Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Proto-Indo-European Resource Masterpost

Last Updated 2/22/26 

As I spent a large chunk of 2025 going down the rabbit hole of historical linguistics, I read a lot of extremely niche academic papers, obscure blogposts, and assorted crackpot theories: I’ve gathered all the ones I can remember here to offset the field's bullheaded resistance to ever putting anything in one place. Heaven forbid academic reference material be easy to find.

This will, of course, be a curated list shaped by my own interests and biases. If you're here because you want to get into hobbyist PIE linguistics, I encourage you to assemble your own trove.

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Important Lessons to Know Going In

  1. Reconstructed PIE is a model - it's highly flawed, it's not an accurate representation of the historical reality, but it is the best we've got at the moment.
  2. Many resources online are out of date; there is no centralized database.
  3. Wikipedia is not a good source to get in-depth information about PIE topics, only to learn that the topics exist. You will likely find yourself having to unlearn things like I did.
  4. Literally anyone can post stuff to Academia.edu (which is a exceedingly enshittified website), and because the recommendation algorithm is a blind and senseless deity Academia.edu will regularly recommend you pdfs that are not peer reviewed / are not good scholarship / are not coherent and functional as a linguistics text / are basically just blog posts to a greater or lesser degree of quality.
  5. PIE the language changed radically over time, especially when comparing before and after Anatolian split off: PIE the reconstruction rarely takes this into account.
  6. The laryngeals are a headache and I highly recommend removing them immediately, or at the very least being judicious about where they are kept. 
  7. Go through morphology and lop off the stuff you know you don't want to keep before you start sound changes.
  8. Sometimes you need to make an arbitrary choice and stick with it: sound changes are a rabbit hole: go in with a target and don't let yourself get waylaid by what-ifs.
  9. Word-building is actually easier if you just make them yourself from a root list and the endings.
  10.  THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE LETTER - if you have to fudge things to make the project work, fudge to your heart's content. The rules are made up & the points don't matter. 

**

The Indo-European Conlang Checklist

  1. So, why are you doing this? (d4)
    1. I like difficult and complex puzzles
    2. I am classically, King Lear Act 4 insane
    3. I have a high tolerance to frustration  
    4. I am desperate for a distraction from The Horrors 
  2. Have you reconsidered? (d3)
    1. Now that you mention it, backing out seems like a good idea.
    2. Ha-ha, I'm in danger! 
    3. I barely consider things the first time: full steam ahead!
  3. Are you sure? How about a sub-family? They're more reasonable. (d10)
    1. Proto-Albanian
    2. Proto-Anatolian
    3. Proto-Armenian
    4. Proto-Balto-Slavic
    5. Proto-Celtic
    6. Proto-Germanic
    7. Proto-Hellenic
    8. Proto-Indo-Iranian
    9. Proto-Italic
    10. Proto-Tocharian
  4. Won't be dissuaded? Suit yourself. How are you handling the laryngeals? (d12)
    1. I'm deleting them immediately, like a sane person would. 
    2. Rasmussen - h / x / ɣʷ 
    3. Kloekhorst - ʔ / q(ː) / q(ː)ʷ 
    4. Lindeman - x́, ɣ́ / x, ɣ / xʷ, ɣʷ 
    5. Keiler - / h / ħ / ʕ
    6. Bomhard 1 - ʔ / x / ɣ 
    7. Beekes -  ʔ / ʕ / ʕʷ 
    8. Kümmel - h / χ / ʁ 
    9. Meier-Brügger - ʔ / x / ɣ(ʷ) 
    10. Kortlandt -  ʔ / q~χ / qʷ~χʷ
    11. Pooth - ʔ / χ / ʕ
    12. Ringe -  ç / x / xʷ
  5. And if those are too normal for you... (d4)
    1. Szemerenyi - h [1]
    2. Martinet -  ʔ, h / χ , ʁ, ħ, ʕ / χʷ , ʁʷ, ħʷ, ʕʷ [2]
    3. Bomhard 2 - ʔ / ħ͡h / ʕ͡ħ / h [3]
    4. Pyysalo - aɦ / ɦa [4]
  6. Glottalic theory: yea or nay? (d10)
    1. Traditional - Plain / Voiced / Breathy
    2. Hopper - Plain / Ejective / Voiced
    3. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov - Aspirated / Ejective / Breathy
    4. Beekes - Plain / Preglottalized / Aspirated
    5. Kümmel - Plain / Implosive / Voiced
    6. Clackson - Plain / Creaky / Breathy
    7. Shcirru - Plain / Preglottalized / Slack
    8. Kortlandt - Geminated / Ejective / Plain
    9. The Tocharian Option - Fuck all this, collapse everything to plain unvoiced stops.
    10. Fuck it, they were actually affricates [5]
  7. Centum, Satem, or the Forbidden Third Option? (d4)
    1. Centum - Get that god damn palatovelar series out of here.
    2. Satem - There will be no labialized consonants under this roof thank you very much.
    3. Menage a troistem - All three dorsal series are present, no there will not be an explanation. [6]
    4. Qantum - plain velars were actually uvular, palatovelars were plain. [7]
  8. How are thorn ([alveolar stop]+[velar stop]) clusters getting resolved? (d8)
    1. No change; TK => TK
    2. Metathesis; TK => KT
    3. Assibilation; TK => sK
    4. Deletion; TK => *K
    5. Metathesis-Assibilation: TK =>KT => Ks
    6. Metathesis-Deletion: TK => KT => *T
    7. Metathesis-Assibilation-Deletion: TK => KT => Ks => *s
    8. Metathesis-Deletion-Affrication; TK => KT => *T => *Ts 
  9. Do the S be mobile? (d4)
    1. Mobile S is present in all cases. [8]
    2. Mobile S is absent in all cases. [8] 
    3. Mobile S is present seemingly at random 
    4. Not only is Mobile S absent, it seems like it never appeared in this branch: any roots that pattern as STeDh are now DheDh. [8]
  10. Am I finally done? (d1)
    1. No. You're in it now. Welcome to Wonderland, we're all mad here.

[1] - Not a mistype, just one laryngeal with no coloring effect: he supposes PIE just had more vowels and ablaut patterns than thought.

[2] - The book is in French so I have no idea how he defined which environments got what. 

[3] - As used in his book on Nostratic; the sounds used for h2 and h3 don't appear in PHOIBLE, Wikipedia, or cursory google search, so take that as you will.

[4] I'm including this one because it exists; I do not care to spend the time to wrap my head around this theory, which considering what I have spent that time on should say a lot.

[5] This is extremely unlikely in reality, and I don't know of anyone who actually supports it.

[6] To my knowledge, no daughter languages keep all three. Melchert claims that Luwian did, but it doesn't look like he has gotten significant support on this

[7] This is not an uncommon stance, and it does play nicely with the laryngeals being uvulars, but it isn't the mainstream of the model.

[8] To the best of my knowledge, three of the four options here are not extant, I just included them to make a table. 

** 

The rest of this post is going to be links to resources and citations, divvied up into categories. While I am grouping by quality, I am compiling by quantity, and so I will include sources do not align with the mainstream of the field, which may also be sources that I don't agree with / don't consider to be good sources / are just plain wrong: I will notate these accordingly. Those whose contents I have forgotten i make no such promises for.

Recommended Reading

Books I would recommend to people who don't give a shit about conlangs but are modestly interested in PIE. 
  • Beekes, Robert: Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction (2011)
    •  This is probably the best general-audience overview you're going to find, or at least that I've found. Beekes manages to cover an enormous amount of material in an approachable and thorough manner and doesn't get lost in the weeds. 
  •  Mallory, J. P., D. Q. Adams: The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo European (2006)
    • The other gold standard. If you have bit of linguistics knowledge going in or a willingness to learn you'll have a good time. Where Beekes is the all-rounder, Mallory & Adams is more specific, divying up the reconstructed PIE vocabulary by topic and combing through to see which words are best attested, and how they came to be.

 

 

The Big 4

The ur-resources.

  • Pokorny, J. Indogermanisches Etymologisches Woerterbuch (Indo-European Etymological Dictionary) (1959)
    • Out-of-date. Does not contain laryngeals or Anatolian material. Still somehow the most approachable lexicon. You can find a cleaned-up online version via the University of Texas: if you want fewer moving parts for your project and don't care overly much about accuracy, it's servicable. There's also a edited / cleaned up / laryngeal-including version here, though I can't find who was behind it.
  • Rix, Helmut, Martin Kümmel et al. Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben (Lexicon of Indo-European Verbs, LIV)
    • Has not been translated into English.
  • Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series
    • Incomplete; the project turns 35 next year and the promised grand unified replacement for Pokorny is most likely dead in the water - the most recent of the dictionaries was released in 2014. You can, of course, not find all of these in the same place, because Indo-Europeanists break out in hives when things are too convenient
  • Wikipedia & Wiktionary
    • A cobbled together mess; outdated information is everywhere, along with shoddy and questionable reconstructions. Use with caution.

You will notice that I throw shade on all these sources: this is because they are inadequate and are unlikely to ever be replaced. Your average fan wiki has better organization than this field. 

Andrew Byrd at the University of Kentucky has been working on DERBi PIE (Database of Etymological Roots Beginning in PIE), but the website is basically just a holding page and given how funding for the humanities has been going the odds of seeing it to completion are lower than even the extremely low rate of the field.

