A Most Majestic Fly Whisk

An Aka father expresses a wish for his teenage son's future, seen here cutting some wood to help set up camp ( Caterpillar Moon, 1996) I read the recent False Machine post on LBJ and taking the grey pill , which almost got me to post yet another rambling annoyingly multipart Blogger comment, until I remembered that I made this to store that kind of nonsense in the first place. Despite growing up almost literally in the shadow of the LBJ Presidential Library, which I visited frequently on school trips as a callow yoof, I'm not really equipped to deal with that aspect of the post BUT the thoughts toward the end on politicians and power interact in a cool ("cool") way with other books that have been perched in my mind for a while now. Brian Hayden's ethnographic/historical work on feasting and secret societies provides a few conclusions on the development of hierarchies of leadership that seem to converge on ideas adjacent to those Patrick came up with.  The most imp...

I sometimes hang around worldbuilder spaces (I know, I know) focused specifically on magic and a thing that I've seen come up a fair amount is the question of classification. You're probably pretty familiar with the sort of topics discussed if you're looking at this, but an interesting variation that I stumbled across recently was a good-natured debate concerning the dominance of what we could annoyingly call something like ~neo-western paradigms~ when folks try to set up more structured magical systems. There's definitely merit to at least broadened forms of this point, so I thought that providing a guided tour through an ""out there"" example of a real-world system for classifying magical practice might make for some good clean edifying fun. I apologize in advance for the bad photos, I typically prefer to use PDF screenshots but this book hasn't been digitized yet and hunching over a desk with an old phone creates utilitarian results at best.  ...

from Hoover's The Seduction of Ruwej: Reconstructing Ruund History It was between the fly whisk blog name or a Ryangombe epic-cycle reference blog name and important fly whisks are a lil more global. I'm already selling out. Finally got around to posting a comment under one of the OSRish blogs that I silently watch and the experience broke me - went from "made an account to interact :)" to "another fucking guy with a tabletop blog" in under 24 hours. Easily the slipperiest slope I have ever experienced. It really was great kicking back and allowing other peoples' creativity to wash over me while it lasted. I spent most of the downtime I carved out this past summer trying to muster up the will to put some stuff up online but it seems fitting that I only found the nerve to try NOW when I have a thousand other things to do. Anyways, this is largely going to be about miombo-belt Cent. African/Inland Sea E. African history and spirituality + exploiting it for...