Wikipedia Links Slushpile 4

Slushpile index 

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

I should probably be paying more attention to the fact that the content of these posts is all compatible with Cairn.

Wikipedia Slush #4

1. Umarell
Retired old men in Italy who, having lots of free time on their hands, go stand around construction sites to watch / commentate. Life goals, honestly.

2. Beringer’s Lying Stones
1725 fossil hoax played by Johann Georg von Eckhart on Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer, dean of medicine at the University of Würzburg. The weird little guys on the stones themselves are fun in their own right, as is how the obvious chisel marks and Hebrew letters on them were taken as evidence of divine providence. Beringer took Eckhart to court after he realized he’d been duped, and the transcripts reveal that the whole thing originated in a personal beef. That’s some A-grade wizarding bullshit.

3. Andrew Vachss
By all reasonable metrics, an extremely cool human being.

• Eyepatch
• Prolific crime novelist
• Dedicated his law career to representing children and teenagers in abuse and neglect cases.
• Advocate for “dangerous” dog breeds (pit bulls, dobermans, rottweilers, etc), helped train therapy dogs as part of the above.

The thing that really caught my eye, and thank you Wikipedia Editor for putting some large direct quotes from the man front and center, is that he was keen on reframing conversations of child abuse: survival itself was not the thing to focus on, but rather those who survived abuse and did not perpetuate it. To quote the man himself:

“I believe that many people who were abused as children do themselves—and the entire struggle—a disservice when they refer to themselves as "survivors." A long time ago, I found myself in the middle of a war zone. I was not killed. Hence, I "survived." That was happenstance ... just plain luck, not due to any greatness of character or heroism on my part. But what about those raised in a POW camp called "childhood?" Some of those children not only lived through it, not only refused to imitate the oppressor (evil is a decision, not a destiny), but actually maintained sufficient empathy to care about the protection of other children once they themselves became adults and were "out of danger." To me, such people are our greatest heroes.”

4. Karnabo
One of those many folkloric stubs where my gut says it was invented by a folkorist in the 60s, but it is a good monster design: humanoid with basilisk eyes and an elephant trunk, menacing the French countryside.

5. Thirty Tyrants
Oligarchy installed in Athens by Sparta after the Peloponnesian War. Lasted eight months, in which time they proceeded to do what Spartans do best; enact brutal violence against unarmed civilians and then fold like a house of cards in a real fight.

6. Astronomical Chess
Not actually a chess variant, but a perfect wizard’s game all the same; players roll a 7-sided die to move their playing piece through the zodiac zones surrounding Earth in the center of the board (game is from 1283, after all). Points are gained and lost according to how close a piece is moved to that of another player when it moves between zones. Astrology and gambling all in one.
 
7. Ezekiel the Tragedian
A Jewish playwright from Alexandria in the 2nd or 3rd century BCE; wrote Exagōgē, an adaptation of the Exodus as a five-act stage play in the Hellenic mode. The text itself didn’t survive intact, but a fifth to a quarter of the play (269 lines) has been reconstructed from other sources - enough to show that Ezekiel had altered parts of the narrative to better fit the medium he was using.

8. Switchel
Also called haymaker’s punch; drink consisting of vinegar mixed with water, ginger, and molasses. Popular in the Americas and Caribbean from the 17th through 19th centuries.

9. Hamburg School of Astrology
A fairly radical deviation from normal astrology, focusing entirely on the midpoint between celestial bodies and inventing eight entire trans-Neptunian planets (technically not actual planets, just points in space useful for their system of astrology). The school and its members were declared enemies of the Nazi party, with founder Alfred Witte committing suicide before he could be sent to a concentration camp; his collaborator Ludwig Rudoph was interned, but he survived to the end of the war and was able to squirrel away copies of the School’s main books.

10. Green Children of Woolpit
A weird little story from 12th century Suffolk, concerning a brother and sister who appeared out of nowhere in the village of Woolpit, speaking an unknown language, possessing green skin, and eating only raw fava beans. The brother dies shortly after they’re found, and the girl claims that they came from a place called St. Martin’s Land where everything is green.

