A Most Majestic Fly Whisk

  Profile/Part I, The Twenties: Liza in High Cotton  by Romare Bearden (1978) It is this line that consummates the love, and it is this central spondaic foot that is the metrical consummation of the whole structure. The meter conducts the argument. The meter is the poem...It is thus possible to suggest that a great metrical achievement is more than the mark of a good technician: it is something like the signature of a great man.  -  Fussel's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form Way too short for the task at hand This is (partially) a response to a much older post written by Marcia B but the actual inspiration for it comes from her recent one analyzing the math of Long Live HD . I read it this morning, liked it, and moved on...until I picked up The Poem's Heartbeat  again over lunch. I've been studying it over the past couple weeks in an attempt to work out some prosodic characteristics for the mock-epic side of my current project, but in combination with the new post on dice math a

  Family photo! The star twins  Kasajja and Kawuugulu are in the middle of the back row, with their cousins Mpuunyi and  Nyoolaevvubuka framing them at their left and right, respectively. The royal spear Kawawa stands in the center, while the youngest and smallest ensemble members - the  Nyamitongo drums - wait near the alms basket and beer gourd . This post has several parents - the proximate cause was my stumbling across stories about the haughty royal drum Karinga while trawling Kagame's dynastic histories of the Nyiginya Kingdom for setting material, but it owes a lot to Sofinho's excellent Blades with Brains  and Vulnavia's older (but also extremely cool) post A Family of Evil Swords  over at The Lovely Dark. T he most direct inspiration was provided by the  Kawuugulu ensemble: a powerful collection of item-relatives belonging to the Little White Mushroom ( Butiko , Aboobutiko pl.) Clan of the Ganda who fight malignant spirits, ward off drought, "bind hearts tog

Don't be alarmed by the French, the video is mostly in English  Jan Vansina was one of African history's legends - a rare example of a scholar who not only had a hand in shaping the development of an entire field but remained nimble enough to reassess that influence long after he had become a living institution. More than once, he'd write  the book on a topic (working with oral records, reconstructing deep histories in Equatorial Africa, etc), tearing apart centuries of colonial scholarship in the process, and then proceed to blow up the new consensus that arose around  his own work with another book a decade or so later. Vansina did this at least three different times - a historian's historian. He's been on my mind a lot recently, since I'm re-reading one of his books for inspirational purposes as I work on a tabletop thing based heavily on his work, and I thought it would be fun to introduce the man here in all his accented Belgian glory.  It's such a joy

Nizari village shrine in Porshnev, Gorno-Badakhshan, Tajikistan In what appears to be an inescapable pattern, I read through Mechnoir + its three transmissions as part of an attempt to learn more about the plot node maps that Technoir -derivatives employ and wound up with this. I might go back and form it into a proper transmission later, but I just wanted to get some ideas out for now. It's still too wordy for the typical TECH-ENV-SOC openers that transmissions employ, anyways. Mechnoir is gonzo in a pretty fun way: definitely soft on the ol' sci-fi Mohs hardness scale and the three major factions dueling over Mars are clone cult Jehovah's Witnesses, mechboxing-obsessed anarchocommunists, and a celebrity NRM in "Hashashin" cosplay (two out of three are cults based on real world religions - an interesting choice.) All are probably worth exploring a bit more, but I was drawn to the Shiat al-Raj'a for much the same reason that I was to  Eclipse Phase 's Ma

  The young king Kwet aPe of the Kuba, seen here with ANTI-GOD CHARMS fashioned for him by a travelling Nsappa Sap (Songye) sorcerer to break the GOD DOOM CURSE on his dynasty.  From Vansina's Being Colonized: The Kuba Experience in the Rural Congo, 1880-1960 Interested parties (my brother and my roommate) have informed me that the passing reference to Africanist philosopher Thaddeus Metz in the previous part of this readalong was " out of place " and delivered with " a shockingly pretentious off-handedness ." This was fantastic news for my future as a loser with an rpg blog, so I've decided to follow up the win by employing the most annoying method possible to explain what I meant by relational personhood and the Basongye - an extended book excerpt :  "There are two ways to be part of or party to a communal relationship, either as a subject or an object. Being a subject involves identifying with others and exhibiting solidarity with them oneself. A

Pangolins, made     for moving quietly also, are models of exactness, on four legs; on hind feet plantigrade,   with certain postures of a man. Beneath sun and moon, man slaving   to make his life more sweet, leaves half the flowers worth having,         needing to choose wisely how to use his strength;            a paper-maker like the wasp; a tractor of foodstuffs,         like the ant; spidering a length            of web from bluffs              above a stream; in fighting, mechanicked              like the pangolin - Marianne Moore Got wiped by a twelve-hour shift and worked myself into a funk listening to Jewels of Thought   on loop -  still processing Pharaoh Sanders' death - so instead of Lupupan Magic Two, we're doing pangolins; looking at a pangolin is clinically proven to reduce stress. This post is brought to you by two women named Mary. The other Mary is legendary anthropologist and ethnographer Mary Douglas, who wrote about the role of the pangolin cult extensive