A Profound Waste of Time

magazine on game-related stuff.  Not Jacob Geller depth though, bit disappointing.

B. Catling - "The Vorrh" / "Erstwhile" / "The Cloven"

Strange but good story about a mythical forest (where Adam still roams, less and less human like?) that takes people's memories.

The cyclops Ishmael, who is raised by the Kin (unknown what's behind this) and then escapes.

Tsungali, a hunter and killer.

Ghertrude Tulp, originally Ishmael's carer of sorts, and Cyrena, who got her sight back after spending a night with Ishmael.

The Bowman, oneofthewilliams, who made a bow out of (Irrinep)este. The Erstwhile that hunt them. He has forgotten his original travel through the Vorrh and encountered a letter written by himself.

This is only book one of three....

Reminds me a bit of Ægypt by John Crowley in how it uses real people, the photographer Muybridge, the Winchester heiress and her strange Winchester Mystery House...

There are so many things I learned about my world from this book yet it is fiction. Authors should be applauded for that.

-- The Vorrh ---

"It's from the Highlands. The fleyber is the spirit of one that died in childbirth; they say its soul wanders the moors as a ghost light, a will-o'-the-wisp."

"These are beyond my wildest hopes. You are obviously a man of significant talents."
    Emotion swept over her again, and the elder touched her sleeve. She rose and turned to leave the room, the prints pressed hard against her bosom. Muybridge rose with her, watching as she tottered slightly, robustly supported by the anxious elder. At the door, she turned to look at Muybridge once more, to thank him silently before leaving him alone in the cavernous space of her departure.
    He stood awkwardly in the odd room at the centre of the winding, empty mansion, in a state of total bewilderment, awash with flows of contradiction. He glowed at her words but turned to ash at their meaning.

 

 --- The Erstwhile ---

 

He was unfazed by it, until he realised that it was its binding agent that was so different. The gooey charm that held all of Nicholas's contradictions together had saturated into the very meaning of each. So that held all of Nicholas's contradictions together had saturated into the very meaning of each. So that the hard kernels of consequence and implication had been dissolved like teeth insyrup. But there were hard gums driving his words and Hector had the ghastly image of Nicholas sitting with the older patients, chewing at the pale stringy parts of their being, while they winsomely rambled and drifted away, unaware of his purposeful gnashing.

Ghertrude fainted in a slurred S, as if her string had been cut.

   "What was her message?" asked Cyrena calmly. Ishmael was a rat in a wheel, running hard in the spinning cage of lies.

    The guillotine had existed in mainland Europe and the British Isles for centuries. The sharpened head axe or crushing weight had scuttled downd between its very long verticals to messily separate life in all manner of different forms and variations. Its distictive profiel reached into many dark and gloomy skies long before it obtained the lasting nomenclature of the good Dr. Guillotine, who, seeking a fast and humane method of dispatch, unwittingly signed his name in blood forever to laws allowing the use of an instrument of fearsome horror. Its dramatic simplicity came to represent the revolution's repetitive slaughter, turning it into the dripping icon of the Terror. Germany had a part in the French prototype -a highly skilled harpsichord makernamed Tobias Schmidt crafted the pencilled designs into fundamental reality. Some say the gleaming, oblique, forty-five-degree angle of the blade was his own personal refinement. The speed and efficiency of the new "gin" or engine was infamous. With its endless supply o clients, a new manner of operation was needed. An almost industrial, conveyor belt mentality that kept it overstocked. These earnest labours of the rational matter-opf-fact instigated evengreated performances of bizarre fact and elaborate fiction to dance around the djuddering leaky basket, which Duymas tells us had to be changed or mended every three days because the wicker bottom would be chewed out by tghe growing number of furiously chattering heads that thrashed in their narrow contgainment. Better documented but equally weird accounts tell of numerous  experiments carried out to ascertain the consciousness of the severed minds. The most elaborate being conducted by two young doctors who waited at the foot of the engine, ready to receive the falling head. Once grabbed it was rushed to their nearby carriage and attached via its arteries and gutta-percha pipes to a pump that, in turn, was connected via more tubes to a living dog, strapped to the carriage floor.  The horses were geared up and sped towards their laboratory, the cobbled streets sending loud shock waves through the passengers, who swayed  and steadied themselves while frantically hand-pumping the dog's hot blood into the flushing head. All the while shouting the victim's name aloud and slapping his cheeks over the deafening noise of the hard wheels and the whimpering dog. Some success was recorded, a partial opening of the eyes, a shudder of the lips. Even "some slight agitation" one hour and a fresh dog later, when the head was decanted to an attic laboratory.

