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It’s spooky season again, and if you know me, you’ll know I’m no fan of scary movies! But TCM has lots of other good stuff airing this month and I’m recommending two of my pre-Code and film noir features that I’ve previously covered here at Shadows and Satin. My Satiny pick is What Price Hollywood? (1932), starring Constance Bennett and Lowell Sherman, and directed by George Cukor. Bennett plays Mary …

Band:1349Country:NorwayGenre:Black MetalYear:2024Buy the original!BandcampDownload

There’s just one month to go until the opening of our new exhibition Medieval Women: In Their Own Words. We can’t wait for visitors to come and explore the rich and complex lives of women in the Middle Ages! If you can’t wait either, then you might be excited to...

As part of restructuring my shop for the current economy, I added all of the individual In Detail publications to the Digital Whimsy section. This is an excellent way to learn about original pieces of fancy work. Each volume (except the blue ribbon case) contains directions for making your own. The compilation edition: Fanciful Utility […]

The Age reported that the State Government is planning to reduce the three stations in Brunswick (Jewell, Brunswick and Anstey) to two during the project to remove 8 level crossings. Looking at the current distances between the stations (source: Vicsig) we can see they’re pretty close. Stationkm from Southern Crosskm from previous stopRoyal Park5.432Jewell6.4631.031Brunswick7.2730.81Anstey7.9810.708Moreland8.7840.803 Platforms are about 160 metres long, meaning the distance from the end of one to the …

magCulture Live London is back! Join us on Thursday 7 November for our annual celebration of magazine culture. The day will focus on the creative power of the double-page spread, and feature a series of talks from designers and editors including:Richard TurleyInterview, Rolling Stone, Offal et alShira InbarMSCHF & A24 zines Lucy RoeberThe Erotic Review Davide CazzaroNotebookNina CarterIt’s Freezing in LA!Chris O’LearyFatboy ZineWith more to be confirmed… read on for …

Not a new theory, but the golden age of streaming really was a ZIRP thing. I mean, Patriot anyone? RIP Cool Rick.

A puzzle kata, and a possible solution. When I was a boy I had a nine-piece puzzle that I'd been gifted by the Swizz branch of my family. It's called Das verflixte Hunde-Spiel, which means something like the confounded dog game in English. And while a puzzle with nine pieces doesn't sound like much, it is, in fact, incredibly difficult. It's just a specific incarnation of a kind of game …

Consider this post a public service announcement. Not to mention a good way to kick off this month of October! Yes, you did read the title correctly. While many silent fans are unaware of it, the nearly 100-year-old script for … Continue reading →

PennLive reports “Central Pa. school district installs surveillance windows in gender-inclusive bathrooms”: as a parent of a non-binary kid I’m obviously concerned about the outcomes of policy like this but reading through the South Western School District’s justification for this policy also highlights just how much of the modern public school experience has “prison” like design qualities.

After spending countless hours trekking across Ryan Laukat’s more expansive landscapes via Sleeping Gods and its sequels, Primeval Peril and Distant Skies, Creature Caravan is a throwback to his earlier titles not only in terms of setting, but also time commitment. It doesn’t quite hit the twenty-minute duration of Eight-Minute Empires, clocking in at closer to an hour, but Creature Caravan shows Laukat in fine form, pressing his craft forward …

This is a piece of advice that I found myself giving to many early career researchers, students, and colleagues supervising and advising those as well. For years, actually. A mathematician, the joke says, is a blind man, in a dark room, searching for a black cat that isn't there. I don't know about that, but I think we can still agree that a researcher, in most fields, is sailing a …

This one hardly needs making. I found it by accident when we roasted a chicken this Sunday. As we were tearing the carcass apart like a pack of hyaenas, I noticed that one of the wings had a nice, distinct thumb claw. Here it is in a big plastic bowl in the kitchen — shown this way to emphasize its mundanity. And here is the wing closer up. This is …

Earlier in the summer, the Democratic party and its supporters faced a difficult decision: should they gently but firmly sideline President Joe Biden from the 2024 ticket? There were plenty of reasons to agonise over the decision: loyalty to Biden; the daunting practicalities of the switch; fear of the chaos that might ensue; nervousness that the likely replacement, Biden’s vice-president Kamala Harris, wasn’t up to the job. But such nerve-racking …

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. ***Martial arts mayhem was still ruling unsurpassed in Britain, this week in 1974, with Carl Douglas' Kung Fu Fighting retaining the singles chart pinnacle it had claimed seven days earlier.However, there was change - of a sort - atop the corresponding LP listings, thanks to Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells having now snatched …