time & death sleep side by side

Thanks, Anon!

Could only add one link here, but both are free PDFs on kofi.

I'm just gonna slide this on in here for anyone that is interested in preserving old games. They take it very seriously too, they want an archive of every single game. Like, they have lists of every game ever released for a system, and once that system gets old enough, they add it to their archive and start collecting. Their latest addition was the Xbox 360, they opened that vault up in September 2022, and proudly announced they'd finished their collection of games for it back in April.

Also, while their game archives are almost entirely complete, they've got another project of archiving the manuals that came with those games, and that is... considerably less well filled out. Their collection of Xbox 360 manuals is especially rough, they've only gotten manuals for three games. So if you've got some Xbox 360 games kicking around, and the manual's still with them, please consider scanning them and submitting them to the site!

you're an antique rover abandoned by the galactic empire who originally deployed you to a remote moon but now a princess from an opposing polity is stranded here too so to bound you show her old cave art you discovered in the moon's lava tubes....

iukhimov was ukrainian by the way, possibly from odesa though there’s very little info on him i can find in english. his now-dead website exists on the internet archive but text only sadly. someone on the tolkien collector site i’ll link below at one point compiled a bunch of his illustrations on weibo though that link seems to be defunct now unfortunately

The figures look like, say, the illustrations in Old English Genesis A. There might be a little Eastern Orthodox icon style creeping in, or it might just be that that style has a lot in common with early medieval British and Irish manuscript illustration (ca. 600-1100 AD). These are great, and an extremely clever nod to the texts Tolkien was drawing from, and even the literal manuscripts in which he was imagining his work (or at minimum Bilbo’s work, in-universe) to be written:

As Tolkien says, “Further information will also be found in the selection from the Red Book of Westmarch that has already been published, under the title of The Hobbit.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, “Prologue: Concerning Hobbits”). Or, perhaps, in the Red Book of Hergest (Welsh, Llyfr Coch Hergest) — another Red Book of the West (or Wales, that is). Obviously The Hobbit does not actually show up in one of the most important medieval Welsh manuscripts (currently housed at Oxford), but from the very first page of lotr, Tolkien was playing with an incredibly specific manuscript history!