Ghost of a flea

"Contaminated pods get destroyed. No exceptions. That's what she wrote. That's what she's transmitting to Harlan, hundreds of years from Earth, along with one quiet addition: she was wrong." Link in the comments.

C. S. Lewis's library contained a copy of Robert Bloch's 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑂𝑝𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑊𝑎𝑦, a collection of fantasy and horror stories, including some in the Cthulhu Mythos. Mind you, I suspect that it was Joy's, not Lewis's.

He won the Olympics. The Pythian Games. The Nemean Games. The Isthmian Games. Agias of Pharsalos - one of the most decorated pankration champion of ancient Greece. AI reconstruction based on his marble statue, 336 BC. #AncientGreece #AIArt #GreekMythology #Olympics

Sorry to my long time followers, but I'll always have to mention in these cases that the great Gatsby is a 1:1 symbolic response to the iliad, and assumes you've read it. No one ever told me. I just started wondering why there was a catalogue of ships in chapter 2 and why they were fighting over a woman over a body of water

Black cabs are last vestige of UK glory. They’re awesome. Beautiful cars, drivers speak perfect English and have total knowledge of the city. They’re ambassadors and tour guides—priceless contribution to daily life. The English historically the only culture to put extreme great pride in servile jobs like butler, chauffeur, groundskeeper, driver etc. One of the main reasons they dominated the globe is because they translated a surplus of labor from Industrial Revolution into the cultural benefit of fixation on manners and service. I do not understand people who say black cab “human capital” should be better used on what, spreadsheets? Insane Moreover, these sorts of IRL culture jobs—black cab tour type driver, private school teacher, maître d’, public parks gardener, experiential organizer, and clergy—have big future. Smart upper middle class types will no longer send kids to be lawyers or accountants or marketers because those jobs will be first eliminated by ai. Much like how Industrial Revolution gave birth to English pride in service, so will AI drive upswing in live culture professions. Supply will drive demand.

Just found out that in the Middle Ages they invented coats of arms for God and Satan

I think we should all resolve to make our own personal translations at this point.

Really entrancing spatial-visual guide to the Iliad’s action > Of the 360 named characters, 232 are warriors killed or wounded, yet the poet is remarkable in his ability to keep his characters on the battlefield straight (the instances of Homer's nodding are strikingly rare).

I just discovered the social surrealism of Irving Norman and...this guy needs a much wider audience. There was NOBODY painting like this in postwar america. We need his ferocious vision today. irvingnorman.com

An advertisement illustration created by futuristic concept artist, Syd Mead, for the Alcoa Aluminum Corporation in 1969. This "high-density cliff community" was intended to show potential uses of aluminum in urban infrastructure and appeared in TIME Magazine.

@wuhwwormwow @PaulSkallas Stuck

Found this gem on Bluesky

Chilling and bizarre scene from Brussels in 1794 of exiled French nobles discovering the scale of the bloodshed in Paris.

The Duke of Windsor watching the 1966 WC Final between England v Germany. England won their only WC trophy to date, 4-2.

On this question of whether we should or should not read "the classics" -- A decade back I taught some to high school students in China. It was a clarifying experience for me. As I put it:

Southern Exceptionalism.

Name of Alexander the Great in hieroglyphs, circa 330 BC.

El francés Mäel Le Lagadec (18 años) ha devuelto al Aneto la cruz arrancada este abril. El joven ascendió hasta los 3.404 metros cargando una cruz de madera de 35 kilos tallada por él mismo. Donde destruyan, reconstruir; donde ataquen, conservar; donde olviden, recordar.

Alexander's childhood tutor, Leonidas, was so parsimonious that one day when Alexander took a whole handful of incense to throw on the altar fire, he rebuked the boy, saying that once he had conquered the spice markets of Asia he could waste good incense but not before. Years later, when Alexander had taken the entire Near East, he sent his aged tutor an enormous shipment of frankincense and myrrh with a note saying he could now stop being so miserly to the gods. Alexander Weighing Gifts for his Tutor Leonidas, by Jean III Pénicaud

YouTubers be like “wake up at 4am and run, that’s alpha!” No, it’s not. Look at apex predators; they’re all lazy. Bears hibernate, lions sleep all day. You know who wakes up at 4am and runs? Squirrels.

Grundtvig's Church in Copenhagen (1940). An expressionist church built from six million handmade Danish bricks.