 

Top Billing

Articles which I think are good for just understanding PIE / the most useful ones for conlanging.

  • Byrd, Andrew: Reconstructing Indo-European Syllabification (2010)
    • Byrd's stuff is generally just good to look into, since he focuses a lot on reconstructing PIE as a language that people spoke over a algebraic formula. 
  • Byrd, Andrew: The Rules of Reconstruction: Making our Etymologies More Grounded (2017)
    • That is, if you can find his papers - I had found this paper on Academia within the last year, but since then it and all of Byrd's other papers have been pulled from that site and further searching led me expensive dead ends. I am reminded, once again, of why not going on to higher ed was a blessing, I would lose my fucking mind with this recursive walled garden.
  • Gąsiorowski, Piotr: The use and misuse of evidence in linguistic reconstruction (2012)
    • A useful reminder about how reconstructions are never set in stone, and how they can be shaped by bias and lack of data. 
  • Kiparsky, Paul: Compositional vs. Paradigmatic Approaches to Accent and Ablaut (20XX) 
    • Origin point for a (thankfully, it seems, gradually catching-on) alternative to the traditional PIE accentuation schema, which tosses out the rather arbitrary categories with a series of rules that can be applied to derive the patterns that have been reconstructed in a natural and logical manner. A few other works cited in this post build on this paper, and I'll mark them as such.
  • Kümmel, Martin: On new reconstructions of PIE "laryngeals", especially as uvular stops (2022)
    •  This is, in my amateur's opinion, the best argument I've yet seen made for the laryngeals and their identity: namely, that they pattern in Hittite like a fortis / lenis or unvoiced / voiced pair, and taking other  aspects into account were probably χ and ʁ, which he notes does not rule out earlier q and ɢ or later h, x, or ħ.
  • Kümmel, Martin: Typology and reconstruction: The consonants and vowels of Proto-Indo-European (2012)
    •  Wins a slot here for being simple and functional: he goes through the available evidence, compares it to the patterns of modern languages, and comes up with serviceable answers for the plain voiced series and the development of the vowel system.
  • Moniz, C. Ryan: PIE vowel quality and accent approaches (2022)
    • An excerpt from an undergraduate thesis that compares different theories of PIE's vowel space and accent structure. Extremely helpful if you want to just want to compare options and pick one. Cites a bunch of sources down at the bottom, several of which are also in this list. 
  • Weiss, Michael: The Proto-Indo-European Laryngeals and the Name of Cilicia in the Iron Age (2016)
    • If Kümmel's 2022 paper above is the magic bullet, I consider this to be the smoking gun: when Hittite proper nouns were transliterated into neighboring languages such as Akkadian, the laryngeal descendant ḫ was consistently written with symbols for uvular consonants instead of pharyngeals (since Akkadian made that distinction and Hittite did not).
  • Yates, Anthony and Jesse Lundquist: The Morphology of Proto-Indo-European (2018) 
  • Yates, Anthony: (Reconstructing) stress assignment in Hittite and Proto-Indo-European (2016) 
    • Builds on Kiparsky: the Hittite evidence checks out in favor of the Compositional Theory.
  • Yates, Anthony: Some basics of Indo-European Phonology (2018)




Personal Wildcards

Articles that I, personally, think are great specifically for me, but which might not be particularly sturdy hypotheses or are otherwise nonstandard. We all get to have a couple Crank Credits as a treat, and these are mine.

  • Adiego, Ignasi-Xavier; A little-known law on the root and syllable structures of Proto-Indo-European (2022) 
    • This paper, combined with Jan’s below, has me convinced that at least some of the laryngeals were approximants formed by vowels breaking under stress, because there are a lot of roots that otherwise inexplicably pattern as CHVR. So much PIE scholarship ties itself in knots over *i and *u. If the same sound is *ew when stressed and *u when unstressed, that means that stress broke the vowel
  • Bičovský, Jan: Proto-Indo-European laryngeals and voicing assimilation (2019) 
    • h3 being treated as voiced and labialized has always felt weird to me, because neither of those traits are necessary to fulfill the criteria they supposedly fill: the voicing assimilation premise is based on exactly one word, and labialization is based on turning adjacent *e to *o, despite no other labialized consonants doing that. Jan here is in the same boat, and he lays out a solid case against the traditional reconstruction and paired argument for laryngeals as having both fricative and approximant realizations.
  • Gąsiorowski, Piotr: Another long grade: Non-canonical ablaut involving PIE *ā (2013) 
    • Speculation on the mechanisms that could lead to an *ā ./ *a ablaut series in PIE. I appreciate that it's labeled as non-canonical up front.
  • Monti, Nicolás: The twofold development of PIE *o in Greek, Italic and Celtic (2026-) and Again on the reflex of medial PIE *ō (2026-)
    • These papers have gotten several updates since I first became aware of them, so I'm linking Monti's main profile page instead. These are some pretty radical papers (as in, what they propose would rewrite half of the reconstructive model if true) and they are very much still WIPs, but they're also the sort of theory where I kinda want it to be true. Wanting doesn't mean being, of course, but the theory is easy to understand and can probably help simplify a lot of a conlang project.

 

Laryngeals & Laryngeal Accessories

Now you too can be driven to rend your garments and pluck out your beard like an old testament prophet whenever you see an H!


Other Phonology Articles

Because there are, in fact, non-laryngeal sounds in PIE

 

Roots and Syllables

Little nuggets of sound

 

Stress and Accent

Let me tell you how much I have come to hate mobile accent since I began this research...


Placeholder Category

For stuff that I either can't sort into a different category or can't be bothered to.

 

The Pooth Zone

Roland Pooth is either an absolute madman or 100% on the money, no in-between. His interpretation of PIE as a Semitic-style root-and-pattern language plus direct-inverse alignment is extremely out there, but even if he is completely wrong, he’s still made a cohesive and consistent model that provides coherent explanations for some of the otherwise inexplicable elements of the traditional model, and that’s a fair sight better than most of the field. I'm not linking his entire corpus here, but enough to give you an idea of what you'll be dealing with.

 

Indo-Uralic & long-range stuff, etc

Take all of this with a complimentary salt lick. I don't support any of these theories beyond "it'd be really cool if that was the case" / "yeah there's a good chance of a connection, but there's no way to prove it"; you'll find out in short order that people can make themselves a semi-convincing argument for a relationship between PIE and damn near anything, which will be entirely incompatible with every other semi-convincing argument. This is fine if you are doing Conlang Shit, because you can just arbitrarily pick a version you like and roll with that.

 

Helpful and / or Silly Stuff I Found on Reddit

It ain't peer-reviewed, but sometimes plain speech and the freedom to shoot the shit is fruitful. You will notice an abundance of links to r/linguisticshumor: this is because r/linguistics dried up under extremely strict posting rules.


Assorted Blogposts

Some of these are from 5-10 years before some sizable developments in the field, and so are a bit diminished when it comes to accuracy. But, they are amateurs for amateurs and that's got it's place, especially if your goal is conlang stuff and the spirit of the law takes priority over the letter.

 

I Do Not Vouch for These

Still potentially good for inspiration, though caveat that emptor.


Useful Resources

Don't leave home without 'em.

 

So What Have We Learned? 

The people writing fanfics about the statue that shits blood and then kills you instantly are better at organizing and cross-linking their work than historical linguists.

 

 


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Thursday, January 8, 2026

50 Things You Heard Online About Aklo

One would be hard-pressed to find a language more beset by crankery than Aklo. For well over a century it has been the cornerstone of an entire subgenre of bullshit, and the forecast shows no signs of letting up. TikTok, YouTube and Instagram are flooded with claims that it:

  1. Is the original human language
  2. Confirms hard Sapir-Worf
  3. Contains no word for love
  4. Grants its speakers magical powers
  5. Was inherited from aliens
  6. Was inherited from angels
  7. Was inherited from demons
  8. Was inherited from neanderthals
  9. Is a memetic virus from space
  10. Is Proto-Indo-European
  11. Is Proto-Dene-Yeneseian
  12. Is Proto-Nostratic
  13. Is Proto-Dene-Sinitic-Caucasian
  14. Was spoken by dwarflike pre-Celtic inhabitants of Europe 
  15. Was spoken by pre-Christian witch-cults
  16. Was spoken in Atlantis and / or Lemuria and / or Mu
  17. Was spoken prior to the Tower of Babel
  18. Was invented by the Soviet Union in order to destabilize the United States
  19. Was invented by the Nazis in order to speak to esoteric Hyperborean intelligences
  20. Was invented by the child-eating secret societies of the English aristocratic elite
  21. Was invented by the United States in order to destabilize the Soviet Union
  22. Was invented by Yakub so white people could conspire in secret
  23. Was invented by linguists to perpetuate the hoax of Proto-Indo-European
  24. Was invented by John Dee
  25. Was invented by Noam Chomsky
  26. Was invented by the Freemasons
  27. Was invented by the Jesuits
  28. Was invented by medieval kabbalists
  29. Was invented by the United Nations
  30. Has grammatical features found in no natural human language
  31. Has no numbers
  32. Doesn’t permit recursion
  33. Violates linguistic universals
  34. Isn’t truly pronounceable by humans
  35. Is completely without phonemic vowels
  36. Is the original language of the Necronomicon
  37. Is the language of the Voynich Manuscript
  38. Is instinctively understood by children deprived of language
  39. Can only be properly translated by AI
  40. Is an AI-generated hoax
  41. Was spoken by at least two of the 9/11 hijackers
  42. Is actually bastardized Sanskrit
  43. Is actually bastardized Hungarian
  44. Is actually bastardized Basque
  45. Is the only oligosynthetic natural language
  46. Features no grammatical or semantic ambiguity
  47. Can be translated into any language with no loss of meaning
  48. Was spoken by God to create the universe
  49. Contains a word that will end the world if read aloud
  50. Is an elaborate worldbuilding project that got out of hand.

