Books
fromwww.scientificamerican.com
17 hours agoAdapt or die inside James S. A. Corey's alien empire in The Faith of Beasts
The Captive's War series explores human adaptation and resistance under an alien empire's control.
Dimension 20 has primarily used Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition across its campaigns, with occasional side quests using other systems. The main cast has only deviated from D&D for the sixth campaign, A Starstruck Odyssey, which utilized an unofficial Star Wars system.
Everbound uses an 18-card construct to fill out the crew of a pirate ship. You start with your Captain and a twinkle in yer eye. And presumably a ship. Yarrrr. You'll take one of two actions per turn. Draw: Take a card from the Dock. Recruit: Play a card from your hand by paying its icon cost.
For decades, we smallfolk have been told that goodness is naïve, that moral grayness is sophistication, and cynicism is cleverness. Turns out, we do not want it. Most of us can only take an endless string of villains, liars, and normalized nastiness for so long. Our battered nervous systems want a hero to root for who would not lie to us or betray us.
Looking to the Middle Ages for answers to the perennial puzzles of life can seem quaint, even artificial, a long reach across centuries marked by violence, hierarchy, and exclusion. And yet medieval culture offers a way of thinking about love that still speaks to the present. If love is most urgently tested in moments of strain and upheaval, then it is in those moments - where care is stressed or obscured - that its meaning comes most clearly into view.
Abū Nuwās's poetry is sheer joy: it never fails to delight, surprise, and excite. His diwan, his collected poems, encompasses the principal early Abbasid poetic genres: panegyrics ( madīḥ), renunciant poems ( zuhdiyyāt), lampoons ( hijāʾ), hunting poems ( ṭardiyyāt), wine poems ( khamriyyāt), love poems ( ghazaliyyāt) to males ( mudhakkarāt) and females ( muʾannathāt), and transgressive verse ( mujūn).
The Witcher 4 won't arrive until at least 2027, but in the meantime, studio CD Project Red is working with Go On Board to create a new board game based on the hit series. A cooperative adventure game for one to four players, The Witcher: Legacy will focus on the events that led to the fall of the School of the Wolf. Players will take on the role of witchers seeking to unravel the conspiracy against their order, fighting monsters and exploring the kingdom of Kaedwen through a branching narrative featuring multiple scenarios.
While working on a graduate school paper on the mystical powers of coral, gemologist Anna Rasche ventured deep into the archives of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum's library. Coral is the most powerful material to ward off the evil eye-a belief Italians have held since ancient times. Romans often gifted newborns coral amulets to prevent sickness and bad luck.
At long last, the secret behind Egg has been revealed. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is now half over, but now viewers have learned the squire's true identity, something readers of the original Tales of Dunk and Egg books have known from the start. But what does this new secret mean for the future of the show - and the future of Westeros itself? The answer is a lot more complicated than you may think.
"What was so beautifully done about House of the Dragon is this epic scale at which the story is told. So to have this big booming orchestral score was very important," Kingdoms showrunner Ira Parker says during a roundtable interview. However, for his series, "we realized early on that we're telling a small story here - a small story about a simple person who has smaller ambitions. And so, certainly our sound had to suit that."