The James Webb space telescope, launched into orbit at the end of December 2021, is going through some mirror alignment steps. A test image was taken, and it shows the astounding potential of the telescope in space imaging. Take a look:
Not only does the focal point star stand out conspicuously, you can see other stars and galaxies(!) in the background.
“While some of the largest ground-based telescopes on Earth use segmented primary mirrors, Webb is the first telescope in space to use such a design. The 21-foot, 4-inch (6.5-meter) primary mirror – much too big to fit inside a rocket fairing – is made up of 18 hexagonal, beryllium mirror segments. It had to be folded up for launch and then unfolded in space before each mirror was adjusted – to within nanometers – to form a single mirror surface. […]
“Webb is the world’s premier space science observatory and once fully operational, will help solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it.”
I don’t need to be a STEM person to be delighted at the progress!
It was time to re-do some of my World of Warcraft transmogs. Among others, I updated my Blood Elf rogue’s look. I still like her previous shadow concept mog a lot, so this update was more a teeny tweak than a grand change.
Her chest remains mogged to Ghostclaw Tunic, but I updated her legs to Jadefire Pants and hid her belt. Then I dinked around with her weapons and ended up with Enchanted Azsharite Felbane Dagger as a partner to the ever-gorgeous Ethereum Phase Blade.
The house is Victorian, built circa 1891, and located in Simsbury, Connecticut. Before the covid pandemic, Natcharian and her crew organized various book-themed events: author talks, writing classes, poetry slams, summer camps, book clubs, D&D game nights, tea or cocktail parties, live murder mysteries, even escape rooms.
The door into the gaming den opens when you pull a candle sconce attached to the bookcase:
The new secret room is papered with stone-block-look wallpaper and equipped with various furnishings that nod towards medieval castles: a round table with ornate wood chairs, a small suit of armor in the corner, and wall textiles, for example.
I’m flabbergasted that she was able to source so much of the furnishings second hand. I mean, who has a miniature suit of armor just lying around until you decide to sell it off on Craigslist?
The results are well worth the effort, and surely will be enjoyed by all event visitors. For more images, visit her site, or, should you prefer to watch a video about the build process instead, you can see it on YouTube.
The Roman orator Quintilian has a thing or two to say about making jokes at the expense of groups of people:
I have already noted, when talking of jokes, how unworthy it is to go after someone’s circumstances in life, and there is no call for nastiness against classes, ethnicities, or nations, either.
Quintilian, The Institute of Oratory 11.1.86
(My own translation)
Now, Quintilian is specifically speaking here about how to comport oneself as an advocate in court, and he goes on to say that if your opponent comes from a group whose moral qualities might seem dubious to a Roman jury, like soldiers or tax farmers, it may sometimes be appropriate to make a joke at their expense. His advice is tactical, not moral: this is how you sway a jury and win your case. Still, it’s good advice in general that “just joking” about people’s ethnicities, origins, or life circumstances is not a great way to get people on your side, in ancient Rome or today.
Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.
The release date for the next movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is approaching. Here is the second official trailer for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness:
To me, the creepiest thing in the trailer is the mention of a repeating dream Strange says he’s having. Brr, merely the thought is hair-raising. (Not to mention that I can’t even think of the kinds of nightmares you might have if your reality had shifted to a multiverse of possibilities. Anyway.) Apparently MoM is the first MCU film to be released under the horror genre, so that sounds appropriate.
The trailer looks as astounding as all of the MCU movies do; indeed, technical accomplishments have never been Marvel’s weakness. Where it might fall is the story. I don’t recognize the writing team for MoM at all: Michael Waldron (who’s apparently written the Loki series) and Jade Halley Bartlett (with a total of four credits to her name in IMDB).
Another aspect I’m completely ignorant of is superhero America Chavez, played in MoM by Xochitl Gomez, who will be introduced in this film. I’ve sometimes wondered whether I’d be enjoying the MCU more had I read Marvel’s superhero comics as a kid instead of the mutant ones, but it hasn’t been a big deal so far. In phase four, however, as the stories are moving further away from the biggest names and most popular heroes, it might make a difference.
I’m also ambivalent towards the director Sam Raimi. His Spider-Man trilogy certainly faded from my memory soon enough. MoM is also Raimi’s first film in nine years. I have to wonder whether directing is like riding a bicycle—will he be able to handle the reins of a massive production again?
Apparently the events will also tie in with the series Loki and WandaVision. As I haven’t seen either, I hope any links will be clear enough anyway. I guess we will see. It’ll surely be nice to see more of Wong (Benedict Wong) and Dr. Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams).
