I just saw the news about John Blanche. RIP John. Thank you for everything. Absolute legend.
John Blanche, the legendary illustrator whose art helped define the grimdark Warhammer 40,000 setting, has died.
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@renatoram
I just saw the news about John Blanche. RIP John. Thank you for everything. Absolute legend.
John Blanche, the legendary illustrator whose art helped define the grimdark Warhammer 40,000 setting, has died.
You know... a lot of things suck in the world, so I'll spread some joy: a couple of young musicians and sound guys in Genoa (Italy) were inspired by the NPR Tiny Desk concerts (Indoor, a handful of ppl in the audience, but genuine and with extra good audio and video quality) and they went and made their own.
It's called Live From The Docks (Genoa is a port city after all) and they had three episodes so far.
Seeing young musicians play with passion is honestly refreshing... if you were brooding that the new generations only seem to listen to terrible slop, and forgot the joy of making music with your own hands and voices... think again.
They're out there, it's just that the "music industry" doesn't care. This is the first ep: these kids literally met in high school, and props to them.
(songs in Italian, but whatever, give 'em a listen)
Graphic designer and filmmaker Saul Bass was born on May 8, 1920. #botd Master of the title sequence.
Lunedì ho fatto un salto in piazza quando lo spoglio elettorale aveva spogliato abbastanza il risultato. C'era una bella folla eterogenea. Ho incrociato uno del sindacato tutto sorridente che mi fa "non ci sono mica abituato, a vincere qualcosa".
Ma visto che a sinistra i momenti di felicità hanno un ciclo di vita inferiore a quello della drosophila melanogaster, è partito da subito lo sport che va per la maggiore da qualche lustro a questa parte: l'ombrellatura - che consiste nell'infilare arbitrariamente sotto il proprio ombrello eventi socio-politici dalla correlazione ambigua se non completamente inesistente.
Dal 2015 di Podemos in Andalusia al referendum costituzionale, ogni battito d'ali di farfalla in Brasile è un chiaro segnale dell'imminente riscossa del centrosinistra italiano, a prescindere dal fatto che la sinistra parlamentare italiana sia da più di un quarto di secolo in stato di incoscienza (cognitiva e di classe).
Al termine di una campagna in cui il ruolo del leone l'hanno fatto per lo più i comitati civici, tentando di entrare nel merito tecnico delle questioni e spiegando come l'approvazione della riforma fosse un problema trasversale, con aspetti, sì, ideologici, ma impatti concreti per tutti, i politici più morigerati hanno espresso commenti tipo che questo voto è stato un segnale di mancata rappresentanza del governo rispetto al popolo (ci sta, pur concorrendo al premio Grazie Al Cazzo™ 2026) ma altri, soprattutto in area PD, hanno direttamente fatto un salto quantico ascrivendo l'intera platea elettorale pro-no ad elettori propri, così, sulla fiducia.
Avrei detto che sarebbe stato un ottimo momento per una riflessione a sinistra tipo: c'è più gente di quanto pensassimo disposta a infilarsi in una cabina elettorale per qualcosa in cui crede, mentre alle politiche non ci caga; facciamoci due domande sui temi che proponiamo e come. E invece.
Giusto per aggiungere un dato (anche se non ho la fonte sottomano), mi dicevano ieri che stando a sondaggi fatti post referendum, solo il SETTE PERCENTO dei "no" sostiene di aver votato in quel modo perche' seguiva le indicazioni di un partito.
Ovvero, il 93% di chi ha votato "no" sostiene di averlo fatto per via del merito della domanda, non perche' sostiene questo o quel partito.
Tra questo e proiettare "il 53% degli elettori voterebbe per noi" mi pare che ce ne passi un bel po'.
It’s a dangerous business Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.
book cover illustrations, respectively, by Doug Beekman and Tristan Elwell
Y'all understand this is my job, right?
Same, @mockramblings. Same.
Oh, I wish sometimes I could draw a protection ring around my desk...
Less than three days to back Swords Without Master on Kickstarter!
To celebrate this amazing run we've had, I want to take time to highlight the artists we've been able to bring in thanks to your support!
A ttrpg of strange sorceries, ferocious deeds, and astounding wonder by Epidiah Ravachol.
First, let me tell you a bit about Swords Without Master:
Do you long to play games that feel like the pulpiest of Conan the Barbarian adventures? Do you dream of taking your friends to places stranger than those visited by Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser? Do you seek to don the chainmail, leather, furs and ferocity of Red Sonya, Valeria or Jirel of Joiry? Well, friends, this might be the game for you!