Cursory review of even moderately-reliable sources indicates few to none of these claims has even minimal backing in mainstream linguistics.


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Sunday, January 4, 2026

Public Domain Roundup 2026

Let’s get this year started on the right foot (well, as right as we can get given the Circumstances) with more art liberated from the shackles of copyright. All this shit is yours now, do with it as you will.

This isn’t going to be an exhaustive list by any stretch (check out Public Domain Review, Duke University, the Smithsonian, and Wikipedia for more), and will be shaped, as always, by my own foppery and whim.

  • Important reminder 1: The public domain elements of a long-running series extend only up to the point of expiry, so characters, plot elements, and whatnot from an installment in 1931 or later are still under copyright (if that story hasn’t fallen out of copyright through other means). Estates love abusing this (“Holmes can’t show emotions yet, that’s still under copyright!”).
  • Important reminder 2: Trademarks cover branding, and many of the rights-holders are real bastards about things like names and costumes and whatnot. So it’s in your best interest to shake things up a little & put your fingerprint on your version of the character (makes for better derivatives, anyway)

Anyway, let’s get rolling.

Nancy Drew

Secret of the Old Clock, The Hidden Staircase, The Bungalow Mystery and The Mystery at Lilac Inn are all good to go (in their 1930 versions, not the 1959-1960 reprints). Any PD use of Nancy would have to be based on the contents of just these four works, which probably is in everyone’s benefit because you’ve got less to wade through and it’s yet to become set in its ways.

Relevant: We’re also now up to the first 9 Hardy Boys books. Honestly we are spoiled for choice when it comes to detectives, most of the big names of the era are PD now.

Adaptation: The great thing about a plucky teenage detective is that you can toss them in basically any story with a mystery element and it'll work out fine: Nancy tracking down the rare book thief who stole from the Miskatonic University special collection, for example. Plenty of room for moving her around in time or writing her at different stages of her life, as well: book came out in 1930, Nancy is 16 in it, so she was born in 1913-1914 and so you could feasibly set her anywhere up to the late 90s early 00s if you took this route. (I like this method a lot; rooting the characters in time and place allows you to bring all that historical context to bear.)



Miss Marple

Now, Miss Marple is technically already PD because she first appeared in some short stories in 1927, but those got republished in Thirteen Problems in 1932 so trying to track down the originals will likely be a pain and a half. Anyway, Murder at the Vicarage hit PD this year, and it’s going to be the only one for another 12 years.

Adaptation: Crossover with Nancy Drew, obviously, could get a fun mentor-student dynamic out of that. 

 

The Burroughs Corner

1930 gets us both A Fighting Man of Mars as well as Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. For those of you keeping track at home, that’s seven Barsoom novels, 13 Tarzan novels, three Pellucidar novels, and one extremely litigious estate that’s never let the reality of copyright law get in the way of picking at a warmed-over exquisite corpse. They’ll let you read the stuff on Gutenberg but heaven forbid you come within nine miles of their trademarks.

Adaptation: Given the quite repetitive nature of these series, adaptations have their work cut out for them as either "just steal the monsters and whatnot and plug them into something else" or "massively overhaul the entire thing into some drastically new form", or some mix between the two. The latter is a safer bulwark against the vulture estate, as it's much more difficult to claim infringement of trademark when there's no way anyone could confuse the derivative work with the original. 



Last and First Men

I read this one last year, and had some sizable thoughts on it: mainly that it was extremely inspiring in those moments when it was not extremely frustrating or dull. It’s a canvas to work from / lego box to loot, not so much something to adapt directly: science has indeed marched on and Stapledon’s knowledge of astronomical, evolutionary and social science is very much limited by time, place and circumstance. Expect a post about this in the future, I’ve been percolating thoughts.

Adaptation: The weirdo future posthumans are the highlight of the work, but they're also something that needs a good bit of elbow grease to use. It's not really a plug and play if you want to do it justice.


Golden Bat

He’s a gold skeleton with a sword and a sick cape. Life goals, certainly, but also part of a cool storytelling tradition that I had only heard about in the lead up to writing about this post.

Golden Bat started in kamishibai, which was a type of street performance during the Depression and post-War period where the storyteller would perform with a little stage they could slot pictures into: it’s basically an analogue PowerPoint party, where you’re ad-libbing something funny with the slides you have available. Absolutely fascinating, definitely worth including wherever it can fit (and of course, include the Golden Bat)

Adaptation: There have been several movie, manga, and anime adaptations, none of which are PD. (Golden Bat being from Atlantis is from this later version). Best play it safe and just have the gold skeleton with a sword and sick cape and work from there. You don't need lore, it's Golden Bat!



Other Noteworthies

  • All Quiet on the Western Front (film version)
  • As I Lay Dying (plus several Faulkner shorts)
  • The Maltese Falcon (book only)
  • Rover the dog (he doesn't become Pluto until later)
  • Flip the Frog (from Fiddlesticks, first color cartoon with sound)
  • Betty Boop ("Dizzy Dishes" only, so she's still in weird dog-hybrid mode) 
  • Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow (Piet Mondrian) 
  • The Sun God's Children (Good writeup here) 
  • Folk Tales of All Nations (Good writeup here, same blog as above)

 

** 

Something I've noticed in my occasional visits to r/publicdomain is a trend that a lot of people, when dealing with PD material, seem stuck in Franchise Brain. They want The Thing as a discrete intellectual property, maintaining the shape of what came before - which is fine, though I find it disappointing. PD allows for its contents to be disseminated as part of collective culture, unbound from the strictures of who gets to use what or how they use it. You can just have a sailor named Popeye show up in something else, you don't need to make a New Popeye Thing Featuring Famous Character Popeye. PD detaches the ideas from the source so that those ideas are no longer tied down to a single specific execution or iteration. Does that make sense? It makes sense in my head. 

Anyway, all this is still just a starting point. Doubtlessly I will find some more that I've missed (or be reminded of them), and I've got some other PD goodies (Leslie Stone project included) in the works. In a world where the powers that be are trying to own information itself via Azathoth's idiot plagiarist brother, circulating the tapes like this brings at least a little peace of mind.



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Sunday, December 28, 2025

Bookpost 20

Hot damn, bookpost #20.

Bookpost Index 

 

A Comprehensive Introduction to Nostratic Comparative Linguistics With Special Reference to Indo-European 5th Edition, Allan Bomhard

A text that clearly represents a great deal of time, effort, and research on the part of the author; none of it is convincing evidence for the Nostratic hypothesis, and most of it is compelling evidence against. 

[Aside: The Nostratic Hypothesis is a proposed linguistic macrofamily containing most of the languages of Eurasia. As with basically all macrofamily theories, it exists well outside the mainstream of the field.]
I understand the appeal: it would be really cool if Nostratic was real, because it fires up the good ol' pattern recognition and puzzle solving parts of the brain and you know how much I love Recognizing Pattern. I wouldn't even rule out the possibility that something of its general shape could have existed at some point in the deep past, but I don’t think that this can ever be proven, barring sudden access to the Pnakotic Library. We simply cannot know the answer, and we are left with an empty space in which to daydream (and, let's be real here, project our own beliefs onto the past: with enough confidence and elbow grease you can make a convincing argument linking PIE to damn near anything, and they can't all be right.)

[Example: This isn't an exaggeration, here's what I can do just off the dome.]
["*gʷé̄n and be'nal both mean 'wife', which indicates that the original Proto-Indo-Euro-Klingon form was **gʷe'nal; PIE dropped the second syllable while the glottal stop vanished and lengthened the **e; in the more conservative Klingon branches **gʷ > b."]

If Nostratic did indeed exist, and it split into the families that this book claims it did, reconstructing it to any degree of accuracy would require hitting a jackpot a dozen times in a row. Every single proto-language included in the theory would have to be reconstructed accurately on its own, and then you would have to accurately place these reconstructions in relative chronology with each other in further second, third, fourth, and so on orders of reconstruction. For each of these layers, even if you had reconstructions of an outright miraculous level of accuracy, you'd still have to be factor in a margin of error for false positives, loan words, semantic drift, and information entropy. Nostratic isn’t just a second-order reconstruction: it’s five, six, seven orders or more, and each and every one of those would need to be damn near flawless in order to get a meaningful result. 

You who have read my posts on my failed-for-the-moment pre-PIE project will be familiar with difficult this is. The most thoroughly-studied language family on Earth has produced a reconstructive model held together with duct tape and a prayer, with holes you can drive a bus through. That's the best the field has produced: this book hinges on much weaker models, including two that have minimal evidence for their own existence on a good day (Altaic, Elamo-Dravidian) and one that is so loosey-goosey that no one can even agree on a core phonology (Afroasiatic). The comparisons made between the chosen language families are littered with vagaries, maybes, stretches of imagination, inadequate correspondence-based methodology, cherry-picking, extremely fuzzy semantics and flood-the-zone tactics, and rely wholly on the reader not pushing back against the claims that are being made.

