Read.
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dotaturls_feed at 01:42am on 03/10/2025![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yhlee at 12:11pm on 03/10/2025 under writing: businesstelophase that I suspected that the "actual" "author" was some middle-aged white dude scammer sitting in North Dakota or, more tragically and pessimistically, some human trafficking scam farm outside the US.nwhyte_wp_feed at 04:09pm on 03/10/2025Second frame of third section:
I’ve really enjoyed Burns’ weird stories in the past, and I’m sorry to say that I didn’t find this one as much to my taste, perhaps because it is not as weird. Brian, the protagonist, is a teenager who is obsessed with classic films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Last Picture Show, and also with his friend Laurie. He stumbles around rocky outcrops, both physical and emotional, and doesn’t quite manage to get where he needs to go. It’s OK as a coming of age story, but I wanted a bit more. You can get Final Cut here.
Next on my pile of unread comics in English is Ness: A Story from the Ulster Cycle, by Patrick Brown.
digital_antiquarian_feed at 04:04pm on 03/10/2025
There was some discussion about it: “Wow, gosh, it’d sure be nice if we were making more money and selling more copies so we could do crazy games of the type we want, as opposed to having to worry about how we’re going to sell more.” Hey, I’d love it if the public was more into what I like to do and a little less into slightly more straightforward things. But I totally get that they’re into straightforward things. I don’t have any divine right to have someone hand me millions of dollars to make a game of whatever I want to do. At some fundamental level, everyone has a wallet, and they vote with it.
— Doug Church, Looking Glass Studios
Late in 1994, after their rather brilliant game System Shock had debuted to a reception most kindly described as constrained, the Boston-based studio Looking Glass Technologies sent their star producer Warren Spector down to Austin, Texas. There he was to visit the offices of Looking Glass’s publisher Origin Systems, whose lack of promotional enthusiasm they largely blamed for their latest game’s lukewarm commercial performance. Until recently, Spector had been directly employed by Origin. The thinking, then, was that he might still be able to pull some strings in Austin to move the games of Looking Glass a little higher up in the priority rankings. The upshot of his visit was not encouraging. “What do I have to do to get a hit around here?” Spector remembers pleading to his old colleagues. The answer was “very quiet, very calm: ‘Sign Mark Hamill to star in your game.‘ That was the thinking at the time.” But interactive movies were not at all what Looking Glass wanted to be doing, nor where they felt the long-term future of the games industry lay.
So, founders Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner decided to make some major changes in their business model in the hope of raising their studio’s profile. They accepted $3.8 million in venture capital and cut ties with Origin, announcing that henceforward Looking Glass would publish as well as create their games for themselves. Jerry Wolosenko, a new executive vice president whom they hired to help steer the company into its future of abundance, told The Boston Globe in May of 1995 that “we expect to do six original titles per year. We are just beginning.” This was an ambitious goal indeed for a studio that, in its five and a half years of existence to date, had managed to turn out just three original games alongside a handful of porting jobs.
Even more ambitious, if not brazen, was the product that Looking Glass thought would provide them with their entrée into the ranks of the big-time publishers. They intended to mount a head-on challenge to that noted tech monopolist Microsoft, whose venerable, archetypally entitled Flight Simulator was the last word — in fact, very nearly the only word — in civilian flight simulation. David-versus-Goliath contests in the business of media didn’t come much more pronounced than this one, but Looking Glass thought they had a strategy that might allow them to break at least this particular Microsoft monopoly.
Flight Unlimited was the brainchild of a high-energy physicist, glider pilot, and amateur jazz pianist named Seamus Blackley, who had arrived at Looking Glass by way of the legendary Fermi Laboratory. His guiding principle was that Microsoft’s Flight Simulator as it had evolved over the last decade and a half had become less a simulation of flight itself than a simulation of the humdrum routine of civil aviation — of takeoff permissions and holding patterns, of navigational transponders and instrument landing systems. He wanted to return the focus to the simple joy of soaring through the air in a flying machine, something that, for all the technological progress that had been made since the Wright brothers took off from Kitty Hawk, could still seem closer to magic than science. The emphasis would be on free-form aerobatics rather than getting from Airport A to Airport B. “I want people to see that flying is beautiful, exciting, and see the thrill you can get from six degrees of freedom when you control an airplane,” Blackley said. “That’s why we’ve focused on the experience of flying. There is no fuel gauge.”
The result really was oddly beautiful, being arguably as close to interactive art as a product that bills itself as a vehicular simulation can possibility get. Its only real concession to structure took the form of a 33-lesson flying course, which brought you from just being able to hold the airplane straight and level to executing gravity-denying Immelman rolls, Cuban eights, hammerheads, and inverted spins. Any time that your coursework became too intense, you always had the option to just bin the lesson plans and, you know, go out and fly, maybe to try some improvisational skywriting.
In one sense, Flight Unlimited was a dramatic departure from the two Ultima Underworld games and System Shock, all of which were embodied first-person, narrative-oriented designs that relied on 3D graphics of a very different stripe. In another sense, though, it was business as usual, another example of Looking Glass not only pushing boundaries of technology in a purist sense — the flight model of Flight Unlimited really was second to none — but using it in the service of a game that was equally aesthetically innovative, and just a little bit more thoughtful all the way around than was the norm.
Upon its release in May of 1995, Flight Unlimited garnered a rare five-stars-out-of-five review from Computer Gaming World magazine:
It’s just you, the sky, and a plane that does just about anything you ask it to. Anything aerobatic, that is. Flight Unlimited is missing many of the staple elements of flight simulations. There are no missiles, guns, or enemy aircraft. You can’t learn IFR navigation or practice for your cross-country solo. You can’t even land at a different airport than the one you took off from. But unless you’re just never happy without something to shoot at, you won’t care. You’ll be too busy choreographing aerial ballets, pulling off death-defying aerobatic stunts, or just enjoying a quiet soar down the ridge line to miss that stuff.
Flight Unlimited sold far better than System Shock: a third of a million copies, more even than Looking Glass’s previous best-seller Ultima Underworld, enough to put itself solidly in the black and justify a sequel. Still, it seems safe to say that it didn’t cause any sleepless nights for anyone at Microsoft. Over the years, Flight Simulator had become less a game than a whole cottage industry unto itself, filled with armchair pilots who often weren’t quite gamers in the conventional sense, who often played nothing else. It wasn’t all that easy to make inroads with a crowd such as that. Like a lot of Looking Glass’s games, Flight Unlimited was a fundamentally niche product to which was attached the burden of mainstream sales expectations.
That said, the fact remained that Flight Unlimited had made money for Looking Glass, which allowed them to continue to live the dream for a while longer. Neurath and Lerner sent a homesick Warren Spector back down to Austin to open a second branch there, to take advantage of an abundance of talent surrounding the University of Texas that the Wing Commander-addled Origin Systems was believed to be neglecting.
Then Looking Glass hit a wall. Its name was Terra Nova.
Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri had had the most protracted development cycle of any Looking Glass game, dating almost all the way back to the very beginning of the company and passing through dozens of hands before it finally came to fruition in the spring of 1996. At its heart, it was an ultra-tactical first-person shooter vaguely inspired by the old Robert Heinlein novel Starship Troopers, tasking you with leading teams of fellow soldiers through a series of missions, clad in your high-tech combat gear that turned you more than halfway into a sentient robot. But it was also as close as Looking Glass would ever come to their own stab at a Wing Commander: the story was advanced via filmed cutscenes featuring real human actors, and a lot of attention was paid to the goings on back at the ranch when you weren’t dressed up in your robot suit. This sort of thing worked in Wing Commander, to whatever extent it did, because the gameplay that took place between the movie segments was fairly quick and simple. Terra Nova was not like that, which could make it feel like an even more awkward mélange of chocolate and peanut butter. It’s difficult to say whether Activision’s Mechwarrior 2, the biggest computer game of 1995, helped it or hurt it in the marketplace: on the one hand, that game showed that there was a strong appetite for tactical combat involving robots, but, on the other, said demand was already being fed by a glut of copycats. Terra Nova got lost in the shuffle. A game that had been expected to sell at least half a million copies didn’t reach one-fifth of that total.
Looking Glass’s next game didn’t do any better. Like Flight Unlimited, British Open Championship Golf cut against the dark, gritty, and violent stereotype that tended to hold sway when people thought of Looking Glass, or for that matter of the games industry writ large. It was another direct challenge to an established behemoth: in this case, Access Software’s Links franchise, which, like Flight Simulator, had its own unique customer base, being the only line of boxed computer games that sold better to middle-aged corporate executives than they did to high-school and university students. Looking Glass’s golf project was led by one Rex Bradford, whose own history with simulating the sport went all the way back to Mean 18, a hit for Accolade in 1986. This time around, though, the upstart challenger to the status quo never even got a sniff. By way of damning with faint praise, Computer Gaming World called British Open Championship Golf “solid,” but “somewhat unspectacular.” Looking Glass could only wish that its sales could have been described in the same way.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see all too clearly that Neurath and Lerner crossed the line that separates ambition from hubris when they decided to try to set Looking Glass up as a publisher. At the very time they were doing so, many another boutique publisher was doing the opposite, looking for a larger partner or purchaser to serve as shelter from the gale-force winds that were beginning to blow through the industry. More games were being made than ever, even as shelf space at retail wasn’t growing at anything like the same pace, and digital distribution for most types of games remained a nonstarter in an era in which almost everyone was still accessing the Internet via a slow, unstable dial-up connection. This turned the fight over retail space into a free-for-all worthy of the most ultra-violet beat-em-up. Sharp elbows alone weren’t enough to win at this game; you had to have deep pockets as well, had to either be a big publisher yourself or have one of them on your side. In deciding to strike out on their own, Neurath and Lerner may have been inspired by the story of Interplay Productions, a development studio which in 1988 had broken free of the grasp of Electronic Arts — now Origin System’s corporate parent, as it happened — and gone on to itself become one of the aforementioned big publishers who were increasingly dominating at retail. But 1988 had been a very different time in gaming.
In short, Neurath and Lerner had chosen just about the worst possible instant to try to seize full control of their own destiny. “Game distribution isn’t always based on quality,” noted Warren Spector at the end of 1996. Having thus stated the obvious, he elaborated:
The business has changed radically in the last year, and it’s depressing. The competition for shelf space is ridiculous and puts retailers in charge. If you don’t buy an end-cap from retailers for, say, $50,000 a month, they won’t buy many copies.
Products once had three to six months. The average life is now 30 days. If you’re not a hit in 30 days, you’re gone. This is predicated on your association with a publisher who gets your title on shelves. It’s a nightmare.
With just three games shipped in the last two and a half years — a long way off their projected pace of “six original titles per year” — and with the last two of them having flopped like a wet tuna on a gymnastics court, Looking Glass was now in dire straits. The only thing that had allowed them to keep the doors open this long had been a series of workaday porting jobs that Warren Spector had been relegated to supervising down in Austin, while he waited for the company to establish itself on a sound enough financial footing to support game development from whole cloth in both locations. Ten years on, after Looking Glass had been enshrined in gaming lore as one of the most forward-thinking studios of all time and Spector as the ultimate creative producer, the idea of them wasting their collective talents on anonymous console ports would seem surreal. But such was the reality circa 1997, when Looking Glass, having burnt through all of their venture capital, was left holding on by a thread. “I remember people walking into the office to take back the [rented] plants which the studio was no longer able to pay for,” says programmer Randy Smith.
As for Neurath and Lerner, they had swallowed the hubris of 1995 and were now doing what the managers of all independent games studios do when they find themselves unable to pay the bills anymore: looking for a buyer who would be able to pay them instead. But because Looking Glass could never seem to do anything in the conventional way even when they tried to, the buyer they found was one of the strangest ever.
The Boston firm known as Intermetrics, Inc., was far from a household name, but it had a proud history that long predated the personal-computer era. Intermetrics had grown out of the fecund soil of Project Apollo, having been founded in March of 1969 by some of the engineers and programmers behind the Apollo Guidance Computer that would soon help to place astronauts on the Moon. After that epochal achievement, Intermetrics continued to do a lot of work for NASA, providing much of the software that was used to control the Space Shuttle. Other government and aerospace-industry contracts filled out most of the balance of its order sheets.
