You guys... *really* liked Sulak the Mesopotamian Toilet Demon, huh?

...is this a bad time to tell you I'm working on a game about Mesopotamian doctor-exorcists?

Tag them on the Mesopotamian toilet demons too!!

An image of a lion-centaur fighting Sulak, the ancient Mesopotamian toilet demon. The lion-centaur is a man from the head to the human waist, which is connected to a lion's body sans neck. It has four legs and a tail. Sulak looks rather like a cross between a crocodile and a pig, with a spiny little mane and a pug-like face. He's potato-shaped. I love him.

For the curious, this is what the ancient Mesopotamian toilet-demon (Šulak) and the lion-centaurs who fought him look like.
Šulak looks rather like he should be getting lanced by St. George, or perhaps hanging out in the Garden of Earthly Delights.
He's a potato of toilety evil and I love him.

An image of a lion-centaur fighting Sulak, the ancient Mesopotamian toilet demon. The lion-centaur is a man from the head to the human waist, which is connected to a lion's body sans neck. It has four legs and a tail. Sulak looks rather like a cross between a crocodile and a pig, with a spiny little mane and a pug-like face. He's potato-shaped. I love him.

According to the paper, they looked like this. Half-man, half-lion.
Sulak looks rather like he should be getting lanced by St. George, or perhaps hanging out in Bosch's Hell.

(The running gag is that there are a couple of very small children near me playing the ancient game of Drop and Pick Up, and I am talking to them as though they are Distinguished Personages of Science.
Baby: *Drops bottle, starts crying*
Me: "Awww, did your grant funding get denied? Me too, buddy."

Tiny hamster, sandy back and white belly, staring that the viewer with large black eyes.

The same hamster in profile against a black backdrop, showing off the little puff of whiskers and the stubby tail.

> Roborovski hamsters like this one at Zoo Berlin are typically no more than 2.5 inches in length and weigh less than an ounce. Native to the deserts of central Asia, these small but mighty critters are known to dig burrows with steep tunnels as deep as six feet underground.

[Joel Sartore]

Can you tell I'm waiting in line at a government office with no end in sight?

My JSTOR reading is the only thing keeping me sane at the moment, because if I am not able to distract myself with the ancient Mesopotamian toilet lions (or a Running Gag about baby scientists) I will go more insane.

This would make a fantastic middle grade novel for small boys who are reluctant readers, and I only regret that I have no time to write it at the moment.

Text from a paper about Mesopotamian toilets and plumbing: Later cultures of the Near East and Europe perpetuated this ancient anxiety of a demon in the lavatory (Stol 1993: 76). Joann Scurlock even proposes to find a far-eastern "equivalent (with sex change) for the Mesopotamian Sulak, räbisu of the lavatory, in the Korean 'toilet maiden'. (106). The similarity lies only in place of residence, however, for in Korea the Toilet Maiden's function is protective, "guarding against the prédations of evil spirits" (Grayson 20) Her role finds a closer parallel in the benign demon enlisted to oppose Sulak, who now makes his entrance. Unsurprisingly the Babylonians sought, by magic means, to drive Sulak and other demons out of the lavatory, and prevent their return. Among the various apotropaic figurines that could be buried in the foundations of a house, in order to keep wicked and evil powers outside, were lion centaurs. A passage of a Standard Babylonian prescriptive text describes how this benign monster could be enlisted to guard the lavatory (12): [A long string of Babylonian text] Clay figurines of Lion Centaurs: you write on their sides: "You shall bar the way of the Upholder-of-Evil. You bury them at the doorway of the lavatory, left and right.

Update, even more Not A Drill: Ancient Mesopotamian Toilet Demons and the Lion-Centaurs Who Fought Them.

THE ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIANS HAD PLUMBING, THIS IS NOT A DRILL

The Fall of the House of Valenziaga: A Special Edition Novel It’s Drag Race meets a gay Game of Thrones meets The Chronicles of Amber in this queer post-apocalyptic science-fantasy extravaganza!

The time is NOW. Valenziaga will fall.

Category is: Science-Fantasy EXTRAVAGANZA! Think Drag Race meets a gay Game of Thrones meets Chronicles of Amber.

High drama and high CAMP!

Spread the word! RT, tell your friends, shout it from the rooftops!

BACK THE BOOK TODAY!