[Example: This book draws a lot of material from the long-range macrofamily proposals of Russian linguist Sergei Starostin: Starostin's proto-language reconstructions are consistently characterized by extremely high consonant counts such that, with the right number of mergers and deletions, you can justify effectively any outcome if you are operating purely on correspondences. I think this is an extremely shaky methodology, given how often consonants change according to nearby vowels: did we start with a series of palatalized stops, or did some stops in some branches just get palatalized thanks to an adjacent front vowel that then shifted? Chicken-and-egg quandaries ahoy.]

If this was a creative effort of speculative conlanging, I'd be more positive on it. Quite positive, honestly, if this was reskinned as someone making an Atlantean language for a fantasy novel I would be all on board; filling gaps in the data and going on one’s merry way is perfectly acceptable in those circumstances. But this book isn't a purely creative work; this was written with sincere belief in the factual truth of its contents, and the end result is a projection into the blank canvas of prehistory that, while it clears the bar of "it doesn't take a hard right turn into bizarro linguistic nationalism", is still an argument in search of data built on a house of cards with a foundation of sand.

The one genuinely helpful thing it presents is that, in pursuit of a Grand Unified Theory, Bomhard cites and compares the theories of basically everyone who has ever published anything in the field of historical linguistics. (For better and worse, as many of them are questionable in their own right. Lookin' at you, Joseph Greenberg.)



Black Amazon of Mars, Leigh Brackett

[I had listened to this story in audiobook form via Librivox quite a long while ago, so this is technically a reread - eagle-eyed readers may remember that I swiped the "black amazon" name for the human servants of Orca in an equally long-ago post, though in hindsight that was probably not the best name.]

Sword and planet high adventure. Has some good imagery and the prose is solid. Also contains one of my least favorite tropes of all time: the cool masked warrior is revealed to be a woman and then immediately gets sidelined to a passive role so the inevitably less-interesting male main character can finish the plot. What a waste. The character was already doing cool things, just let her keep doing cool things!

Also contains potentially the weirdest example of pulp sci-fi racism I have ever encountered: the bending over backwards this series pulls to avoid having an actual black man as the protagonist - despite invoking all the signifiers of the colonialist imaginary - would have every chiropractor in the hemisphere breaking down the door to schedule an appointment. Our protagonist Stark has dark skin, excused as being from Mercury, and I could almost buy that as an interesting explanation were it not for the fact that his name in his youth was "Nchaka" (evoking sub-Saharan Africa by way of a prenasalized consonant; the only hit I can find on that name in a cursory search is a festival held by the Ogba of Nigeria which I doubt was the actual source) and much is made of his "wildness", "primal nature" or vaguely defined "instincts" (sigh). But he's definitely not black, guys!

Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

I don’t know if that was Brackett’s doing, the editor’s doing, or if it was Brackett trying to get around the editor through malicious compliance. Literally just stick a population of Bantu speakers on Mercury and give him an appropriate name, this isn’t difficult. 


The Lost Continent, C.J. Cutliffe Hyne

An unexpected treat. I had picked this on a whim and ended up with a thoroughly enjoyable rip-roaring adventure that repeatedly surprised me with how modern it felt. Took a full 50% of the book before the old-timey sexism reared its head, and I've read worse from much more recent books. It would take very little effort to make a modern adaptation

The premise is solid: Deucalion, career philosopher-soldier-priest and former governor of the Yucatan colony, is recalled to Atlantis by direct order of the empress Phorenice as part of a greater plan to bolster her rule in the midst of economic crisis and civil war. The kicker here is that Phorenice isn’t portrayed as stupid. This is a pulp novel from 1899 and the ambitious woman in power is portrayed as canny and competent. She’s blinded by hubris to the real dangers threatening Atlantis, but she’s not portrayed as the idiot running things into the ground where it was once already perfect - the rot was already there, Phorenice took advantage of it for her own benefit, and the narrative is very clear that this is the case. Her sins are the sins of the nobility. 

This isn’t even mentioning Nais, who I described to my partner as “a second baddie has entered the narrative” and honestly don’t want to spoil why. You’ll know it if you read it. She does, unfortunately, get hit with the “demoted to passive character” beam later on, but her arrival is fucking strong. Deucalion himself is more interesting than I expected because of what I think is a bit of intentional unreliability in his steady 1st person POV - he regularly says or thinks things that are at odds with what is being depicted on the page, and a whole lot that is clearly biased by his aristocratic-Stoic leanings.

I had wondered while reading if the author had socialist leanings, but couldn't find any real info - his descriptions of the excessive wealth of the Atlantean nobles, the squalid conditions of the common people, and the casual cruel indifference Deucalion, Phorenice, the priesthood, and aristocracy aim at the underclasses. This could all be me pulling an unintended reading from the text, but it feels intentional in a way that other works of the time would treat this state of affairs as just the way of things.

Also: I haven’t even mentioned the dinosaurs yet! We got antediluvian monstrosities left right and center! No science here, no sir. You’re going to have plesiosaurs attacking boats right off the bat. Somewhere along the line fantasy authors decided they were too cool for dinosaurs, and that's a fucking shame.



Omniligual, H. Beam Piper

Short story about a team of scientists cracking the Martian language during their excavations of one of their ruined cities. There are, of course, some serious handwaves underpinning the exercise just for the sake of practicality, but it holds up pretty well (and doesn't have to do with Sapir-Whorf, which is the only linguistics 99% of sci-fi authors have ever heard of). It's on Gutenberg, you can zip through it in an afternoon.



Qoholeth, Madison Scott-Clary

DNF 45%

I know the author on Discord, she had the series on sale and I grabbed this and its sequels in a bundle. They are, from the outset, a conjunction of elements normally outside my wheelhouse, but I figured it's good to go stretch the legs on new routes once in a while.

Premise: it’s the future, our main character is a furry who hangs out in VR and ends up comatose with their mind trapped in a simulation for reasons unknown.

The fundamental issue with the book, and what got me to DNF, is that it’s just kinda dull. 

There’s no real antagonist; the conflict is wholly based in the mystery of the people lost inside simulations, but there’s no urgency, no tension, no forward momentum. The three POV characters, at least by the point I stopped at, not only hadn’t interacted with each other but barely interact with anyone else:

  • RJ / AwDae has one conversation with a friend, and then wanders aimlessly in a simulation with no one else around to interact with.
  • The doctor, whose name I have forgotten by the time I write this, technically has her research team, but none of the members have any distinguishing features and they’re basically as interchangeable as the members of a Greek chorus. At the time I dropped the book, she was just beginning to investigate RJ / AwDae's case.
  • Ioan, who is from a plotline set in the future of the other two but had not been connected by the time I DNF'd, only ever speaks to the character that hired them to do this investigation.

The short chapters feel like a hamster wheel after a while, moving speedily along to nowhere. The plotline with Ioan and Dear is especially hurt by this, as even the "why" any of this is happening is lost beneath cryptography, data structures, and Dear being immensely unhelpful in that “never ever give a direct answer” fairy chicanery sort of way (on top of being a story about What Art Means and What It Means to Be An Artist, a genre I have never been particularly fond of.)

By the time AwDae has 'eir first revelation wrt the simulation (pg 123 / 44%), the conclusion ("the call is coming from inside the house") is something that should have been top 3 potential options since 'ey got stuck in it seventy, eighty pages ago. The way 'ey realized it was neat (the contents of books in 'eir simulated childhood home reflecting 'eir memory rather than what they actually were), but the realization is so delayed that it paints AwDae as just kind of a dunce. It's not really a twist, it's a moment of "wait, why didn't you consider that"?

Additionally: for a book by and about people with animal-based alter egos, there’s a noteworthy and disappointing lack of variety when it comes to the virtual world at the center of the story. Nobody rolls up with a custom-built anomalocarid rig, or is chilling as an orangutan, or a manta ray, or a slime mold, or a colony of cordyceps-infested wasps, or a giant crab with a house on its back: your options are order Carnivora and nothing else. We’ve got a fennec fox, a skunk, and a cat. This restraint extends beyond the characters to the environment; the functioning simulations we’re shown are a London pub and an apartment, and the anomalous broken one is a high school and surrounding neighborhood. The fully-immersive VR tech that somehow avoided getting subsumed directly into the Torment Nexus is wholly unweird, in total opposition to the actual real-life examples of VR Chat and Second Life. (My bias towards overwhelming weird detail is in full effect here, so take that as you will.)

There are, I think, four sequels; I don't know how or if any of this changes with later installments.

Note: RJ / Aw Dae uses ey / em pronouns in the book, which makes the narrator in my head sound like The Fonz. This was extremely distracting while reading the book, but is an issue with the reader rather than the text. 



Three Imposters, Arthur Machen

A fixup novel of some otherwise unconnected short stories, and while I don’t know how much the frame narrative was doing for me, Machen’s got a richness to his language that I appreciate. It’s fun seeing where HPL picked up some of his bad habits, though saying that makes it seem like I had a worse time than I did. I think Machen is better than Lovecraft at just dropping a “man, look at this inexplicable fucked-up thing” (though there were some clunky ad-hoc explanations in these stories, don’t get me wrong), though he’s never met a paragraph he can’t extend for three to four pages. Much less concerned with building up any sort of world or setting. I didn’t have any strong feelings of “oh damn I want to write something with this”, but I also have a small sample size.