In August of 1995, however, a group of investors led by a television executive bought the firm for $28 million, with the intention of turning it into something altogether different. Michael Alexander came from the media conglomerate MCA, where he had been credited with turning around the fortunes of the cable-television channel USA. Witnessing the transformation that high-resolution graphics, high-quality sound, and the enormous storage capacity of CD-ROM were wreaking on personal computing, he had joined dozens of his peers in deciding that the future of mass-market entertainment and infotainment lay with interactive multimedia. Deeming most of the companies who were already in that space to be “overvalued,” and apparently assuming that one type of computer programming was more or less the same as any other, he bought Intermetrics, whose uniform of white shirts, ties, and crew cuts had changed little since the heyday of the Space Race, to ride the hottest wave in 1990s consumer electronics.
“This is a company that has the skills and expertise to be in the multimedia business, but is not perceived as being in that business,” he told a reporter from The Los Angeles Times. (It was not a question of perception; Intermetrics was not in the multimedia business prior to the acquisition.) “And that is its strength.” (He failed to elaborate on exactly why this should be the case.) Even the journalist to whom he spoke seemed skeptical. “Ponytailed, black-clad, twenty-something multimedia developers beware,” she wrote, almost palpably smirking between the lines. “Graying engineers with pocket protectors and a dozen years of experience are starting to compete.” Likewise, it is hard not to suspect Brian Fargo of Interplay of trolling the poor rube when he said that “I think it’s great that the defense guys are doing this. It’s where the job security is now. It used to be in defense. Now it’s in the videogame business.” (Through good times and bad, one thing the videogame business has never, ever been noted for is its job security.)
Alas, Michael Alexander was not just a bandwagon jumper; he was a late bandwagon jumper. By the time he bought Intermetrics, the multimedia bubble was already close to popping under the pressure of a more sustained Internet bubble that would end the era of the non-game multimedia CD-ROM almost before it had begun. As this harsh reality became clear in the months that followed, Alexander had no choice but to push Intermetrics more and more in the direction of games, the only kind of CD-ROM product that was making anyone any money. The culture clash that resulted was intractable, as pretty much anyone who knew anything about the various cultures of computing could have predicted. Among these someones was Mike Dornbrook, a games-industry stalwart who had gotten his start with Infocom in the early 1980s. Seeking his next gig after Boffo Games, a studio he had founded with his old Infocom colleague Steve Meretzky, went down in flames, Dornbrook briefly kicked the tires at Intermetrics, but quickly concluded that what he saw “made no sense whatsoever”: “They were mostly COBOL programmers in their fifties and sixties. I remember looking around and saying, ‘You’re going to turn these guys into game programmers? What in the world are you thinking?'” [1]Dornbrook wound up signing on instead with a tiny startup called Harmonix Music Systems, which in 2005, after years of diligent experimentation with the possibilities for combining music and games, altered the landscape of gaming forever with Guitar Hero.
Belatedly realizing that all types of programming were perhaps not quite so interchangeable as he had believed, Michael Alexander set out in search of youngsters to teach his old dogs some new tricks. The Intermetrics rank and file must have shuddered at the advertisements he started to run in gaming magazines. “We are rocket scientists!” the ads trumpeted. “Even our games are mission-critical!” When these efforts failed to surface a critical mass of game-development talent, Alexander reluctantly moved on to doing what he should have done back in 1995: looking for an extant studio that already knew how to make games. It so happened that Looking Glass was right there in Boston, and, thanks to its troubled circumstances, was not as “overvalued” as most of its peers. Any port in a storm, as they say.
On August 14, 1997, a joint press release was issued: “Intermetrics, Inc., a 28-year-old leading software developer, and Looking Glass Studios, one of the computer gaming industry’s foremost developers, today announce the merger of the two companies’ gaming operations to form Intermetrics/Looking Glass Studios, LLC. Through the shared strengths of the two entities, the new company is strategically positioned to be a major force in the computer-game, console and online-gaming industries.” Evidently on a quest to find out how much meaningless corporate-speak he could shoehorn into one document, Michael Alexander went on to add that “Looking Glass Studios immediately catapults Intermetrics into a leading position in the gaming industry by giving us additional credentials and assets to compete in the market. Our business plan is to maintain and grow our core contract-services business while at the same time leveraging our expertise and financial resources to be a major player in the booming interactive-entertainment industry.” The price paid by the rocket scientists for their second-stage booster has to my knowledge never been publicly revealed.
The acquiring party may have been weird as all get-out, but it could have worked out far worse for Looking Glass, all things considered. In addition to the obvious benefit of being able to keep the doors open, at least a couple of other really good things came directly out of the acquisition. One was a change in name, from Looking Glass Technologies to Looking Glass Studios, emphasizing the creative dimension of their work. Another was a distribution deal with Eidos, a British publisher that had serious retail clout in both North America and Europe. Riding high on the back of the massive international hit Tomb Raider, Eidos could ensure that Looking Glass’s games got prominent placement in stores. Meanwhile this idea of the Looking Glass people serving as mentors to those who were struggling to make games at Intermetrics proper — an excruciating proposition for both parties — would prove to mostly be a polite, face-saving fiction for Michael Alexander; in practice, the new parent company would prove largely content to leave its subsidiary alone to do its own thing. Now the folks at Looking Glass just needed to deliver a hit to firmly establish themselves in their new situation. That was always the stick wicket for them.
The first game that Looking Glass released under their new ownership was Flight Unlimited II, which appeared just a few months after the big announcement. Seeking simultaneously to capitalize on the relative success of their first flight simulator and to adjust that game’s priorities to better coincide with the real or perceived desires of the market, Looking Glass paired the extant flight model with an impressively detailed depiction of the geography of the San Francisco Bay area. Then they added a lot more structure to the whole affair, in the form of a set of missions to fly after you finished your training. The biggest innovation, a first for any civilian flight simulator, was the addition of other aircraft, turning San Francisco International Airport into the same tangle of congested flight lanes it was in the real world. These changes moved the game away from being such a purist simulation of flight as an end unto itself — so much so that a disgruntled Seamus Blackley quit the project and the company early in the development cycle. Still, there was a logic to the additions; one can easily imagine them making Flight Unlimited II more appealing to the sorts of gamers who don’t tend to thrive in goal-less sandboxes. Be that as it may, though, it didn’t show up in the sales figures. Flight Unlimited II sold better than Terra Nova or British Open Championship Golf, but not as well as its series predecessor, just barely managing to break even.
This disappointment put that much more pressure on Looking Glass’s next game to please the new boss and show that the studio could deliver a solid, unqualified hit. In a triumph of hope over experience, everyone had high expectations for The Dark Project, which had been described in the press release announcing the acquisition as “a next-generation fantasy role-playing game.” Such a description might have left gamers wondering if Looking Glass was returning to the territory of Ultima Underworld. As things worked out, the game that they would come to know as simply Thief would not be that at all, but would instead break new ground in a completely different way. It stands today alongside Ultima Underworld in another sense: as one of the three principal legs — the last one being System Shock, of course — that hold up Looking Glass’s towering modern-day reputation for relentless, high-concept innovation.
Ironically but typically for this studio, the off-kilter masterstroke that is Thief arose from an attempt to hit the mainstream a little more directly. Looking Glass’s talented graphics programmers, who were not without a requisite degree of arrogance about their talents, thought that they could easily come up with a pure first-person-shooter engine as good or better than the one that John Carmack and his friends at id Software rolled out for 1996’s Quake. The Dark Engine, as it would come to be known, fit that bill pretty well, and could have powered a “low-brain shooter,” as the Looking Glass folks called the likes of Quake, with perfect equanimity. But in the end they just couldn’t bring themselves to make one.
It took a goodly while for them to decide what they did want to do with The Dark Engine. Doug Church, the iconoclastic programmer who had taken the leading role alongside Warren Spector on System Shock, didn’t want to be out-front to the same extent on this project, even as Spector was now down in Austin, which limited his involvement as well. The initial result of this lack of strong authority figures was an awful lot of creative churn. There was talk of making a game called Better Red than Undead, mixing a Cold War-era spy caper with a zombie invasion. Almost as bizarre was Dark Camelot, an inverted Arthurian tale in which you played the Black Knight against King Arthur and his cronies, who were depicted as a bunch of insufferable holier-than-thou prigs. “Our marketing department wasn’t really into that one,” laughs Church.
Yet the core sensibility of that concept — of an amoral protagonist set against the corrupt establishment and all of its pretensions — is all over the game that did finally get made. Doug Church:
The missions [in Dark Camelot] that we had the best definition on and the best detail on were all breaking into Camelot, meeting up with someone, getting a clue, stealing something, whatever. As we did more work in that direction, and those continued to be the missions that we could explain best to other people, it just started going that way. Paul [Neurath] had been pushing for a while that the thief side of it was the really interesting part, and why not just do a thief game?
And as things got more chaotic and more stuff was going on and we were having more issues with how to market stuff, we just kept focusing on the thief part. We went through a bunch of different phases of reorganizing the project structure and a bunch of us got sucked into doing some other project work on Flight [Unlimited] and stuff, and there was all this chaos. We said, “Okay, well, we’ve got to get this going and really focus and make a plan.” So we put Greg [LoPiccolo] in charge of the project and we agreed we were going to call it Thief and we were going to focus much more. That’s when we went from lots of playing around and exploring to “let’s make this Thief game.”
It surely comes as no revelation to anyone reading this article that most game stories are power fantasies at bottom, in which you get to take on the identity of a larger-than-life protagonist who just keeps on growing stronger as you progress. Games which took a different approach were, although by no means unknown by the late 1990s, in the decided minority even outside of the testosterone-drenched ghetto of the first-person shooter. The most obvious exponents of the ordinary-mortal protagonist were to be found in the budding survival-horror genre, as pioneered by Alone in the Dark and its sequels on computers and Resident Evil on the consoles. But these games cast you as nearly powerless prey, being stalked through dark corridors by zombies and other things that go bump in the night. Thief makes you a stealthy predator, the unwanted visitor rifling through cupboards and striking without warning out of the darkness, yet most definitely not in any condition to mow down dozens of his enemies in full-frontal combat, Quake-style. If you’re indiscreet in your predations, you can become the cornered prey with head-snapping speed. This was something new at the time.
Or almost so. Coincidentally, two Japanese stealthy-predator games hit the Sony PlayStation in 1998, the same year as Thief’s release. Tenchu: Stealth Assassins cast you as a ninja, while Metal Gear Solid cast you as an agent of the American government on a top-secret commando mission. The latter in particular caused quite a stir, by combining its unusual gameplay style with the sort of operatically melodramatic storytelling that was more commonly associated with the JRPG genre. That said, Thief is a far more sophisticated affair than either of these games, in terms of both its gameplay and its fiction.
The titular thief and protagonist is a man known only as Garrett, who learned his trade on the streets of The City, a mixture of urban squalor and splendor that is best described as Renaissance Florence with magic — a welcome alternative to more typical fantasy settings. Over the course of a twelve-act campaign, Garrett is given a succession of increasingly daunting assignments, during which a larger plot that involves more than the acquisition of wealth by alternative methods does gradually take shape.
Although the mission tree is linear, nothing else about your experience in Thief is set in stone. It was extremely important to Looking Glass that Thief not turn into a puzzle game, a series of set-piece challenges with set-piece solutions. They wanted to offer up truly dynamic environments, environments that were in their own way every bit as much simulations as Flight Unlimited. They wanted to make you believe you were really in these spaces. Artist Daniel Thron speaks of the “deep sense of trust we had in the player. There isn’t a single solution to Thief. It’s up to you to figure out how to steal the thing. It’s letting you tell that story through gameplay. And that sense of ownership makes it unique. It becomes yours.” In the spirit of all that, the levels are big, with no clearly delineated through-line. These dynamic virtual spaces full of autonomous actors demand constant improvisation on your part even if you’ve explored them before.
Looking Glass understood that, in order for Thief to work as a vehicle for emergent narrative, all of the other actors on the stage have to respond believably to your actions. It’s a given that guards ought to hunt you down if you blatantly give away your presence to them. Thief distinguishes itself by the way it responds to more subtle stimuli. An ill-judged footstep on a creaky floor tile might cause a guard to stop and mutter to himself: “Wait! Did I just hear something?” Stand stock still and don’t make a sound, and maybe — maybe — he’ll shrug his shoulders and move on without bothering to investigate. If you do decide to take a shot at him with your trusty bow or blackjack, you best not miss, to steal a phrase from Omar Little. And you best hide the body carefully afterward, before one of his comrades comes wandering along the same corridor to stumble over it.
