Category: Mayhem

Merlin: The Influence Of King Arthur’s Magical Mentor | Merlin – The Legend | Chronicle

This ancient story was an influence on Xen: The Zen of the Other

Merlin is the archetypal wizard, Welsh and Celtic in origin but with connections across the water in Cornwall and middle Europe, and, of course, the Arthurian legends. The powerful wizard is portrayed across folklore with many magical powers, including the power of shapeshifting, and is well-known for being King Arthur’s mentor, ultimately guiding him towards becoming the king of Camelot. In this documentary, we take a deep dive into the fantastic world of Merlin and his influence in today’s society.

So much ice is melting that Earth’s crust is moving

So much ice is melting that Earth’s crust is moving

As the continents’ frozen burden dissipates, the ground deforms — not only in the immediate area, but also in far-flung locations.

The loss of melting ice from land masses such as Greenland and Antarctica is causing the planet’s crust to warp slightly, even in spots more than 1,000 kilometres from the ice loss.

LINK: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02285-0?fbclid=IwAR1_d0xhB7frPvmD8AOizqgY8tNHtj1mZ9xJjvRJj4fPhtEmEJaHJYl5E8w

Climate Change and the Future of Cities | Eric Klinenberg

What qualities help assure that a community can survive the threat of disaster? The population density of cities leads to inherent vulnerabilities to mass climate disasters: such as single point of failure transit systems and utilities built prior to today’s environmental realities. At the same time the resources of cities offer tremendous potential for preparation and innovation.

As a sociologist, Klinenberg brings insights on how neighborhood dynamics (what he calls “social infrastructure”) can help individuals & communities prepare for extreme weather including flooding and heat waves. He discusses how cities can be wiser and think more long-term by planning traditional infrastructure projects which also enable such social infrastructure in their design.

“Climate Change and the Future of Cities” was given on March 07, 02017 as part of The Long Now Foundation’s “Conversations at The Interval” Salon Talks. These hour long talks are recorded live at The Interval, our bar, cafe, & museum in San Francisco. Since 02014 this series has presented artists, authors, entrepreneurs, scientists (and more) taking a long-term perspective on subjects like art, design, history, nature, technology, and time. To follow the talks, you can:

A Former College Professor Accused Of Serial Arson Is Denied Bail In California

Investigators say they’ve linked the Ranch Fire, pictured here shortly after its discovery, and other blazes to Gary Maynard, a former college professor. He is charged with starting only the Ranch Fire.
U.S. Forest Service

 

Firefighters battling the Dixie Fire have also been facing a second enemy: a serial arsonist who went on a spree of setting fires in July and August — and who sought to trap fire crews with his fires, according to agents from the U.S. Forest Service. They allege former college professor Gary Maynard is the culprit, citing their tracking of his movements and other evidence.

“Where Maynard went, fires started. Not just once, but over and over again,” the government said in a court memorandum arguing for Maynard to be denied bail.

LINK TO FULL ARTICLE: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/11/1026700103/former-college-professor-arson-charges-california-dixie-fire

Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made

https://youtu.be/BhRYNJOtYC8

Why The Deadliest Film Ever Made Is Finally Being Released

Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made is a cursed film is supposedly responsible for nearly 60 deaths. It’s now getting released for anyone to see.

 

One of the Writer/Director’s of Antrum said about Xen: The Zen of the Other:

…wildly creative experiments with form…through a down-to-earth lens and with a sense of humor. … I felt spoken to many times as Ezra articulated his own frustrations with life and with his own expectations of the world. – DAVID AMITO, award-winning Actor. Writer, Producer, Director of Antrum

‘One of the worst jobs I ever had’: former Citizen employees on working for the crime app

Working for the app, which feeds users local crime information, ‘is very traumatic’ and the managers ‘don’t appear to care’

“There’s nothing that tells me that that wouldn’t happen again,” one employee said. “It’s a private security force controlled by a bunch of really rich white men who have no concept of the communities that they’re supposedly protecting because all they want is money. What could go wrong?”