Oomphel in the Sky, H. Beam Piper

I have complicated feelings on this one. On the one hand, I generally have very little patience for “let’s use aliens as an obvious stand-in for indigenous peoples of Earth”; on the other hand, this story takes that and builds it to the lesson of “you know you should probably actually listen to people and meet them where they are.” Specifically in this case, the aliens believe that there’s an immanent apocalypse due to the orbital weirdness of their world mixed with contact with humans, society is beginning to break down in the mass hysteria, and it’s ultimately avoided by taking a bunch of cunning men up on a rocket so they can see things for themselves and then cook up an explanation for why it isn’t the end of the world that functions within their pre-existing worldview. 

Piper’s 60s libertarianism is very front and center with this one, and I feel similarly complicated feelings about that. The “practical rugged individualism solves everything” element (which was present in Little Fuzzy and Omnilingual, but is strongest here), is quite pronounced, and while he did get it right about liberalism’s shortcomings vis a vis “it’s all fun and games and kumbaya until you have to actually acknowledge complicated cultural differences that aren’t easily sanded down”, there’s a non-zero amount of complaining about strawmen (he’s got a stand-in university for Berkeley and starts sounding like Hannity every time it’s mentioned). Plus there's the elephant in the room of Piper’s 60s libertarianism playing a sizable role in his suicide. So yeah, complex feelings. 



The Sundering Flood, William Morris

DNF 5%

The first (c.1897) fantasy novel to include a map of the secondary world at the front, or so the summaries go. It might be a perfectly fine adventure story (William Morris seems like an interesting fella, old-timey socialist and proponent of the arts-and-crafts movement) but it’s written in some truly unbearable faux-archaic language. No amount of historical curiosity will make me think that “meseemeth” is an acceptable thing to inflict on a reader. The map’s nice, though.

 

Green Antarctica,  D'Valdron

DNF 6%

A novel alt-history / speculative evolution prompt (Antarctica never fully glaciates) undercut at every opportunity by the eye-rolling excesses of performative online edginess. I skipped all the way to the end and can confirm that the incessant torture, rape, cannibalism, bestiality, necrophilia, genocide and assorted other crimes against humanity does not even have the decency to end with “The Aristocrats!” 

Also worth mentioning is that this text leans very heavily on both Poe and HPL, and certainly honors the legacy of both by being outrageously racist in that very specific online way of skipping the slurs and going straight to “I've invented an elaborate rational justification for why these dark-skinned people eat babies, isn’t that shocking?”

Come off it, mate. Tsalal deserves better than this shit.

 

**

 

Gameable Content Bonus

The Gold Tiberius (City encounter, via Three Imposters)

While passing through an alley towards their destination, the party is startled by  the sudden appearance of a man sprinting down a perpendicular cross-alley and throwing a small object in their general direction.

The Gold Tiberius: A large golden coin, resting nearly on top of the bars of a sewer grate. 

  • Face: head in profile of a famous emperor of antiquity. 

  • Reverse: a faun with his euphemistic flute, splashing around in a reed-lined pool beneath the word VICTORIA. Pure gold and in perfect condition. 

  • A bit of historical research (or just having a classically-trained wizard in the party) will identify this as a semi-legendary coin, the only survivor of coins cast to commemorate a grand orgy hosted by the emperor on its face. Vanished from its last known whereabouts over a century prior.

Should the players take the coin, they will soon encounter a young man with glasses while traveling to your intended destination. He's tall, thin, brown-haired, sideburned, and has a nervous look about him. This is an encounter at a distance, or maybe he bumps into a PC; it's something that characters will notice in the moment and forget immediately afterward, and they won't get a chance to speak to him. This is the Young Man With Spectacles that had startled the party in the alley - he is on the run from parties out to kill him for stealing the coin from them, and one of them will, perhaps a couple days later, approach the party trying to suss out the Young Man's whereabouts.

The Imposter will whip up a story about how they need to find the Young Man - a lost family member in trouble, an unexplained occurrence in his presence, financial matters that need resolved. They aren't going to mention the Tiberius at all, but they will cold read the players for all their worth.

From this point it's something that should be tailored to the game at hand, with the following constants:

  • The Imposters will kill the Young Man if they find him, and without the PCs intervention they will find him within a week or so.
  • The Imposters will not go after the PCs unless they are given reason to believe that the party has the coin; if so, they will try to social engineer it out of the party's hands before resorting to force.
  • The Imposters have access to ritual magic
  • The coin is worth holy shit GP; taking it to an official assessor will not go without notice and will put the Imposters on the party's trail. 
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Friday, December 19, 2025

2025 in Review

What a godsforsaken shitass dogfuck year. 

Sorry for opening on a downer, but I need to get this out of my system. I will attempt to focus on the positive later but there was very little to go around even when factoring out The Everything.

Previous Years: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024

d12 ways 2025 has fucked me over

  1. One of our cats died from a tumor so rare that the vet gave us a discount because it qualified as a teaching experience. Three cats in three years. At this point I feel like it’s either a curse or something in the fucking water, though we don’t even have the benefit of clean correlation because all three of them died in entirely different ways.
  2. Partner got a new job she doesn't like.
  3. My car died (the transmission was already dying, but then the battery went fucked while I was out driving in fucking January, and I had to be jumped twice just to get back home - was stalling out every time I came to a stop.)
  4. My partner’s car died. (Don’t know what happened to this one)
  5. Car dealership yanked us around for days, forcing us to make multiple Ubers across the city for no fucking reason. Fucking hate cars so god damn much.
  6. Multiple friends in and out of mental health crises, job loss, divorce.
  7. Partner had to get her gallbladder removed, then had to be rushed back to the ER a few weeks for an after-effect. (She’s doing okay now)
  8. Some chucklehead tried a bit of Western Union fraud as a treat.
  9. Our other cat has kidney disease, so now the odds are rising that will have a fourth cat loss in as many years.
  10. Database migration plus the holiday season is making work a nightmare, and now they’re getting after me for slipping performance - yeah, no shit my performance is slipping, I am fucking stressed.
  11. After a 2152-day clean streak, I get covid two weeks before Christmas.
  12. Dealer’s fucking choice.


So that’s been my year.



Leslie Stone transcription project

With the first pass complete on most of the short stories, I’ve got the longer novellas left and that has slowed things a decent amount. Still, it’s been a fun project (as evidenced by my previous posts) and I’m glad I’ve gotten myself into it - it’s a good way to relax when the mind goblins are at their worst and I can’t focus on anything else or do anything productive.



Superman (2025)

Of all the many, many things I adored about this movie, the one that has stuck with me is the bit in the faux-interview  when Lois is grilling him about his previous interference in global politics. Clark’s frustration at her line of questioning reads very strongly to me as “oh, this Superman is on the spectrum” in a very true-to-life way. To Clark, the logic of his moral universe is as simple and as natural as breathing; people were dying, and he needed to stop it. Political ramifications be damned people were fucking dying; that’s enough reason for him to step in, and he genuinely doesn’t understand why anyone would have a problem with that. The thought is alien to him. 

What a good movie.



Bloodywood

Dana Dan gets the coveted "song that got me through the year" slot, for reasons that will be immediately obvious to anyone who has heard that song and also read this blog.



Naked Gun (2025)

It is so nice to watch a movie that understands how to do a proper gag. My dad would have loved it. If a joke doesn’t land for you there’s a new one in a few seconds, it’ll be fine.



Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc

Very glad they did this as a movie, I don’t think it’d be possible to pull it off with TV show pacing and still have it work. Chainsaw go brrrrrrrr indeed.



The year of Lovecraft 

An unintended trend, but it got me writing so that’s a net positive. Probably something to do with The Horrors. Something something, art that’s flawed in interesting ways will get me to engage even when I’m a vocal critic of the art. Always funny how that works.


The Year of PIE

Technically most of last year was this as well. If nothing else, it's been extremely educational.



A great year for video games*

While the greater industry seems rapidly accelerating towards a mass extinction event, anyone who exists on the fringe of that ecosystem is feasting like a king. So long as itch isn’t getting forced into a blind panic by Mastercard and Australian Christofascists. Or Steam doesn’t arbitrarily decide to axe your specific game for vaguely-defined and spurious reasons.



The MiniSalties

  • Get in Losers We’re Going to Fight God: Expedition 33
  • Greatest Disappointment: Silksong
  • Blasting From the Pasting: Binding of Isaac Repentance, Nuclear Throne
  • I Played it a Lot in January and Need to Go Back: Caves of Qud


God Damn I Listened to a lot of Elden Ring OST this year

I can only assume that Spotify is extremely confused by my listening habits. Top themes are Bayle, Radahn, Fortissax, Messmer, Maliketh.



My Partner Has Yet To Find A Romantasy that Features a Dwarf

Now, I am getting this second hand from her descriptions of the audiobooks she listens to, nut I still I think it is a fascinating trend. No dwarves have appeared in any context in any of the books she's read (let alone as a leading man), which is fucking wild to me since damn near all of them have elves of some manner and this is a highly-derivative genre. I want to see the red string board. Are they considered too cheesy? Did the authors just not have Tolkien or his imitators as a formative inspiration? Is a short hairy dude just a no-sell in heteronormative mass-market romance? The world may never know, but I wish I did.