These types of situations and the split-second decisions they force upon you are the beating heart of Thief. Bringing them off was a massive technical challenge, one that made the creation of 3D-graphics engine itself seem like child’s play. The state of awareness of dozens of non-player characters had to be tracked, as did sound and proximity, light and shadow, to an extent that no shooter — no, not even Half-Life — had ever come close to doing before. Remarkably, Looking Glass largely pulled it off, whilst making sure that the more conventional parts of the engine worked equally well. Garrett’s three principal weapons — a blackjack for clubbing unsuspecting victims in the back of the head, a rapier for hand-to-hand combat, and a bow which can be used to shoot a variety of different types of arrows — are all immensely satisfying to use, having just the right feeling of weight in your virtual hands. The bow is a special delight: the arrows arc through the air exactly as one feels they ought to. You actually get to use your bow in all sorts of clever ways that go beyond killing, such as shooting water arrows to extinguish pesky torches — needless to say, darkness is your best friend and light your eternal enemy in this game — and firing rope arrows that serve Garrett as grappling hooks would a more conventional protagonist.
Looking Glass being Looking Glass, even the difficulty setting in Thief is more than it first appears to be. It’s wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that Thief is really three games in one, depending on whether you play it on Normal, Hard, or Expert. (Looking Glass apparently wasn’t interested in the sorts of players who might be tempted by an “easy” mode.) Not only do the harder settings require you to collect more loot to score a passing grade on each mission, but the environments themselves become substantially larger. Most strikingly, in a brave subversion of the standard shooter formula, each successive difficulty setting requires you to kill fewer rather than more people; at the Expert level, you’re not allowed to kill anyone at all.
Regardless of the difficulty setting you choose, Thief will provide a stiff challenge. Its commitment to verisimilitude extends to all of its facets. In lieu of a conventional auto-map, it provides you only with whatever scribbled paper map Garrett has been able to scrounge from his co-conspirators, or sometimes not even that much. If your innate sense of direction isn’t great — mine certainly isn’t — you can spend a long time just trying to find your way in these big, twisty, murky spaces.
When it’s at its best, Thief is as amazing as it is uncompromising. It oozes atmosphere and tension; it’s the sort of game that demands to be played in a dark room behind a big monitor, with the phone shut off and a pair of headphones planted firmly over the ears. Sadly, though, it isn’t always this best version of itself. In comparison to Ultima Underworld or System Shock, both of which I enjoyed from first to last, Thief strikes me as a lumpy creation, a game of soaring highs but also some noteworthy lows. I was all-in during the first mission, a heist taking place in the mansion of a decadent nobleman. Having recently read Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus and written quite a lot about Renaissance Florence, my receptors were well primed for this Neo-Renaissance setting. Then I came to the second mission, and suddenly I was being asked to fight my way through a bunch of zombies in an anonymous cave complex. Suddenly Thief felt like dozens of other first-person action games.
This odd schizophrenia persists throughout the game. The stealthy experience I’ve just been describing — the boldly innovative experience that everyone thinks of today when they think of Thief — is regularly interspersed with splatterfests against enemies who wouldn’t have been out of place in Quake: zombies, rat men, giant exploding frogs, for Pete’s sake. (Because these enemies aren’t human, they’re generally exempt from the prohibition against killing at the Expert level.) All told, it’s a jarring failure to stick to its guns from a studio that has gone down in gaming lore for refusing to sacrifice its artistic integrity, to its own great commercial detriment.
As happens so often in these cases, the reality behind the legend of Looking Glass is more nuanced. Almost to a person, the team who made Thief attribute the inconsistency in the level design to outside pressure, especially from their publisher Eidos, who had agreed to partially fund the project. “Eidos never believed in it and until the end told us to put in more monsters and have more fighting and exploring and less stealth, and I’m not sure there was ever a point [when] they got it,” claims Doug Church. “I mean, the trailers Eidos did for Thief were all scenes with people shooting fire arrows at people charging them. So you can derive from that how well they understood or believed in the idea.”
And yet one can make the ironic case that Eidos knew what they were doing when they pushed Looking Glass to play up the carnage a little more. Released in November of 1998, Thief finally garnered Looking Glass some sales figures that were almost commensurate with their positive reviews. (“If you’re tired of DOOM clones and hungry for challenge, give this fresh perspective a try,” said Computer Gaming World.) The game sold about half a million copies — not a huge hit by the standards of an id Software or Blizzard Entertainment, but by far the most copies Looking Glass had ever sold of anything. It gave them some much-needed positive cash flow, which allowed them to pay down some debts and to revel in some good vibes for a change when they looked at the bottom line. But most importantly for the people who had made Thief, its success gave them the runway they needed to make a sequel that would be more confident in its stealthy identity.
Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.
Sources: The book Game Design Theory & Practice (2nd. ed.) by Richard Rouse III; Next Generation of March 1997 and June 1997; PC Zone of December 1998; Computer Gaming World of September 1995, June 1996, August 1997, April 1998, and March 1999; Retro Gamer 117, 177, and 260; Los Angeles Times of September 15 1995; Boston Globe of May 3 1995 and May 26 2000.
Online sources include the announcement of the Intermetrics acquisition on Looking Glass’s old website, InterMetrics’s own vintage website, “Ahead of Its Time: A History of Looking Glass” by Mike Mahardy at Polygon, and James Sterrett’s “Reasons for the Fall: A Post-Mortem on Looking Glass Studios.”
Where to Get Them: Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri and Thief Gold are available for digital purchase at GOG.com. The other Looking Glass games mentioned this article are unfortunately not.
| ↑1 | Dornbrook wound up signing on instead with a tiny startup called Harmonix Music Systems, which in 2005, after years of diligent experimentation with the possibilities for combining music and games, altered the landscape of gaming forever with Guitar Hero. |
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acoup_feed at 04:05pm on 03/10/2025Hey folks! Apologies for the lack of a post this week – a mix of teaching, writing and family demands had to come first. Still, so that I don’t leave you with nothing to read, here are some things I’ve been reading and watching lately you may find interesting.
Over on YouTube, Tod Todeschini of Tod’s Workshop is doing some interesting experiments with fire arrows, trying to refine a design and formula that performs well, using just medieval materials. The results are impressive, though of course at best this sort of method can only yield a plausible ‘it could have worked like this’ conclusion (since the materials were available) rather than ‘this is how they did it.’ What I find most interesting, however, is how relatively modest his final fire arrows are: they burn hot and for a while, but it is hard to miss that he would have to get quite lucky with them to set his wooden target alight. I don’t think that’s a failure of Tod’s approach, but actually a success: he’s confirming the efficacy of these weapons, in that it takes a lot of fire arrows to get a settlement or camp burning, because each individual arrow is relatively unlikely on its own to light a fire. But of course an army in a siege context that can keep applying fire arrows can eventually cause a lot of little fires which may get out of control, thus making them a valuable siege tool.
Also on YouTube, I ran across an older video on ships biscuits, often known on land as hardtack, which goes through the process of creating them and the ways you might eat them. The Romans had a similar campaign food, called bucellatum which seems to have been a similar dense, dehydrated biscuit (Amm Mac. 18.7.2; HA Avid. Cass. 5.3, Pesc. Nig. 10.4; Cod. Iust. 12.37.1; cf. ‘prepared rations’ in older sources which may be the same, Livy 21.49.7-8, 34.12.6, 37.37.5; Front. Strat. 4.1.1). An army could prepare these in advance of a march in order to move through areas without supplies or move quickly for a short time without the need to forage, since they would keep – much the same way they were used in early modern warfare. By removing basically all of the water in the baking process, these sorts of hardtack can last a long time (decades) without spoiling and pack a lot of calories into a relatively small package. Of course, they’re not very appetizing, so being able to compel your soldiers to eat hardtack was itself an exertion of a form of discipline.
We also had reporting on an interesting archaeological find outside Vienna, Austria of a mass grave of what appears to be roughly 150 Roman soldiers from the late first century AD. We don’t have full publication yet just an initial press announcement, but from the description, the assessment, that this was a battlefield burial of a defeated unit by an enemy (probably the locals) makes a lot of sense. 150 is something of an odd number. We’d probably expect a large patrol in force like this to be done with a cohort (480 men), while 150 is too many for a single century (80 men). My initial guess might be that this was originally a cohort which got into a fight that it lost – perhaps an ambush – with most of the cohort fleeing or retreating (but obviously with heavy casualties), while the victors looted and swiftly buried the fallen (taking their own dead back for a more ordered, proper burial).
Also worth noting for your ancient new and updates, we’ve had a new Pasts Imperfect late in September, with an essay on monsters and monstrous peoples in ancient and medieval thought and the usual bevy of interesting links.
Finally, I’ve had more than a few people ask, given my discussion of American civil-military relations, what I thought of the recent general-officer all-call meeting in Quantico, which I have come to calling the Quantico Disgrace, which I suppose answers the question of what I think. I’m working up a piece of my own on this (not for the blog, for somewhere else) but in the meantime, I thought that both Kori Schake’s take at Foreign Policy (alas, paywalled) and Alan Elrod’s at Liberal Currents were both good at expressing why the content of that meeting was so troubling and dangerous and such a clear and open breach of two-and-a-half-centuries of successful civil-military tradition. I will also add that for a military which has, for at least the last 165 years, distinguished itself by winning its wars through relentlessly superior logistics and organizing, the emphasis on chasing the mirage of ultra-masculine ‘strong men’ super-soldiers (at the expense of logistics, organizers and bureaucrats) strikes as almost absurdly historically illiterate. The United States military has spent more than the last century and a half mopping the floor with manly-man armies, be they the Flower of Southern Chivalry1 or the Nazi Übermenschen. Where it has failed (Afghanistan, Vietnam) it has not been fighting armies of body-builders but scrappy, under-fed, foreign-supported forces willing to be tactically and politically flexible, like a smaller boxer waiting for a larger one to ‘punch himself out.’
Finally, a poem, Margaret Atwood’s, “The Loneliness of the Military Historian.” An excerpt (read the whole things):
My trade is courage and atrocities.
I look at them and do not condemn.
I write things down the way they happened,
as near as can be remembered.
I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same.
Wars happen because the ones who start them
think they can win.
[…]
But it’s no use asking me for a final statement.
As I say, I deal in tactics.
Also statistics:
for every year of peace there have been four hundred
years of war.
And that’s all for now. Back next week for more on the labor of peasant women! Here’s a picture of some cats to close us out:
in_the_pipeline_feed at 10:43am on 03/10/2025I’ve been traveling, so I want to take the opportunity to catch up with all the acetaminophen/paracetamol/Tylenol stuff the Trump administration has been connecting to autism. As everyone will have heard, HHS and the White House are claiming that exposure to the drug during pregnancy is a cause for the rising incidence of autism diagnoses over the last few decades. Let’s dispose of that one right here in the first paragraph: there is no good evidence supporting such a causal link, and in fact there are large studies that have found no association at all. Despite the administration’s claims that “scientists have proposed biological mechanisms” for such an effect, the paper that this statement links to does no such thing and in fact states that any such mechanism(s) remain unknown.
This article at the Guardian does a very good job in a short space of dealing with the topic, and it illustrates how the administration’s spin on this is deliberately deceptive. And I mean that. We’re not talking about just a difference of opinion about medical or scientific issues. The document issued by the Trump White House literally double-counts studies to make it look as if there is more evidence in their favor, while ignoring other studies that do not support its conclusion. It also completely ignores any genetic factors and (very importantly) also ignores expansions in diagnostic criteria over the years and overall monitoring of such symptoms. As mentioned above, even its direct links to the literature do not support what is claimed in the text. Although it is dressed up like some sort of dispassionate review of the literature, it is a tendentious document written with intent to deceive.
That’s because our HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has a longstanding interest in blaming exposure to various pharmaceuticals (and of course the drug companies who develop them and the physicians who prescribe them) for what he sees as modern epidemics of disease. Of course, he also is ready to blame consumption of seed oils and food dyes for other conditions, lack of evidence be damned, but the common thread is that you and your children are only getting sick because people are doing things to you. And here we are, the fearless Trump administration, finally riding to your rescue to save you from the evildoers!
