Welcome back, everyone! Let’s gather ’round for some links!
How was the week been treating you? It’s been awful cold in New England. My little space heater finally kicked the bucket yesterday, on a day when the high was 13 degrees Fahrenheit. Talk about timing!
Sarah and I also recorded a podcast, so keep your eyes (ears?) peeled for that!
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If you love finding new patreons to support, I found one that may be of interest to some of you. It’s Sebastian Crane’s Hellfire Club, which explores queer, occult, erotic, and arcane histories. Sebastian is also a ghost tour guide in Salem, MA. How fucking rad!
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Launching next year, Oakland-based artist and UC Santa Cruz assistant professor A.M. Darke will be starting what will probably be the world’s first free database for 3D-modeled Black hairstyles. The Open Source Afro Hair Library has plans to go live Juneteenth 2023. You can read more about it in this Vice article.
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I’ve been obsessed with this Leia Ham’s reimagining of Lord of the Rings set in ancient China.
A thought that has haunted me for years is 'what if LOTR but ancient China?'
So I finally made it!
Here's the first look at a series of art I'll be posting: Frodo at the beginning of the first 'movie', and the Fellowship of the Ring. pic.twitter.com/LGA1KoOV0K
— Leia Ham (@leiahamart) January 3, 2022
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Sometimes the YouTube algorithm giveth and I’ve come across the most accurate video title in existence.
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Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
Per an earlier thread about the portrayal of older women in romances, this morning’s link to a NYT article « Sex after 70: Older couples are finding joy (and challenges) in intimacy » seemed terribly apropos. Didn’t skim even a single paragraph.
Joey Jones, author of the interactive fiction Trials of the Thief-Taker, wrote several years ago about his approach to creating romanceable NPCs in that game. He’s probably wrong in his sweeping dismissal of all other ways to do it, but it’s worth discussing, and in any case I will say that he did a fine job of implementing what he tried to do: the potential romantic interests (three of them in this rather short game) don’t necessarily seem to be that until you’ve interacted with them a while, at which point you may have no chance with them because the personality, past history, and choices of the character you’re playing are incompatible with them. I rather agree that a game interaction is more interesting if the player’s character has a personality and the NPC has a personality — that just makes it harder to find someone you mesh with romantically!
I had to click on that video to see what it was and got a disturbing video where the people were not controlling their dogs, allowing them to chase a horse, and the horse was pretty out of control in a bad area as well. Looked like it had been chased to where the person with the camera was. It’s so sad when people allow their animals to be in danger of injury for a video…
I hope that was supposed to be another video??
Tilde Swinton as libraries thread is everything:
https://twitter.com/JudeAtwood/status/1468030063819964424?t=F45WBPG4MW_Xw76Mtsimqw&s=19
Not sure how I spelled Tilda as Tilde. Lo siento mucho.
This was shared on another comment thread here a few days ago, reposting for anyone who missed it. The saga continues. I’m slightly obsessed with the daily updates.
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/14/1072812001/cat-vitamix-blender-box-standoff