Except, they won't be. Even if they get actual Native American actors to play these characters, even if they bring on a Native American to serve as a cultural advisor, it wont matter. Why? Because Smeyer appropriated a real Native American tribe and twisted their culture and history in her fantasy books for her own profit.

"Actually Holmes, this looks like salt. Quite unusual for a magic circle, since it can be scattered so easily..."

"It tastes like salt too. Good eye Watson. Let us start by visiting the fish mongers."

"But then they'd have to pay the tarrif!"

"An excellent question, the key was the footprints."

"But he doesn't even have feet!"

"He doesn't as of right now. But you forget, the magic circle."

"I see! The killing spell was a water spear, which normally requires a circle."

"But doesn't if you're already imbued with water magic like our scaly ambassador."

"So the circle..."

"To grant him a pair of feet. For just long enough to leave distinctive footprints in the scattered salt and to make us suspect a two-legged killer."

I look back at pictures from the time and see how separated I was from them. I remember knowing I was different. I remember posing questions about the world to the girls playing next to me and realizing that they had never asked the same ones to themselves. That the ways we thought couldn’t be more different.

I kept myself amused with my own fanatical stories and musings in my head. I would wander the playground on a circular path, imagining a friend and being sorely disappointed when it didn’t feel as real as I’d hoped.

It also raises questions on how the Kings themselves breed, since you very rarely ever see more than one amongst a group of Lurks. Are the Kings with groups of other Lurks the females, using the numbers to feed and protect themself and their nest, with roaming males coming in to fertilise their eggs? Or do they all take control of groups and try to find each other anyway, either stepping away from their group during mating season or one sex bringing their group along on the search with them? Maybe they do live in pairs and one simply spends most of their time in the nest, explaining why we only ever see the one outside at a time.

15 years ago today, on October 28, 2008, Fallout 3 was officially released in North America! Its release marked a new era for the Fallout franchise, and brought the series widespread attention.

Happy 15th Anniversary Fallout 3! And thanks to everyone involved on the game!

More recently, some scenes in “Wolf Hall” were also shot with period live-flame lighting and IIRC until they got used to it, actors had to be careful how they moved across the sets. However, it’s very atmospheric: there’s one scene where Cromwell is sitting by the fire, brooding about his association with Henry VIII while the candles in the room are put out around him. The effect is more than just visual.

As someone (I think it was Terry Pratchett) once said: “You always need enough light to see how dark it is.”

A demonstration of getting that out of balance happened in later seasons of “Game of Thrones”, most infamously in the complaint-heavy “Battle of Winterfell” episode, whose cinematographer claimed the poor visibility was because “a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly”.

So it was nothing to do with him at all, oh dear me no. Wottapillock. Needing to retune a TV to watch one programme but not others shows where the fault lies, and it’s not in the TV.

*****

We live in rural West Wicklow, Ireland, and it’s 80% certain that when we have a storm, a branch or even an entire tree will fall onto a power line and our lights will go out.

Usually the engineers have things fixed in an hour or two, but that can be a long dark time in the evenings or nights of October through February, so we always know where the candles and matches are and the oil lamp is always full.

We also know from experience how much reading can be done by candle-light, and it’s more than you’d think, once there’s a candle right behind you with its light falling on the pages.

You get more light than you’d expect from both candles and lamps, because for one thing, eyes adapt to dim light. @dduane​ says she can sometimes hear my irises dilating. Yeah, sure…

For another thing lamps can have accessories. Here’s an example: reflectors to direct light out from the wall into the room. I’ve tried this with a shiny foil pie-dish behind our own Very Modern Swedish Design oil lamp, and it works.

Smooth or parabolic reflectors concentrate their light (for a given value of concentrate, which is a pretty low value at that) while flatter fluted ones like these scatter the light over a wider area, though it’s less bright as a result:

This candle-holder has both a reflector and a magnifying lens, almost certainly to illuminate close or even medical work of some sort rather than light a room.

And then there’s this, which a lot of people saw and didn’t recognise, because it’s often described in tones of librarian horror as a beverage in the rare documents collection.

There IS a beverage, that’s in the beaker, but the spherical bottle is a light magnifier, and Gandalf would arrange a candle behind it for close study.

Here’s one being used - with a lightbulb - by a woodblock carver.

And here’s the effect it produces.

Here’s a four-sphere version used with a candle (all the fittings can be screwed up and down to get the candle and magnifiers properly lined up) and another one in use by a lacemaker.

Finally, here’s something I tried last night in our own kitchen, using a water-filled decanter. It’s not perfectly spherical so didn’t create the full effect, but it certainly impressed me, especially since I’d locked the camera so its automatic settings didn’t change to match light levels.

This is the effect with candles placed “normally”.

But when one candle is behind the sphere, this happens.

 It also threw a long teardrop of concentrated light across the worktop; the photos of the woodcarver show that much better.

Poor-people lighting involved things like rushlights or tallow dips. They were awkward things, because they didn’t last long, needed constant adjustment, didn’t give much light and were smelly. But they were cheap, and that’s what mattered most.

They’re often mentioned in historical and fantasy fiction but seldom explained: a rushlight is a length of spongy pith from inside a rush plant, dried then dipped in tallow (or lard, or mutton-fat), hence both its names.

Here’s Jason Kingsley making one.

You get very used to low lighting. I had candles as my home lighting for the nearly 4 years I lived there. You can read by them, it can be tricky but not unpleasant. Embroidery colours don’t show up so well though.