It’s a simple story, which makes it easy to sell. Blaming a list of enemies for all kinds of health problems is certainly a tempting strategy. Enemies make for great politics, the Good Guys versus the Bad Guys, and if it turns out that there are even more Bad Guys than you thought and they’re doing even worse things than you thought (giving your kids autism!), then that makes the Good Guys look even better, right? Of course, this acetaminophen idea is probably not what some of Trump’s and RFK’s fans were expecting, because many of them already believe that autism is caused by one sort of vaccination or another. But what the heck. Bad People are doing Bad Things to you, stick with that, and we’re going to hammer 'em for you. Here, buy a t-shirt to celebrate.
Given all the other chaos going on right now with US policy (foreign and domestic), this may look like a minor issue. I mean, it’s just a small pile of lies, when there are so many others stacked up in every direction. But it’s illustrative. This is how the Trump Administration treats every issue, at every scale: brazen falsehoods, puffed-up language, triumphal press releases, trumpet blasts. Anyone who disagrees is slandered, ridiculed, and if possible fired. Or worse: we’re now to the point of adding “arrested” “beaten up” “deported” or “shot” to the list of possibilities.
All in just a few months, and it gets worse week by week. I miss having competent adults in positions of authority instead of vengeful sociopaths. I miss ideals, and I miss principles. I miss the United States, God damn it. Let’s not stop until we get all of that back, and let’s not stop until we’ve figured out ways to keep this disaster from happening again.
james_davis_nicoll at 09:10am on 03/10/2025 under doing the wfc's homework, doing what the wfc cannot, review
colossal_feed at 01:21pm on 03/10/2025
Alexander Calder’s most widely recognized creation is perhaps the mobile. The lauded artist was a titan of Modernism whose desire to “draw” three-dimensional objects spirited the invention of what went on to become both an art historical achievement and a ubiquitous nursery item. Broadly interested in movement and space, Calder (1898–1976) is often cited as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
Now, his work finds a new home in a sprawling museum in Philadelphia, the city where his family lived for generations and where he was born. Located on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Calder Gardens comprises a 1.8-acre landscape and an 18,000-square-foot building that presents a rotating selection of the artist’s works.
The museum is designed to bring art, architecture, and nature into a constant and ever-evolving conversation. Outdoor sculptures stand amid a lush prairie by Piet Oudolf, while architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron created an interior that interacts with Calder’s sculptures. Large-scale pieces loom inside airy concrete galleries, while smaller mobiles seem to nest perfectly in a well-lit opening.
Calder Gardens is open Wednesday through Monday. Find more on its website.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Calder Gardens, a Light-Filled Museum and Prairie, Houses the Sculptor’s Work in Philadelphia appeared first on Colossal.
johndcook_feed at 01:16pm on 03/10/2025Several years ago I asked myself a couple questions.
I remember realizing, in particular, that if I knew 10x more about statistics, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. The limiting factor on statistics projects has rarely been my knowledge of statistics. The limiting factors are things like communication, endurance, organization, etc. Getting a little better at those things has helped.
This came to mind when I ran across a couple blog posts about Emacs and org-mode. It reminded me of a time when I was convinced that mastering these tools would make me significantly more productive. That was marginally true at the time, and not true at all now.
There’s a perennial temptation to solve the problem you want to solve rather than the problem you need to solve. The former may be in the 10x category and the latter in the 10% category. I would find it more fun to explore the corners of org-mode than to deal with proposals and contracts, but the latter is what I need to do today.
There’s an adage that says it’s better to work on your strengths than your weaknesses. I generally agree with that, but with more caveats than I care to go into in this post.
The post 10x vs 10% first appeared on John D. Cook.dotaturls_feed at 01:57pm on 27/09/2025seawasp at 08:09am on 03/10/2025torque_control_feed at 09:00am on 03/10/2025By Jo Lindsay Walton
Wole Talabi’s short story ‘Embers’ (2024) explores the potential consequences of energy transition for a rural community in Nigeria, focusing on one oil worker who cannot let go of dreams of petrochemical prosperity.
Kawashida fuel cells were invented by a team of scientists at the ShinChi Technology Company of Japan […] By using a proprietary genetic modification technique to rewire the metabolism of a heterotrophic bacterial strain, making it autotrophic, and then further splicing the synthetic microbe with a cocktail of high cell density, rapid reproduction genes, Dr. Haruko Kawashida and her team created a living, breathing, renewable supply of energy for the planet. The synthetic autotroph used concentrated sunlight to efficiently consume carbon dioxide and exchange electrons, creating a steady stream of electricity.1
How convenient! And as if its abundant, net carbon-negative energy weren’t enough, Kawashida cell technology also revolutionizes wastewater treatment. It’s a near-perfect deus ex machina for the climate crisis.
But not everyone is happy. When Kawashida decimates the oil industry, Uduak is abruptly cut off from his sponsored scholarship. Cast adrift, Uduak becomes a kind of inverted solarpunk protagonist—he uses grit and ingenuity not to jury-rig funky green utopiatech, but rather to attempt to revive the village’s derelict oil refinery. Even though clean energy is widely available, Uduak argues that the village’s real needs remain unmet, and he remains hostile to the post-carbon vision laid out by his idealistic rival, Affiong.
The story comes to a grisly and tragic conclusion—murder, arson, suicide. Without excusing Uduak’s rather OTT response, we can see that there is a clear lack of compassion to support him transition to the era of a stabilised climate. One wonders if Uduak might also have a point: will the village as a whole be left behind by government, industry and civil society? Just as Uduak was left behind by the village?
Uduak becomes what is sometimes called a ‘stranded asset,’ something once valuable, whose value has vanished because of a probably permanent shift in its circumstances. The story’s core tension—between his thwarted social mobility and the new sustainable technology—reflects the current dilemma of green transition for petro-states like Nigeria.
It also implies broader questions about energy transitions. Within science fiction, transformation of the energy system often forms the hard-to-imagine bridge between the dystopian present and the ambiguously utopian future. There are the dilithium crystals and warp cores in Star Trek, there is the Grid in Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. But the questions which arise are not just about what energy will power the future. They are also about how societies will allocate and manage such energy. Could energy itself somehow be the foundation of a just and equitable economy? If the flow of energy were to directly underpin the flow of money, could this support systems that are more cooperative, collective, and liberated, and less exploitative? Systems that are not just energy-based, but also just based pure and simple?
Energy-based currencies in speculative fiction
These are certainly questions which have fascinated science fiction writers, although (spoiler alert) I’m not convinced that their answers are that plausible, at least not in their current forms. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992-1996), moneys are developed based on calories or on hydrogen peroxide fuel. His Ministry for the Future (2020) imagines a currency based on atmospheric carbon removed or carbon emissions avoided (not energy-based exactly, but strongly linked with energy). Michael Cisco’s Animal Money (2015) briefly plays with the idea of an active “verb money” as opposed to reified noun money2; Cisco’s title refers (sort of) to money used by animals. Of course, in the real world, cattle have been an early and enduring currency which also constitute a kind of energy currency. Many commodity currencies and social currencies have been tied to animals, plants, or products derived from them, and therefore to the energy metabolisms of the species: grain, tea, firewood, charcoal, peat, beeswax, oil, ethanol.
In a different medium, Jonathan Keats’s Electrochemical Currency Exchange Co. (2012) was a business, or an art project, which exploited “electrochemical arbitrage” between the differences in the metallic content of Chinese and American coinages to generate a faint electrical current. Keats’s entry to the 2016 Future of Money award, which challenged designers to imagine an alternative origin story for money, suggested that money originated in the sun. Keats’s entry also extended this with a ‘solar dollars’ concept, where banknotes would be woven with photovoltaic materials, turning each one into a mini solar panel:
Money originated with the sun. Long before the development of banking, and even before the evolution of the human species, photosynthetic organisms worked out systems to amass, save, and spend solar energy. For many plants, energy earned by collecting sunlight gets banked as sugars, which may be invested in personal growth or spent on sex.
Our economic systems, which emerged with agriculture, merely emulate what we’ve observed in nature. However, we don’t do it as well as the average rhododendron. We expend an enormous amount of energy working for money that has almost no energy value. […]
Humans can do much better by learning from the origin of money. We can reengineer currency not only to store energy more efficiently, but also to continuously generate new energy from sunlight.
The concept is simple: Embedded with flexible solar cells, solar dollars and pounds will become more valuable just by lying around. Thin-film photovoltaic materials will charge a paper-based supercapacitor, which will work as a rechargeable battery. Each note will also include a self-resonant coil to allow for wireless energy transfer from the supercapacitor to household appliances or the grid. Plus, the money will feature a matrix of light-emitting quantum dots to display current value, indicated in watts.3
Sometimes money may be tied to a particular type of energy, kinetic energy, or movement of mass through space. Postage stamps might be considered generalised ‘movement credits,’ and have sometimes historically functioned like money. But they are unlike most commodity moneys, since their ‘intrinsic’ use value is so clearly a creature of law, in a manner resembling fiat currency. Early in the US Civil War, the North switched to new stamps to deprive the South of its stamp stock assets. Later, in response to specie hoarding and inadequate ledger-based money infrastructure, the Post Office issued wartime ‘postage currency,’ some initially featuring perforated edges and images of stamps. Postage currency functioned similarly to ‘shinplasters,’ small dollar denomination notes issued by businesses and local authorities, which were also widely in circulation at the time. Later, email and digital cash would also have entwined histories, through shared concerns with privacy and decentralisation, and anti-spam mechanisms.
The idea that money might be not only a store of value, but a vehicle for moving value to where it is needed—has reappeared in speculative visions of future economies. In The Shape of Things to Come (1933), H.G. Wells envisions a world administered by a unified authority intent on reconstructing civilisation after cataclysmic upheavals. Central to this future is the World Transport Union (WTU), an international organisation that establishes a standardised global transport network. As part of its operations, the WTU introduces the “air dollar,” a form of currency directly tied to physical transport costs. Each air dollar pays for moving one kilogram of goods one kilometre on WTU aircraft.
Even though Star Trek’s Federation is proudly post-money, its warp drive-enabling dilithium crystals behave suspiciously like a commodity money; there is also at least one mention of rationing the teleportation system via Transporter Credits.4
In Frank Herbert’s Dune series (1965-1985), the commodity money spice is a potent mélange of time and space; from Children of Dune (1976):
Not without reason was the spice often called “the secret coinage.” Without melange, the Spacing Guild’s heighliners could not move. Melange precipitated the “navigation trance” by which a translight pathway could be “seen” before it was traveled.5
In Charles Stross’s space opera Neptune’s Brood (2014) there are three kinds of money: fast, medium, and slow. There is a sense in which fast money is highly liquid, medium money is somewhat liquid, and slow money is scarcely liquid at all. Slow, in fact, sort of means illiquid. But what is striking about thinking through these currencies is the qualitative shifts involved. Slow money is essentially implicated with a different kind of activity. An economic anthropologist might say that it constitutes its own ‘sphere of exchange’ or its own ‘transactional order.’ That is, slow money is “the currency of world-builders,” used for financing starships and colonies.
Charles Stross, Neptune’s Brood: A Space Opera (Ace: 2014)
There’s a lot of diversity here already. What does it really mean for a currency to be ‘based on energy’? Toward the end of Douglas Adams’s The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), the Golgafrinchans—a gang of uncannily familiar bungling interplanetary colonists—attempt to establish a new currency.6
“How can you have money,” demanded Ford, “if none of you actually produces anything? It doesn’t grow on trees you know.”
“If you would allow me to continue …”
Ford nodded dejectedly.
“Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.”
The Golgafrinchans might struggle a bit with inflation, especially during the lush summer months.7 However, the Golgafrinchans have thought of everything.
“So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revaluate the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and … er, burn down all the forests. I think you’ll all agree that’s a sensible move under the circumstances.”
The twist is that the planet settled by the Golgafrinchans is prehistoric Earth. The Golgafrinchans are us. How extravagant is this satire? Is anyone on Earth really reckless enough to burn down trees in an effort to form a new currency? Surely not!
Unless. Unless, of course, those trees decay. And turn to peat. And then compress down into coal. And then, some time later, someone invents Bitcoin.
Bitcoin and other proof-of-work cryptocurrencies may be considered energy-based currencies, but in a very particular way. Bitcoin is created by spending money on electricity to power computers that guess the answers to mathematical puzzles (Bitcoin mining). But if Bitcoin is energy-based, it is in roughly the opposite sense from that intended by many science fiction writers and utopian thinkers. Unlike utopian visions where energy-based currencies promote sustainability, the energy that ‘backs’ Bitcoin is consumed and unavailable for other uses. Bitcoin is based on used-up energy, not available energy.
