April Pieces Of My Mind #1

New bike tire!

• It struck me that my attitude to the various theoretical schools in archaeology is the same as my attitude to football teams. I don’t support any football team, because I am hostile to football and want it out of the public sphere.
• Movie: Les Cinq Diables / The Five Devils (2022). Little girl has the supernatural power of spying on people in the past. By these means she discovers that the reason her parents are unhappy is that her mom would really rather be with her aunt. Great child actress but slow and predictable. Grade: fail. This is the second movie starring Adèle Exarchopoulos that I quit after an hour, and believe me, it’s VERY MUCH NOT because I get tired of watching her wander around in skimpy outfits.
• Robin D. Laws said something really eye-opening about dreams. One reason that they’re so confusing is that they’re generated in the moment as you dream along, and retain no memory of previous “stage sets” where you have been that night. Your dreams have a narrator or game master with a super short memory. They’re like AI Dungeon, the text adventure game that seemed so convincing until you realised that it had no concept of object permanence.
• Some people have a synaesthetic relationship with numbers. I’m turning 51 in a few days. It reminds me of a woman on Twitter who reported acute discomfort, almost to the point of throwing up, when she realised that 51 is not a prime, but equals 3 x 17.
• Movie: The Eternal Daughter (2022). A film maker goes to a rural manor hotel with her elderly mother to celebrate her birthday and write the movie we’re watching. The present and their memories become conflated for both women, each played by Tilda Swinton. Lots of Gothic imagery. Too slow, but interesting twist, so grade OK.
• I casually mentioned “primary reality” to my RPG group. An excellent newer member who is a psychiatrist reminded me that this is not actually a household term for most. It’s from one of Tolkien’s essays, a synonym to “off live” in LARPing.
• Movie: Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (2023). If you’ve ever enjoyed the sword & sorcery genre in any medium, and most particularly if you’ve enjoyed playing D&D, I think you too will adore this lavish exciting funny movie. It even has a diverse cast and badass fighting women! And owl bears and paladin jokes! Grade: great!
• The Battle of Tumhalad makes no sense geographically. It’s on the wrong side of the River Narog. Troops are crossing two major rivers without a word from Tolkien. Then somehow it’s a problem that a new bridge across the Narog allows the bad guys access to Nargothrond. Come on JRR, you have just established tacitly that the Narog is fordable just north of the cave city.
• Tolkien and Lovecraft: both obsessed with miscegenation; one thinks it’s great, the other is mortally terrified of it.
• Swedish has no single word for mental health, no equivalent of sanity or sane. Unlike the English, we assume it as the default.
• Reading Fleming about James Bond and Dunsany about Jorkens recently, it struck me that affluent men in the early to mid-20th century spent all their waking hours under the influence of caffeine AND nicotine AND ethanol.
• You know how Republican base voters are paranoid about government being controlled by the “Deep State”? I’m betting that what they are dimly perceiving is actually university graduates.
• I mourn the trilobites. They were awesome.
• ChatGPT, write a sequel to the Iliad about how Ulysses and his men sail home to Ithaca through years of adventure and hardship.
• Idea for an online dating scam: fill the site with attractive AI-generated pictures and ChatGPT chat bots, make the site free to use, put lots of ads on it.
• I did the math. In the past 2.5 years I have game-mastered for over five office-hour working weeks, not counting prep. Live table time, quality time with good friends!

Found another tree house ruin

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