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Reading List More from A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
This is the first part of our [I don’t know; a few?] part series looking at the Siege of Eregion sequence from the second season of Amazon’s Rings of Power and what we can learn by pointing out its missteps. And I’m not going to bury the lede here: this entire sequence is a mess. … Continue reading Collections: The Siege of Eregion, Part I: What Logistics? →
Hey folks! Happy Valentine’s Day. Fireside this week and then hopefully next week we’ll start into our look at the Siege of Eregion in Season 2 of Rings of Power and also the larger Tolkien legendarium. I confess, watching the show, my suspension of disbelief fell much faster than the city did. But in the … Continue reading Fireside Friday, February 14, 2025 (On Grant Funding) →
This week we’re going to have a bit of fun looking at some of the interesting armor choices for the recent Dragon Age: The Veilguard. In a way, this is an extension of the post on “The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor,” because I think Veilguard provides a pretty exceptional example of visual character-design armor … Continue reading Collections: The Strange Armor of Dragon Age: The Veilguard →
Last time, we started our retrospective on the Gracchi looking at the elder brother Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and his term as tribune of the plebs in 133 BCE; this week, we’ll wrap up this look by discussing Tiberius’ younger brother Gaius Sempronius Gracchus and his terms as tribune of the plebs in 123 and 122 … Continue reading Collections: On the Gracchi, Part II: Gaius Gracchus →
Hey, folks. As much as I hate doing it, I have to pull a ‘gap week’ this week, as the second part of the Gracchi series (on the younger brother, Gaius Gracchus) isn’t done yet and I have some academic travel that I need to prepare for which is going to demand most of my … Continue reading Gap Week (January 24, 2025) →
More in history
Die Mondexpedition is the original German book that was translated into English in 1969 as The Log of a Moon Expedition. It's full title at the time was Die Mondexpedition: 14 Mal 24 Stunden auf dem Mond roughly translated as The Lunar Expedition: 14 times on the moon for 24 hours. Which I simplify as "The Lunar Expedition: 14 days on the Moon." The author and illustration was Ludek Pesek, a well known space artist. See his Wikipedia article here. He illustrated space and planetary themes in books and National Geographic illustrations since 1963. This was his first science fiction novel which he chose to illustrate with lush paintings of an expedition to the Moon. I blogged about the English language copy of this book in 2009. If you have not seen these before I am happy to show you some wonderful art you might have missed. Pesek, Ludek. Illustrated by Pesek, Ludek. Die Mondexpedition: 14 Mal 24 Stunden auf dem Mond . Recklinghausen: Paulus Verlag. (126 p.)
Review of David Lay Williams’s “The Greatest of All Plagues”
In 1979, American artist Christy Rupp (born 1949) created a street poster of a prowling, life-sized rat. With a keen interest in animal behaviour and habitat, Rupp’s popster coincided with a three-week strike by NYC sanitation workers. As the rubbish bags piled up on the city’s streets, Rupp added her poster wherever rats were claiming … Continue reading "Christy Rupp: Rat Patrol in New York City, 1979" The post Christy Rupp: Rat Patrol in New York City, 1979 appeared first on Flashbak.
‘All state authority is derived from the people’