For a currency based on available energy, we might start with the Technocrats. The Technocracy movement of the early 20th century, emerging during the Great Depression, proposed a radical restructuring of society and the economy based on scientific principles and technological efficiency, rejecting both capitalism and democracy. In some Technocrat schemes, we encounter the impulse to base money on something incontrovertibly real. As Howard Scott wrote in 1933, “all forms of energy, of whatever sort, may be measured in units of ergs, joules, or calories […] A dollar may be worth—in buying power—so much today and more or less tomorrow, but a unit of work or heat is the same in 1900, 1929, 1933 or the year 2000.”8 For Technocrat Theodore Bruce Yerke, however, even the term currency carried unwanted connotations. Technocracy would scientifically optimise economic production, Yerke argued in Futuria Fantasia, a fanzine produced by the young Ray Bradbury. “In the TECH THERE IS NO MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE, THERE IS ONLY A METHOD OF TECHNOLOGICAL ACCOUNTING. […] Technocracy is NOT a political or revolutionary movement. It is 100% American.”9 During its heyday in the 1930s the Technocracy movement had links with pulp sci-fi, such as Nat Schachner’s series ‘The Revolt of the Scientists’ (1933), where Schachner depicted the revolutionary destruction of existing money. Technocracy is a little hard to place politically, although there are some unmistakable resonances with contemporary big tech bumbling into its fash era.
In speculative fiction, Christopher Stasheff’s A Company of Stars (1992) features the energy-based Kwaher. In Starhawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing (1994) money is “backed by energy, human and other sorts” and the “basic unit of value is the calorie.”10
‘Do you use money?’ the woman next to her asked.
‘Our credits function like money, but they’re not backed by gold or silver. They’re backed by energy, human and other sorts, and our basic unit of value is the calorie. So a product is valued by how much energy goes into its production, in terms of labor and fuel and materials that themselves require energy to produce. And part of that accounting is how much energy it takes to replace a resource that is used. Something that works with solar or wind power becomes very cheap. Anything requiring irreplaceable fossil fuels is generally too expensive to think about.’
‘But do you have rich and poor?’ the same woman asked.
‘We’re each guaranteed a share of the wealth of the past and of the resources, which translates into a basic stipend of credits. As I said before, you could live on that, frugally, if you really didn’t want to work. But if you do work, you earn work credits, and the more you work the more you earn, so there’s incentive for those who want personal advancement. And if you do something really spectacular, achieve something fabulous, people bring you gifts.’
‘Don’t people cheat?’ asked a woman at the end of the table.
‘All the accounts are public. Your whole work group sees the bill you put in each week, and believe me, they know if it’s accurate. If not, you’ll hear about it, and if necessary they’ll bring it up before your Guild or council. Of course, some jobs don’t lend themselves to counting hours, like mine, or like being an artist or a musician. We get a fixed stipend.’11
Dave Gerrold’s A Matter for Men (1981), where the currency is the kilocalorie (or KC, ‘casey’), succinctly makes the case for energy-based currencies:
[…] you can only measure your wealth by the amount of difference you make in the world. […] The physical universe uses heat to keep score. […] We want our money to be an accurate measure, so we use the same system as the physical universe: ergo, we have the KC standard, the kilocalorie.12
Of course this is a sleight of hand. The universe doesn’t need to ‘keep score,’ the universe simply exists. As for the ‘amount of difference’ that results from an energy expenditure, this depends on the context: the kWh powering a life support machine is not equal to the kWh powering a brightly luminous billboard selling Coca-Cola to nobody on a desolate rural road.
Nonetheless, we might suppose that there’s often a rough correlation between energy input and economic value, and in certain contexts—perhaps transport, and some industrial processes like smelting—quite a close correlation. There are also semi-precedents for energy currencies, such as prepaid electricity cards (at the household level), Renewable Energy Certificates (intended to spur investment in renewables), assets in energy derivatives markets (futures, options, swaps), as well as the currencies of oil-producing countries (petrocurrencies) which tend to be tied to the price of oil.
What is this correlation between energy and value were strengthened? How feasible is a full-blown energy money?
Is energy-based money possible?
Let’s look at several concepts. Our currency could be structured so that a holder could redeem it directly for a specified amount of energy. Your coin says 10 kWh, so you can get 10 kWh for it. A ‘central energy bank’ would need to maintain sufficient energy reserves to redeem these claims.
This is conceptually simple, like a gold-backed currency. Logistically though, it quickly begins to look like a castle-in-the-sky. Storing vast amounts of energy is far more challenging than storing gold bullion. One might even imagine a literal castle-in-the-sky approach: immense weights suspended at high elevations, descending to turn generators; together with water pumped uphill into tarns, ready to drive turbines; underground caverns tense with compressed air; molten salt and other thermal storage systems; the silhouettes of grid-scale batteries littering the horizons. With all this in place, perhaps enough energy could be stored to back a currency.13 But it surely wouldn’t last long. Inefficiencies in storing and releasing energy would make the system appear extremely wasteful. As the world transitions to renewables, energy storage is already a critical challenge. Intermittent sources like solar and wind depend on precisely these storage systems to balance grids and ensure reliability. One of the reasons gold has sometimes worked well as a backing is that it is mostly useless.14 Diverting energy to monetary reserves would sap resources needed to decarbonise and meet rising demands.
A second, more feasible concept does not maintain reserves centrally. Instead, the currency would be pegged to a basket of energy-related goods, priced on the open market. Traditional monetary policy, including interest rate adjustments, would manage the value of the energy currency so that a 1kWh coin could reliably purchase about an hour’s running time for a 1kW appliance. Fiscal interventions, such as taxes and subsidies applied to energy production, could also help to maintain this peg.
In theory this approach could work, but its benefits are not entirely clear. Perhaps it would strengthen trust in the currency and the broader economy, assuming the peg could be upheld. Psychologically and culturally, a currency denominated in energy might also foreground energy scarcity. Today, people will shake their heads and huff, What a waste of taxpayers’ money! In the world of this energy-referenced currency, they might instead grumble, What a waste of planet-dwellers’ energy! Such grumbles could be especially revolutionary during our current transition era, in which societies built around the expectation of relatively abundant fossil energy suddenly need to use energy much more intelligently.
But overall, I don’t think this concept would achieve what writers like Stasheff, Robinson, Starhawk, and Gerrold are really getting at with their energy currencies. One might intuit that an energy peg guarantees greater stability compared with ordinary money. As Technocrat Howard Scott wrote, “a unit of work or heat is the same in 1900, 1929, 1933 or the year 2000” (q.v.). But improved stability would actually be unlikely.15 If monetary policy is tied to keeping the currency aligned with energy, it leaves less scope for tackling inflation. Historically, the link between money and energy has fluctuated considerably, so pinning it down may well displace that volatility elsewhere.16
In fact, the real fascination with energy currencies is about more than stability. It’s about justice and truth. We want money to measure the ‘real cost’ of things, yet we know many prices ignore environmental or social harm—‘negative externalities,’ in economists’ terms. We feel that anchoring our money to energy would account for important externalities, the ones tied to energy use.17 For example, an energy money society surely wouldn’t revolve around mass individual ownership of gas-guzzling internal combustion engines, would it? Even better, we wouldn’t need interfering government apparatchiks to break the news to us, because the physical universe itself would be breaking that news. It wouldn’t be Obama or Biden coming for your guns, for your gleaming ’67 Ford Mustang, your sun-scorched stretch of Route 66, your fizzing neon diner sign and your jukebox of dreams, your haze of light and shimmer where the road meets the sky. No, you would simply roll up your sleeves, and contend with the reality before you, finally made plain by honest money. Because the true cost of oil to the climate would now be factored into the price of gas at the pump, wouldn’t it?
Wouldn’t it? Well, no actually! There is a conceptual confusion here. Pegging a currency to the cost of energy has no inherent effect on the externalities of energy production or consumption. In Starhawk’s solarpunk future, “a product is valued by how much energy goes into its production” (q.v.). But the energy peg doesn’t get us even to that, let alone to a sustainability-constrained version of it. Even if all goods and services were priced in kWhs, their actual prices would still be determined in the usual way, by the product’s demand and supply, and a few other factors.18
An example will help to clarify this. Imagine, say, a hand-woven scarf for sale at a local craft fair. Its energy inputs might be minimal. But because each scarf is lovingly and skilfully crafted by a single artisan, supply is low. These scarves are in high demand for their beauty and glamour, so customers will pay many kWh coins for them, far in excess of the kWh embodied in their production. The reverse is also true: even with an energy peg, energy can still be too cheap in terms of environmental sustainability.
This means there’s nothing preventing gas at the gas station pouring into gas-guzzling SUVs far too cheaply, except now it’s too cheap in kWh coin. There’s nothing stopping intensive energy crop farming from ravaging local habitats, raising food prices, and polluting waterways. Serried rows of empty skyscrapers can still loom, beautifully lit up and temperature-controlled all night long. Even the crypto rigs can keep churning. The whole fiery, ecocidal kit-and-kaboodle can continue apace, only now gloriously denominated in kWh, with a cool dollar sign logo drawn in fire.
Our instinct tells us that transactions denominated in energy units will automatically reflect underlying physical energy flows. This instinct is wrong. This brings us to the third concept. What would it take for goods and services to reflect an estimate of the energy wrapped up in them, as Starhawk describes? It doesn’t have to be perfect—if a particular pashmina happened to take more energy to make than all the other similar pashminas, we don’t need to know that—but can we have good enough estimates for general categories of goods?
The key thing here is not so much energy-based money, as energy-based prices. So most obviously, the answer is price controls, as in a centrally planned economy where officials attempt to fix prices based on kWh invested in production. In fact, we can think of two different versions here: one where prices always reflect embodied energy but are denominated in dollars, yen, euros etc., and another version where prices reflect embodied energy and are denominated in kWh or some other energy unit.
Modelling how much energy is embodied in broad categories of goods and services is challenging but not impossible—there is a very partial precedent in Emissions Factor databases, used in carbon accounting. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, the character Vlad gestures toward the complexity of the calculations, especially when putting energy values on services. Vlad is talking about calories rather than kWh, as we have been, but the principle is the same.
“If you burn our bodies in a microbomb calorimeter you’ll find we contain about six or seven kilocalories per gram of weight, and of course we take in a lot of calories to sustain that through our lives our output is harder to measure, because it’s not a matter of predators feeding on us, as in the classic efficiency equations — it’s more a matter of how many calories we create by our efforts, or send on to future generations, something like that. And most of that is very indirect, naturally, and it involves a lot of speculation and subjective judgement. If you don’t go ahead and assign values to a number of non-physical things, then electricians and plumbers and reactor builders and other infrastructural workers would always rate as the most productive members of society, while artists and the like would be seen as contributing nothing at all.”
“Sounds about right to me,” John joked […]19
Beyond energy, goods and services also embed other scarce or valuable inputs—labour time, natural resources, etc. Should pricing reflect only total energy input, or should there be some weighting to also reflect the ratio of energy to other inputs? And if those other inputs are themselves valued according to their embodied energy, what recursive dynamics emerge? Different methodologies would incentivise different behaviors. Crucially, energy-based pricing involves empirical data and mathematical modelling, but it also involves political and ethical value judgments.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (Del Rey: 2021)
Let’s imagine an economy where prices reflect embodied energy. We have come a long way since the early Soviet Union’s Gosplan fumbled through its material balances exercises. In our techno-utopian system of embodied energy prices, some form of automated Life Cycle Analysis forms the backbone, while each price carries associated metadata about how confident the system is in its accuracy. Each product or service’s cost is updated based on current data about energy use throughout its supply chain. These prices dynamically account for factors such as changing energy sources, production methods, and transport distances. There is a slight premium associated with uncertainty, so there is an incentive to fill in gaps in the data. There are of course weightings to support the transition to renewable energy. Machine Learning and other statistical techniques track and forecast shifts across the whole system.20
Set aside questions of data surveillance, or how people might hack, speculate on, or game the system. Would it fulfil the basic promise of Starhawk’s energy money (albeit in a very different way)? I’m not sure that it would. These science fiction authors want monetary systems that are rooted more directly in human vitality and in the earth’s ecological resources. They want money that helps to allocate resources well, responsive to both human wants and needs and to the energy implication of those wants and needs. They want something spontaneous, bottom-up, springing from the universe itself, not imposed top-down bureaucratically. The use of AI and sophisticated data analytics might spark a flicker of interest—Perhaps AI is the lens with which we can read the true state of the universe? But ultimately AI is just another layer of human decision-making, akin to opaque bureaucracy.
