorite faces and more on the nicer ones.
There is, however, one thing I will NEVER want to see again: high heels that stay glued to the female protagonist’s feet while she’s running through the jungle. Oh, hello?! Yuckkk!
At this writing, Jurassic World Dominion will be released on June 10, 2022 in the U.S.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
One of the astounding things about living right now is the sheer amount of scientific knowledge and technical skills humanity has gained in the past 100 years or so alone.
These days it’s trivial, for example, to get high-quality photos from a neighboring planet brought to your personal device.
(Ok, it’s not truly trivial in the strictest sense since so many steps and technologies are involved, but at the same time: Photos. From another planet. Automatically delivered. Via the Internet. Which many (if not most) of us in the West have casual access to. Pretty much daily! So yes. Trivial.)
Specifically, I’m talking about the Persevererance Imgage Bot on Twitter. It’s a project by computer engineer Niraj Sanghvi. He has automated image tweeting mostly from NASA/JPL-Caltech sources for an impressive, ever-growing collection.
The photos are purely functional, of course, helping the rover to operate, but some are also quite interesting as photographs. Below are some recent favorite shots.
(Click on the image source links below to find more about each photo.)
As before, the head and shirt slots are hidden and the bracers aren’t visible. I also retained the two fist weapons mogs (Silithid Claw).
The update is built around the Bronzebeard Heritage Armor set. Since I tend to find the pre-made sets often a bit lifeless, however, I only used the shoulders, chest, hands, and feet, and filled out my new transmog with Dignitary’s Traveling Cloak, Stygian Belt, and Harvester’s Court Leggings. I was suprised how well the diamond-patterned quilting in the Revendreth pants fit with the diamonds in the Bronzebeard shoulders, and the red in the belt exactly matches the pants.
Finally, I added some red tattoos (Gryphon pattern) to match the pants color and the detailing on the shoulders.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s speculative work The Last Man starts very much like a run-of-the-mill regency-era novel with its three-book structure. You even start to wonder whether much of interest is ever going to happen.
And then a plague hits. Book three, especially, where people drop off like flies, felt rather grim even before living through a pandemic myself. (I read it a few years ago.)
Since the plague aspect is a little too on the nose, I’m going to skip all of that for now. Instead, below is what the protagonist thought about reading:
“I felt convinced that however it might have been in former times, in the present stage of the world, no man’s faculties could be developed, no man’s moral principle be enlarged and liberal, without an extensive acquaintance with books. To me they stood in the place of an active career, of ambition, and those palpable excitements necessary to the multitude.”
– Lionel Verney in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man
Sounds astonishingly like Mr. Darcy’s line about a truly accomplished woman who must improve “her mind by extensive reading” in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, doesn’t it? It must’ve been very much in the air in the early 19th century.
I’ll admit, Venthyr is not one of my favorite covenants. The gothic vampire vibe just doesn’t do it for me. But when I saw that the Venthyr mail set has candles on the shoulders, I knew I had to have it for my Tauren shaman.
Caoileann O’Mahony crocheted some wheelchair spoke covers and blogged the instructions for the Glasgow in 2024 Worldcon bid. This isn’t your sleepy granny square crochet, though, oh no; O’Mahoney also made little planet appliques and turned the spoke guards into a model of our solar system.
And round and round it goes. I like the color selection (although I wish the photo were a little clearer). Saturn and Uranus even have their rings. How cool is that?!
Have you ever asked yourself: “I wonder what it would be like if there were a Eurovision-style song contest in Azeroth?” No? Just us? Well, okay then.
If you’re not familiar with the Eurovision Song Contest, it’s an annual competition in which countries around Europe (and a few beyond) present songs in a wide variety of styles and genres. It’s good for inventive songs, wild stage shows, and good-spirited competition among nations. What if we had the same thing in the lands of World of Warcraft? Here are our ideas of what songs might represent the various realms and lands of the Shadowlands.
Oribos – La Forza by Elina Nechayeva (Estonia, 2018)
An ethereal, soaring, operatic melody from Estonia in 2018 befitting the mystical city surrounded by The Inbetween. (Probably helps if you like opera.)
In English, the Italian lyrics start something like “You know in the night for me / There is a star / It lights up my way / For eternity / It is my guide / In the immensity / That never leaves me” (someone else’s translation). Very apt!
Bastion – Visionary Dream by Sopho Khalvashi (Georgia, 2007)
Georgia’s Eurovision contribution from 2007 is a hypnotic song. Among its lyrics: “I will fly away / To reach the heights I’ve ever dreamed / Beneath the sun / No sense of time and space.” Sounds like Bastion to us.