A Long, Unpleasant SCP Aside

While my “get back in” phase of a couple years ago has since faded back out, I’ve still been keeping a few tabs on current events: they aren’t good.

To make a long, unpleasant aside as short as I can: in 2022, one of the wiki’s founding admins was banned after revelations of a long history of sexual harassment. Many of the victims were minors, and it became very clear that said admin’s penchant for gross-out sexual content in their stories was not simply being edgy and in bad taste. They had, on top of abusing their admin powers to cover up their behavior, leveraged their reputation as a popular 1st generation author (with a extremely popular “comedic pervert” author avatar character) to facilitate the abuse.

Well, it’s nearly 2026 and despite widespread public outcry to get that shit gone, site staff have been dragging their feet. One tale was deleted through official channels, and the prominent / infamously unfunny List of Things Dr. Bright is Not Allowed to Do at the Foundation was deleted by a moderator who wanted to go out with a bang. Everything else has been nearly four years of angry people, gnashed teeth, talking in circles, and hand-wringing about procedure. It took a moderator going rogue just to get a splash page explaining what had happened.

So yeah. Feels fucking bad. The site's always been dysfunctional to some degree, this isn't the first creep or the first botched response to a crisis, but fuck, man. The bar is on the fucking ground. 



Year-End Correction of Longstanding Oversight

Finally got around to binge-watching Esoterica. Dr. Sledge is a beacon of sanity in an age of madness and not an episode goes by without things to swipe for vague yet certainly nefarious RPG uses.



There are too many fucking games

I do not care about your Kickstarter, your Zinequests, your Mothership months. There are too many fucking games. Stop making new games. Put up a free ashcan rules hack like a civilized human being if you absolutely must. Too many fucking games. I already own too many fucking games, I do not need more fucking games, I'm already busy not playing any fucking games!



I need to play more games

I ran exactly two games this year (one Mothership, one Delta Green) and god I’ve missed it. I desperately want to play more, but I also am burned out enough that I basically need to be forced into doing it by some kind of external circumstance. Playing in person is the easiest way to do this, but actually doing that is easier said than done. I would really like to just be a player for a while, but my in-person DM friends are all just as ADHD and busy and frazzled as I am if not more, and none of the other friends have shown any draw to ttrpgs unless I’m the one running them. Could go out and look in the local group recruitment server, but that’s another couple dice rolls to see if it’s in a convenient location / is of a game I want to play.

Just very tired.



Blogged more than 2024

Not by much, but it’s a trend in the right direction.



Onward

2026 will mark 9 years of this blog. Hard to imagine it. Depression and stress fuck with your memory something fierce (and that’s on top of ADHD crippling that faculty from go), so it feels like I’ve done so little despite that being objectively untrue. There’s this perpetual feeling of “if I could just fucking rest and do nothing for a couple weeks something will snap into place and I’ll be back”, but things never pan out that way. I straight up forgot to spend the second half of my vacation days this year, and even on vacation one still has to cook and clean and do laundry and interact with other human beings. 

Ah well. The Wheel turns, the Turtle moves, and we're all a year older. Keep yourselves safe out there.

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Thursday, December 11, 2025

Wikipedia Links Slushpile 2

Slushpile index 

Second verse, same as the first; these are all links I saved for myself in my general notes doc.

1. Irish Bell Shrines
Reliquaries for hand bells made by / made for / associated with saints. I love a good super-specific bit of religious-historical minutiae and these absolutely scratch the itch.. Perfect excuse to introduce bell exorcism, too!

2. The Plain of Jars
Jar burial is pretty common historically, which isn’t that unusual. More unusual is a region in central Laos where there are thousands of stone jars dated back to the bronze age whose makers are not particularly evident (possibly the Sa Huynh culture?). No erdtrees, though. Definitely where our boy Alexander got his start, though.

3. Olo (Color)
A color that can only be seen by shooting lasers into your eyes and specifically targeting your M cone cells, supposedly something close to a low-saturation teal. Only discovered in April ‘25, but assuredly going on the list next to octarine and ulfire. 

4. The Book of Ingenious Devices
A perfect text to drop in a setting without changing anything, because the summary alone sounds like it’s from a fantasy novel.

  • Straightforward and evocative title
  • Written by three brothers working at the House of Wisdom at the behest of the caliph.
  • Contains schematics and descriptions of 100 mechanical devices and automata.

Honestly I expect someone has already added it to D&D, and you should too. 

5. Hundun
Befitting the formless chaos that preceded existence, most of this article is a tangle of weird etymologies, double-triple-quadruple meanings, puns (that might be food-related), a total lack of consistency between a given source and any other source, and a lumpy-dumpy six-legged thing with four wings and no face or head. Playing the hits.

6. Fomorians
Big old nasties from Irish myth, all-purpose ogrelike enemies of the Tuatha de Danann. Linked here specifically because of the painting by John Duncan, which is a) public domain b) an extremely fun collection of freaks. Look at that sardine man!

7. The Knight of the Burning Pestle
1607 stage play that opens with a play-in-a-play (The London Merchant), which is interrupted by two audience-member characters (the Citizen and his Wife) whose actors had been sitting in among the real audience (the audience for Knight of the Burning Pestle) and who then get up on stage (Where the actors for Knight of the Burning Pestle are trying to put on The London Merchant), derail The London Merchant and start putting on their own performance of The Knight of the Burning Pestle (the play-within-the-play-within-the-play, not the 1607 stage play that opens with The London Merchant). This is the first scene!

8. Kushan Empire
Critically-overlooked historical polity of Central Asia c. 30 - 375 CE, successor state to the Greco-Bactrian kingdom. Puts every fantasy setting you’ve ever read to shame with the level of syncretism going on: simply reaching into your pocket for a handful of change would leave you with coins depicting Zeus, Ahura Mazda, Shiva and the Buddha. 

9. Vigenère Cipher
A cipher where each letter of the encrypted message is encoded with a different Caesar cipher. 

Plaintext message: Trap chest ahead
Key Text: redtriceratops

So to encode the plaintext, we shift [t] forward 19 letters, wrapping around from z to a and ending on [k]. ([r] is the 18th letter of the alphabet, but for the cipher we start counting with 0)

Then we just run through the plaintext, remove the spaces and punctuation, and we have

Encoded message: kvditpgwkaaspv


The game usage should be obvious: stuck some coded messages in a dungeon, drop a key in as a conspicuous detail (hastily painted red triceratops below the ciphertext) or even a physical item. It’s complicated enough that I wouldn’t lock progress behind it, but for hidden treasure, secret doors, lore and messages it’s a solid way to make it more engaging than a simple skill check.

10. Qara Khitai
Another historical polity of central Asia, though this one only lasted for about a century (1124 to 1220, as that’s when the Mongols did their thing.) Noteworthy for being the origin of Cathay, the name used for China as a whole in a lot of medieval / renaissance european literature. I specifically found this article through the articles on Orlando innamorato and Orlando Furioso - the princess Angelica of Cathay is just “generic pagan” in the text, but the mind goblins are saying “oh but what if that chivalric adventure was slightly more historically accurate, wouldn’t that be cool?” 

11. Lilith #Incantation Bowls
There’s an entire rabbit hole to go down on incantation bowls and their use in Mesopotamia as traps for evil spirits; I include this link here not because of that, and not because of Lilith specifically, but because of how the art is clearly done by some rando off the street. A good reminder that for every surviving masterwork of antiquity there were countless more made with much more ordinary levels of skill.

12. Gotcaris & Cambropachycope
Some weird Cambrian arthropods that make for extremely good mi-go. Add some funky fungus and you’re good to go.

13. Order-5 truncated pentagonal hexecontahedron
A sphere consisting of 12 pentagons, each with 5 hexagons surrounding it. A nice little Super Mario Galaxy-sized hexcrawl map. I want to do a Mothership thing with one of these, eventually.

14. Jambudvīpa
“Land of the jambu trees” - a name for the Indian subcontinent, used primarily in a mythic or cosmological sense as part of a greater division of the world into a nice symmetrical arrangement of lands around Mt. Meru.

15. Longmen (mythology)
“Dragon gate” - a great waterfall at the headwaters of a river, where migrating carp that manage to make the jump transform into dragons. I can’t help but think of an American version based on salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest, which makes me think of a dragon-analogue that shares design language with indigenous art of the region and that’s a very cool image.

16. Kilkenny Cats
The cats that fought until only their tails were left. Not everything’s got to be big and important.

17. Polygraphia (book)
1518 text on steganography (encoding a text inside another text so that it does not obviously appear to be a cipher). Also the origin of the Witches’ Alphabet / Theban Alphabet.

18. Oponskoye Kingdom
Utopian kingdom at the edge of the world from Russian folklore. Doesn’t have a whole lot of detail associated with it, but I like the name and it’s a good reminder that folks will always imagine up some far away place where the nobles are off their case and the king’s less shit.

19. Clime
Divisions of the world into climate bands in Greco-Roman geography and astronomy. One of those instances where the ancients were on the money for the most part (the world is spherical and is cold at the poles and hot at the equator) but off by one major misconception that’s good worldbuilding fodder (uninhabitable hot band at the equator and the antipodes on the other side).

20. Hara Berezaiti
Legendary mountain in Zoroastrianism; home of Mithra, center of the world, focal point around which the stars and planets revolve, all the classics. Translates to English as “High Watch”, which feels almost too boilerplate fantasy novel to be real.

