"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

A game of… Queens?

You might be familiar with the fact that in the original versions of chess — the Persian hatranj and the Indian chaturanga — the overpowered omnipotent Queen was respectively the ferz, the counsellor, and the mantri, the general. Go figure, you might think.
What you might be less familiar with is that originally all the queens we didn’t have in chess were poured into checkers.

It’s what we’re looking at today on my Patreon, as two of my main characters are playing this game back in 1522.

books and literature

Werewolves Wednesday: The Wolf-Leader (18)

A werewolf story by Alexandre Dumas père. Chapter XVIII: Death and Resurrection The cold morning air brought Thibault back to consciousness; he tried to rise, but the extremity of his pain held him bound. He was lying on his back, with no remembrance of what had

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Pride Month

Pride Month 2025 – Words of the Day

She Knew Better than Any Man: Female Lovers in Brantôme’s Courtly Chronicles “This reminds me of certain women who love their companions so dearly that they would not share them for all the wealth in the world—jealous as a beggar with his drinking barrel.”— Pierre

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architecture, engineering and construction

Did you say Parametric?

The Buzzword Syndrome Some words age like wine. Others, like milk. And then there are those that never had a fair shot to begin with, poured over cereal before anyone checked the expiration date. “Parametric” might just be one of them. It started in all

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