Box Machina, Cox Machina, Doorknob-sox Machina

the REAL reason why jazz never takes off his visor

“Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave it to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale (BA, 1977), and was trained to be a museum curator in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (MA, 1980). A decorative arts curator at the Newark Museum for thirty-seven years before he retired, Ulysses has never stopped writing for the sheer pleasure of it. Aside from books on Victorian furniture, art pottery, studio ceramics, jewelry, and the White House, Ulysses created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel, appeared in 2012. His most recent novel, Cliffhanger, was released by JMS Books in December 2020.

“Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of 45 years. They have two grown children, adopted in 1996.

Atlanta: With the new age of Exandria upon us, and the chaos that has followed in its wake, a once-isolated undersea kingdom of Exandria has breached their waters with dark intent! Bells Hells must delve into the depths to confront this tumult, or be swallowed by what lurks in the dark below… (Robbie will be here.)

Berlin: An Experiment gone wrong has caused Caleb and Essek’s continued exploration of the Folding Halls of Halas to become an even more terrifying labyrinth, with a corrupted Caleb Widogast as the maze master. The rest of the Mighty Nein must now brave this twisted dimensional dungeon to recover and restore their friend… before they become part of it themselves.

Edinburgh: Many years of slow-moving machinations come to a head as the Plank King discovers Kingley’s plot to take Darktow and the Revelry is now hunting the would-be-usurper! His hand forced, Kingsley must call the Mighty Nein to his aid and rush to claim the throne of Darktow before the Plank King claims him!

London: With the shadow of Predathos now faded and Exandria in flux, Vox Machina (whole once more) seeks to protect a recently discovered, reborn Deity. In chasing the path of the divine child and the mysterious faction who has taken it, they must journey to the Red Moon of Ill Omen… but things are not as they once were upon Ruidus, and the terrible promise of horror in space awaits them…

The Timetables of History by Bernard Grun

I grew up with this book, which is frickin’ enormous, and it was endlessly fascinating to young me to pour over the side by side comparison of events taking place concurrently under different headings and in different parts of the world.

Or if you want something you can put on your wall, there’s this:

Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500

✨️with a special focus on colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure✨️

So yew trees are weird. They are extremely long lived with basically no known upper limit to their age. They do this by simply being extremely good at not dying like other trees do.

When a normal tree gets to an old age what usually happens is a fungus gets into their heartwood and takes hold. Their internal, dead wood rots away and they hollow out, lose structural support and collapse. Depending on the species this process can take decades or a good few centuries or so.

While yew trees do hollow out in this way they simply keep going afterwards. A ring shaped yew tree with most of its trunk missing is actually just middle aged and the most ancient yews get even weirder than that.

Wikipedia has this image of a Scottish yew where the start of this hollowing process can be seen. To be clear - for most tree species this would already have been fatal.

The thing is seeing a very old yew in this condition looks wrong to a tree surgeon, it's like the tree is constantly on the verge of death. So, if it's a well loved tree you try and do what you can to stop it from falling apart entirely.

A hundred years ago people tried all sorts of things like chaining up branches and also, yes, plugging the hollowed trunk with concrete. We know better nowadays.

Funnily enough there are even yews that survived this treatment and are still alive today.

This is a picture of the Tisbury yew in 1998 from the Ancient Yew Group, barely a minute ago from the tree's perspective.

Yews are fascinating plants with roots in European culture as ancient as the trees themselves. A few individual specimen trees are even estimated to be around five thousand years old - literally prehistoric in age.

Oh also they do weird things with sex as well sometimes. One of the oldest UK trees, the Fortingall yew appears to partially be turning from male to female on one side. It'll be interesting to see what becomes of it in the next few centuries of its life.