A fourth concept would be to give up on energy as that ‘special something,’ that ‘unobtanium,’ that can fix money once and for all. Instead, we might tie money creation directly to renewable energy generation. After all, money is a human device, not a property of the universe. Since modern money comes into being through lending, it could instead be lent into existence with strings attached—namely, that it must be used for funding clean energy projects. This dispenses with the idea of a currency that measures value in the same way the universe does, or captures an unfiltered physical reality. Instead, it treats money as something we consciously design and adapts it to accelerate and stabilise the growth of renewable energy. Money creation is very much in demand within the utopian imagination these days. Such a proposal would need to prove itself not only against the status quo, but also against many other proposals for reforming money creation, such as using it to fund Universal Basic Income.
While we have mostly been occupied with ambitious or fanciful ideas for monetary reform, I suspect that these science fictional imaginaries also strongly inform important ongoing debates in energy economics. Earlier, I briefly mentioned Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), which allow renewable energy producers to register and receive a tradable certificate for each megawatt-hour of electricity they expect to generate. These certificates are tracked in a database and can be bought by suppliers or other companies wishing to label their energy as ‘green.’ When a supplier buys a certificate and provides that equivalent amount of electricity to customers, the certificate is retired from the system. However, unless you have your own on-site renewables, buying green electricity doesn’t change what physically comes out of your sockets; the grid still delivers a collective mix. Rather, by purchasing RECs, your utility company obtains the right—according to established accounting practices—to count your energy usage as renewable.
If it sounds like an awful greenwashing scam, it’s not quite that bad. The purpose is to spur investment in renewable energy. It is almost like a deliberate double-counting: a renewable energy producer can sell their energy to the grid, but they can also sell their RECs based on that production. This means that renewable energy projects that might not have been financially viable suddenly become viable: they have an extra income stream.
However, frustration has been mounting with the unbundled RECs system, with some evidence suggesting that it hasn’t really led to much additional investment in renewable energy. There are parallels with carbon offsetting too: big, rich companies have been able to purchase RECs fairly cheaply. and make technically legitimate claims that they are 100% renewable energy powered, and perhaps delaying much-needed operational changes. Meanwhile, the things they physically do need to be powered somehow, and some of that power comes from coal, oil, and gas.
Longer-term Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) have been seen as one good antidote to the RECs approach. Another paradigm that is gaining traction is 24/7 hourly matching, also known as 24/7 carbon free energy. This approach requires energy buyers to match their consumption with renewable energy generation in the same region every single hour, rather than simply offsetting total use over a longer period. By making sure electricity is generated locally and at the same time it is consumed, 24/7 hourly matching should prevent companies from claiming green energy sourced from distant places (where all the energy happens to be green anyway, so the additional investment is minimal or nonexistent), or mismatched time slots. It should encourage companies to actually change what they do: for example, scheduling more energy intensive activities for when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and the grid has renewable energy to spare. It may also encourage investment in more robust renewable infrastructure, often supported by energy storage to handle off-peak or fluctuating demand. By tying consumption to real-time local supply, 24/7 hourly matching aims to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, bolster genuine renewable availability, and encourage a more resilient, sustainably powered grid. At the time of writing, in early 2025, there is some beef simmering in the tech world, with Google championing 24/7 hourly matching, and trying to get it written into the influential Greenhouse Gas Protocol, while Amazon wants to double down on an even more liberalised version of RECs.
The criticisms of Amazon’s position are convincing. But what if 24/7 hourly matching involves a kind of unobtanium? In fact, I am suspicious of 24/7 hourly matching, for reasons rooted (partly) in science fiction. I know some brilliant and passionate individuals who are working on it, and in many ways I trust them more than I trust my own paranoid instincts. So perhaps it will be a step in the right direction. But 24/7 hourly matching does feel like yet another expression of that same desire which animates these science fiction stories: to align our economies with an objective, scientifically given reality, and sweep aside subjective value judgments. As we’ve seen, things tend to be a little more complicated, and there is a risk that by burying these value judgments, we place them out of reach of popular scrutiny and dissent. We may also place them beyond more radical possibilities for the democratisation of energy. Energy currencies may have their uses, but they need to be as responsive to the realities of human values, as to the metrics of energy flows.
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Jo Lindsay Walton is Vector’s Editor-at-Large.
dotaturls_feed at 11:13pm on 02/10/2025dg_weblog_feed at 07:00am on 03/10/2025
"As of Friday evening, the situation is like this:
Bus Stop E: Soon to be retired bus stop, with temporary sign - ALL BUSES STOP HERE
Bus Stop G: Reopened and looks convincing, but has an M on top and buses generally aren't stopping
Bus Stop M: Still has its bus shelter but has lost its post, and is probably no longer a bus stop (probably)
In summary, buses are stopping at E but people are still waiting at M, and now additionally at G because nobody's told them not to. This end of Bow Road currently has one open bus stop that's soon to close, one possibly open bus stop that appears still to be closed, and one probably closed bus stop that still looks open. Could somebody official possibly pop down and sort this mess out?"
cks_techblog_feed at 03:03am on 03/10/2025Apache's .htaccess files have a generally bad reputation. For example, lots of people will tell you that they can cause performance problems and you should move everything from .htaccess files into your main Apache configuration, using various pieces of Apache syntax to restrict what configuration directives apply to. The result can even be clearer, since various things can be confusing in .htaccess files (eg rewrites and redirects). Despite all of this, .htaccess files are important and valuable because of one property, which is that they enable delegation of parts of your server configuration to other people.
The Apache .htaccess documentation even spells this out in reverse, in When (not) to use .htaccess files:
In general, you should only use
.htaccessfiles when you don't have access to the main server configuration file. [...]
If you operate the server and would be writing the .htaccess file, you can put the contents of the .htaccess in the main server configuration and make your life easier and Apache faster (and you probably should). But if the web server and its configuration isn't managed as a unitary whole by one group, then .htaccess files allow the people managing the overall Apache configuration to safely delegate things to other people on a per-directory basis, using Unix ownership. This can both enable people to do additional things and reduce the amount of work the central people have to do, letting people things scale better.
(The other thing that .htaccess files allow is dynamic updates without having to restart or reload the whole server. In some contexts this can be useful or important, for example if the updates are automatically generated at unpredictable times.)
I don't think it's an accident that .htaccess files emerged in Apache, because one common environment Apache was initially used in was old fashioned multi-user Unix web servers where, for example, every person with a login on the web server might have their own UserDir directory hierarchy. Hence features like suEXEC, so you could let people run CGIs without those CGIs having to run as the web user (a dangerous thing), and also hence the attraction of .htaccess files. If you have a bunch of (graduate) students with their own web areas, you definitely don't want to let all of them edit your departmental web server's overall configuration.
(Apache doesn't solve all your problems here, at least not in a simple configuration; you're still left with the multiuser PHP problem. Our solution to this problem is somewhat brute force.)
These environments are uncommon today but they're not extinct, at least at universities like mine, and .htaccess files (and Apache's general flexibility) remain valuable to us.
sovay at 09:41pm on 02/10/2025selkie's cream bread and am inordinately entertained by this TikTok from the Fenimore Art Museum which N. shared with me. spatch lit last night's yahrzeit candle for remembrance of the dead. The rest of us are still here at the start on the other side. G'mar tov. My godchild gave my laptop existential angst.
fictionmachine_feed at 11:42pm on 02/10/2025The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise consistently adjusts its tone and content with each successive sequel, pushing from horror to fantasy, and from thriller to comedy. The Dream Child – the fifth instalment that was released in 1989 – is the first film to arrest this trend. It is essentially another 90 minutes of the surreal and fantastic content that was presented in The Dream Master. That choice is easy to understand: at almost USD$50m in theatrical revenue, The Dream Master was the most successful Elm Street movie yet. Why mess with a formula that finally seemed to have reached its maximum commercial potential?
Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox), who seemed to have finally defeated Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) and banished his spirit to hell, has only just graduated high school when she discovers she is pregnant. Cursed by dreams of Freddy and a mysterious nun named Amanda, Alice discovers Freddy has returned – and is using the dreams of her unborn child to threaten her friends.
The idea of using pregnancy as a theme in an Elm Street movie had been bouncing around New Line since before the release of Dream Warriors in 1987. It finally emerges here, utilising the survivors of the fourth film Alice and Dan (Danny Hassel). Directing duties pass over to another new filmmaker – only Wes Craven directed more than one instalment – and Stephen Hopkins shows off a strong visual sense and a very glossy style. The visual influence of the music video, which drove the look of The Dream Master, is in particularly vivid force here. There is a strong argument that The Dream Child represents the best-looking film in the series yet.
Sadly on the plot level things are somewhat less certain. The Dream Child was famously cut when Hollywood’s MPAA took exception to the film’s more violent sequences. There is a lot here that feels bowdlerised, particularly Freddy’s murder of aspiring model Greta (Erika Anderson). In the released cut he appears to force-feed her to death at a dinner party. As scripted he is actually carving out and force-feeding her her own internal organs – a far more visceral and horrifying scene that could have been a franchise-wide highlight. Some of the cuts feel structural as well – there is an overall sense that elements of the plot have been excised to move more rapidly between the dream sequences.
One scene that does stand out features comic book artist Mark (Joe Seely) trapped inside a monochromatic superhero world. It is the film’s most inventive sequence, and its abstract nature allows it to bypass the MPAA censorship that affected other parts of the movie.
While stylish and broadly enjoyable, The Dream Child feels like a compromised work and does not quite make the impact that its immediate predecessor did. That seems reflected in its commercial performance. With grosses of USD$22m in American theatres, it was profitable but much less so than The Dream Master. For the first time, Elm Street appears to be running out of steam.
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guardian_learning at 06:54am on 03/10/2025 under dà | 大, shī | 失, tóu | 头, zhěng | 整, 一天一橘, 部首 | radicals
Seriously. Fuck these fascists. Join a No Kings protest on October 18 and stand up for our rights and our democracy.
colossal_feed at 07:02pm on 02/10/2025
In the hands of Argentinian tattooer Nano Ponto, lush gradients and surreal compositions emerge from layers and layers of tiny dots. Entirely self-taught, Ponto never learned to use the machines typical for many artists working in the medium. He instead embarked on an experimental journey 13 years ago that has since produced a vibrant catalog of designs, from a grayscale eye crying primary colors or a vivid beam shooting from a flying saucer.
Ponto shares that while his process is typically slower than that of artists who utilize machines, his tools and approach are simple. “I just have to layer dots until I reach my desired saturation and look, which varies from skin to skin and the tattoo’s characteristics,” he says. “I use several kinds of needles to play with dot width, resolution, tattooing depth, ink saturation, and a few more variables to create my designs.”
While based in Buenos Aires, Ponto has spent the past few years moving between Europe, Mexico, and the U.S. Travel has been essential to his development from the beginning because most artists work with newer technologies and don’t share the same technical approaches. “Ten years ago, it was key for me to start traveling to meet other handpoked tattoo artists to share experience and knowledge, as there was no one in Argentina I could do this with,” he adds.
Ponto’s latest travels have brought him to Brooklyn, where he’s a guest resident this month at Atelier Eva. Find more about his availability and bold designs on Instagram.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Innumerable Dots Form Bright, Bold Gradients in Nano Ponto’s Entirely Handpoked Tattoos appeared first on Colossal.
dotaturls_feed at 04:08pm on 26/09/2025colossal_feed at 05:37pm on 02/10/2025
When playwright Tennessee Williams reflected on the oeuvre of photographer Stephen Shore in 1982, he said, “His work is Nabokovian for me: Exposing so much and yet leaving so much room for your imagination to roam and do what it will.” The sentiment mirrors not only the power of Shore’s work but the capacity of street photography, more broadly, to provoke wonder and curiosity where we least expect it: the everyday.
