The Lady of the Green Kirtle, IMO, is one of Lewis’s most terrifying creations in the Chronicles… so terrifying she doesn’t even get a proper name! Duplicitous, poisonous, beguiling, only when her power is defied does she show her true nature: she morphs into a giant snake that is more dragon than serpent. Her …
In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the White Witch (Jadis) demonstrates several magical powers that show her might: she can disguise herself and her servants as inanimate objects, can summon evil supernatural creatures and cause them to do her bidding, and control the weather to the point where Winter reigns in Narnia for …
E is not one of my favorite letters, I’ll admit. True, it can be elegant, extravagant, enticing, enjoyable, and a slew of other en- words. But it’s also enormous as an elephant, with an old-fashioned, outdated, Victorian feel. Sound out the words Elizabeth, euphonious, evangelist, and Euphrates, and you will see what I mean. Though …
Victorian writer Charles Dickens was known for the odd and whimsical names he gave to his characters, presumably so readers would better remember them. As his stories were first serialized in publications over many weeks or months, this makes sense. These odd names also served a satirical purpose. Some of the more memorable of these …
As in, why did the band pick that name anyway? Logic might tell you it comes from a long line of band names that change one or two letters of an ordinary word to become something wacky and eye-catching. As in The Beatles, The Monkees, The Byrds, Cyrcle, Def Leppard (a Led Zeppelin imitator if …
When it comes to Led Zeppelin songs, their titles recall mostly about one thing: Blues, Blues, Blues. Unlike Beatles songs, they didn’t dabble in storytelling or psychedelia. This makes the song titles themselves not too interesting, but they’re also easy to recreate. Maybe there’s a bootleg of these around somewhere… Led Zeppelin Songs, what …
Above is a portrait of the most recent of Hungary’s exports: the Vizsla, wearing a traditional peasant outfit courtesy of AI art. The speedy, good-natured hunting dog joins the rank of other notable exports like paprika, ghoulash, video pioneer Ernie Kovacs, and Gene Simmons (by way of Israel) to name a few. Situated in Central …
Now that Spring is here, it’s entirely appropriate to talk about shades of green, and how they are named. Pictured above is a set of green PMS colors, once the standard for the printing industry. Basic colors of ink were mixed together to create the colors in the squares, which were referred to by …
Now let’s get down to what makes a Dark Acadamia setting truly dark: the secret societies! There are for students, and in the Ivy League schools, for the elitist of the elite. Dartmouth has its Sphinx Society, Princeton its 21 Club, and Yale, the most notorious one of all: The Skull and Bones, thrust into …
For some reason, there aren’t as many fictional colleges around as there are cities, states, and countries. Of them, Miskatonic University, H. P. Lovecraft’s creation and the setting for many of his stories, is the best known and detailed, even having a map. (I’d call those stories Dark Academia before the term existed, even though …