thehoveringbrain

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Midas, the Touched by John Patrick Gañas

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Do you get seasonal depression in the summer?

#!!!! Spring. Not now. Some years back

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Metropolis (1927) Set Preserved in the German Cinema Museum

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Doing a final proofreading pass on my dissertation before I deposit it and it goes in the repository where people can actually look it up and read it. Decided, just to be sure, let's go ahead and run a spellcheck through Word.

It identified nearly 50,000 spelling errors, which I'm now going through one by one. Most of these are just because I'm a medievalist, so the whole document is thoroughly salted with Old and Middle English words that the spellcheck is parsing as typos. So far I've found one actual typo ("arrangemnt" for "arrangement"), one word that's apparently not common enough to be in Word's dictionary (brewster), and this oddity:

I have not marked the first part of this with "ignore". Word apparently just got overwhelmed and only checked the last third. Fascinated by this.

Anyway, this is the first medieval block quote I've reached, so we'll have to see if it keeps up like this.

#I FEEL YOU SO MUCH #I love my passive voice and i always got top grades in my literature classes AND i took syntax classes i know what i'm doing word #Ugh i hate these style suggestions #On the other hand of the spectrum sits openoffice. Which i want to love but can't seem to UNDERSTAND that i might wanna write #In a language different from my computer's UI. So it the orthography package that i have installed refuses to activate

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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

#No??? And i have 2 to 3 coffees a day. But i only drink espressos #Also my mum who drinks up to 5 espressos a day never had these

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Do you think faking your own death should be illegal?

#I'm pretty sure it is in most countries....?

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Shakespeare Fun Fact

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Two of Pentacles and The Lovers

You've decided to save on your wedding budget by not buying expensive fancy clothes you're only going to wear once.

#this is a thing i think about so often. Because yeah that's a silly way to spend money. But also i cannot see myself having the courage #To get a niiiiiice dress and re-wear it a lot. But also once in a life time buying a super fancy gown is a nice treat ya know #But also i like historical clothings. But also my culture's folk costumes suck/are non existent. But also i really just want to spend #Those money on a custom-made proper corset. But no one will see it you know? Plus the best corset makers are all in the uk....

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Pitcrawler digital is here!

Behold! The digital edition of Pitcrawler is here!

...if you backed it on IndieGoGo, at least. The rest of you will have to wait another month or two to Behold! it, I'm afraid.

It's been a real labour of love this last year to get it all ready for folks, and we're so happy to be sharing it. If you backed the campaign, you should have it in a Backerkit email that came through to you inbox (or your spam if your computer's suspicious) last week. If you haven't had it, let us know.

And for everybody else, here's a little tast of what's to come after we've sorted printing and it goes public.

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Today's aesthetic: cosmic horror tabletop RPGs from the 1980s whose creators wrote the "madness rules" by simply plagiarising a list of disorders and their descriptions from the DSM-II and turning it into a d100 lookup table, except the DSM-II still listed "homosexuality" as a mental disorder (it wasn't removed until the DSM-III), with the result that there are several published tabletop RPGs where there's a small but non-zero chance that seeing Cthulhu will make you gay.

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Odd interaction at the bookstore yesterday. Got summoned to the register in my capacity as Employee Who Knows About Old Books because a customer wanted to know what Don Quixote was about.

(Yes, this does mean that the employee already at the register wasn’t able to answer that question. I have a lot of “what are they teaching you in those schools?” interactions with my younger co-workers.)

Anyway, I gave the customer a quick synopsis. He asked if I’d recommend it, and I said I would, that it was not only well-written but also pretty accessible & engaging for a novel written four hundred years ago. Then he asked if he would “see things differently after reading it.”

He then elaborated that he really liked Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist and wanted other books he read to have a similar paradigm-shifting effect.

(I haven’t read The Alchemist, specifically because every time someone recommends it to me they use this same kind of language, which makes me feel like they’re trying to get me to join a cult rather than read a book.)

We are in a college town, so “young person who’s just learned what philosophy and poetry are and now thinks of themselves as Deep” is a Type of Guy we encounter fairly frequently.

(Just a few hours before this, I overheard a young man recommending a book to his female companion because it would “help with her creative energies”.)

So it’s not that this is particularly unusual in vibes, it’s more that… this seems like an odd standard to hold a novel to before you read it. And it’s an odd question to ask your local bookseller — “will this book change my life?” I dunno, man, I don’t know your life. Maybe it will, books do that sometimes.

Anyway, I told him “probably”, because honestly Don Quixote is a really good book and I think more people should read it. And, I dunno, maybe it will make him see things differently.

(It might even make him see novels as intrinsically worth reading rather than as vessels for personal change.)

I have no idea if that worked, because as mentioned I wasn’t at the register at the time. I went back to organizing the used books and didn’t see him again. Kind of hope he bought it.

(To be clear, at no point during this conversation was he holding a copy of Don Quixote. I had to instruct him to look under “C” for “Cervantes” if he decided he wanted to buy it. His curiosity was sparked by a set of novelty bookends.)

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#chips galore. I love biscuit ice creams

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Lancelot crossing the sword-bridge

[ID: A medieval illustration showing the knight Lancelot crossing a bridge that is a giant sword placed across a river. Lancelot wears his helmet, arm and leg armour, and chain mail, but his hands and feet are unarmored as he crawls across the giant sword, using his hands and feet to grip the sharp edges. Across the river is a castle where King Bademagu and either Prince Maleagant or Queen Guinevere look down out of a window. On the far side of the castle where the land curves away behind the wall, two lions watch. In the distance are plains, a town, and hills rising into the sky. End ID.]

Read this story for free on Project Gutenberg.

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personal rules for winter ❄

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#white tea can be so good.... when you don't burn it. But most days i'm drinking prince of wales which is as dark as it gets lol

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saw a poll about dry/humid heat and like OBVIOUSLY everyone preferred dry heat but. would love to know what everyone considers to be “too hot”

me personally it’s a hard cutoff at 75°F. don’t need anything more than that thank you 🫶🫶🫶

#15°C is a complicated weather to dress for but it's nice. 20 is warm. 22 is uuuuuugh now i can't walk fast too warm

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💎 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺! Unstoppable Heart
Wondrous item, very rare (requires attunement) ___

This smooth, copper device looks a bit like a mechanical heart. Glowing red solution moves through its internal chambers and valves in perfect sequence. As part of attuning to the heart, you must hold it against your chest for the duration. Once you’re attuned to it, it magically vanishes within your chest and begins to beat alongside your normal heart.

While inside your body, the heart grants you the following benefits:

• You can move an additional 10 feet whenever you take the Dash action. • You have advantage on Constitution saving throws made to resist poison and to endure a forced march. • You have resistance to poison damage. • Whenever you roll a Hit Die to regain hit points, you double the number of hit points it restores. • You stabilize whenever you are dying at the start of your turn. • You reduce your exhaustion level by two whenever you finish a long rest, instead of one.

If your attunement to the heart ends, it magically appears in your open hand or in the nearest unoccupied space. ___

✨ Patrons get huge perks! Access this and hundreds of other item cards, art files, and compendium entries when you support The Griffon’s Saddlebag on Patreon for less than $10 a month!