Chinese Bronze Sword With An Inlaid Rock Crystal, Turquoise and Gold Hilt Warring States Period, Circa 4th - 2nd Century B.C.

Lucretia Borgia Reigns in the Vatican in the Absence of Pope Alexander VI by Frank Cadogan Cowper circa 1910

Errors, “Errors,” and Sci Fi

@strawberry-crocodile

tvtropes calls stuff like the wolf example "science matches on" which I think is a pretty fair shake

This.  This is what’s got me thinking so much about errors.  There’s a certain danger, here.  A certain way that this particular effect — delicious dramatic irony — tempts the mind when reading old stories, even true ones.

What do you know about R.M.S. Titanic? I ask my class every year, and the first hand rises.  “It was unsinkable,” the student inevitably says, and everyone is nodding, “or so they thought.”  I write the word UNSINKABLE on the board, underneath my crude drawing of a ship with four smokestacks.  It will be crossed out before the end of the hour, but not for the reason they expect.

“I find no evidence,” Walter Lord, preeminent biographer of the ship’s survivors, wrote, “that Titanic was ever advertised as unsinkable. This detail seems to have entered the collective mind so as to create a more perfect irony.”  Indeed, historians’ examinations of White Star Line documents show the shipbuilders themselves worried it would be so large as to risk collision; they stocked several more lifeboats than 1910s regulations required.

The War to End All Wars (deep breath, satisfied exhale), also known as World War ONE. Chuckle.  Shake of the head.  What if I told you that this phrase, used primarily in American newspapers after the fact, wasn’t meant to be literal? Nowadays we’d say The Mother of All Wars, or One Hell of a Fucking War, but we wouldn’t mean literal motherhood, literal intercourse.  What if I said the armistice and the Lost Generation and the Roaring 20s were all braced for another outbreak of European conflict, and yet we still failed to prevent it?

Did you know they were so confident in the safety of the S.S. Challenger that they put a civilian schoolteacher onboard? I do, because I’ve heard that one repeated many times.  Only, see, it’s got the cause and effect reversed.  Challenger launched on a day the shuttle’s engineers knew to be dangerously cold, because the first civilian in space was on board. And NASA knew its shuttle project would be cancelled entirely, if they couldn’t get that civilian’s much-delayed entry into space in the next two weeks.  So they launched on a cold day, and killed her instead.

These are all what cognitive science calls Hindsight Bias on the personal level, what sociology calls Presentism on the cultural level.  Social psychology’s a little of both, is primarily interested in why you’re sitting on your couch in a Colonize Mars shirt watching PBS and chuckling at the fools who believed in El Dorado.  It wants to know why the mind flees straight from “marijuana will kill you” to “marijuana will cure cancer” without so much as a pause on the middle ground of its real benefits and drawbacks, its real (mild) risks and rewards.

And they can paralyze the sci-fi writer, if you think too much about them. Jetsons is futurist one decade, retro the next.  “There are no bathrooms on the Enterprise,” the creators of Serenity say smugly, as if Gene Roddenberry should’ve simply known that decades later it’d be acceptable to show a man peeing in full view of the camera, nothing but the curve of the actor’s hand to protect his modesty.  “No sound in space,” the Fandom Menace says, “No explosions in space,” and “A space station can’t collapse in zero-G.”  Only then NASA burns a paper napkin outside of atmosphere, transmits music using only the ghost of nearby planets’ gravities, and logs onto Reddit long enough to point out the Death Star would implode in its own gravity field.  And now we’re the ones pointing, the ones laughing, at those earlier point-and-laughers.  Self-satisfied, smug in superiority.  As if we did the work to find out ourselves, instead of just happening to be born a little later than George Lucas.

Billy Idol in NYC, 1978 🖤

Photo by Roberta Bayley

REVELATIONS NEWS ❖ COMMENT ❖ HEAVY FUCKING METAL HOT NEW BAND

Sleep is not just for the weak, according to Vessel and co

STAY TOKE The gimmick may be goofy, but Sleep Token’s music is no laughing matter

“My favourite 90s album is Fantastic Planet by Failure. It’s devastatingly bleak in a way that resonates into our deepest self.” – VESSEL (VOCALS)

SOUNDS LIKE an intriguing and shadowy blend of atmospheric post-rock and tech FOR FANS OF Meshuggah, Bon Iver, Explosions in the Sky LISTEN TO Calcutta 

Over the years Metal Hammer has heard all manner of bizarre sonic coalitions and watched bands emerge from the deepest, weirdest corners of our scene, yet mysterious collective Sleep Token are up there among the most unique and ‘WTF?’ propositions so far. Not only is their music a fairly unclassifiable fusion of brutal tech-metal and atmospheric post-rock, but the band, driven by masked and cloaked frontman Vessel, claim to live in thrall to an ancient deity called Sleep. OK…

Much like Ghost’s Nameless Ghouls, the remaining members of Sleep Token have chosen to remain anonymous in order to retain their shadowy presence— only agreeing to answer our questions via email.

