Casting Stones

Do you ever feel that you're "saving yourself" for something that never comes? Our culture has become obsessed with prolonging life and health, but with no clear idea of what we're preserving it for. My latest on why you should be trying to use yourself up, not preserve yourself for old age, with a brief shoutout to @GuruAnaerobic! Read it here 👉 dreamsinthevoid.blog/p/against-self…

thinking of george balanchine's version of midsummer nights dream with the nyc ballet

@NewRightPoast Would be very interested.

I was so annoyed by this tweet that I spent the last week writing an entire children's book called The Insignificant Speck, which starts out telling this Reddit Atheist story ("You're just a speck, you're not special, nothing means anything"), but then takes a left turn halfway through, exploring the mathematical impossibility of life, how miraculous it is that anything exists at all, how an infinite sequence of stuff had to happen to produce you, how you are imbued with all of that magic, how the human experience is ablaze with the majesty and wonder of its Creator, and how your life has cosmic importance and is weighted with tremendous moral responsibility, and you owe your ancestors and your progeny the honor of living well and fully. It's the children's picture book I want my kids to read more than any other. A based "Oh, the Places You'll Go" for our retarded age. Anyone know any illustrators who'd want to collaborate on this?

@TheFigen_ These are societies that had a reason to build that extended outside of utility.

Before technology advanced, everything was art and elegance…

@jholtillus @ruralsketchin Thank you for bringing this chap to my attention J!

I commissioned @ruralsketchin to draw Theseus in his style. It's absurdly excellent. If we hit the Stretch Goal on my campaign, I'm giving every book backer a print of this glorious drawing. It's worth getting the book just to get the print. Let's be honest.

A promise is a promise, and I said I was going to talk about Vermis's soundtracks. Vermis is quite influential in the retro fantasy scene, even if someone says "this just looks like AI nonsense." Of course, that's because it's Dark Fantasy, which is now heavily AI-generated. Not the case, of course. All the albums are dungeon synth, of course, that musical genre with lofi synthesizers but distinct from lofi because it deals with dungeons and dark fantasy, so it's haunting and eerie instead of chilloutesque and has no beats. The genre is actually related to 90s symphonic black metal, having originated together. It is, in fact, symphonic black metal but without rock instruments (no guitars or drums). "Symphonic" also means without vocals.

"American Pop" - The 1920s

Cool World (1992) work by Barry E. Jackson for #mondaymotivation

Casual reminder your life’s importance has no correlation to what percentage of the universe your body occupies and you are the tip of the spear of emergent complexity amidst an otherwise entropic universe with the agency to consciously direct the future of it

Moebius

Bruce Pennington

Jean-Claude Mézières (1938–2022) was a legendary French comic artist and one of the most influential visionaries in science fiction illustration. His aesthetic helped shape the visual universe of Luc Besson’s 1997 film The Fifth Element, where he worked as a concept artist. Many of the film’s iconic elements—layered megacities, flying traffic lanes, and eccentric extraterrestrial environments—echo the visual language he had developed decades earlier in his comics.

‘What did the Saxons do when they first came to Wessex?’

Somewhere in the 90s

@tstartworks There will always be areas to be displeased with. You should take just as much time to enjoy the areas you are happy about.

@StonesCasting Thank you kindly! I’m perturbed because I overworked the King’s face, but it is what it is.

These are superb.

The romantic nature of Europe, as it once was.

to grow and explore the textures of this world, 2025