The cover art of "World Circus" by New York State thrash band Toxik, released Dec 1987. A man with a quiff hair-do and a suite and tie, wearing clown-makeup, holds a detonation button and gestures towards a big top with belching cooling towers over it. In the middle ground there is a wire fence with angled parapet such as you would see around a prison camp, and a melee between armed soldiers and cavalry. jet fighters fly overhead. It is signed bottom right corner "©'87 E.REPKA"

never fails to amaze me how 1987 cover art for thrash band Toxik (by the stalwart Ed Repka, who painted a multitude of classic thrash covers and endures to this day) while being a bit on the nose for "ooh big business bastards waging war and murdering mother Earth", still somehow remains relevant

as far as I can tell it's just their digital infrastructure that was compromised and they just don't have the money to rebuild it: the master digitised images are still there (somewhere?).

and there's been all the strikes for low pay and the chief exec leaving after less than a year. what a mess.

although it somehow didn't occur to me that their site name came from the SA Forums, somehow that remains more embarrassing than the other thing

Harley 2110. Seems it was digitised an' all, since it's linked here.

I still don't really understand the BL Oct 2023 cyberattack. Did they simply not have an offline backup of ANYTHING?

em1060.stanford.edu/manuscript/l...

Thought I should at least try since the whole thing had been recently digitised, but it's exhausted my minimal codicology skills. There IS a Castle Acre cartulary that I think it's in which the BL hold, and well. I don't expect them to have many more digitised manuscripts up again soon (ever?)

Western Medieval Manuscripts : Cartulary of Peterborough Abbey (The Book of Robert of Swaffham) IntroductionThe monastery of Peterborough was first founded in the seventh century as 'Medeshamstede'; after its destruction

spent best part of day looking for a charter regarding Long Sutton. Pretty certain it's not in the Peterborough MS it's usually cited to be in (since it regards Castle Acre Priory rather than Peterborough Abbey) and a footnote is in the wrong place in Owen 1971.

cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-PETE...

Long Sutton model between Grantham (L) modelled after multiple data sources including "Buckies Adventures" although I really need to improve it, and Sutterton, from video shot by Dr Emily Floyd in 2017 (while I was there although I didn't do anything helpful)

Scaled between the mighty church at Grantham and the nearby church of Sutterton. thing that sucks about Lincolnshire - although possibly the best medieval church county - as well as having no VCH outside of monastic houses, there's a lack of G-Earth photogrammetry, so I have to cobble stuff together

First pass, left. From a video taken at a misty dawn by Simon Everrett in April 2022. Second pass, right. From a video taken after snow fall by Lee Wright, February 2018.

Combined model with colours of textures for the snowy pass corrected to match

Wanted a model of the parish church of St Mary, Long Sutton (Lincs) so was able to find two drone passes of it that I could render.
Problem is one was taken in snow so I had to change the roof colouring as well as the overall colour temp. But I think it turned alright, as an illustrative massing.

Bluesky dev: Looking forward to what the "ai sucks ackshoeally" crowd has to say about this one. Replies and quotes are turned off.

“Looking forward to what the "ai sucks ackshoeally" crowd has to say about this one.”

(Replies and quotes disabled)

we're all doomed

Surprised there wasn't more anti-vibecoding stuff on the recent outage that got the usual pushback from the bsky team that "AI is cool ackshoeally" because they're desperate to monetise their product rather than keep it propped up by investors

of course this is what we want

bsky.app/profile/sage...

never ceases to amaze me how the son of a cabinet minister under Thatcher gets to mull over all this sort of stuff and ask "however did we get to this?"

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Enjoying collecting a multitude of bluesky errors as the website spends a day shitting itself inside out

"thrift store dumpster"

ahem.

charity shop bins.

not that there's anything wrong with rescuing cool stuff from bins, but selling it as a lifestyle is just nonsense clickbait desolation.

ours was "dosser", although someone ran interference to make it seem like a dosser was a cool person.

also have some respect. we Brits don't go "dumpster diving". We "scrounge around bins"

this is just a story based around a YouTube account trying to grow its numbers. is this really what Reuters should be reporting

tho Starfox 64 is basically constantly parodying movie narratives (especially the level based off Independence Day, even if you don't take out the mothership by flying up its bumhole like Randy Quaid). you get a movie if you play the video game. an actual movie is pointless.

they'll make one anyway

quite funny looking back at the dogshit nazi website and seeing what follow backs are still there pending

i haven't seen this movie or the first Mario one or any of the Sonic movies but hopefully there will be a Starfox movie where they say the things we know and we are like ahh i know what that is.

First stage in Starfox 64 (Lylat Wars in PAL regions), Corneria City, the player character Fox McCloud's Arwing doing a spin along its longitudinal axis which deflects incoming attacks with a blue serrated light shield, as instructed by Peppy Hare's comm of "Do a barrel roll (Z or R twice)!"

i regret to inform you that in the Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Toad does indeed tell Fox McCloud to do a barrel roll (although actually what you do in Starfox 64/Lylat Wars if you tap Z or R twice in aviation terms is an aileron roll)

it doesn't need transverse arches across the columns because it's a tunnel each way.

thing is you can still build the ribs over a timber centring frame and then move it on, and then pack the cells over shuttering planks. It has an aesthetic dimension but it's also practical

Durham Dormitory undercroft, looking NE. Promotional photograph with families dining.

weirdly i cant find any photos i took of it (... maybe I haven't!) but the dormitory undercroft at Durham is rib-vaulted. It is 13th-century, although the dormitory on top was rebuilt in the 15thc. It's extremely weird that the dormitory is over the W block of the claustral range (usually it is E)

basically two barrel vaults intersecting. There isn't really any difference between it and a rib vault in the way they work structurally as the built result, but Durham Cathedral's aisles (and possible the original high vault?) in 1093 is the first full system of rib vaults.

Deventer, St Lebuinus (the Grote Kerk) flying in as part of the archdiocese of Utrecht, of which it was a cathedral church 1559-81. It was the final Super Universas seat to be formally occupied by its Bishop, on 30 Nov 1570.

St Lebuinus, Deventer. Crypt looking E, built mid 11thc. Three pairs of columns supporting a masonry groin vault. The first pair are carved with spirals (akin to a number of Early Romanesque monuments likely imitating the "Solomonic" columns that were obtained by Emperor Constantine and used in the screen surrounding the high altar and St Peter's tomb at Old St Peter's Basilica, Rome), the eastern pair are scaled. The central bay originally had a splayed window, which was opened and reclosed in the 1990 archaeological works. Wikicommons: Davidh820. Taken Sept 2017

you see, Deventer does a barrel roll at Peppy Hare's command because it has spiral columns in its Romanesque crypt. also I was getting really bored at animating fly ins at this point and decided to have this one rotate around a centre along a path

Spacefleet Ecclesiastica: Cathedrals of the Holy Roman Empire YouTube video by Stained Glass Attitudes

realising i put a rather prescient Starfox reference in my latest cathedrals in space thing

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgSD...

it genuinely seems to be destroying the red sandstone blocks it's around

They may have an internal candidate decided on and they're legally obliged to advertise it?