Shore was among the first to adopt color photography as an artistic medium, traveling throughout America to document quotidian scenes of life in rural towns and big cities alike. His work followed behemoths of the medium like Walker Evans and Robert Frank and set the stage for others who emerged in his footsteps, including Alec Soth, Nan Goldin, and Martin Parr, among many others.
Shore is included in Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which explores the ever-evolving techniques and approaches that photographers use to document people and daily life. Seminal works from the 1970s to the 1990s by Shore, Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Dawoud Bey, and Yolanda Andrade, among others, are complemented by more recent contributions to the genre by artists like Parr, Luc Delahaye, Katy Grannan, Amani Willett, and Zoe Strauss.
Today, smartphones with powerful digital cameras have made photography more accessible than ever—and also completely transformed the medium. With people always unabashedly filming—taking photos, making videos, posting to social media—in the city, “photographers are now less concerned with surreptitiously capturing an image and much more likely to collaborate with their subjects in the street,” the MFA says.
The difference between snapshots and art is perhaps partly in intention, although that line is often purposely blurred. Bey’s striking “A Man and Two Women After a Church Service,” for example, captures a seemingly simple scene, yet the composition and clarity are a testament to timing and technical expertise. In what feels like simultaneously a public and private moment, the 1976 image glimpses both a particular scene and an American historical period.
Whether taken decades ago or snapped within the past few years, the images in Faces in the Crowd invite us into each experience. Luc Delahaye’s “Taxi,” for example, captures a solemn, intimate, enigmatic moment as a mother holds her young son in her arms in the back of a vehicle.
Yasuhiro Ishimoto’s crowd photo, taken from the hip, immerses us in the thrum of a city thoroughfare. And Yolanda Andrade captures an uncanny blip when a street performer disappears behind the unsettlingly large head of a puppet. The MFA says, “Drawn to photography’s narrative potential, many employ the camera as a tool of transformation, taking everyday pictures from the ordinary to the strangely beautiful or even ominous.”
Faces in the Crowd opens on October 11 and runs through July 13, 2026. Find more on the museum’s website. You might also enjoy A Sense of Wonder, a monograph of the work of Joel Meyerowitz that was just released by SKIRA.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Explore Trailblazing Street Photography in ‘Faces in the Crowd’ at MFA Boston appeared first on Colossal.
nwhyte_wp_feed at 04:08pm on 02/10/2025Second frame of part three:
Another in Cutaway Comics’ explorations of unseen parts of Doctor Who history, this goes behind the backrop of both The Three Doctors and more importantly Underworld. It is about the difficulties of the Minyan princess Malika, who tries to prevent Omega from destroying the planet Minyos and then leads a further attack on him from the planet Draktria in the fourth of four parts. I found it a rather right-wing narrative; Malika and her family have been elevated against the common people of Minyos by superior technology supplied by the Time Lords, and the rebellion of the Minyans against their oppressive rulers is stoked by Omega and an evil populist politician. The Draktria chapter is straight from the playbook of great powers recruiting loyal but doomed native troops from the colonies. The writer does not seem conscious of the tropes that he has put into the story… The art is generally good but Ridgway doesn’t always get his characters’ faces consistent.
You can get Omega here, along with a DVD and an audio version starring Brian Blessed; unfortunately I don’t have those as I bought it from the Cutaway stall at Gallifrey One.
scalziwhatever_feed at 04:00pm on 02/10/2025
Greek mythology is a mythos that is full of despair, anguish, and characters that can’t seem to a catch a break. Author Seamus Sullivan brings us some of these familiar ancient characters in his debut novel, Daedalus is Dead. Follow along to see how Sullivan’s relationship to his son contributed to the inspiration of this classic myth retelling.
SEAMUS SULLIVAN:
Years ago, when I first tried to write about Daedalus in the form of a ponderous and contraction-free short story, Maria Dahvana Headley gave me some characteristically thoughtful line edits, and one note in particular stayed with me. She had gone back into my draft and added contractions, explaining that a lot of writers instinctively reach for “I am” rather than “I’m” when writing something set in antiquity, but at the expense of distancing the story from the reader. Contractions allow for intimacy, and intimacy is what the story demands.
Years later, I tried to write about Daedalus again. I had become a parent, and the first year of my son’s life overlapped with the first year of the global COVID-19 pandemic, a brutal police crackdown on protests, the January 6th insurrection, and other delights. I was deeply angry with men, with a society built to accommodate the worst impulses of men, and with myself for being part of it. With Headley’s note at the back of my mind, I framed the story as Daedalus’s direct address to his late son, Icarus. I’d worked in this mode before, a parent directly addressing their child. There was an assumption in there somewhere that any kid born in the present day would, before long, start observing the world and demanding that the adults explain themselves.
For me, Greek mythology’s appeal has always had something to do with grandeur, with the glory and tragedy of an imagined past, sure, but also with scale and awe and durability. Maybe that’s just how it feels when you read the stuff as a kid. Writing in the Mary Renault style wouldn’t work for me – I didn’t have the skill or the eye for anthropological detail to pull that off, and anyway there was no point in pretending I wasn’t doing the literary equivalent of shaking my fist at the world immediately outside my window. So most of my narration’s intimacy came from my own day-to-day, which largely consisted of carrying an inquisitive baby around and explaining things to him, and for the grandeur I went back to Homer.
Emily Wilson’s Odyssey translation had been out for a few years by then, so I went over passages from that and from my older, Stanley Lombardo Iliad translation. Those helped with the details of how royal households worked (slave labor and all), what funeral rites were like, and a general idea of how to convey that sense of grandeur in vernacular-friendly language that would pull readers into this imagined version of a bronze age society. Wilson’s Odyssey introduction was a great resource for social context and for how composition and performance of Homeric verse might have worked. In the spring of last year I got to see Wilson perform the opening lines of The Iliad for a packed New York Public Library audience, in the original Greek, with enviable gusto; I came away with a deeper appreciation for the artistry and energy that kept these texts alive, in performance and print, for millennia.
Magpie-like, I accumulated images and ideas from other sources. Much of the opening chapter, describing the escape from Crete and the fall of Icarus, comes from Ovid. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, an intensely affecting depiction of a mother’s search for her child, has a haunting image of an older woman seeking work at the village well as a nursemaid, and this influenced my back story for Naucrate, Daedalus’s wife and Icarus’s mother. (Naucrate has a name and a job description, household slave, in Pseudo-Apollodorus, but we don’t have much surviving information on her character beyond that.) I learned about an old tradition of reluctance to mention the king of the underworld by name, referring to him only through indirect titles, and worked that into the book as well. While Daedalus, the character, has an extremely dry sense of humor, I did my best to put some jokes in, because there are jokes and boasts and coarse insults in Homer, and because I find people do crack jokes when they’re under constant stress.
All this research made the book genuinely fun to write, even though it’s a book about things in the world that make me intensely sad and angry. I did my best to make the book fun to read as well. Only an egomaniac would seriously entertain the hope that his work will stick around as long as Homeric verse, but I do like to think about the comfort and collective enjoyment that audiences would have found in hearing very old myths performed and retold centuries ago, including the many, many versions of those myths that haven’t survived into the present day. If my own version can provide some of that enjoyment for you, if we can both shake our heads, together, at the terror and grotesquerie and grandeur of the world we inhabit right now, I’ll feel like I did my job.
Daedalus is Dead: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Books-a-Million|Powell’s
Read an excerpt.
dotaturls_feed at 10:13am on 26/09/2025jaysbrickblog_feed at 01:40pm on 02/10/2025At Fan Media Days 2025 in Billund, Denmark, we were given a sneak preview of LEGO Ninjago’s 15th anniversary with this mysterious lineup of 7 black minifigures! LEGO Ninjago celebrates an epic milestone in 2026, turning 15 and it looks like we’re going to be treated with a heavy year of Ninjago celebrations, sets and […]
The post LEGO Ninjago teases 15th anniversary celebrations in 2026 with mysterious minifigures appeared first on Jay's Brick Blog.
scalziwhatever_feed at 01:20pm on 02/10/2025
To begin, for those of you who do not follow such things with intense interest, a little context about the “AI” company Anthropic being sued for stealing authors’ works and reaching a settlement. Go read that and come back when you do.
The law firm representing authors in the suit has posted up a searchable database listing which works are included in the settlement. I went and looked and had 17 qualifying works, and filed claims for them; at $3,000 per title it adds up. Now, how much of that $3k/title I get after lawyer payout and other shenanigans will be another question entirely, but that’s for another time.
I will note that this settlement is not “free” money – my work, along with the work of thousands of other authors, was stolen to feed an LLM whose function is at the heart of Anthropic’s current $180 billion-plus market valuation. This settlement is, bluntly, the absolute minimum Anthropic could get away with paying.
It is also more than I expected. I had expected Anthropic to litigate this thing until the heat death of the universe. But the fact of the matter is that the damage, such as it is, has already been done. Anthropic has reaped the benefit of its theft and any additional training data for LLMs will have to come from other sources, and at this point someone in Anthropic’s legal department decided it’s better to throw a few (relative) coins to copyright holders than to have a legal liability outstanding. Authors qualified for the settlement can refuse it and pursue individual claims against Anthropic, but most authors can’t afford to do that and won’t (and wouldn’t necessarily get more even if they did). For most of us, this is it.
My suggestion to other authors, unless you genuinely have hundreds of thousands to burn to pursue an individual case, is to check that database above to see if you have a title in there that you can file a claim for. The settlement is not great! But it’s still something, and these days most authors — hell, most people — are not in a position to turn down something if they can get it.
On a slightly lighter note, having so many works used to train Anthropic’s Large Language Model (as well as most of the other ones; they all sifted through the same stock of stolen works) at answers the question about why sometimes the responses I get from them sound a little like me. It’s because more than a little of me is in there. I do a better version of me, though. I always will.
— JS
colossal_feed at 01:19pm on 02/10/2025
Commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, Berlin-based artist Chiharu Shiota presents a poignant suite of large-scale works in Two Home Countries at Japan Society Gallery. That artist is known for her immersive string installations, inviting us into emotive, atmospheric experiences that tap into both universal and deeply personal narratives.
In Two Home Countries, viewers enter a vivid world shaped by red thread, redolent of intertwined veins and blood vessels that attach to the floor, take on the shapes of houses, and spread through an entire room with a cloud-like aura of red—filled with written pages. Themes of memory, mortality, connection, identity, and belonging weave through Shiota’s pieces, exploring “how pain, displacement, boundaries, and existential uncertainty shape the human condition and our understanding of self,” the gallery says.
An expansive, room-sized work titled “Diary,” which is based on an earlier installation and commissioned anew for Two Home Countries, incorporates a dense web of yarn in which float pages of journals that once belonged to Japanese soldiers. Some were also penned by German civilians in the post-war era. “The accumulated pages reveal an expansive record of shared human existence across national boundaries,” the gallery says.
“When the body is gone, the objects which surrounded them remain behind,” Shiota says in a statement. “As I wander the stalls of the markets in Berlin, I find especially personal items like photographs, old passports, and personal diaries. Once, I found a diary from 1946, which was an intimate insight into the person’s life and experiences.” For Shiota, the power of these objects are revealed in how she feels the presence of writer’s “inner self.”
Two Home Countries is on view through January 11 in New York City. Plan your visit on the Japan Society’s website, and find more on Shiota’s site and Instagram.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article World War II Journal Entries Float in a Web of Blood-Red Yarn in Chiharu Shiota’s ‘Diary’ appeared first on Colossal.
james_davis_nicoll at 08:57am on 02/10/2025
relaxedjames_davis_nicoll at 08:36am on 02/10/2025 under review
james_davis_nicoll at 08:28am on 02/10/2025vass at 10:16pm on 02/10/2025 under culture consumeddotaturls_feed at 01:36am on 01/10/2025mastershield in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_community_promo at 07:49am on 02/10/2025 under adult_content, fandom_gamedigital_antiquarian_feed at 10:50am on 02/10/2025I had a long talk recently with some nice folks at the DOS Game Club podcast. Our subject was one from the early days of this site, the Infocom game Planetfall. Maybe some of you will find it interesting. You can get it from the DOS Game Club homepage, or more than likely wherever you get your other podcasts. My thanks to the hosts for their kind invitation, and to the other guests for their patience with my historical rambling! (I’m told that this is the longest episode of the podcast ever.)