Maldraxxus – Hard Rock Hallelujah by Lordi (Finland, 2006)
Finland won in 2006 with this hard rock song. It’s got monsters, pyrotechnics, and a head-banging beat. What else could you hope for from the Necrolords of Maldraxxus?
Ardenweald – Spirit in the Sky by KEiiNO (Norway, 2019)
Norway’s song from 2019 has a magical fairy-tale feel and features a yoik performance evoking the spirits of the northern lights. It feels like something the Night Fae of Ardenweald would be into.
Revendreth – It’s My Life by Cezar (Romania, 2013)
In 2013, Romania blessed us with this levitating falsetto vampire drama king. If that’s not right for the Venthyr of Revendreth, I don’t know what could be.
The Maw – Hatrið mun sigra by Hatari (Iceland, 2019)
Content note: The Icelandic group Hatari is described on the official Eurovision site as “Award-winning, anti-capitalist, BDSM, techno-dystopian, performance art collective”. The music pretty much matches that description—in English, the song name apparently translates “hate will prevail”. Be warned.
The lyrics start with “The revelry was unrestrained / The hangover is endless / Life is meaningless / The void will get us all” (someone else’s translation), and the stage show includes chains and spikes. Yep; as bleak as playing through The Maw.
Torghast – Warrior by Nina Sublatti (Georgia, 2015)
Representing Georgia for the 2015 contest we find another Eurovision song where the lyrics and stage show seem to fit WoW uncannily well (Sublatti’s outfit certainly does!) and certainly suit the desolation of Torghast.
Korthia – Higher Ground by Rasmussen (Denmark, 2018)
The Belgian entry from 2003 is sung in an imaginary language and also has a bit of an otherworldly quality to it, making it the perfect song for Zereth Mortis.
Finally, as an honorable mention, if there is a Eurovision song for the Shadowlands expansion as a whole, it’s Sweden’s Heroes from 2015.
Shadowlands – Heroes by Måns Zelmerlöw (Sweden, 2015)
Any favorites among these or other Eurovision songs, or suggestions for additional WoW zone pairings? Do share!
P.S. The 2022 Eurovision Song Contest semifinals are finished, and the final is held this Saturday, May 14, in Turin, Italy, should you want to follow along.
Of Dice and Dragons is an occasional feature about games and gaming.
The Roman fort at Vindolanda near Hadrian’s Wall in Britain has been a source of many remarkable finds. The unusual conditions at the site preserved many examples of the kinds of organic material that usually disappears to decay, including wood, textiles, and leather. When the onset of the covid-19 pandemic delayed the start of the excavation season, researchers at Vindolanda used the time to reexamine some leather scraps that had been turned up in earlier seasons and came across an unexpected find: a toy mouse!
The mouse is cut from a flat scrap of leather and has markings on the body to indicate eyes and fur. Mice would have been a common sight around the fort and the nearby village, a constant nuisance to a community that depended on stored grain to survive through the winter. Since we know there were families and children in and around the fort, this mouse might have been a child’s toy. Or perhaps it was made to be slipped into some unsuspecting legionary’s bedroll for a practical joke. Whatever the original intent for this mouse, it’s still cute two thousand years later!
History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool. From worldbuilding to dialogue, history helps you write.
In September 2021, Photographer Dmitry Kokh visited the currently unoccupied Kolyuchin Island in the Chukchi Sea between Russia and Alaska, and documented some of the wildlife there. A bunch of polar bears seem to have settled in the abandoned buildings of a former Russian weather station.
You can see the bears casually stroll in between the houses, and apparently even spend time inside the buildings, often peeking out of the glassless windows. Astounding!
Kadri Liik shared on Twitter some of her family history of using mines to dye fabric for colorful folk skirts in western Estonia in 1930s.
Strictly speaking, of course, it’s not mines themselves that were used in dyeing, but the picric acid in them. Russian World War I battleship Slava sank in 1917 between Muhu island and mainland Estonia, only 12 years after putting to sea.
Estonians scrapped the ship in the early 1930s. During that process, picric acid was extracted and put to use. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, picric acid was first used in dyeing in 1849, initially of silk. In Muhu, it was apparently used with wool.
The bright yellow derived from picric acid was locally known as mine yellow (miinikollane). Below is the Muhu skirt made from scratch by Liik’s grandmother or great aunt in 1930s:
Apparently, Muhu skirts enjoyed such popularity that older women might be doing their everyday chores in them as late as the 1960s.
It’s quite striking, isn’t it? It seems that some of these traditional patterns survive, either in traditionally woven textiles or as prints on modern fabrics, which is fabulous. I’m not sure I’d like to know exactly how the picric was extracted in the 30s, though…!
Co-Geeking 
You must be logged in to post a comment.