sorry if i am currently not publishing much. i am currently deep in a hyperfixation on leprosy, medieval geopolitics and logistics all in the sloping shape of Balduin IV.
Bear religion probably fucking rocks. You're a fucking bear, you're the deadliest thing on earth, once a year an endless supply of salmon just flings itself up the river to gorge on and then you nap for 3 months.
The most delicious food in the world is protected by tiny demons who can defend it from everyone except you. Your natural armor is thick enough that you can just eat the damn hive while they buzz around you. God's chosen animals right there
Regular bears tell stories of angel bears sent by the Bear God, pure white and twice as strong as any normal bear could be, who rule the summit of the Earth and kill all who stand in their path.
And they are right, those bears exist and totally do that. Humans just have fake angels as a cope.
love the idea of bears being the chosen species actually. having a near death experience and glimpsing heaven and realising it's just full of bears, no humans at all, humans not ensouled actually, humans an accidental byproduct of God's plan for bears
He Man Masters of the Universe is the definition of absolute cinema. I was smiling the whole time, I sang along to the soundtrack, and laughed out loud many times. I loved how they translated the dialogue into live action and how cheesy it was
The movie is cool, it's funny, the action scenes are so cartoonish. The movie embraced the cringe. I was expecting it to be tolerable, but it was an amazing experience
Instead of a feudal mud village number 9000 this time the Imperium discovers a world frozen in the industrial victorian era.
Lion El’Jonson
The Lion immediately becomes the subject of urban legends. Nobody knows if he is a detective or a ghost and he encourages this confusion by answering no questions and appearing in locked rooms.
He appears only in the fog usually near political scandals or hunting lodges where someone is absolutely committing treason. He doesn’t mingle with high society, he simply watches then one morning twelve corrupt lords are found alive, unharmed, and completely broken, having confessed to crimes nobody knew had happened. The Lion gives no statement.
Fulgrim
Fulgrim becomes the most adored and hated man in the entire capital. He attends one single salon and instantly dominates society, painters want to paint him, poets want to die tragically near him and aristocrats copy his hair.
He publishes an essay about beauty, ruins three marriages, causes two duels and becomes the patron of an opera house where every production is so beautiful and morally concerning that the Ecclesiarchy starts taking notes. He absolutely adores velvet fainting couches, scandalous portraits and the ability to destroy someone socially with one sentence at dinner.
Perturabo
He loves and hates this new planet with volcanic intensity. On one hand he has factories, railways, bridges, foundries, an entire civilization that understands industry but on the other hand everything is inefficient. Perturabo enters one engineering institute and leaves three hours later having demolished the reputation of every man inside.
He redesigns the railway network overnight but nobody thanks him properly, thus begins the Industrial Grudge. He becomes a brutal reforming magnate who builds perfect infrastructure while being emotionally unbearable to everyone involved. Workers fear him, engineers worship him and politicians resent him because he keeps proving their entire ministries are decorative.
Jaghatai
He dresses like a foreign prince in a world that can't decide whether to exoticize him, fear him or ask him to please slow down. He loves trains and locomotives that scream across the landscape like iron horses with furnace hearts.
He becomes obsessed with rail speed records and long distance courier routes. He also becomes beloved by postal workers, messengers, cavalry officers and every street child who dreams of running away.
Russ
Russ becomes a scandalous northern lord with a terrifying estate and absolutely no respect for polite society. Aristocrats invite him to dinner because he is politically useful then stop inviting him after he drinks too much, insults the soup, calls the heir weak and lets three enormous hounds sleep under the dining table… then they invite him again because he is extremely entertaining.
He loves drinking clubs and making fragile gentlemen uncomfortable, he also has a soft spot for underfed servant children, this causes trouble because when Russ discovers the cruelty of the workhouses he arrives personally and with dogs.
Dorn
He looks at the Victorian city and immediately thinks: fire hazard, poor drainage, indefensible layout and unacceptable bridge design. He becomes the most severe urban reformer in history, his buildings aren’t beautiful but are impossible to destroy. Victorian newspapers call his style Oppressive Practicalism and Dorn takes this as praise.
He is extremely good at building the kind of world that survives itself, unfortunately he communicates all of this like a brick wall wearing a waistcoat. At parties people ask if he enjoys music and he answers that the concert hall requires additional exits.
Konrad Curze
Jack the Ripper retires not because the streets became suddenly safe but because there’s something even more dangerous lurking now. He becomes an urban legend called The Night Judge.
Newspapers write about him, children dare each other to say his name in alleyways, criminals leave town while politicians pretend not to believe in him while secretly increasing their private guards. He reads the newspapers about himself and corrects their grammar in blood red “ink”.
Sanguinius
Sanguinius becomes the beloved prince of the age, even bitter old aristocrats soften when he enters the room. He is painted constantly in oils, stained glass, lithographs and even in devotional cards sold in street markets. Every version fails to capture him and artists become mildly obsessed.
He attends hospitals, orphanages and charity balls but unlike most Victorian charity figures he does actually care. A factory owner gives a speech about productivity and moral discipline and Sanguinius looks sad… the man funds safety reforms the next morning.
Ferrus
Ferrus becomes the patron saint of foundries, mechanics and angry apprentices. He has no time for etiquette and goes straight to the machine shops. He improves everything he touches, Victorian industry advances thirty years because Ferrus got annoyed by a badly made machine.
He respects skilled labor more than most nobles and certainly more than most factory owners. If a machinist knows their craft, Ferrus listens, if a gentleman investor starts talking without technical knowledge Ferrus mentally kills him. He and Fulgrim get into an infamous public argument at the Great Exhibition.
