ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝

A geologist and archaeologist by training, a nerd by inclination - books, films, fossils, comics, rocks, games, folklore, and, generally, the rum and uncanny… Let’s have it!

Elsewhere:

  • Yrtree.me - it’s still early days for me in the Fediverse, so bear with me
  • 8 Posts
  • 74 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • One Summer I got Paul G Bahn’s Journey Through the Ice Age, stuck some post-it notes in on anything that look interesting and drove down through the Dordogne to the Ariege. The wealth of ancient art is astounding, even if you just branch out from the classics, like Lascaux (which you have to do while in the area).

    So the ones that still stand out in my memory are:

    • Abri du Cap Blanc which has stunning animal carvings
    • Niaux - which is quite the experience as you get to feel quite how magical such places would be. You start high up on the valley in what would have been a great position for hunter-gatherers to spot game, then enter the cave, pass the pools and into a long, dark tunnel that opens into a huge cave with numerous animal drawings
    • Bédeilhac which is a vast cave (it housed an aircraft factory in WW2) with a range of stone age art in a number of techniques.

    Then, when you have the key locations locked down, you can search around for others, via pages like Prehistoric Sites of the Vezere Valley and the Prehistoric caves in the Ariège Pyrenees (which mentions Le Mas d’Azil, which is worth a look as the road goes through the cave but you can only see reproductions of the art, and the Prehistoric Park that might give you other pointers). It’s become a lot easier to research thanks to the Web - this seems a good place to start. Looking through that, I think that holiday I get to most of the ones in the Vezere, Lot and Ariege. They are relatively close by and the sites are usually not far from each other, so you can visit a few in one day.
















  • If you read The Scar it goes into how strange the setting is and how broken reality is in places. Some of the things in there may or may not explain some of the races, lime the cactus people. However, it is all kept very vague.

    You should probably take it as a reaction against Tolkeinesque fantasy that draws on northern European myths. There’s a wide range of influences as well as Mieville just making up oddities just for the sake of it. So, for example, Kephri is an Egyptian scarab-headed god and then everything is built around that. It doesn’t have to be plausible it just has to contribute to the strangeness.


  • That just seems so fantastically unlikely that I wonder if any of the other books in that setting explain it.

    Not in any depth/at all and it is the fantastically unlikely nature of it that is one of the attractions of the series. As the setting is possibly an infinite plane, one of many, it helps get you straight into the idea that this is a strange and almost dream-like place. After all it has to be pretty odd to spawn it’s only literary genre, even if very little has been able to achieve similar heights of weirdness.




  • Unlike the author, I don’t think that the internet is dying, but instead entering a new phase that resembles in some aspects the old internet: search has become unreliable and those mega-platforms enshittify themselves to death, so people shift to smaller (often non-commercial) platforms and find new content to follow by the hyperlinks provided by other people. It’s a lot like the internet before Google Search.

    It is definitely feeling like this is a trend, we are moving back to more curated ways of sharing information.

    The Fediverse feels like a return to the old, open Web before it was captured by Big Tech, just with new bells and whistles attached. With all the enshittification, it seems like it is well-placed to be the solution to the problem. It’s not there yet but it’s a start.


  • We had a bunch of Japanese teenagers run scripts on their computers and half the Fediverse was full of spam. If someone really cared about spamming, this shit wouldn’t stop as quickly.

    The upside of that attack is that instance Admins had to raise their game and now most of the big instances are running anti-spam bots and sharing intelligence. Next time we’ll be able to move quickly and shut it all down, where this time we were rather scrambling to catch up. Then the spammers will evolve their attack and we’ll raise our game again.