 

    "Sometimes you are very childish," said an infuriated Ghertrude.
    "A condition that we have never ourselves experienced," said Luluwa.
    Gertrude listened for sarcasm in the clicking rattle of her speech but realised that none existed.

--------------------------

"The Cloven"

Behind each moment of acute sensing lay solidification, each blind nuzzle dying back into the terse density of colourless fibre, the water squeezed through the now-inert roots and passing upwards. If the mass of the forest that lived in light was alien to humans, then the mass that lived in night was positively hostile in its indifference. Even the burrowing Erstwhile would not be tolerated. Even though their supposed purpose was a form of protecting the forest. When they dug down they never snapped or cut a root. The simply pushed them aside and squirmed in between their languid violence. But as the sleepers hid, the roots turned, often trapping them in fearful embraces. Or sent out more tendril extensions of themselves to penetrate the mothlike bodies, digging into heir ribs and hooking through their faces. Those that eventually awoke often bore the scars of these intrusions, looking like ill-formed knotted arteries wandering under their jaws, cheeks, and eyes. Some no longer had eyes. Teh tips of the roots had found their moisture and sucked it into all the others, sugars to sprite the distant, frivolous leaves that jiggled and danced in the warm sunlit air.

    "This is really difficult for me to understand. Is Blake saying that all of humanity was a mistake?"
    "Not God's mistake in making it. The mistake was that it escaped from the garden and grew abnormal in one direction. Those clever thumbs were given for the tending of plants, not making cities, machines, and endless ideas of how things work, most of which are wrong."

Then, before the cyclops had time to scream of beat him, the beetles arrived. The first heavy black dot landed on Seth's face like an uncertain inkblot; then the air darkened in a clicking dry thunder of them.

Arthur C. Clarke - "How the world was one"

Inspired by the long read by Neal Stephenson, "Mother Earth Mother Board" (https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/)

The ICI scientists took the cheap and common gas ethylene - C2H4 - and compressed it under more than 1000 atmospheres. This is a pressure greater than that found at the bottom of the deepest ocean, and the result was startling. The invisible gas turned into a waxy solid, and when the pressure was released it remained a solid. This new substance, which had never existed in the world before, was christened polyethylene - a name which was itself rapidly compressed to polythene.

one Captain Selwyn, RN, wanted to avoid paying out cable from tanks inside the ship (with the attendant risk of kinks and breakages) by having it wound on a large floating drum which would be towed behind a steamer. The drum would revolve in the water as the cable uncoiled, but the committee remarked, "We have great doubts as to the practicability of this plan." As far as the open Atlantic was concerned, the committee was quite correct. However, in 1944 just such floating drums were used to lay the underwater pipeline PLUTO (Pipe Line Under The Ocean) through which fuel was pumped across the English Channel to power the invasion in Europe in 1944.

what is so often called a 'crash programme': 'at first one goes nearly mad with vexation at the delays, but one soon finds that they are the rule, and then it becomes necessary to feign a rage one does not feel... I look upon it as the natural order of things that if I give an order it will not be carried out; or if by accident it is carried out, it will be carried out wrongly.

(1850) Electrical tests showed that it had broken somewhere near the French coast, and it was subsequently discovered that a fisherman had fouled the line with his anchor. As the line was so light he was able to haul it aboard, and he was immensely puzzled by this new kind of seaweed with a metal core. Thinking that it might be gold, he cut out a section to show his friends, and thus started the long war between the cable companies and the other users of the sea that has lasted to this day. More damage has been done to submarine cables by dragged anchors or trawls than by any other cause, and the annoyance is often mutual. A small boat that hooks its anchor around a modern armoured cable is as likely to lose its anchor as to damage the cable.