Link to full story: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/02/citizen-app-employees-mental-health

Rice and Beans in the Outer Darkness

Psychotherapists figured out a long time ago that a roundabout approach is necessary if you want to tease out the origins of any serious psychological problem. You won’t get there by any direct approach, since the defensive maneuvers the patient uses to keep from thinking about the real source of his problems will keep you from getting there either. That’s why dreams, slips of the tongue, and the like played so large a role in psychotherapy, back before the medical profession stopped helping people understand their problems and settled for the more lucrative option of drugging them into numbness instead. That strategy is also a viable option when the craziness we need to understand belongs to a society—ours, for example—rather than an individual.

LINK TO FULL STORY: https://www.ecosophia.net/rice-and-beans-in-the-outer-darkness/

Solar storms are back, threatening life on Earth as we know it

While invisible and harmless to anyone on the Earth’s surface, the geomagnetic waves unleashed by solar storms can cripple power grids, jam radio communications, bathe airline crews in dangerous levels of radiation and knock critical satellites off kilter.

A few days ago, millions of tons of super-heated gas shot off from the surface of the sun and hurtled 90 million miles toward Earth.

The eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, wasn’t particularly powerful on the space-weather scale, but when it hit the Earth’s magnetic field it triggered the strongest geomagnetic storm seen for years. There wasn’t much disruption this time — few people probably even knew it happened — but it served as a reminder the sun has woken from a yearslong slumber.

While invisible and harmless to anyone on the Earth’s surface, the geomagnetic waves unleashed by solar storms can cripple power grids, jam radio communications, bathe airline crews in dangerous levels of radiation and knock critical satellites off kilter. The sun began a new 11-year cycle last year and as it reaches its peak in 2025 the specter of powerful space weather creating havoc for humans grows, threatening chaos in a world that has become ever more reliant on technology since the last big storms hit 17 years ago. A recent study suggested hardening the grid could lead to $27 billion worth of benefits to the U.S. power industry.

“It is still remarkable to me the number of people, companies, who think space weather is Hollywood fiction,” said Caitlin Durkovich, a special assistant to President Joe Biden and senior director of resilience and response in the National Security Council, during a talk at a solar-weather conference last month.

 

READ THE FULL ARTICLE: https://www.pennlive.com/news/2021/05/solar-storms-are-back-threatening-life-on-earth-as-we-know-it.html

New Maps-Deindustrial Fiction

New Maps- Deindustrial Fiction

If you’re reading this now, in these early stages of New Maps, you’ve probably found your way here from Joel Caris’s Into the Ruins or John Michael Greer’s blog Ecosophia. Thanks for coming. I’m excited to be starting this new project, and making sure good deindustrial fiction will keep getting out into the world.

The first issue of New Maps is planned for early this coming winter—I’m aiming for January of 2021. Until then, though, it’s not just all me. There are some things you can do to help make the first issue as terrific as I know it can be.

First and foremost, I’m looking for stories! If you’ve written for Into the Ruins, or if you always wanted to but never got to it before the last issue was announced, I want to hear from you. For that matter, I want to read your story even if you’ve just arrived here from none of the places I mentioned above, and you’ve never even heard of deindustrial fiction before, but you’re intrigued by what you see, and want to take a crack at writing some of it. Just head over to the contact and submissions page and get in touch.
I hope you’ll consider subscribing to the first year of New Maps. Each issue will be available for individual purchase, but everyone who subscribes early helps make this magazine more possible and better from the get-go. You can subscribe now, and order single issues once they come out, at the order page.
I’m looking for letters to the editor to make up the first issue’s letters section. I realize that without any previous letters or stories to respond to, obvious topics to write about are somewhat thin on the ground, but I hope the beginning of a new publication, as well as some of the interesting new manifestations of the long decline that have shown up around us lately, will provide enough material to go on. As I keep building this site and laying more groundwork for the magazine, I may also pose some questions here. Info on how to get in touch is at the contact page.
If you’d like to keep abreast of the latest, including questions for readers to weigh in on, progress, and the occasional sale, sign up for the New Maps email list, which will keep you updated whenever news is posted here or when a new issue is on its way. (I plan to keep the amount of email manageable: likely an email every one to three months.)
Thanks, and I look forward to creating a magazine you’ll love to read.

LINK: https://www.new-maps.com/news/2020/08/a-welcome-to-new-maps/