There are two almost-contemporaneous accounts of the event, which vary enough to indicate that the latter probably wasn’t directly copying the other. Whether it’s just a folk story about fairies or some exaggerated/garbled account of some lost children with hypochromic anemia, it’s great material.

11. Yi Script
I just think it’s neat.

12. Dragon’s Teeth (mythology)
Evil wizards and their constructs are just a universally useful trope, and dragon teeth are a nice break from animated armor or skeletons. Potentially more useful from a storytelling perspective, since you have to have some way to get the teeth out of a dragon and that’s ripe for conflict. And the horror of "what if a dragon's tooth soldier gets a cavity?

13. Hondridge Life Zones
Biomes demarcated by temperature, precipitation, and evaporation. The graphic. Criteria are easily mappable to dice and the graphic already comes pre-hexed for your convenience

14. Category:Low Quality Images of Horses
Friend of the blog Ian / iemcd over at Benign Brown Beast sent me this and I had to include it, for self-evident reasons that I do not have to explain or justify.

15. Lhamo Latso
A sacred lake in Tibet, where the head monks of the Gelug school convene for spiritual guidance in selecting a new Dalai Lama. 

16. Thalassogen
Term coined by Asimov for liquids capable of forming a surface ocean on a planet. Article comes with a nice table of temperature ranges for various substances, though will also be faintly disappointing by confirming that most of these substances have very small liquidity ranges. Water chauvanism wins again.

17. Magonia
lprictorez on Discord pointed this one out. A land in the clouds; home of sky pirates who descend during storms (raised by accomplice tempestarii sorcerers on earth), to pillage fields and other goods. 

18. Ui-te-Rangiora
Legendary Polynesian sailor and navigator who probably didn’t reach Antarctica (wishful mistranslation, as usual), but it would be very cool if he did.

19. Tsul’kalu
Another folklore article that’s pinging all sorts of skepticism alarms and sent me down a rabbit hole. 

Supposed to be a giant associated with the hunt from Cherokee tradition, with the plural form used in the Cherokee  translation of the Bible for the nephillim. Fair enough. But then we get increasingly off the rails with the name.

Tsul’kalu violates Cherokee syllable structure (everything’s CV or V, that’s why they use a syllabary). The Cherokee name in the article is given as “ᏧᏓᎦᎳ or ᏧᏓᎫᎳ”, which would be tsu-da-(ga/gu)-la - this is at least close to the Jutaculla / Judaculla name used in a few geographic locations. 

Then randomly it’s changed again to Tsul’kälû’, which I think is the fault of ethnologist James Mooney and irregularly applied Americanist Phonetic Notation - under APN the diäerësïs should mean the vowel is fronted, the l’ (or maybe ‘k) is potentially glottalized (if it’s not just eliding a vowel), no clue why there’s a circumflex there. I don’t know, APN is an absolute trainwreck

Anyway I got here because Manly Wade Wellman used the name in a vaguely Mythos-adjacent fashion and Yogwiki’s citation standards are somewhere between nonexistent and actively antimonious.

The Commons Section

1. PIA17655 Kraken Mare crop no labels (PD)
Trace over it and you have yourself an instant fantasy Mediterranean.

2. Mappa geographiae naturalis (PD)
A teaching map by Matthäus Seutter, containing all the major geographic and hydrographic features in one convenient place. Always liked these sorts of illustrations in my grade school science books.

3. Temperance Map (PD)
Allegorical map by Rev. John Wiltberger Jr. espousing the benefits of temperance and the dangers of alcoholism. With a bit of renaming you can extrapolate some interesting domain-level dynamics from the odd geography.

4. Mt. Penglai (Mountain of Immortals) (PD)
Painting by Tomioka Tessai

5. PIA21923: Seeing Titan with Infrared Eyes (PD)
Composite false-color photographs of Titan’s surface taken with Cassini’s infrared cameras. Very aesthetically pleasing, though the moon unfortunately does not actually have large regions of purple.

6. Bashi-Bazouk (PD)
Painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme of an Ottoman irregular with a very stylish outfit.

7. Saint Teresa of Avila (PD)
Painting by John Singer Sargent. I just think it’s neat.