A no-prep storytelling game where the dice drive the tone, not the tension, Swords Without Master will take you and your table on a journey to unknown realms, unimagined ages, and unforgettable adventure!
Once findable only in Worlds Without Master Issue #3, Swords Without Master is now on kickstarter - but only until the last seconds of Friday, February 13th!
And why kickstarter? To create a beautiful standalone book, of course! But also -- and this is where I come in -- to build for you a library of the best and strangest and most enticing Eidolon Folios the world has ever seen!
What is an Eidolon Folio? It is a collection of eight tarot-sized art cards, featuring on the front beautiful illustrations designed to inspire you at the table with worlds, characters, monsters, magics, mysteries and more - and on the back? prompts for play, tricks for rogues, and more ways to build up and expand your game into new realms!
What am I doing with all this? I am painting a folio, yes! But also - I am art directing, helping Epidiah and Nathan at Unwritten Earths by working directly with our artists to create a lineup of swords, sorceries and much more to make your games as evocative and surprising as possible!
And that is why we need you to help us - we have two stretch goals left in these final days of our kickstarter, and they are really incredible:
We are *so close* to funding our Sword and Planet eidolon folio, featuring @simon-roy's incredible worldbuilding chops let loose!
And for one last big dream before we wrap up:
A deck of creatures, monsters, strangeness and magic from such greats as @monstermonger, @so-engery, and @azuresasha! Baleful and haunting, haunted and beastly, it's going to be a doozy. Help us get there before it's too late!
And stay tuned for some artist profiles, because I have a lot of praises to sing before this kickstarter wraps!
With just under 60 hours left on the campaign, I'm going to celebrate the Swords Without Master kickstarter as the art director by highlighting the artists we've been able to bring on board thanks to your amazing support!
First up I want to highlight Goran Gligović! I admit I’m a bit starstruck to have Goran joining us on Swords Without Master! Goran’s been an artist I’ve admired for a long time - he has an unignorable voice across a range of styles, and it’s strange, magical, dark - and also funny.
Okay you've been good so here's the Witch-king's shell of rot and verdigris
It might be that I also have the iron age material culture research bug, but I love seeing how Goran will find the strangest historical artifacts and then use them to ground his designs of epic fantasy characters like the Witch-king, Elric, Ged.
For Swords Without Master, Goran is producing the “An Age Before Time” eidolon folio - eight tarot-sized art cards, designed to give your table all the inspiration you need to play out epic stories in a magical, strange, grim and darkly funny world.
Goran’s first card was a delight to get in my inbox, and I can’t wait to find out what else he has up his sleeve!
Dopo il blackout di stanotte ed il pensiero (che faccio sempre) che questa piattaforma possa morire da un giorno all'altro, ho iniziato seriamente a fare un pensierino su Substack.
Se non altro per due motivi, hanno un editor nettamente più serio (addirittura in LaTex!! 😍) ed entrano più soldi, che nel mondo in cui viviamo non è sinonimo di garanzia, ma di sicuro ha più chance di questa baracca a conduzione familiare più volte dichiarata in perdita dal suo CEO, che è costretto a vendere gli ori di casa per far postare a noi le foto dei culi.
Mi mancheranno le API, per quanto quelle di Tumblr siano un colabrodo, una volta capiti i workaround da applicare, fanno il loro egregio lavoro.
Devo solo trovare il coraggio del primo post, poi uno inizia a prenderci gusto.
Fun fact: Substack fa i soldi hostando newsletter dei nazi
I just really hate the word "fandom". It's just a portmanteau of "fan" and "random". It sounds like some desperate attempt to be quirky and different. Plus, the word "fanbase" already exists.
idk, i thought it was fan + kingdom, or fanatic + domain??
but yeah, it is a bit weird how we have ‘fandom’ when ‘fanbase’ already existed? but that’s language for you, always changing all the time
Actually, Anon, fandom is significantly older than fan base or fanbase; the OED gives the first known citation of fandom meaning “the community of fans of a thing” from 1903, while their first entry for fan base isn’t until the 1970s. If you compare the frequencies of the two terms in Google Ngram Viewer, you’ll see that fandom has historically been far more frequent, with fan base running a distant second (and the closed form fanbase an even more distant third).
