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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 20h

Some of my photos from when I visited. I only wish I could find more photos from the fairly extensive armor exhibit there.

The Castel Sant'Angelo as seen from the street outside. Already, the historical strata of the circular fortress are in plain view, with the more run-down brickwork from what I believe is the Roman era near the bottom and each succeeding layer constructed with a somewhat different material and style. A bronze statue of a sword-wielding Michael the Archangel stands prominently on top.

The Tiber River and a good portion of Rome as seen from atop the Castel Sant'Angelo, wide-angle photo. The dome of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican can also be seen in the distance.

Photographed atop the walls of the Castel Sant'Angelo is a catapult-looking siege weapon with a bastilla-like arm attached as well (only in this case, presumably used against the would-be besiegers). Clearly, I need to consult a real expert in siege weaponry on the details.

Photo from a gallery of Italian steel plate armor inside the Castel Sant'Angelo. Four gauntlets/vambraces, a shoulder piece, a cuirass with faulds, and a rigid-looking halberd all look to be in reasonably good condition as they gleam beneath the museum's lights.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 18/10/2026

Didn't think to do this yesterday (or most weeks, for that matter), so happy Sunday from my story submissions to yours!

Screenshot of a Submission Grinder (https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com) submission list. Six stories listed (titles redacted) have been sitting in editors' inboxes for a range of zero of 53 days. Honesty, not bad for submitting to (genre) lit mags.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 10/10/2026

Hell yeah. This made my day, which is really saying something as I'm commencing a four-hour layover

The classic Sickos comic with a scraggly-looking fellow in a black shirt that says "Sickos" on it staring into a window at night and saying "Yes... Ha ha ha... YES!"

The classic Sickos comic again, but redone in French ("Oui... Ho hon hon..
OUI!" / The black shirt now says "Pervers" / the guy is dressed like a cosplay Robespierre or some such) in compliance with Canadian bilingualism laws

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 06/10/2026

"but E.M., have you tried using a bullet journal to keep yourself on track?" Sure, yeah, but all of a sudden I've had a better idea.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 03/10/2026

South Korea is at it again with the top-notch glam medieval (totally my term, right?) aesthetics. This time it's Bibi in a photoshoot for tmrw magazine.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 29/09/2026

Getting educated in some sword & sorcery history before I return to the writing mines, and I wanted y'all to read this specific paragraph with me www.flapperpress.com/post/weird-t...

A paragraph from the linked article:

Four years her junior, Kuttner was a Los Angeles native who had just made his first sale early in 1936 with a short story entitled "The Graveyard Rats," which appeared in Weird Tales. Kuttner was a big fan of Moore’s work, and so (thinking Moore was a man) wrote to her. The two soon struck up a friendship and made their first collaboration on the 1937 story "Quest of the Starstone," which was a shared adventure of Northwest Smith and Jirel of Jory. As for thinking C. L. Moore was a man? Well, Henry Kuttner eventually learned otherwise; the two were married in 1940, at which point they began their collaborative efforts in earnest.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 27/09/2026

Can't say I'm a van guy. But if I were, I know I'd try hard to commission @animorphsartist.bsky.social to paint one of these guys on.

A drawing of a bearded, berobed wizard hanging out in a modern-day kitchen. The dim kitchen makes a blue, dusky background against which the wizard's gold-ish robes, a light fixture hanging from the ceiling, beer cans, and a fallen bag of chips pop out strikingly.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 23/09/2026

This is one hell of a way to solicit my business. (It's working.)

Screenshot from the web store page (store webpage? online web store?) for The Grift: Volume 2. The description reads as follows:

The Grift, the greatest and most important literary magazine in history, is back, this time with work from Jacquelyn Bengfort, Zachary Kocanda, Christopher Stevenson, Neil Willcox , Dereck Heckman, Craig Rodgers, Ivy Grimes, Xavier Garcia, Jay Parr, Samuel Day Wharton, and Justin Carter.

The Grift is a PDF-only litmag with a very specific mission: to for God’s sake bring in a little extra money for this money-hemorrhaging small press. We thank you for your patronage!

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 23/09/2026

Looking forward to watching a feature-length film with exactly this sort of dialogue

A captioned still from Pulp Fiction in which Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) says his famous line, except it's been translitered into a hasty attempt at rendering Old English: "Englisc, moðerfucker / sprecan þū hit?"