See you tomorrow with some fresh written content!
andrewducker at 12:00pm on 02/10/2025 under ai, baths, children, copyright, electricity, europe, family, links, minecraft, phones, politics, racism, renewables, sociology, solarpower, uk, usa, waterdotaturls_feed at 03:24pm on 29/09/2025yhlee at 03:55am on 02/10/2025
dg_weblog_feed at 08:00am on 02/10/2025
rydra_wong at 08:16am on 02/10/2025dg_weblog_feed at 07:00am on 02/10/2025cks_techblog_feed at 03:09am on 02/10/2025Recently I re-read Deep Down the Rabbit Hole: Bash, OverlayFS, and a 30-Year-Old Surprise (via) and this time around, I stumbled over a bit in the writeup that made me raise my eyebrows:
Bash’s fallback getcwd() assumes that the inode [number] from stat() matches one returned by readdir(). OverlayFS breaks that assumption.
I wouldn't call this an 'assumption' so much as 'sane POSIX semantics', although I'm not sure that POSIX absolutely requires this.
As we've seen before, POSIX talks about 'file serial number(s)' instead of inode numbers. The best definition of these is covered in sys/stat.h, where we see that a 'file identity' is uniquely determined by the combination the inode number and the device ID (st_dev), and POSIX says that 'at any given time in a system, distinct files shall have distinct file identities' while hardlinks have the same identity. The POSIX description of readdir() and dirent.h don't caveat the d_ino file serial numbers from readdir(), so they're implicitly covered by the general rules for file serial numbers.
In theory you can claim that the POSIX guarantees don't apply here since readdir() is only supplying d_ino, the file serial number, not the device ID as well. I maintain that this fails due to a POSIX requirement:
[...] The value of the structure's
d_inomember shall be set to the file serial number of the file named by thed_namemember. [...]
If readdir() gives one file serial number and a fstatat() of the same name gives another, a plain reading of POSIX is that one of them is lying. Files don't have two file serial numbers, they have one. Readdir() can return duplicate d_ino numbers for files that aren't hardlinks to each other (and I think legitimately may do so in some unusual circumstances), but it can't return something different than what fstatat() does for the same name.
The perverse argument here turns on POSIX's 'at any given time'. You can argue that the readdir() is at one time and the stat() is at another time and the system is allowed to entirely change file serial numbers between the two times. This is certainly not the intent of POSIX's language but I'm not sure there's anything in the standard that rules it out, even though it makes file serial numbers fairly useless since there's no POSIX way to get a bunch of them at 'a given time' so they have to be coherent.
So to summarize, OverlayFS has chosen what are effectively non-POSIX semantics for its readdir() inode numbers (under some circumstances, in the interests of performance) and Bash used readdir()'s d_ino in a traditional Unix way that caused it to notice. Unix filesystems can depart from POSIX semantics if they want, but I'd prefer if they were a bit more shamefaced about it. People (ie, programs) count on those semantics.
(The truly traditional getcwd() way
wouldn't have been a problem, because it predates readdir() having
d_ino and so doesn't use it (it stat()s everything to get inode
numbers). I reflexively follow this pre-d_ino algorithm when
I'm talking about doing getcwd() by hand (cf), but these days you want to use the
dirent d_ino and if possible d_type, because they're much
more efficient than stat()'ing everything.)
fictionmachine_feed at 12:48am on 02/10/2025High schoolers Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox) and Dan Jordan (Danny Hassel) race in a pickup truck to the house of their friend, exercise junkie Debbie Stevens (Brooke Theiss). They are trapped in a time loop, fruitlessly driving down the same length of street over and over. Meanwhile Debbie is transforming, Kafka-esque, into a cockroach: her home gym now resembling an enormous roach hotel filled with viscous glue. It is in this moment that you might recall the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, released just four years ago, and Freddy Krueger’s chain of supernatural slashings and stabbings. You may catch yourself asking, as Debbie’s cockroach head splits out the back of her human skull: what the hell happened to bring us from there to this?
One of the interesting results of A Nightmare on Elm Street being released film by film over the course of the 1980s is that when watching the whole series together, you can see the aesthetic development of commercial cinema over that period (1984 to 1991). With the fourth instalment, Renny Harlin’s The Dream Master, the rise of the music video and cable channel MTV are reflected in the new work’s glossy presentation and extended use of wide angle lenses. While the film follows on directly from 1987’s The Dream Warriors – in fact it is probably the most direct a sequel the franchise gets – in visual terms this feels like a whole new series.
As the style has progressively transformed, so has the content. Wes Craven’s original Nightmare was a comparatively simple affair, in which the dream settings were essentially a means of instigating violent and gory death scenes. By The Dream Master the franchise is indulging in extensive, oftentimes surreal, set pieces where Freddy barely uses his iconic knife glove for its intended purpose at all. The horror elements have been softened, and the humour increased: while the result is a more mainstream entertainment (and The Dream Master marks the commercial height of the original six films) it does feel like something more potent has been lost in return.
There is something welcome about bringing back Dream Warriors‘ three key survivors – Kristen (Tuesday Knight replacing Patricia Arquette), Roland (Ken Sagoes), and Joey (Rodney Eastman) – but also something disappointing in how quickly all three are then replaced by a new cast of ill-fated high schoolers. Most of the new characters feel generally disposable, with the exception of Alice who replaces Kristen as a typical ‘final girl’ character.
There is a lot of entertainment value in The Dream Master, but the creative dividends of the Freddy Krueger character are visibly declining. He is less a monstrous villain hero, and more of a pop culture icon. Less than two months after Dream Master‘s release, the anthology series Freddy’s Nightmares debuted in syndication. Over the following two years Freddy expanded into comic books and videogames, and even turned up in a few music videos. He remains a classic pop cultural icon, but it cannot be denied that while his popularity peaks here his potency as a horror character has already started to decline. The Dream Master is enormous fun, but one can see the rot has already set in on Elm Street.
nnozomi in guardian_learning at 07:48am on 02/10/2025 under bàn | 半, dà | 大, qǔ | 取, tiān | 天, tài | 太, zhēng | 争, 一天一橘, 部首 | radicalscolossal_feed at 07:00pm on 01/10/2025
Throughout history, those who wield the most power or resources are typically the ones whose stories are represented in textbooks, passed down through generations, and etched into our collective consciousness. Without intentional effort, it can be difficult to hear more than a single narrative.
In art history, the reality is much the same. The canon has always privileged white male artists, from titans of the Renaissance like Michelangelo to bad-boy American Modernists like Jackson Pollock. The foundations of 19th-century American landscape painting, for example, are inextricable from the belief in Manifest Destiny, as the American government violently expanded westward. And Western painting and sculpture have historically reigned supreme in the market-driven hallows of galleries and auction houses. But what of the incredible breadth of—namely Indigenous—art forms that have long been overlooked?
For Sičáŋǧu Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk, the construction of American art history lies at the core of her multidisciplinary practice. “She lays bare the exclusionary hierarchies that have long governed cultural legitimacy, authority, value, and visibility,” says a joint statement from Alexander Gray Associates and Bockley Gallery. “In this light, White Hawk reframes Indigenous art and Western abstraction as inseparable practices—linked by a shared history that dominant narratives have labored to separate and obscure.”
Pablo Picasso is credited with the saying, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Seminal paintings like “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” and others created in the early 1900s would not exist if it were not for his fascination with African masks. White Hawk draws a similar parallel between the 20th-century Color Field and Minimalism movements to highlight the influence of Native American art forms in the evolution of these styles. She prompts viewers to consider how these notions shape our aesthetic perceptions and judgment while also considering the role of cultural memory and community.
White Hawk’s work spans painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and installations. Alongside oil and acrylic paint, she incorporates materials commonly used in Lakota art forms, like beads, porcupine quills, and buckskin.
“I strive to create honest, inclusive works that draw from the breadth of my life experiences,” White Hawk says in a statement, merging influences from Native and non-Native, urban, academic, and cultural education systems. She continues: “This allows me to start from center, deepening my own understanding of the intricacies of self and culture, correlations between personal and national history, and Indigenous and mainstream art histories.”
Mirroring the meditative labor and incredible attention to detail required to create traditional Lakota artworks—from elaborately beaded garments to abstract buckskin paintings—White Hawk creates energetic installations that are bold and confrontational. Vibrant geometric patterns are direct and visceral in a way that “unsettles the categories of Eurocentric art history,” the galleries say.
White Hawk notes that her mixed-media canvases honor “the importance of the contributions of Lakota women and Indigenous artists to our national artistic history…as well as the ways in which Indigenous artists helped shape the evolution of the practices of Western artists who were inspired by their work.”
“Nourish,” an installation that spans nearly 31 feet wide and 14.5 feet tall, comprises thousands of handmade ceramic tiles that visually reference Lakota beadwork and quillwork. Permanently installed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the piece enters into a dialogue with the history of American Modernism through painters such as Marsden Hartley and Pollock, who are credited as trailblazers of American abstraction and yet were indelibly influenced by Native American art.
“At its core, White Hawk’s practice is sustained by ancestral respect and guided by value systems that center relationality and care for all life,” the galleries say. “By addressing inequities affecting Native communities, she creates opportunities for cross-cultural connection and prompts a critical examination of how artistic and national histories have been constructed. Her work invites viewers to evaluate current societal value systems and their capacity to support equitable futures.”
Minneapolis-based Bockley Gallery, which has represented White Hawk for more than a decade, has recently announced co-representation of the artist with New York City-based Alexander Gray Associates, where she’ll present a solo exhibition in fall 2026. If you’re in Minneapolis, Love Language opens on October 18 at the Walker Art Center and continues through February 15. The show then travels to Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where it will be on view from April 25 to September 27, 2026. See more on White Hawk’s website.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Lakota and Western Art History Converge in Dyani White Hawk’s Vibrant Works appeared first on Colossal.
scalziwhatever_feed at 05:58pm on 01/10/2025
You can’t judge a house by its paint job. Or by the nefarious things that have gone on inside said house in the past. Author Beth Cato takes us for a tour in the Big Idea for her newest novel, A House Between Sea and Sky. Follow along to see what lore this house holds.
BETH CATO:
Murder houses have feelings, too.
In the case of the titular House of my new cozy-literary fantasy A House Between Sea and Sky, those feelings include loneliness, anxiety, and some undeniable obsessive-compulsive tendencies. After all, it’s not easy to be a witch’s hut for centuries. One’s oven gets used for all sorts of sordid things.
But House has now been abandoned. For years it has lingered, essentially dozing in its precarious position on a cliff at the edge of a strange continent. But on this stormy night, it stirs awake as it recognizes something: a woman flavored by a magic even older than its own. House’s curiosity is piqued. It doesn’t try to hide itself from the woman’s eyes. It lets her come close. Even more, when the woman returns, dragging along a man limp with despair, House lets them both inside to take shelter from the raging rain and lightning.
As House describes the scene:
I am not their home, but I can be a refuge. I can, maybe, know the warmth of bodies and voices again, my hollowness less hollow.
I open my entry to them in invitation.
The year is 1926. The place: Carmel-by-the-Sea in California. The human point of view is that of the woman flavored by magic, forty-five-year-old Fayette Wynne. She is a scenarist for silent films. She’s struggling to catch up on her script-writing after the recent death of her beloved Ma. Fayette’s siblings are dead, too. Her grief is a boulder she can’t budge, though she truly does have one other family member left–the sentient sourdough starter dubbed Mother that her family has tended for decades. Mother’s divine healing powers were not adequate to heal Ma, though, and Fayette bristles with resentment.
Then there is the man Fayette rescues from the storm. Rex Hallstrom is a rising star in Hollywood, handsome and charismatic. But Rex has been forced to act through most every moment of the day, and the falseness of his life is eating away at him like acid. He needs help. He needs hope.
All of my other fantasy novels have been about high stakes: the world is in danger, the kingdom is in danger, that kind of thing. This is a different kind of book. The stakes are low and intimate. These people–and House is definitely a living soul and a person–need each other if they are to survive.
I invite you to step inside this world, too. You’ll find House to be the most accommodating of hosts. There will be a warm fire. Good, fresh sourdough bread. An incredible view. Perhaps some surprise company will arrive as well–after all, this is a witch’s house, and the unexpected should be expected.
Just be sensitive about House’s feelings. It truly is striving to be more than a murder house of lore, but maaaaaybe it doesn’t always make the right choices. Just know that it is trying, just as we all attempt to get by, day to day. We all could use a little more care and compassion as we slog through this storm that we call life.
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