The release day for MoM is still listed as May 06, 2022.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Russia’s unprovoked attack is not okay. The Russian president’s mumbo jumbo about annexation of historical areas is exactly that. Neither the Russian Empire nor Soviet Union exist anymore. If we go down that path, we might as well cry out for the restoration of the Roman Empire, other empires, or basically any polities for “historical” “reasons”.
As a Finn, I am not intellectually okay with this.
Nor do I feel okay.
My age group has grown up in peace, but we have grandparents who lived through our two modern wars with Russia, and you can bet your pants some of our parents carry some inherited wounds. I have a friend, in fact, who grew up in the east near the Russian border. People there had a habit of saying “When the Russians come, [blah blah blah]”. Not if—when.
We remember.
I bet the same conversation is happening all over Eastern and Central Europe now as we are having here jn Debrecen, Hungary at Saturday dinner. The older people are talking about what it was like under Russian occupation. Everyone remembers.
I’ve been reading more fantasy lately than is typical for me. One of the novels paid more attention to everyday colors than Anglo-American fantasy writing tends to do, which turned my brain onto thinking about colors in our environments.
This photo of a tree-lined road with masses of flowers in Parkview, Johannesburg, South Africa, certainly grabbed my attention:
It’s not that I haven’t seen purple or fuchsia flowers on trees or bushes, or tree-lined roads, or tall trees. I just haven’t seen tall trees with purple flowers lining roads before. Fantastic!
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?
This floor mosaic comes from the dining room of a Roman house. The central parts of the floor have been lost, but the edges of the room were decorated to look like the untidy remains of a banquet. We can identify leaves, fish and poultry bones, nut shells, bits of fruit, and the shells of a wide variety of shellfish. This may seem like an odd choice for home decoration, but mosaics in this style were popular in well-to-do Greek and Roman households. To contemporary guests, mosaics like this sent a number of messages about the people who dined on them.
On one level, this mosaic simply reflected the reality of the room it was in. Diners at an ancient banquet could toss their refuse on the floor with abandon because they were not the ones who had to clean it up. The widespread use of enslaved labor for domestic service meant that the rich could lob greasy chicken bones and half-eaten olives around the place without caring about the time and effort involved in cleaning up afterward. In that sense, this mosaic identified the owners of this house as the sorts of people who had other people to do the cleaning up after them.
On the other hand, the evident abandon with which the detritus is strewn around the room is deceptive. The individual pieces are precisely placed so that there the space between them is relatively even. Larger items are spread out with smaller ones between them. They are positioned in loose diagonal lines with a subtle aesthetic regularity; similar objects repeat to help unify the image, but are spaced out and given different orientations to avoid any sense of pattern. This mosaic is an extremely fine one made of very small tesserae in many different shades that must have taken a substantial amount of work by a skilled mosaic artist and a team of workers. The details of this Roman mosaic also imitate a famous Greek predecessor created by the mosaic artist Sosos of Pergamum. The effect was meant to project wealth and power: only the very rich could afford to put so much care into looking so careless.
The choice of food to show in this mosaic is also significant. Meat had a religious, even moral, significance in Greek and Roman culture. Large land animals like cattle, sheep, and pigs were typically eaten as part of a communal religious sacrifice, and religious custom dictated how they could be cooked and served as well as who should partake in the feast. Fish, shellfish, and poultry were not constrained by similar rules and could be eaten when, how, and in any company one liked. As such, this sort of food was associated with indulgence, even decadence. To say that a fellow Greek or Roman dined on fish had a sting of moral judgment akin to declaring that someone today enjoys champagne and caviar. The variety of fish bones, chicken claws, and shells in this mosaic makes a statement that this room is not one for solemn sacrificial meals but a place where the diners can indulge in their favorite delicacies free of any religious scruples or moral condemnation.
A great deal of meaning is packed into a mosaic of an untidy floor. These were messages that the original guests in this dining room would have implicitly understood in same way that we today grasp the status-signaling meaning of a four-car garage or a water view.
Image: Detail of unswept floor mosaic, photograph by Yann Forget via Wikimedia (currently Gregorian Profano Museum, Vatican; early 2nd c. CE; glass tessera mosaic; by Heraclitus, copied from work by Sosos of Pergamum)
History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool. From worldbuilding to dialogue, history helps you write.
Check out this mind-blowing quilt simultaneously copying three fine arts pieces, namely Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, and Edvard Munch’s The Scream:
Even the intricate gold frame is sewn!
This astounding piece is called “Sleep, Play, Scream” and it was made by Flora Joy. She was deservedly awarded for her innovative trispective technique.
Any time I come across someone, typically an older white man (seriously, dudes, you’ve got to do better), sneering at sewing or other textile work, I can’t but shake my head. Poor twits, showing what they emphatically don’t know jack shit about.
Co-Geeking 