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 12/09/2026

If it were any more guillotine-like, right next to that Tommy Hilfiger storefront, it'd remind me of:

Photo of a Gucci store in a city in China. As it happens, this photo was taken during the Chinese Communist Party's 70th anniversary celebration, so there's also a giant, red display of hammers and sickles over said Gucci store.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 10/09/2026

A nice editorial opens the Year 1 collection, too. "As an artist, one may feel compelled to throw up one's hands and declare it all bullshit, that the system's rigged, that it isn't fair... an intrusive, even a seductive thought. Old Moon Quarterly began as a rejection of that thought."

A photo of Old Moon's Year 1 collection, nicely bound with cover art by Senkai Yami. The art is a play on the memento mori genre of art (I'm not the first to argue it's a genre) in which a skeletal knight holds aloft and contemplates a severed fleshy, human head.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 10/09/2026

After international (book) travel and considerable negotiating of logistics, my latest Old Moon editions have arrived to round out my collection, 99% intact. Gorgeous art, as usual for them, and I quite like how the Year 1 collection came out.

Several volumes of Old Moon Quarterly lined up across a desk (with a tabby-coated beast's rump at the edge of the photo). Lots of black-and-white or black-and-sepia covers help reinforce the dark, gothic (in the medieval sense) image of the magazine, and volume 9's muted-yet-dreamy tones are all too fitting for an Arthuriana-centric special edition.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 07/09/2026

I jest somewhat, but per the article, I might not be far off

Screenshot of an excerpt from the article linked above:

Historians have long been aware that the Assyrian King List has problems. A dated royal land grant from Nineveh (known as Rm 75) appears to name a king who did not belong in the chronology. Records of rebellions in the Assyrian Eponym Chronicle hint at political struggles in the Assyrian heartland that were difficult to reconcile with the smooth succession of rulers presented in the Assyrian King List. A ritual inscription (VAT 10136) mentions an otherwise unknown Assur-uballit in a context that appeared to imply royal status. Meanwhile, the Tell Abta stela of the official Bel-Harran-belu-usur preserves the partially erased name of a king called Shalmaneser beneath the later name of Tiglath-Pileser, suggesting someone rewrote the history recorded on the monument.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 07/09/2026

Just sat down for an evening tea at a Turkish cafe after a lengthy travel-sightseeing-cidery day trip. I think I now understand where the concept of health potions came from.

Photo taken inside a cafe of a plate of bedecked baklava and a slender glass of Turkish-style black tea on a spotless white table.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 05/09/2026

Like *bam*, here's one now www.livescience.com/archaeology

Screenshot of the archaeology feed of livescience.com

Just a little ways down the page, already there's a headline about an excavation in Poland wherein they found a Stone Age fella buried with a bunch of other people's heads. Way cooler than what people have reported getting from the slop machine referenced in the original post.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 05/09/2026

Forty is an even, satisfying number, so let's add these two chaos sisters to the mix

A photo of a brown tabby and a ninja tabby, Thucydides and Theodora (Didi and Dodo for short), who have improbably managed to climb up into an above-the-sink kitchen cabinet of their (our) new apartment.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 04/09/2026

A humble suggestion: Have you tried wielding a cheese ax for your cheese

A photo of a tree stump-shaped cheese board, an already sliced wedge of semi-soft cheese with bits of mushrooms in it, and in the foreground, a diminutive cheese ax held by the photographer.

Another perspective on that cheese ax, this time slotted into a made-for-it hole (well, a slot) in said cheese board. Effectively, the cheese ax is really a hatchet-shaped cheese knife.

Stats: One-handed weapon, no dice roll for damage since it just deals one point of damage (but is highly effective against cheese wedges).

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 03/09/2026

Book covers are always a secondary consideration (even if one wouldn't guess it from my posting), but I mean damn, look at these. Ye gods. And I do love to see this sort of VIP treatment for series characters. www.backerkit.com/c/projects/b...

Cover of Seas Afire, Stars Adrown: A Tale of Goatskin by Bryn Hammond. Cover art by Goran Gligović. A queer nomad woman dressed in, well, skins struggles to resurface from a green-glowing sea infested wih snakish monsters with glowing eyes in a scene that visually reads like someone's water- or drowning-related phobia. The upper portion of the cover is an aurora-green starry sky as something between a mirror and a foil to that ominous sea.