“They go hand in hand,” explains Vessel when we ask if the band’s sound and image are simply an exercise in gimmickry. “Sleep Token serves to add a visual dimension to our journey. A world without texture isn’t a world at all.” The story goes that Vessel first encountered Sleep in a dream where he was promised glory and magnificence in return for his worship. “He is the oldest God, a primal majesty that has endured the ages unperturbed by the morality of a flawed and chaotic human race,” says the frontman helpfully. “He is everyone. He is you. There’s a power in music that binds us all, every note relates to another. He showed me a vision of a world filled with depth and texture.”

OK, so their ‘backstory’ is silly. But as far as the music’s concerned, Sleep Token are an undeniably intriguing prospect, inhibiting a sparse world of heart-breaking beauty and intense heaviness where start, and sometimes sinister skeletal soundscapes build to throbbing climaxes with mesmerising effect. Recent single Calcutta, which premiered on Hammer’s website, builds like a storm: violent, djent-tinged destruction erupting amid Vessel’s ethereal and vulnerable Bon Iver-esque vocals.

“We sculpt, build and craft these sounds with an aim to deliver the emotional magnitude of His words,” says Vessel. “Destroy and rebuild over and over until what is left is what His followers shall hear. The influences come from the physical and emotionally charged world at large. Dreams are textural, so is music and much like life; they bring both darkness and life, beauty and ugliness— it’s our job to translate and convey those complexities as best we can. Each of these songs is an experience, but to find the real details you’ll have to explore them yourself. The music will ring out and people will continue to follow, for that’s what people do best. Follow. Stay with us and we’ll show you the whole world through His eyes. What a magnificent sight that is.”

“WE WORSHIP THE OLDEST GOD, A PRIMAL MAJESTY”

SLEEP TOKEN’S NEW EP, TWO, IS OUT NOW VIA BASICK

METALHAMMER.COM

(This is in my Google Drive also, here.)

i love being cringe and emo in the year 2024

Princesses Dagmar and Thyra of Denmark, 1863

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BRAND NEW photographs of the Grand Duchesses, found in the Darmstardt Archive

Shared by Ilya, @sledstvie on Instagram / LastRomanovs on Flickr, these photos show the Grand Duchesses having fun with their Uncle Ernie whilst on holiday in Livadia. Whilst a few photos from this day were found in the Grand Duchesses' albums (and hence known to the public) these funny photos were hidden away in archives!

A number of previously unknown, rare, and high-quality photographs have been uncovered in the Darmstardt Archives in the recent weeks.

Reconstruction ended in the US in 1877, and during that year, as well as the years immediately post civil war, there was an especially huge push for black people to find loved ones who were sold off the other states or countries during slavery, especially those who had children fathered by their masters as their masters were the ones who sold off the child/ren or had the best information on finding them. People would send letters, put ads in newspapers, even take trips themselves to go find loved ones that they had lost due to the scurge that was slavery. And I keep thinking about Louis du pointe du lac, sending all those messages to find his daughter that was sent out of state by her white father

A Roman marble double-faced revolving panel Circa 1st-2nd Century A.D.

some older hifuu doodles because i just found out about the upcoming album and i'm so excited i'm going to explode

girl help redditors have discovered the concept of reclaiming a slur but think that it means that they can just call random people faggots without any nuance

“Flowers are so overrated. They’re bright, gaudy, and almost never make good poisons.”

*puts him in a flower crown anyway*

P-39 Airacobra, which crashed into a Tiger Moth while landing at Magenta airfield, New Caledonia, 1943

➤VIDEO: https://youtu.be/342xJDEbaTY

➤HD IMAGE: https://dronescapes.video/Airacobra

Joni Mitchell, Pittwater’s Palm Beach, New South Wales, Australia, ca. 1978.