PicoBlog

There are few movie posters more iconic than The Silence of the Lambs, and there are few movie stars as iconic as that movie’s large, charismatic moths. The film’s secondary villain, serial killer Jame Gumb, dubbed “Buffalo Bill,” breeds them inside his home and inserts a pupa inside the mouths of each of his victims.  The film used live moths for the scenes inside Gumb’s house, and the moths themselves are a real species.

Narrated: The Motte and Bailey Fallacy· November 11, 2023 Issue No. 10 A very warm welcome to the 70 new subscribers who join us this week. It’s wonderful having you here. Paid subscribers, you can now listen to issue no. 9 on dehumanizing language. It also includes a reading from Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. A story that’s relevant to the topic and that I really love.

Until last year, I wasn’t familiar with the argumentative sleight-of-hand called the “motte-and-bailey.” You might be familiar with it already (it’s well-known), but if you’re not, it’s a metaphor based on a type of medieval castle composed of a flat, walled-in area (the bailey), and an elevated area with a tower on top (the motte). The idea of the layout was that when the castle was attacked, soldiers would defend, at first, the wall around the bailey.

The compact control room is dark and loaded with heavy silence. With no client to host this morning, the typically warm, wood covered walls are shrouded in black. The most powerful sources of illumination come from the various computer screens flanking the enormous, 30-track Neve mixing console splayed out in front of me. Just beyond, the soft yellow glow emanating from the live room provides enough light to make out the label stamped into the board’s heavy wooden frame.

Author’s note: Medium put the original color wheel article (with its 19,000 claps!) behind a paywall without my permission and without me being able to change it, so I’m rehosting/reposting here. Bonus: it’s been updated with, like, 7% new additional content and some small corrections and improvements! Magic: the Gathering is a fantasy card game by Richard Garfield, Ph.D. and Wizards of the Coast centered on a “color wheel” in which five distinct colors in a particular order represent five different flavors of magic.

The origins of Reiki, which came to the West from Japan and spread like wildfire in Europe and America, are kind of murky. For a long time, it wasn’t even clear when the fabled “Dr. Usui” was born and died. When I was initiated as a Reiki practitioner, my Reiki master told me the following legend, which I later passed on to my own students once I became a Reiki master.

July marks 40 years of Hudson Soft’s (and Konami’s) Bomberman franchise. Throughout the month, I’ll be covering Bomberman games, the versatility of its protagonist, and the legacy of both. Previous entries in the series can be found through this link. Whether Bomberman Hero is a good video game or not is up for debate. Sure, the people who don’t think it’s any good or that whined about the lack of multiplayer in it as a reason to not bother with Bomberman’s second Nintendo 64 adventure are wrong, but it’s the kind of wrong you can debate.

My initial professional ambition, back when I was a pre-teen and teenager, was to be a cartoonist. I’ve always loved both drawing and writing and was pretty good at both. During those early years, I executed a few original comic strips for practice and my own amusement. One featured a cast of snakes. I held on to that goal until my freshman year at college, when—after a discouraging experience authoring a comic strip for the school newspaper—I switched to journalism.

The headlines were easy. Throughout the country —from Jackson, Mississippi and Indianapolis, Indiana, to New York City and Boston—copyeditors chose the same four words. It was 1891 and the headline was “The First Negro Novelist.” The book was called True Love and it was written by a 26 year old Sarah E. Farro living in Chicago. It was one of fifty-eight (58!) books written by Illinois women to be exhibited at the 1893 World Fair.