I must apologise most profusely for not putting the other submissions for Lords of Misrule on the
blog in a timely fashion. They were quite long, and i tended to procrastinate for quite a while on
their inclusion, and so i ended up not bothering for fear of cluttering up the timeline with endless
scrolling past other people’s creations — not a particularly dignified viewing environment for them.
But here they are in all their glory, on the main site:
Iō Saturnalia! Today’s post comes from an anonymous reader in Santiago — to comment, please
visit its page on the main site.
as a kid coming down the portway into the harbourside through here was always so epic: going past
the rugby club, along the seamills bridge, down the hill, past the willow whale, seeing climbers on
the gorge, the tunnels randomly sticking out the cliff looking like something out of minecraft, then
coming around the bend and seeing the absolutely massive iconic bridge so high up. diving into the
short tunnel type thing and then being greeted with an truly odd mix of architecture being the
announcement of entering the city so dramatically. first ashton gate sticks out slightly, and then
driving past the first row of house (the last one before the turn has a waving flag of the spanish
republican international brigades — always fun for us, i am from spain but grew up in the middle of
farmyland severn vale — we always came down via the m5 and even there i remember the giraffe cranes
at avonmouth and the hovis silos), then being greeted with these brutalist tendales towards the
airport, but we would always come off and into the redeveloped harbourside of its modern style and
parked in the (very expensive im told) millenium square car park. the short drive through hotwells
road was always very strange to me because its old georgian and victorian housing sandwiched between
two far more modern areas. the nautical theme with the absolutely massive victorian ss great britain
is also great, it used to have even more colourful flags !
the trip back was still good but never as cool as that experience, just a bunch of huge weed-themed
graffiti on the quarryfaces across the river. will probably look much cooler if the train ever comes
back that side.
It’s that time of year again for the dictionaries of the world to come remind people that they still
exist, and that there is absolutely, definitely a reason for anyone to ever pay for them instead of
going on Wiktionary for free1, by proclaiming a singular lemma to be Word Of The Year™.
They’re not usually very good at it. Irritatingly often they plump for words that were around for
hundreds of years before that year, slang terms that won’t be around in five years, let alone fifty,
or terms with dubious status as words at all. That is why last year, as chief etymologist and
steward of this noble wood, i picked my own — “special
military operation”. In hindsight, i might have chosen something less dour, but that’s the way the
biscuit breaks.
So then, how can you capture the essence of the year that was 2023 in a single word? It has been a
year of political stagnation, social carrying-on-per-usual, but of technological upheaval.
Merriam-Webster thought authentic summed it up best, as a counter to industry plants and
GPT malaise… but i’m sorry, that’s bollocks and they know it. Not a word
from 2023, been around for decades, go straight to gaol, do not pass go.
Oxford, on the other hand, had a rather different, more vernacular choice — one i am inclined to
agree with. The word of the year for 2023 is:
rizz
noun. (colloquial) Effortless charisma, the sort that lets you win friends, influence people,
and get the girls.
I’ll admit, it’s not quite a 2023 word. It first gained steam in late 2022, and was
popularised by the streamer Kai Cenat all the way back in 2021 — but to hell with it! The first
mention in my group chat is January of this year, and it has taken the youth by storm in such a way
that it seems destined to stick around, even if only to call back to the twenties the way
radical might the nineties or groovy the sixties.
It too captures Merriam-Webster’s reaction to the plastic sheen of modern technology. Your friends
might have rizz. The people you follow online might have rizz. But ChatGPT? I’m sorry, Dave, but as a large language model, it is not possible for me to have rizz.
Merry rizzmas, everyone, and a happy new year — let’s hope 2024’s word is as undour as this one!
I hope dearly that Jodie Whittaker gets 9,000 Big Finish stories to make up for the Chibnall years
of Doctor Who. She deserved better.
Abaroth’s World: “An eclectic mixture of my interests including models, optical illusions, historic buildings,
roleplaying games, heraldry, puzzles and gardening.”