(1851) After the initial failure and the complete scepticism of all but a few enthusiasts, the establishment of this cross-Channel link - the world's first efficient submarine cable - created a great impression. With typically Victorian optimism, this new miracle of communications was hailed as a triumph for peace, which would undoubtedly improve understanding and co-operation between nations. Today we are sadly aware that though civilisation cannot function without such links, it by no means follows that they automatically bring peace. As the mathematicians would say, they are necessary- but not sufficient.

(1856) ... though among the private subscribers it is interesting to note the names of Lady Byron and William Makepeace Thackeray. These literary figures were obviously keener on progress than their contemporary Thoreau, who had written in Walden two years before; 
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping-cough...

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was not the greatest scientist of the nineteenth century; on any reasonable list, he must come below Darwin and Maxwell [...] Thomson was a unique bridge between the laboratory and the world of industry [...] It would not be unfair to say that if one took half the talents of Einstein, and half the talents of Edison, and succeeded in fusing such incompatible gifts into a single person, the result would be rather like William Thomson. What his contemporaries thought of him is shown by the fact that he was the first scientist ever to be raised to the peerage.

During the development of the atomic bomb, it was necessary to construct the largest electromagnet ever built in order to separate the isotopes of uranium. The magnet was over a hundred feet across, and providing copper for such a monster would have created a serious drain on the United States' supplies of this vital material. Some genius therefore proposed using the silver which was lying in the Treasury vaults, pointing out that it would be at least as safe inside the closely guarded confines of Oak Ridge. So the US Treasury handed over 15,000 tons of the precious metal to go into the magnet windings; it got over 99.9 per cent of it back when the isotope separator was dismantled and its coils melted down again.

Gutta-percha is a substance much more familiar to our grandparents than it is to us, for it has now been largely replaced by the many synthetic plastics that modern science has produced. The gum of a tree found in the jungles of Malaya, Borneo and Sumatra, it was introduced into Europe in 1843, and its remarkable properties were at once recognised. Indeed, it was the first natural thermoplastic ever to come into general use. Unlike rubber, it is not elastic, being hard and solid at room temperatures. However, in hot water it becomes as malleable as putty, reverting to its original hardness when cold again.

In his researches into the very foundations of physics, Heaviside became aware that mass and energy were equivalent long before this was generally realised by the scientific world. By 1890 he had already arrived at a rigorous proof of the famous relationship E=rac2, thus anticipating Einstein's more general formulation of this law by some fifteen years. This is perhaps his most astonishing - and least-known - achievement.

Forty years before my invitation to The Hague, I was on the other side of the North Sea, scanning the coast of Nazi-occupied Holland with the newly invented microwave radar, and wearing an RAF officer's uniform that was even newer. The heart of our three-gigahertz transmitter was the most important secret of the war - the cavity magnetron, invented in 1940 by Boot and Randall at Birmingham University. This generated centimetre-length radio waves of unprecedented power, and so made possible the airborne radar sets which won the vital Battle of the Atlantic.
    When Britain's chief scientific adviser Sir Henry Tizard carried the first experimental magnetron to America, the face of war was changed over a weekend (that of 28-30 September 1940), at a meeting which established the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's famous Radiation Laboratory. Sir Henry's unprepossessing block of copper was later called the most valuable cargo ever to reach the shores of the United States: although the atomic bomb ended the war, without the magnetron it might well have been lost before the Manhattan Project could have got under way.
    Yet - and this is one of history's biggest if's - Japanese scientists had made and tested an identical device a year before the British. If they had followed up their invention, we would not be living in a very different world.

Elden Ring

The Lost Daughter

Okayish film with Olivia Colman as a bereaved mother who is confronted with her past - leaving her daughters behind - while on a working holiday in Greece.

Death on the Nile

Latest adaptation of this Poirot story. It's never explained how he comes to his conclusions, just that he does?

So-so.

The Woman in Black

Nice adaptation of the novel (the play is also an adaptation) with Daniel Radcliffe. Good ending as well, the train, finally reunited with his wife.

The Godfather

Restored! In the cinema!

Fresh

Bit of a silly "comedy horror" about a guy abducting a girl to cut flesh from her and sell it to "the one percent of the one percent".

80s soundtrack. Big holes in the plot. So-so.

Horace Andy - "Midnight Rocker"

One of Massive Attack's voices, does a cover of "Safe from harm". 

Nice reggae.