Cover of Long Is The Night: A Tale of Lathra by Audrey Stollings. Cover art by Brian LeBlanc. In a scene that really wouldn't be out of place on the pulp paperbacks of old (or painted on the side of a van), a vampire woman stands atop a precipice with one hand raised in a fierce pose, working some fiery magic as all manner of minions living and undead seem hell-bent on capturing or killing her.

Cover of The Phoenix & The Maker: Tales of Morlock Ambrosius by James Enge. Cover art by Matej Kollár. A berobed warlock-looking figure stands amid a fiery, wavy dreamscape prominently featuring phoenix flames, a weird sun, a mystical skull or perhaps skull-shaped fantasy landscape feature, and much else.

Cover of Fields of Hell: A Tale of Orhan Timur the Snow Leopard by Dariel R.A. Quiogue. Cover art by Artyom Trakhanov. In a line-drawn scene with just a few stark primary-ish colors, a Central Asian warrior wades in dark water as he raises his sword, torch-like, before gigantic, leering faces. The setting seems to be a ruin or dungeon thouh is deliberately represented rather abstractly.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 29/08/2026

Nature called, it wanted me to tell y'all that it's more powerful than we are. Or something. There was a load of background noise on the other end.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 29/08/2026

Not only will these falls kill you, it'll hurt the whole time you're dying (perhaps until the hypothermia kicks in)

Tall conifers flank a powerful, gray-green montagne waterfall (photo was taken on a cloudy day); sharp mountain peaks rise in the background.

An informational sign explains in detail how you'll die if you fall into he Athabasca Falls or the Athabasca River leading up to the falls. In most cases (typically once every few years), it involves hypothermia and drowning if the fall itself doesn't do you in.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 28/08/2026

Can't say I expected anyone to offer this service in a small mountain town. Neat, though

Inside a small restaurant, a sign appears meant to point to the restroom. But perhaps as a careless design decision, the woman and man stick figures flank the directional arrow, making the sign appear to indicate transitioning from a man to a woman. Or if this business is coming out as staunchly pro-transition, well, cool!

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 26/08/2026

I absolutely do not need any funny t-shirts, but damn, @xkcd.com has me tempted. store.xkcd.com/products/xkc...

A light gray t-shirt with the text "No thanks! I'm in the CONTROL GROUP" printed on it.

Beneah the text is a bunch of cartoon stick figures (in the signature xkcd style) standing around, one half of the group with a black background behind them like they've just been sorted for some nefarious scientific trial.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 12/08/2026

Skeleton 150 of Stirling Castle, I'm pouring one out for you tonight.

Excerpt from the article in the original skeet:

For one 20-something defender of Scotland’s Stirling Castle, death came from above—and arrived very, very quickly. Known to archaeologists as Skeleton 150, the man was killed more than 700 years ago by a massive blow that shattered his skeleton in dozens of places before pinning him to the ground.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 12/08/2026

I am not certain I would survive this journey. Guess why.

Excerpt from the article in the quoted skeet:

The crew did not consume anything on board which would not have been available in the 10th Century, meaning no coffee or potatoes.

They bake bread in a granite kiln on the boat, eat period appropriate vegetables and store meat or fish in clay pots.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 07/08/2026

Cleaning up my tabs from this Wiki binge and I found some drawings of little guys from 5th and 6th c. BCE Scythian stelae. Tag yourself, etc., etc.

Caption from Wikipedia: A collection of drawings of Scythian stelae of the 6th and 5th centuries BC. Many of them depict warriors, apparently representing the deceased buried in the kurgan, holding a drinking horn in their right hand.

Addendum to the caption above: The drawings also have moderately goofy little faces with beady eyes and funny noses. Most still look like little people with distinct personalities.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 04/08/2026

2. Top 5 books of all time Dislike such rankings, so here's five out of dozens of faves The True Story of Ah Q and Other Tales of Lu Hsun (trans. by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang) One Message Remains, Premee Mohamed A Woman of the Sword, Anna Smith Spark¹ The Road, Cormac McCarthy² The Odyssey³

A photo of a paperback edition of The True Story of Ah Q and Other Tales: Selected Short Stories of Lu Hsun. Against a white background with subtle grayish swirls, brushstroke-like graphics containing the title and subtitle text resemble the Sun setting (or rising?) over a red Earth, but tilted at a 90 degree angle.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 03/08/2026

This was a rare case of a Wiki editorial decision getting an "oh, come on" out of me

The header of a Wikipedia article about the Iron people, speakers of the Iron dialect of the Ossetian language, but there's an italicized caption that says "Not to be confused with robots."

