Thursday, April 30, 2015

Walpurgisnacht 2015!

Yesterday's post on some local sorcery was premature... tonight is Walpurgisnacht, which, as longtime readers will know, is one of my favorite holidays. Of course, in the pre-Christian Celtic religion and modern neo-paganism, it's Beltane, a time to celebrate "fertility", which is commemorated in a classic schoolyard poem.

I don't practice any sort of goety (or goatse, for that matter), but if I did, I know just the cat to employ as a familiar.

If I lit a huge Beltane fire on the job and indulged in some "extracurricular activities", I'd probably bring down the wrath of the local Fire and Police Departments and lose my job. I'll have to content myself with maybe re-reading The Dreams in the Witch House, which apparently was adapted for cable-TV a decade ago:





The Dreams in the Witch House is an oddball tale- witchcraft as an esoteric branch of mathematics. Lovecraft sure had a weird hangup about angles... he had weird hangups about a lot of things. Something tells me he wouldn't have had much fun at a Beltane celebration.

6 comments:

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Happy May Day!

#StopFastTrack
~

mikey said...

If you like that kind of stuff, you might want to check out the old Wizardry Compiled series by Rick Cook. In the late 80s and early 90s they were a knowing wink to the early computer programmers and geeks. For that matter, in the same time frame (mid 80s in this case) there was The Eudaemonic Pie by Thomas Bass. It is a true story of a bunch of physics grad students at UCSC who decide to create a wearable computer that can beat the roulette wheel. Great fun...

Anonymous said...

Hiya sweetcheeks !
Thanks for the nod on MPS - at last, a man who does not totally ignore me.I feel the love.
Workers of all nations unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains! Happy Workers Day to you.
Suezboo

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Happy May Day!

Solidarity, Comrade Thunder!

If you like that kind of stuff, you might want to check out the old Wizardry Compiled series by Rick Cook. In the late 80s and early 90s they were a knowing wink to the early computer programmers and geeks.

I gotta check those out next time I'm in a used book store. Originally, I was conflating these with the Wizardry computer RPG franchise.

Thanks for the nod on MPS - at last, a man who does not totally ignore me.I feel the love.

You know I love you, Suezboo! Given the timezone difference, you were always my harbinger of dawn.

Smut Clyde said...

Despite the involvement of Stuart Gordon, the cable-TV adaptation is pretty meh. Perhaps it is too faithful to the original and has none of the WTF weirdness that Gordon brought to Reanimator and From Beyond.

mikey said...

This is REALLY old school geek stuff. You have to be a real greybeard to remember it, but I think it has some historical importance.

In those days, if you didn't write code in C or COBOL you were doing work in Shell or Batch or, most commonly, assembly.

You could write code in assembly (machine language), code tightly bound to the processor commands that would execute the software. In fact, there was a program in DOS called "Debug" that you could use to compile assembly code. The magazines of the day would publish assembly source code for useful utilities - you meticulously typed it in and compiled it using "debug", and believe it or not what you ended up with was a filename.com program, which was a recognized executable LONG before dot com became something rather, er, larger...