21. Fantasy Cartography
The article itself isn’t super noteworthy on its own, but the header image is someone’s setting map that they released into public domain. Alwayotta shout out the real ones. And then there are the maps of fictional Esperanto-speaking islands that were drawn up for US army cryptographers and so are also PD.

22. Open Geofiction
One of those creative projects that has kept on keeping on in its own remote pocket of internet obscurity. Premise is “here’s a world map built with OpenStreetMap, fill it with nations and peoples and languages and geography and infrastructure”. I do love a good map. The project is CC too, though it’s non-commercial so alas, no SCP crossover. Definitely seems to be one of those canon-heavy projects sustained by a small but very dedicated core.

23. Megijima
An island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, associated with Onigashima from the story of Momotaro. So if you need a place for oni to come from, that’s the spot.

24. Akilineq
Inuit toponym for “the opposite country”; likely referring to to trade settlements along the Thelon River (Akilinik - “on the other side”), but it seems to have been used in other contexts for Labrador, Baffin Island, potentially even Iceland. 

25. Alatyr (mythology)
The “father of all stones”, located on the island of Buyan at the navel of the world, protected by Gagana the iron-beaked bird and Garafena the snake. The world tree grows upon it, those who touch it are healed, and god damn there’s so much cool Russian folklore out there.
 
26. Palmares (quilombo)
A sizable independent polity of escaped slaves, indigenous Brazilians, mixed-race folks and some Portuguese settlers on the outs with the colonial government. Resisted takeover by both the Dutch and the Portuguese for nearly a century.



The Wikipedia Commons Section

These are all images rather than articles, and I've noted licensing as appropriate.

Turns out the key to finding cool things on Commons is to abuse the category: function over default search, much better results.

1. Lovecraft Country
CC-BY-SA 3.0 (Hoodinski)
I have never gotten much from the parochiality of Lovecraft’s geography, but it’s nice to see it cobbled together into a map. I assume somewhere in the background there is some sort of horrible thing underneath this little pocket that draws all the Weird Shit to it.

2. The Dead-Line
Public domain
Map for the 1924 Western novel The Dead-Line by W.C. Tuttle. Perfectly serviceable for a fantasy story (tautology there, most westerns are fantasies)

3. The Sundering Flood (map)
Public Domain
Map of the 1897 fantasy novel The Sundering Flood by William Morris, a man who from a cursory look at his Wikipedia page appears to be an extremely interesting fellow: Socialist activist, proponent of the arts and crafts movement, founded an organization to preserve historic buildings. 

(The day after writing this blurb I tried reading The Sundering Flood and found it to be written in unbearable faux-archaic language that I would not willingly inflict on another human being. Alas.)

4. The Forty Isles
Public domain (Gilbert Anthony Pownall)
An amalgamation of locations from Robinson Crusoe, with some wildcards thrown in for good measure. Change the names and you’ve got a very nickel little archipelago, or even a full continent if you want to change the scale. Feels very Earthsea.

5. Pirate Island
Public domain (Gilbert Anthony Pownall)
Same artist and style as the above. Always gotta have a pirate island, especially one with such excellent place names as the capital city of Jolly Rogerville, the Block & Pulley tavern, and the quaint seaside village of Poop.

6. The Rail Way Map
Public domain. (Gilbert Anthony Pownall)
Man, Gilbert Anthony Pownall was a busy cartographer in 1924. Another charming satirical map.

7. Discovery II (top view, labeled)
Public domain (NASA)
A spaceship to get your ass to Jupiter.

8. Map of Lemuria
Public domain
As drawn by William Scott-Elliot, an astoundingly, comedically racist theosophist who wrote with absolute sincerity that Stonehenge was built by Akkadians who migrated to Britain 100,000 years ago. But it is, I must admit, a pretty good map. Most maps of Lemuria are just a green triangle someone made in MS paint, this one’s got actual coastlines. Don’t know what’s up with the blue splotches up north, or why literally only Greenland keeps its exact shape. Probably Hyperboria or some shit. Can’t win ‘em all.

9. Bankoku Jinbutsu no Dzu
CC-BY-4.0 (Rawpixel)
Cleaned-up version of the 1825 PD original.  Poor central Asia, it just got shlorped out of existence. 

10. Mother of the World
Public domain (Nicholas Roerich)
Now that’s a Soulsborne level-up lady if I ever done seen one.



 

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Tuesday, December 2, 2025

What do people know about the Mythos?

I don't buy into the premise of a masquerade between the mundane and supernatural. False dichotomy, Enlightenment hubris, strains disbelief, requires too many extra parts, no conspiracy is airtight, removes potentially interesting interactions, etc etc. Essay for another time. People are going to know something.

Anyway, this post is "what can your DG agents / hapless bystanders / plucky investigators / meddlesome kids find with 30 seconds and a Wikipedia tab". They're meant to be trailheads and initial breadcrumbs - maybe it's a real lead to the real Mythos, maybe it isn't. Just because people know something doesn't mean it's accurate, but it will be something, and that's a sight better than the constant vagaries this genre subjects its readers to.

Been too long since I've done a post like this; the last Lighthouse Field Guide was four years ago. Don't know why I stopped; I wrote enough entries for this one that I had to split it into multiple posts.

 

Innsmouth, Massachusetts 

Historical fishing hamlet along the north coast of the state, rendered a ghost town in 1927 after an FBI raid to break up a bootlegging and gold-smuggling operation. The site was never resettled and was declared a nature reserve in 1937. Hobbyist explorers would occasionally “make pilgrimage” to the ruins of the town, but this ended when the last standing structure (the meeting Hall of the Esoteric Order of Dagon fraternal society) collapsed during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.


Peaslee-Boyle Syndrome

An extremely rare psychological disorder where the subject will experience a sudden and totalizing shift in personality that will last anywhere from several weeks to several years. Affected individuals will obsessively study niche topics despite no previous interest, neglect existing relationships and occupations, demonstrate both uncharacteristic knowledge and ignorance about topics, and drastically shift the manner and content of their speech.

Episodes will end without warning or apparent cause; affected individuals will return to their previous personality with no memory of the intervening time.


The Mammoth Caves Sloth-Man

Cryptid hailing from south-central Kentucky, first reported by a trio of backpackers in October 1971. Described as a huge, black-furred creature combining the body of a prehistoric ground sloth with the face of a vampire bat. Fairly popular among cryptid fandom. The nearby town of Hoker’s Mill has a festival / farmer’s market / craft fair in his honor the first weekend of October every year. Claims that it was known to the Cherokee as tsatokokwa are, to the best of anyone’s research, wholly fabricated in 2012 by a now-deleted tumblr account.


Black Hat, Red Scarf

A string of purported encounters with a supernatural individual or individuals. The figure varies in appearance and sex (though is usually male), but is always seen wearing a suit, a black hat, and a red scarf, necktie or handkerchief (leading to the common abbreviation of BHRS). 

Encounters typically fall into one of three categories; happenstance meeting, sudden appearance, or conspicuous recurring observation. Many contactees claimed that BHRS possessed intimate knowledge of and familiarity with them, and nearly all of them claim to have received some form of cryptic message. 

Sightings of BHRS have occurred from the mid 1940s to the present, with spikes in the 1970s and late 2010s. The majority of these have been written off as fiction (including all supposed sightings prior to 1945), hoaxes, or pranks; the consistent and easily-replicated wardrobe has ennobled generations of copycats.


Roswell Incident

The June 1947 crash of a high-altitude listening balloon associated with the USAF’s Project Mogul, which over the course of nearly 80 years has proven to be the single most effective piece of disinformation ever devised by human beings entirely by accident. You can tell people the truth, you can put all the evidence in front of them in 8 by 10 color glossy photos with circles and arrows on them, and they will downright refuse to believe that reality could possibly be that fucking boring.


Zhào Zhāo / 兆𬬿

“Graveyard sickle”; a monster (appearing alone or as a group) that occurs sporadically in Ming-dynasty gods-and-demons fiction. Described as a reclusive tribe of cannibal dwarfs from the southern uplands (modern Vietnam and Laos) who desecrate graves, attack travelers with darts covered in paralytic poison, and carve up their still-living victims with heavy iron sickles. While lurid, these narratives are repetitive and occasionally plagiarized, with the trope of the unlucky traveler realizing that their dumplings contain human flesh just before the trap is sprung being particularly rote. No evidence linking the Zhào Zhāo to a real-world cultural group has ever been found; the narratives themselves petered out around 1610 and the monster remained obscure until its inclusion in the 1986 Japanese RPG Tower of Lictor for the PC-88.


March Technologies

American defense contractor that made it big in the wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Weapons R&D, surveillance, AI development, private security. They have fingers in pies, irons in the fire, and a “Controversies” subheading on Wikipedia the length of a moderately-sized novel. 

Despite doing extremely well for themselves over the last two decades, the company has been showing signs of internal chaos in recent years. C-suite turnover is high, lawsuits are numerous, media scrutiny is high, shareholders are antsy, at least one high-cost classified project for the Air Force has been scuttled, and capping it off the CFO was assassinated in February 2025 and the head of marketing was incriminated on sex trafficking charges through his connection with Jeffrey Epstein in emails released in November of the same year. Public opinion, already at the bottom of the barrel, has managed to dig through the bottom and find a new barrel.