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 30/07/2026

While some of the more odious discourse concerning the film is obviously tiresome, and not everyone needs to have an opinion on everything, I remain firmly in the camp of "it's actually good when critically engaging with art is a commonplace activity online."

Screenshot of a post from Reactor Magazine linking to an article re: Odyssey film discourse. The lede reads, "Sometimes it is bliss to cultivate no opinion whatsoever."

In all fairness, they do help build their case somewhat by using a still featuring Agamemnon's Batman Vader-ass helmet for the header image, as that specific design choice surely has roused some really tedious arguments about the film.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 29/07/2026

At this rate, that whole preaching-on-planes phenomenon is gonna turn into a Life of Brian situation with competing prophets and everything. And their captive audiences still won't have enough legroom or good snacks.

Photo of cast members from Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) with five different bedraggled men, most in robes of different colors (and much less robes), all simultaneously preaching over a sick person. Imagine the latter as an already exhausted commercial airline passenger, if you will.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 15/07/2026

Got four neat-looking novellas in the mail yesterday. Too bad I'll never find out what the title of one of them is

Four novellas from Brackenbury Books spread out on a coffee table, but the title of one is half obscured by the butt of a black cat.

Full titles:
What Rough Beast? by Bryn Hammond
The Hunt of a Thousand Leagues by Dariel R.A. Quiogue
Suplex & Sorcery by June Orchid Parker
[The Bar]barian [at] Dream's End by Steve Hugh Westenra

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 09/07/2026

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey. Marvelous "lighting" and sharp contrasts for effect. Exceptionally emotive faces painted on. More than that, it exemplifies, to me, the natural end point of the violent bullshit inherent in political conflict and in our political instincts.

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (Paum Delaroche, 1833, oil painting). One Lady Jane Grey is to be executed just days after being hastily proclaimed Queen of England. She wears the white of innocence and a blindfold, and a sort of false stage lighting in the piece highlights her (and those who mourn her most) in a not-quite-realistic, semi-cinematic sort of way. And boy, does her company mourn. Her wetnurse and another attendant are wholly, emotively despondent. The Tower of London lieutenant who guides her towards the executioner's block isn't exactly doing so eagerly. The executioner himself looks on with pity, clearly not wanting to be there.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 04/07/2026

19. Both Will Arnett and Michael Cera are Canadians, making Arrested Development, what, up to 20% Canadian? Regardless of what one thinks of either actor as a person, they're both undeniably nature-made for these roles.

A banner ad-sort of thing for Arrested Development, featuring Michael Cera (one of the top 0.1% most awkward people on this overheating Earth) and Will Arnett (a fundamentally convincing sleazebag) among other cast members.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 04/07/2026

18. Sandra Oh, for those who didn't already know, was born in Ontario. Can't say I'm a Grey's Anatomy watcher, but she's been in plenty of other stuff, of course

Sandra Oh and Keanu Reeves in a still from some movie called Good Fortune (2025), standing about with the cheapest looking fake wings attached to their backs. Oh well, at least these two are fun to watch.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 04/07/2026

Back to actors, 17. Michael J. Fox is of Canadian make, and, well, isn't there something characteristically Canadian about a movie depicting a wartime attack on Washington, DC (Mars Attacks)?

A still from Mars Attacks (1996) in which a news anchor for "GNN" (Michael J. Fox in sunglasses) stands in ass-middle-of-nowhere desert as he covers an alien-greeting event, complete with American flag colors and a "WELCOME to EARTH" banner in the background.

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E.M. White, load-bearing grad student @emwhite.sadbutbuildingworlds.blog · 04/07/2026

In the spirit of continuing to post (increasingly dubious?) Canadian media until either I or the rest of you get sick of it, 16. A detour to music: Godspeed You! Black Emperor are a Montreal-based act, making this little graphic I found with their lyrics that much more timely:

A graphic of the American flag, but the starry blue has the words "In our America" in place of stars, and the stripes are lined with the following lyrics:

The car is on fire /
And there's no driver at the wheel /
And the sewers are all muddied /
With a thousand lonely suicides /
And a dark wind blows /
The government is corrupt /
And we're on so many drugs /
With the radio on and the curtains drawn /
We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine /
And the machine is bleeding to death /
The sun has fallen down /
And the billboards are all leering /
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles

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