A Hidden Life (2019)

I’m a big fan of horror, as well as the subgenre of ‘psychedelic horror’, in which the psychedelic experience or ‘psychedelic’ aesthetic’ is used to unsettle and terrify viewers. I’m also interested in the future of psychedelic horror: What aspects of the psychedelic experience, or what trippy effects, could be realised on screen that have… The post What is the Future of Psychedelic Horror? appeared first on Sam Woolfe.

It’s a while since I featured any of the regular Renard arrivals on the Ramblings, but they continue to pop through the letterbox (as part of my subscription with them) and each book is a little gem. So I thought I would share a few recent incomings, which were wonderful to dip into when I needed a little distraction. One thing I love about Renard is the variety of the titles they issue, and these three volumes reflect that. The Werewolf by Clemence Housman One of Renard’s strengths is the…

Darkly Bright Press's new Arthur Machen collection, The Guide, is a 260+ page compilation of "eighty-two works originally published across twenty-seven periodicals and spanning nearly three decades," to quote from editor Christopher Tompkins's "A Brief Introduction." It is subtitled "A Collection of Rare & Unknown Work"--for "rare" we can read it to mean as uncollected from

Nothing bad could ever happen inside the remnants of a giant battleship left wedged in a magical nest of demons, could it? Unlike the previous Game Boy Sakura Wars game, which was a sort of raising sim with me playing the role of a little ticket-clipping newbie in training, this time I’m sent off on an intriguing RPG adventure through the bowels of the Mikasa’s wreckage (and beyond), with the cast fighting by my side. Whether I perform this task as my hardworking ticket-clipper or a completely…

We need them now so badly, Mr. President! Can somebody, please... call the guy who created it?!? How truly blessed we will all be once they spring into action to solve this Iran debacle (and when the smoke clears... maybe take a look at that nasty pool)!Or maybe cartoon Supervillain, bribery aficionado and owner of Greenwater Services (he who Trump placed in charge of beautifying said pool), John Cafaro can come to the rescue and fix up The Strait of Hormuz- before or after the pool thingie...

a quick little update about my week... ➜ on Tuesday I visited Fleur to get my new tattoo. she took her time adjusting the design perfectly to my arm and started tattooing. it's 2/3 done and I have to go one more time to finish it. it was a lovely experience, because we seem to have so much things in common! we had a great chat and I felt so at home with her and in her studio ♡ it was a very valuable day for me in more ways than one. oh and of course I LOVE my tattoo! ♡ ➜ we are in the midst of…

- "If you talk to me, I'll punch you in the face, are you ok with talking with me?" - "Nods in agreement." - "Proceeds to punch the man in the face." That's how I feel whenever I hear the Miranda rights being read. It was designed specifically to scare anyone being read to, into silence. Don't incriminate yourself. If you are like me, guilty of watching those police bodycams videos on youtube, then you know that people proceed to talk right after they are read their rights, as if they heard…

The hardest part is getting your data out of Gel in a useable format, the rest is easy.

In the previous article we looked at how the kernel gives every process its own private view of memory. But memory is only half of what a process needs to actually run. The other half is the CPU itself — and there are only so many CPUs in a machine, while there are usually hundreds or thousands of things that want to run on them. So somebody has to decide, constantly, who gets a CPU and for how long. That somebody is the scheduler. Every few milliseconds, on every core, the kernel asks itself…

In honor of Father’s Day, I wanted to add to the two quotes from my Dad’s obituary, “Seven days without chicken made one weak.” and “If you fail at raising your children, nothing else mattered.” with another saying he had. Ain’t no hill for a stepper. If you’d like to learn more about this, check out this part of the A Way with Words podcast, and apparently, it might have come from the musician John Gaar.

I was crying in the operating room before the surgery started Not because I thought I was going to die Not because the procedure was especially dangerous Not because the staff were cruel to me I was crying because I was lying there in a hospital gown while my body was being moved around underneath me. I was staring at the ceiling unable to really see what was happening while people around me touched and arranged my body Everything was medically normal but it struck a painful part of my brain…

I believe in preparing for things, which manifests in ways like making a 150-row spreadsheet of songs I have done or might like to do at karaoke, each notated with their highest note, subjective difficulty, and availability in common karaoke systems. This does not appear to be common practice, but I've gotten a lot of mileage out of it. A few of the commonly available songs on the Pareto frontier between "comfy song everybody can sing along to" to "exciting performance to questionably show off…

Great mysteries of archaeology: an ancient Amazonian world revealed from the sky A good review article on the Amazonian archaeology and the lidar revolution.

