wendelsae

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“The Garden of Earthly Delights” (c. 1500) by Hieronymus Bosch

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Prehistoric Sculpted Clay Bison from Tuc d'Audoubert Cave, 'Ice Age Art Now' Exhibition, Cliffe Castle, Keighley, Yorkshire

Deep underground sculptures of a male and female bison are spectacularly staged in the middle of a small chamber. Made from unfired clay dug from the cave floor, these statues are shaped by hand and detailed using bone spatulas. They represent a bison bull behind a cow. Accurately proportioned, this natural scene shows the male sniffing the air for the females' scent. Her tail, now broken off, is raised ready to mate which happens in September. Finger marks suggest the involvement of five or six makers on a single occasion and the installation is surrounded by heel and footprints of adults and children celebrating the significance of the scene.

Replica made by Philippe Lacomme of Toulouse Museum in 1933, British Museum.

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Prehistoric Portraits of Reindeer and an Ibex, 'Ice Age Now' Exhibition, Cliffe Castle, Keighley, Yorkshire

Living as part of nature, Ice Age hunters and artists knew the animals around them well. These portraits on a prepared rib bone are of familiar, individual animals. A male ibex with hairy face and goatee beard, second from left, is set back at a distance hom the reindeer.

Courbet Cere. Midi-Pyrenees, France Beta Muse, Palan 505

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Prehistoric 'Swimming' Reindeer Mammoth Tusk Carving, 'Ice Age Art Now' Exhibition, Cliffe Castle, Keighley, Yorkshire

Posed with their chins up, antlers tipped back, and legs outstretched, the reindeer appear to be swimming as they do when crossing lakes and rivers on migration. This made the best use of the tapering tip of the mammoth tusk. The wavy lines on the male's face may represent water.

Montastruc rockshelter, Midi-Pyrenees, France British Museum, Palart.550

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Give me strength, Almalexia…

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Antefix (roof tile) with head of a diademed woman

Etruscan, late 6th century B.C.

terracotta

Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Ruin with a cross on a moonlit night - FrantisekXaver Prochazka

Czech , 1746-1815 

Oil on wood, 20.5 x 14 cm,

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Catherine Sedley (1657–1717), Later Countess of Dorchester Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723) English Heritage, Kenwood

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Gazelle finial mount, 5th century BC-4th century BC, Northwest China or Mongolia.

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looking back on my Seldonry from ~10 years ago, what I expected the near future to bring, I find two major errors:

I expected that faction of the rulers which is called the Democratic Party to attain to unopposed one-party rule far sooner. they have instead shown themselves remarkably incompetent; far from being able to seize power or falsify elections, they haven't even been able to reliably win elections by conventional means. it seems that the rulers are about as retarded as their followers are. it seems that the usual back-and-forth of the factions may well continue for a good while more, and the possibility cannot be completely eliminated that their rivals will attain to the throne instead, at least for a time. a pity there's nothing good, not even anything conservative anymore, in the conservatives.

I expected that Thinking Machines would arise far later than they have, something on the order of 50-120 years, not 10. furthermore I misexpected their abilities and (initial) use. I thought they would be computer programs built to coordinate many systems that automatically & swiftly carried out information gathering and responsive command. they would be held only by states and perhaps major businesses- both because they were akin to military weapons, and because no one else would have the computerized infrastructure to make much use of them. the abilitiy to analyse and create images would be the last thing they would be able to do, not the first. and I certainly didn't imagine them really having a personified interface any more than any other computer program does. instead, the Thinking Machines we have now are personified; they are not integrated into existing systems (yet), and indeed seem not to have been programmed at all; and far from being limited in use to states & corporations, their use is for some reason openly available to the masses as a substitute for a search engine, of all things. while I do of course expect that they will be integrated to serve state surveillance & enforcement in the long run, in the short term they seem to be rather a source of delusion & miscounsel, both for the people and perhaps even for the (retarded) rulers.

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cute!

Serrana Karn (セラーナ・カーン, Serāna Kān?) (alternatively, Selena Karn) is a character who first appears in the Mobile Suit Gundam: Advanced Operation video-game[...] As Serrana she despises war and desires peace. She loves her family and upon the death of Haman she decided to transform herself into a Cyber Newtype with the personality of Haman Karn as she felt guilty for letting Haman shoulder the responsibility of leading Neo Zeon.

okay.

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I don't like the Islamic Republic of Iran much, but I do dislike it less than the other modern regimes, because it's at least trying to do something a bit different, even if that something different is just to be Plato's Republic a bit more literally.

However it seems it will not survive this, or if it does it will survive because it's lost all its power projection, indeed it more or less already has. Antagonizing Yillrael so much was a mistake- though I see how it was meant to draw away Sunnic enemies- but I don't know how obvious it was at the start that Americk's, Almain's, &c. service to Yillrael was so unbending & unending. The ~Christian Great Power service to Yillrael seems the inexplicable inevitable adamantine fact of the Near East. The Persians ought to have recognized this and redirected their efforts.

It's wretched to see how one-sided this war is.

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'Young Reindeer With Its Mother' Bone Carving, 'Ice Age Art Now' Exhibition, Cliffe Castle, Keighley, Yorkshire

Around 15,000 years ago, as winter turned to spring, feelings of hope perhaps inspired this superb, engraved drawing of a reindeer calf alongside its mother on bone.

La Madeleine Rockshelter, Dordogne, France

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Aigrette. Achaemenid, Tajikistan. 5th to 4th Century BCE.

The British Museum.