#booksky

bit.ly/3OIVfNs

I'm currently frustrated about a story that could have been SO GOOD if it was good. I want to write my own version.

Alas, I have SO many other projects...

Silhouette of a woman with an enormous updo hairdo, long 18th century gown, and an absurd hat perched atop.

How can you be talking about HISTORY with everything that's going on. 18th century history? Women's history? Waves hands.

Friends, it is precisely because of everything that's going on that we need to talk about history much, much more.

....I hope wherever he is, he knows.

He was as right as he could possibly be. It took us 2000 years to figure it out because the brain is a weird meat tube full of lightning.

But we figured it out. Because of him.

He was RIGHT that it was a natural disease. That it was in the brain. That it wasn't a divine punishment.

He was RIGHT that it could be cured like anything else.

I just want to Dr.-Who-Van-Gogh this man to a pediatric epilepsy clinic.

And let him hear the doctors explaining to the kids (and their grownups) what epilepsy is. And that we can make it so you can have a normal life.

And I want to tell him that he was RIGHT. In EVERY respect he could be.

But he ends this treatise like so:

"A man with the knowledge of how to produce... dryness and moisture, cold and heat in the human body, could cure this disease too, provided he could distinguish the right moment for the application of the remedies. He would not need to resort to... magic spells."

He's wrong about what causes it- he's working off humoral theory, thinks it's phlegm.

He's having to fight his theoretical structure, fight the other doctors (who think it's a Divine Punishment), fight for his patients.

He can't figure this out. And he knows it.

I'm getting sentimental about my Ancient Medicine class.

We're reading "On The Sacred Disease", a treatise on epilepsy. Hippocrates argues that epilepsy is a natural disease, that it's in the brain, and that a skillful enough doctor could cure it.

He is SO CLOSE to being right...

Local zoning is the way! A lot of these are being stopped or stalled by neighborhood organizing.

These warehouses often need to be purchased, permitted, approved for occupancy and specs. Each one of those steps can be interrupted.

Ppl are pressuring corps not to sell, counties to deny permits, etc

Your Ancient Medicine Factoid Of The Day:

"That goats suffered from epilepsy was widely believed in Antiquity, perhaps because of the presence of ‘staggers’, whose symptoms resemble those of an epileptic fit." (Nutton 2013)

Anyway, I'm sorry for the Utter Radio Silence for the past [don't worry about it], I've been exhausted.

I'm taking a full time course load (ask me about my Ancient Medicine class!), an extra class from the local writers' org, transferring schools, and continuing to work on Bright Young Things...

Dying of wretched embarrassment today, as I accidentally told a non-native-speaker of English to "break a leg"

I'M SO SORRY, I AM A THEATER KID, IT SLIPPED OUT

The Hugo nomination period is officially open, which seems like a good time to remind folks about my links post gathering eligibility and recommendations from others. I'll continue to update through the nomination period so keep sending links my way!

acwise.net/what-have-yo...

(Invert is a period term for gay man.)
(This is a piece of vintage homophobia, but I'm honestly kind of delighted, can we reclaim this one the way we reclaimed "fruity"?)

Historian Peter Ackroyd, re: 1920s Bright Young Men:

"[Men] wear attractive wristwatches and constantly consult them with a flourish of the forearm. This is now considered to be a sign of effeminacy, and an invert may be called 'terribly wristwatch' or accused of having a 'wristwatch accent'."

I wanted to make movies, but realized I'd have to work with people.
I wanted to write books, but publication is anything but guaranteed.
I realized people would pay me to write for video games. I also realized I no longer hate people.

And, well, here I am.

An image from Hydeaway, an indie game in an 8-bit pixel style. A black-haired man is standing in front of a desk; there are papers on the floor and desktop. At the bottom of the screen, there's a dialogue box labeled "Hyde"; the talksprite is the black-haired man, who has red eyes and is wearing a white shirt. He's frowning. HYDE: Hey. Hey, Jekyll. Why is a raven like a writing desk?

The same scene as the first image, but another character, Jekyll, is speaking. Jekyll is a blonde man with glasses and a green cravat. JEKYLL: Poe wrote on both.

I'm working on the dialogue system for Hydeaway today- thanks to some help from folks in the GameMaker discord, I was able to get conditionals working!

Hydeaway is a game of personal horror. A corpse is on your parlour floor. Find out how it got there.

#Hydeaway #JekyllAndHyde #indiegames