The Brooklyn Bridge most New Yorkers know is a slender wonder of steel wires, stone towers, and sweeping views. But there’s a less visible part of the bridge at ground level. These are the anchorages—the masonry structures on both the Manhattan and Brooklyn sides that secure the cables supporting the bridge while also carrying approach roads. Completed seven years before the bridge opened in May 1883, the anchorages are as stunning as the span itself, with their romanesque arches and rusticated…

Perfume PosseGuerlain Ambre Samar We’re moving into another heatwave, probably be hotter than the last one. Sigh. Towards 30 degrees Celsius with it feeling like 37, according to the weather report. So, around 97 Fahrenheit – and humid. Last week I had yet another… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseGuerlain Ambre Samar

Check out Instagram.com/simonreynoldswriter/ for the latest news about the bookPerceptive Observer review of Still In A Dream by Kitty Empire - pictured aboveKieran Press-Reynolds chats with his dad for GQMy Baker's Dozen on reinvention of the guitar at The QuietusMoonbuilding - lovely review by Neil Mason (scroll down a ways)Shoegaze Special for Zakia's Sewell's

The years tick themselves off. Nine years ago, every Monday morning, I accompanied Pat the Salt, then 92y.o., to the Tramore Community Centre and Wheels-on-Wheels hub for sessions of The Heritage Club. The Big Room at the TCC looked out over a steep fall of trees and shrubs between Pond Road and Upper Branch Road. That woodland was making its +10-year transformation into the Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Gardens.On 8th June this year, we were down among The Great and The Good [aka The Olds] of…

What's been happeningI wanted to send this note earlier, but the travels and my work meetings kept me occupied and decided to club Week 24 & 25 notes in one chunky post. More about the travel later on.Last week started okay. Sydney winter has been getting colder but we had some reprieve mid-week. We went to our usual gym PT sessions and have been focusing on improving our bench press workouts. The second workout has been focused on front squats. I was struggling a lot to get my front squat…

There exists a certain subset of drivers on road that makes me cuss at their entire lineage. In no particular order: Speed demons and turtles. You know them. Those who speed unnecessarily and those who drive slow. Both relative to how we drive. And before you ask, the other idiot on the road is the problem! Indicators for thee but not for me. We have to observe, run calculus, throw the dice and divine the intention of this driver. Are they turning left on the Stop sign? Are they going straight?…

The younger man looked nervous, and his supervisor was only marginally less so. Their visitor passes read ESA, and bore a small holographic mark which they had both assumed was standard, but it had drawn expressions of quickly-concealed surprise from more than one person they’d passed on their way from the building’s grand entrance to the office on the sixth floor. There was no plaque on the door, but there had been two secretaries and three armed guards in the outer chamber. The office was…

Check out Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster coming soon to Kickstarter! Describe monsters instead of labelling them so every encounter with a monster is a unique and fresh experience. Ogres are scary. Even if a player watched previous characters battle ogres twenty times before, the first time they face an ogre with a new character, that character would be right to be terrified. We lose this terror if we simply call it an "ogre" and jump to rolling the dice. Instead, use flavorful and distinctive…

LONDON A-Z M is for Marks Gate Barking and Dagenham is an oddly-shaped borough with a narrow two-mile protuberance up north, which is where Marks Gate is. All was open countryside until the 1920s when Eastern Avenue carved through, the same A12 that also destroyed the flat calm in Gants Hill, Little Heath and Aldborough Hatch. A large council estate followed in the 1950s, this the undistinguished warren I'm about to spend several paragraphs walking round, though thankfully with occasional…

The return of Serena Williams to Wimbledon’s courts has raised the question of whether GLP-1s are performance-enhancing drugs. CC-licensed photo by Andrew Luyten on Flickr. You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam. A selection of 9 links for you. Let? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links…

I recently came across a Swedish blog post exploring generative AI, visual culture, aesthetics, and the relationship between AI-generated imagery and authoritarian political tendencies. It's well worth reading in full, not least because it also explains in accessible terms how generative image systems actually function and why certain visual patterns emerge so consistently from them. The discussion around aesthetics stayed with me, but the larger question was harder to shake: what kinds of…

If you’re craving something light, fresh, and full of flavour, this Crispy Chicken Salad is the perfect summer supper. It starts with tender chicken breasts sliced in half to keep them juicy and quick‑cooking then coated in a golden Parmesan‑panko crust that adds the most irresistible crunch.The salad itself is simple and vibrant — crisp greens, shaved carrot ribbons (a vegetable peeler works beautifully), cool cucumber, and de-seeded tomatoes so the dressing stays bright and punchy instead of…

There Are Some Highly Contested Primaries Tomorrow Voters in New York, Maryland and Utah go to the polls tomorrow for primary elections. South Carolina voters are voting in runoffs. Some of the races are bitterly contested. Let's start with New York since it has many very competitive races. The heated primaries there, mostly in deep blue districts, are riven by everything that divides Democrats: generational change, Israel, outside spending by AI and crypto groups, socialism and more: Click…

I am increasingly convinced that the first question pastors should ask about AI is not, “Can it write this sermon?” A better question is: “Can it help me work with the notes I already have?” That difference matters. A blank AI prompt invites the tool to lead. It asks the machine to decide the angle, structure, emphasis, and application before the pastor has done the slower work of observation, prayer, and judgment. Sometimes the output sounds impressive. That is part of the danger. A polished…

I used to love the Cluetrain Manifesto. What was not to love? I was young and rather clueless, and with a rebellious streak. Here come The Beatles, and they tell you that the ways of the world are wrong, which was true, and that everything will change. Which was false. Quite naturally, I hopped on the Cluetrain. It served me well for some time, so no hard feelings. And yet, it’s incredible how different things turned out to be! We went from… #62 Markets do not want to talk to flacks and…