Angron
Victorian society isn’t ready for Angron with all its cruelty hidden under manners and speaking of morality while profiting from misery. He sees through all of it and riots.
Angron becomes a working class agitator and walking emergency, factory owners fear him more than fire, police commissioners dread his name while workers tell stories about him in pubs with shining eyes. He can’t fix the system because he is too broken and too furious to build institutions but he can absolutely destroy a sweatshop owner’s carriage with his bare hands.
Guilliman
He becomes the prime minister in six months. He didn’t even try to, he simply started attending committees and everyone realizes he’s the only person in the room who has read the reports. Victorian bureaucracy is his natural habitat and his enemy for he loves institutions but hates inefficiency.
He produces reform bills at terrifying speed, the civil service both worships and fears him because he actually understands budgets. High society considers him somewhat dull until they realize he can destroy a noble family’s entire financial position with one polite question in the parliament.
Mortarion
Mortarion belongs in the industrial smog, he walks through cholera districts and plague, he is revoltingly durable and grimly useful. Doctors hate him because he ignores polite medical theory and somehow keeps people alive through brutal practicality and priests dislike him because the poor trust him more.
He becomes a myth among the sick, the pale giant who enters fever houses and comes out alive. He doesn’t comfort or offer gentle words, he simply says “drink this” and it works.
Magnus the Red
Magnus becomes the most dangerous man in Victorian academia. He is invited to universities and mystic groups alike and hosts lectures where half the audience faints and the other half forms a society.
He attends séances and corrects the spirits, translates cursed tablets in public and discovers that the planet’s fashionable occult society has accidentally been worshiping something real. He absolutely owns a red velvet smoking jacket.
Horus
Horus becomes the empire’s golden statesman. Aristocrats trust him, workers admire him, reformers think he understands them… conservatives also think he understands them. His speeches are printed and passed around in factories and clubs alike.
Soon everyone wants him to lead and Horus begins as a unifying national hero and gradually becomes the center of a movement.
Lorgar
Victorian planets have religious anxiety everywhere so Lorgar effortlessly thrives, he steps into this world and becomes a prophet by accident then on purpose. He preaches and sermons are printed in cheap editions and bound in gold for the aristocracy, he can make a duchess and a factory worker cry in the same hour.
At first his message is compassion, purpose and shared destiny then the footnotes get stranger, the midnight services begin and the stained glass starts showing things no one remembers commissioning.
Vulkan
He cannot bear the victorian cruelty to children. The tiny bodies working in factories and mines? Absolutely not happening. He opens schools and shelters, teaches trades, repairs homes and personally removes children from dangerous factories and dares anyone to stop him.
The wealthy like him at first because he seems gentle and charitable until he starts asking why they own six houses while children freeze.
Corvus Corax
Corvus becomes the ghost of the labor movement. He doesn’t attend parliament or give pretty speeches but he organizes quietly.
Printing presses run at night, strike funds appear and informants inside cruel institutions start sending documents to reform papers. He is constantly hunted by the state but police raids find only empty rooms and black feathers. He becomes the reason powerful men start checking behind the curtains.
Alpharius Omegon
He runs half the secret societies and infiltrates the other half. Nobody can prove anything, every conspiracy theory about him is true except the ones he started to distract from the truer ones. Every witness describes a different man and Sherlock Holmes hears about him and retires.
The planet eventually develops an entire genre of fiction about mysterious doubles, hidden heirs, masked villains and secret empires.
i support universal free healthcare for one simple reason: if you are diagnosed with a terminal illness you should quit your job. quitting your job is the correct response to terminal illness. but you can’t do that if your healthcare is tied to your job
listen if somebody knows that they will be dead in a years time, and you are forcing them to continue to come into work, that’s fucked up. terminally ill people should be able to quit their jobs and live their last few months to the fullest. i don’t get how that’s a controversial opinion
you wanna see some badass shit from the early 20th century?? The Lumière brothers created the first full color photograph… in fucking 1903! So these dudes dyed potatoes (in red, blue, and green), mashed them down into just pure fuckin’ starch, and used these dyed potato starches as filters to block out/let in certain wavelengths of light. They coated one side of a glass plate with the starches and sensitized the other side with a mixture of gelatin and light sensitive materials (silver nitrate) and loaded these plates in their cameras.. This is a really simple explanation of the process and I may have missed some things
A few of my favorite autochrome photos:
but lets not forget sergei prokudin-gorskiy, who developed a similar process in 1902, published in 1903 and then toured russia to take hundreds of color photographs:
AND the guy developed color slide processing as well. as a person fairly familiar with modern b/w processing at home, but never EVER stepping into color (negatives or slides) territory, i’d say, BAMF to the highest degree.
Here are a few more Prokudin-Gorskiy / Gorskii shots, and a reminder once again that these aren’t recently colourised BW images but original colour photos taken about 120 years ago. Many colourised pics don’t look this good. Some modern colour pics don’t look this good (as I know all too well. “Delete image Y/N? Y!”)
This is Leo Tolstoy, author of “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”.
Alim Khan, Emir of Bukhara…
…and his Minister of the Interior.
A Type B-15 steam locomotive…
Another of those peasant girls with guest-gifts of berries…
The Church of St John the Baptist at Staraya Ladoga…
…and a Sergei Prokudin-Gorskiy self-portrait.
Unlike some current selfies ;-> he’s not dominating the image, so here’s a closer shot.
i had a 4 hour drive today so i put on the revenge of the sith audiobook and the part where palpatine tells anakin to kill dooku came on right around the time that i saw a cybertruck and for a brief and beautiful moment when he said "do it" i had the urge to ram my honda full on into that shitty ass car