The OED also rejects your portmanteau hypothesis, though I suppose sportswriters from the 1900s might’ve been trying to be quirky and different when they coined fandom from the productive derivational suffix -dom, which the OED also gives copies examples of throughout the 1800s (including BA-dom, old fogey-dom, blizzard-dom and theater-dom.
Respect the fandom, guys. It’s older than Steve Rogers.
-dom is a suffix, not a word part of a portmanteau, XYZ-dom means "the set of things/people that have the state or quality of XYZness"
Cfr Christendom a word from the 1500s that means "all of Christianity".
Or fiefdom, the sum of things in a fief (feud, domain).
Swords Without Master has arrived!
I come to you with unmatched good news!
The glorious tabletop RPG Swords Without Master (previously only available in Worlds Without Master Issue #3) is being released as a standalone book!
The game is live on kickstarter, awaiting your support to manifest itself in the most glorious and fitting form: a book, custom dice, and a true dragon’s hoard of art in the form of eidolon card folios!
Draw Your Swords!
map by Ripley Matthews
Treasures for the Mind
What excites me most about playing Swords Without Master? The genre-ful feast the game entices you to imagine as you play!
Your rogues: sworn to those whose names they hold; armored in remnants of adventures past; gleaming with determination, obsession or glorious doom.
Your realm: writhing storm clouds over thrice-cursed swampland; a dessicated dragon corpse hollowed out into an unearthly church; crumbling castle ruins hiding an ephemeral market of artifacts, amulets, spells and swords.
All of you at the table alternately feted and foiled by the whim of the dice — driven into stories both jovial and glum, given gifts of both mysteries and morals, and so much more.
Begin Your Quest!
eidolon by Jabari Weathers
Treasures for the Eye
What brought me into the inner workings of this endeavour?
I have the honour of contributing to this glorious game as the art director! I have been working with Epidiah Ravachol and Nathan D Paoletta at Unwritten Earths to make sure that the illustrations are as wondrous and strange as the game deserves, and I am over the moon with what we have in store for you!
What wonders await you in this new edition?
There will be beautiful cover art from the brilliant Erin Vest, whose work captures the wonder, mystery, glumness and joviality we love in Swords Without Master!
The book will be filled to bursting with glorious interior artwork, all of it held together with evocative glyphs designed by Elemei!
glyphs by Elemei
We are also creating beautiful folios of artful tarot-sized eidolon cards, to inspire you as you play!
The kickstarter is launching with four folios of 6 cards each:
Master Selu Fyrmyor’s Pilfered Charts of the Knowable World maps by Ripley Matthews, Fernando Salvaterra, Arlin Ortiz and Kyle Latino
An Age Before Time illustrated by Goran Gligović
The Sepulchre of Astonishments illustrated by Jabari Weathers
Trials of the Stargazers illustrated by me, Shel Kahn
Peruse Our Treasures!
eidolon by Goran Gligović
Treasures for the Hand
Some treasures cannot be available forever – hand-made custom low-vision accessible tone dice, say.
The unparalleled Jaydot Dice is crafting tone bones – pairs of oversized (20mm) 6-sided dice to help you roll for glum or jovial tones. They will be distinguishable visually and through touch, and due to the skilled labour involved in each set, they are limited edition kickstarter exclusives.
If these speak to you, do not miss this chance to snag a set!
Tell Your Story!
eidolon by Shel Kahn
The Bear, for Swords Without Master
Is it wise to negotiate with the great bear? ✨⚔️🐻 We are inching closer every day to the launch of the Swords Without Master kickstarter (learn more!), and I wanted to share my first folio card!
It feels so good to be back in the illustration chair after a long break to work in other art roles, folks, and I could not have picked a better project to dive back in for!
Swords Without Master is a game that delivers high pulp sword and sorcery goodness, and I consider myself a connoisseur of such things! If you want to learn more, check the link in the first post, or head over to bluesky to follow @epidiah.bsky.social and @unwrittenearths.bsky.social for updates!
(and don’t wait, as big news is approaching fast!)
I am shocked at how many people don't have an actively hostile relationship with advertising
I am skipping your ads as fast as I can. I'm skipping past your sponsor read. I'm muting the tv. I'm muting the tab. If they get too annoying I will simply stop trying to watch.
If advertisers can use every manipulative trick in the book to get me to buy their product, I am fully within my rights to do everything I can on my end to make their job impossible
Especially given aggressive ad placement sometimes outright BREAKS WEBSITES. Congrats, I can no longer do the thing I came to your site to do but oh well, you sure shoved that pizza video ad in my face!