I have officially decided to become annoying and switch to Linux. I can tolerate many things from
Microsoft, but i will not tolerate them taking away my vertical taskbars!
It’s been a long year. That’s the traditional thing to say, but honestly, it’s been quite a
short year for me, and autumn has crept up without me even noticing. That can only mean one
thing…
Io Saturnalia!
It’s time, once again, for our third annual
Satyrs’ Forest Lords of Misrule, where in the spirit of the season, i put you (yes, you) in charge of the site.
If you write or put togeher something — absolutely anything* — and email it to
misrule@satyrs.eu, come Saturnalia (December 17 to 23,
for those who aren’t up to date on their Roman calendar) i’ll put it up on the site, on the blog and
on its own dedicated permanent subpage, etched in stone for all to see.
As in years past, i ask only that you refrain from political polemics and anything that would get
this noble forest in legal trouble. Other than that, the sky is the limit. A video essay on the
occult implications of Gremlins 2? A rant about that new skyscraper that blots out the view
of your favourite billboard? Anything goes. Whatever you — my lords of misrule — want.
You can submit your entries from today until the 16th of December, 2023. Have fun, and
don’t be afraid to get weird with it!
— Xanthe
Gremlins 2 is the hardest i’ve laughed at a film in some time — a movie written and directed
by cocaine.
I think i broke something when the smart gremlin started talking in a New Zealand accent.
Hello. I’ve been to the Bowes Museum. I thought i might
tell you about it.
Housed in a gloriously incongruous French mansion in the small town of
Barnard Castle1, it was built to house the art collections of the noble Bowes-Lyons — a family lucky enough to
count the Queen Mother herself among their members.
Its collection lies largely parallel to the “main” visual arts: ceramics, fashion, textiles,
furniture, and other such things which must account for function as much as form. Most of it plunges
headfirst into the latter, a bit frilly even for my often anti-modernist tastes, but i did like this
caduceus-adorned wooden cabinet:
The star of the show here is the Silver Swan, a gorgeous eighteenth-century automaton which preens
and sways on a bed of glass water. Unfortunately, it’s broken, and the closest you’ll get to see it
is its dismembered corpse awaiting restoration, so [raspberry noise]. You can,
however, see their exhibition on its legacy, which houses a wonderful collection of modern
animatronics made by crafters and tinkerers from all over the world, like this 10/10 pianist:
There are a few items which don’t fit into the above. They’ve managed to snag some real Goyas,
Canalettos, and El Grecos. (Los Grecos?) They even have Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, somehow
— i assume it’s on loan from London?
Two iceberg charts of
surreal movies and
strange films. I may have to watch, erm,
all of these — especially Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, which keeps
coming up in my dives into net-art history…
Yep, that one's going in my Rich Evans Folder (2.1TB)
Hope whoever
felled the Sycamore Gap tree
enjoyed whatever kicks they got out of destroying a centuries old piece of local heritage. Sick
cunt.
De Sledgehammerprojectie — vernoemd naar
het Peter Gabriel-lied — is een nieuwe
oppervlaktegetrouwe kaartprojectie in dezelfde niche als de Winkel-tripel. Een
samenstelling van de projecties van Hammer en Peters behoudt oppervlakte, geeft aantrekkelijke
curven aan zowel meridianen als parallellen, en haar puntige polen vervormen verre noordelijke
regio’s veel minder dan haar afgeplatte equivalenten. (Ik durf wel te zeggen dat zelfs de Antarctis
er goed genoeg uitziet!)
De precieze formule, afgeleid van het techniek
Strebe (2017):1
This post relies on some spiffy new browser features,
and might not work on your machine. Apologies.
The Sledgehammer projection — named after
the Peter Gabriel song — is a novel
equal-area map projection designed to fill the same niche as the Winkel Tripel. A composite of the
Hammer and Peters projections, it preserves area, gives both parallels and meridians pleasing
curves, and with its pointed poles, it does not distort areas in far northern latitudes to the
extent that flat-topped projections such as
Equal Earth do. (I dare even
say that it handles Antarctica alright.)