Book of Azathoth

Anonymous High German grimoire, written in Nuremberg during the late 17th century. Composed of three books:

  • Book 1: Instructions on summoning various spirits of earthly / heavenly / infernal forces.
  • Book 2: A treatise of alchemic principles, mathematics, and natural law.
  • Book 3: A treatise on astrology and astronomy, including charts, tables, and observational data.

The author demonstrates vocal support of Copernicus and Galileo, and spends considerable time in Book 3 compiling a new method of divination for his bespoke heliocentric cosmos. Presaging the later development of the galactic model, the author supposes the existence of a central divine-motive force around which the sun orbits in conjunction with the other stars. This force, referred to interchangeably as “azoth”, “azathoth”, “azimuth” and “atziluth”, is claimed by the author to be the originator of both material and spiritual reality, and the engine by which it moves, changes, is destroyed, and renewed.


The Cornucopia House Killings

Quadruple homicide of the staff of a Maryland orphanage on February 5th, 2001. Emergency responders called to the scene by reports of a fire on the property found 19 nonverbal children, nightmarish conditions, and the bodies of four adults shot and thrown into the fire that consumed one of the buildings on the property. That the extreme abuse at Cornucopia House had flown under the radar of the Maryland DCS for years gave police and governmental officials good reason to minimize what they gave to the media, and so the full details of the case were not known by the public until over a decade later.

The initial police investigation was unable to identify or find the killers: all that could be said for certain was that there were multiple assailants, they had prepared for the attack beforehand, and they cleaned up after themselves. A car believed to have been used in the attack was found in the afternoon of Feb 6th, having been dumped into the Chesapeake, but this provided no further leads.


“The French Play”

A 2-act drama supposedly written in Paris during the 1890s, said to drive its readers, actors, and audience mad. Any further details of the characters and plot are vague and inconsistent, besides its placement in the royal court of a far-away and fantastic country,  decadence as both atmospheric feature and artistic style, and the presence of a central figure variously called “Golden Phantom”, “Dandelion King”, “Lord Midra” “Monarch of Masks”, “Aurelius Le’garde”, and similar appellations.


“Atlantean Minotaur” 

Skeleton of a highly-deformed male individual found on the island of Crete in 1923. Subject suffered from gigantism (likely as a symptom of Proteus Syndrome), alobar holoprosencephaly, and heavy cutaneous horn growth, and died at around 14-17 years of age. Skeleton found in a sealed underground chamber at palace site. Cell walls decorated with bull iconography. Trace organic compounds present, analyzed as fecal matter.

 

Verde Arrowhead Cave

A paleolithic site in Portugal, noteworthy for the presence of both homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis bones dated to approximately 54,000 years ago. Surviving cave paintings depict handprints, human figures, fauna, abstract shapes, and a single anomalous inclusion: a row of three triangles painted with a malachite-based green pigment.


Dog-Face

Low-quality photograph circulated as part of various creepypasta stories since 2005. Depicts a hunched figure with a skeletal, dog-like head. The figure’s mouth is open, and most associated pastas claim that it is smiling or laughing. While regarded as a hoax, it has resisted attempts to identify how it was made: the oldest version of the file displays no obvious artifacts of digital manipulation and is believed to be a scan of a physical photo.

 

1930–31 Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition

Disastrous geological survey mission, led by Dr. William Dyer and funded by the N. D. Pickman Foundation. Of the original 20 members (4 faculty, 7 graduate students, 9 mechanical support staff), 12 died after Dr. Thomas Lake split the party to pursue excavations at a secondary location. Survivors claimed that there had been signs of violence at the Lake campsite, though no bodies were recovered nor photographs taken to confirm.

Dr. Dyer dedicated the remainder of his life to unsuccessfully dissuading further expeditions to Antarctica, claiming to have seen a ruined city dominating a mountainous plateau in central East Antarctica;  the 1935 Starkweather-Moore Expedition performed two flyovers of the provided coordinates and found nothing. 


The Necronomicon

A Latin translation of a supposed Greek recension of Abdul al-Hadrat’s Kitab al-Layl, with a later partial English translation of the Latin by John Dee and a full translation of the Greek by Miskatonic University Press in 1938. The most famous grimoire in the world, beyond even the Ars Goetia, the Necronomicon has long been held by both occultists and the public alike as a madness-inducing lodestone of all that is evil in the cosmos.

This is, ultimately, an exaggeration born of absence. With so few manuscripts surviving, European occultists and church authorities filled the gap with an arms race of who could invent the more lurid and blasphemous secrets to slip between its covers. The only madness it is liable to produce would be born of the reader’s exasperation with its tedious bloviating and manic self-contradiction.

The rediscovery of a nearly-complete first-generation manuscript of the Kitab al-Layl in 2008 revealed that nearly nearly 80% of the Necronomicon was original material written centuries after al-Hadrat’s death, based on the Great Circle school of Byzantine occultism which was in many cases only lightly and spuriously based on the original text.

 

Abd al-Hadrat

The 1) pseudonymous 2) pseudopigraphic 3) wholly fictional 4) actual author of the Kitab al Layl. Credited with dozens of other texts and a life so full of portentous occult happenings that it would be a miracle if he had any time to eat, sleep or shit amongst it all. Also known as Abdul Hadrat, or the Latinized Alhazred.


Tsalal

Volcanic island located on the Balleny Hotspot south of Australia. At only 150 miles from the Antarctic coast, it is the southernmost location permanently inhabited by humans. The island’s volcanic soil and hot springs allow for an ecosystem density sufficient to sustain an estimated 800 individuals; the origin of the inhabitants is unknown, with the two leading hypotheses being that they are descended either from a Polynesian or Australian group.

The Tsalal-islanders have rebuffed all outsiders to the island with violence since the island’s discovery in 1828 by the Jane Guy; it is unclear if “Tsalal” is the indigenous word for the island, the people, the ground in general or “What?”, as the only source is the journal of Arthur Gordyn Pym and the eyewitness account of Dirk Peters.

The most recent cruise-by was made by a South Korean vessel on the way to Jang Bogo Station in 2022. Video taken by the crew and later leaked online showed a group of islanders armed with spears and bows emerging from the treeline. One member of the war party, wearing a masked turtleshell helmet and woven coconut-fiber robe, gained a moment of internet popularity (and a long conspiratorial tail) as “Spaceman”.

 

“Dagon”

A humpback whale encountered off the Newfoundland coast in 1836 by the whaler Marcus Green. If the crew’s accounts are accurate, it was potentially the largest member of its species ever observed. Named by the ship’s spotter, Jed Marsh, after the Mesopotamian deity commonly misidentified as a sea god up through the 1920s.


Stephen Alzis

New York nightclub owner, alleged antiquities smuggler and suspected kingpin of semi-apocryphal criminal organization “the Fate”. Shot and killed in 2002 by an unhoused man who believed him to be Satan. The NYT obituary described Alzis as “a peddler of human misery with a narcissist's insufferable charm, whose death will be celebrated by many and mourned by only a hypothetical few.”

 

Miskatonic University

A private liberal arts college in Arkham, Massachusetts. 2024 enrollment: 1049 students. Division-III basketball team with a record that would be hilarious were it not deeply pitiable. Possesses a not-unwarranted reputation as a dumping ground for cranks and failsons; has been pumping out / hiring spiritualists, theosophists, and UFO cultists since the Second Great Awakening and onwards.

Founded in 1741 as the Arkham Presbyterian Seminary, granted a charter as Arkham College in 1785, changed name to College of the Miskatonic in 1803 and finally  became Miskatonic University in 1849. Closed the medical school and sold off most of the infamous “special collection” in 1968 to cover mounting debts.

 

Pentacanthus protomegas (Yéye)

Extremely well-preserved fossil remains of an enormous Cambrian-era echinoderm, unearthed from the Maotianshan Shales in 2014 and overturning the evolutionary history of Earth ever since. Affectionately nicknamed Yéye (“grandpa”) by the research team, pentacanthus possessed a long, cylindrical body with five-fold radial symmetry. Pronounced ridges (the source of its genus name) ran the length of the body, each serving as anchorpoint for a long, winglike fin used for locomotion and terminating in five short tentacles around the mouth opening (each outfitted with a complex and well-developed eye) and five longer tentacles at the posterior end. At over two meters in length (and nearly double that with the tentacles included), Yéye would have been the largest organism on Earth when it was alive, and is believed to have been a suspension feeder similar to the radiodont Aegirocassis.

 

 **

 

I didn't intend for 2025 to turn into the Year of Lovecraft, but turn it did. As frustrating as I find so much of the source material, the remixing is consistently very fun. "Shit makes for good fertilizer" proves itself a reliable truism once again. Special thanks to friend of the blog MysterySpice for pointing out the al-Hadrat replacement for al-Hazred, which turns our beloved ur-occultist from a nonsense name to "servant of the presences" and that's a fucking winner right there.

Also worth shouting out at the end is this post I found linked in a Deep Cuts review, about how HPL and REH built on Machen and off of each other in their stories about prehistoric little folk, which gave us the Tcho-Tcho via Derleth and Schorer. Never have I been more glad that Tolkien hijacked an entire concept so completely than with hobbits: what came before was fucking dire. 

The next post is well under way, and will be incorporating some non-Mythos but thematically appropriate material. Stay tuned. 


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