Also also... Ad networks have been one of the most common attack vectors for malware for the last 25 years: the networks act as brokers, middlemen between the companies that want to advertise and the websites that want ad money... And they SHOULD vet the advertisers and ads, but really, many don't.
So you create a fake company in some far away country, register as a business, prepare the spyware/virus (often some malware that targets specific home banking services using exploits in non-updated browsers) and publish it through an ad broker.
Blocking ads is basic computer security. More important than an antivirus and surely more important than running a firewall on your pc that only goes online through some wifi router.
There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.
At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.
Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.
Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.
The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.
At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.
Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐,
貞志篤終誓穹蒼,
欽所感想妄淫荒,
心憂增慕懷慘傷。
In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.
Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng
The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."
Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心,
荒淫妄想感所欽,
蒼穹誓終篤志貞,
唐虞聖德懷智仁。
The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.
It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén
And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."
That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!
At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:
詩圖璇玑,始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."
Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖,璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."
Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.
For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.
Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).
Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:
- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.
- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.
- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions
- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.
So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision
And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".
Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.
The heart at the center was filled after all.
At WordCamp Canada 2025, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg called Tumblr his “biggest failure,” noting the challenge of maintaining the platform
This happens mainly because they keep considering T* with the same mainstream, mass-maximization logic of every other social platform — just another mass-market product.
They don’t get that T’s true, premium audience are the queers, the students, the book readers, the artists, the girls, and the lovers of drugs and sex... people who do not want to be “personalized” or “maximized” or "targetized" and who couldn’t care less about the mainstream. If they did, they’d be on Instagram.
These people of Automattic, and before them the guys of Yahoo, are trying to turn a writers’ café into a McDonald’s, and they can’t figure out why it doesn’t work. But why could it? Strange, huh? @thebibliosphere
Worth pointing out, maybe, that the dude is an ass.
One that has a "Disputes" section on his wikipedia page.
And has invested in mass surveillance (ring), bitcoin (coindesk) and Musk's space fashtech (SpaceX).
So feel free to point to him and go "ha ha!"
QUEL SIGNORE NON È LO SCOPRITORE DEL DNA
Lo chiamo signore perché insultare i morti non sta bene. James Watson è morto il 6 novembre 2025, a 97 anni, e nel 1962 ha vinto il Nobel per un articoletto di un paio di pagine, pubblicato con Fracis Crick, in cui descriveva la struttura del DNA.
La foto alla base della "scoperta" è la famosa Foto 51, una delle tante foto che Rosaslind Franklin produsse col suo enorme lavoro mirato proprio a questa scoperta. Watson e Crick vinsero il Nobel per quell'articolo, Franklin no, un po' perché era morta in precedenza, un po' perché col cavolo che gli hanno dato alcun merito.
Watson si è dimostrato, negli anni, uno dei peggiori esseri umani non dittatori esistenti, con uscite razziste e imbarazzanti a non finire. Ma non sono qui per scrivere la sua biografia, me la sto prendendo con la stampa italiana.
Molti hanno titolato col fatto che lui abbia scoperto il DNA, di seguito un piccolo esempio
Ebbene, no.
La scoperta risale al 1869, da parte di Friedrich Miescher e lo chiamò Nucleina. Quasi 100 anni prima del Nobel e più di 80 anni prima della pubblicazione dell'articolo con Crick. Che fosse il DNA a portare l'informazione genetica e non le proteine lo scopriro Avery nel 1943 (con un esperimento fichissimo che ricordo ancora adesso a 22 anni da quella lezione di microbiologia, ma che è lungo da spiegare) e Hershey e Chase nel 1953 (con un secondo esperimento di microbiologia memorabile che abbatté definitivamente i dubbi ancora lasciati dall'esperimento di Avery) (se volete, entrambi gli esperimenti sono su wikipedia).
Watson e Crick hanno vinto il Nobel per aver pubblicato la descrizione fisica del DNA. Essi hanno, per primi, descritto la sua struttura.
Sono stati i primi a dire che il DNA è una doppia elica.
Con un paper di un paio di pagine e con dati rubati.
Io non volevo parlare di Watson, è stata una persona abbastanza sgradevole da meritare la mia indifferenza, ma la stampa italiana ce la mette tutta per farmi inalberare.
My uncle just sent this to me
He understands my level of humor