For billions of years our planet was devoid of life, but something transformed it into a vibrant, living planet. That something was soil.
It’s a much-misunderstood substance, often dismissed as ‘dirt’,something to be avoided. Yet the crops we eat, the animals we rely on, the very oxygen we breathe, all depend on the existence of the plant life that bursts from the soil every year.
In this film, gardening expert Chris Beardshaw explores where soil comes from, what it’s made of and what makes it so essential to life. Using specialist microphotography, he reveals it as we’ve never seen it before – an intricate microscopic landscape, teeming with strange and wonderful life forms.
It’s a world where the chaos of life meets the permanence of rock, the two interacting with each other to make a living system of staggering complexity that sustains all life on Earth.
Chris explores how man is challenging this most precious resource on our planet and how new science is seeking to preserve it. (bbc)
Initially, in October 2014, the studio announced the film would be the start of a trilogy. The sequel is set to be released on 16 November 2018, followed by the third on 20 November 2020. In July 2016, David Yates confirmed that Rowling had written the screenplay for the second film and has ideas for the third. In October 2016, Rowling confirmed that the series would comprise five films. In November 2016 it was confirmed that Johnny Depp will have a starring role in the sequel, reprising his role as Gellert Grindelwald. In April 2017, it was confirmed that Jude Law had been cast for the role of Albus Dumbledore at around the time he was the Transfiguration professor at Hogwarts. The second film will take place in the United Kingdom and Paris. (wiki)
Social studies of waste, pollution & externalities
Discard Studies 2.0
Discard Studies has been operating since 2007, mainly under the stewardship of one or two people. In the spirit of reflecting on what we, as editors, writers, and researchers in discard studies are including or not including in our posts, we’re looking to expand what the blog covers. We’re interested in posts on the waste the flows from virtual systems, collecting and discarding in archives and museums (including issues of repatriation and colonialism), heritage and building waste, noise (701) and light (713) pollution, but also in wider systems that order waste and wasting, such as the state, economies, legal orders, gender constructs, white supremacy, and models of resurgence, revival, and liberation. All have their discards.
“how often we ask for genuine experience when all we really want is emotion.”
First Reformed is a 2017 American drama film written and directed by Paul Schrader. It stars Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, and Cedric the Entertainer, and follows a Protestant minister faced with questions of faith and morality while serving as pastor of a dwindling historical church. (wiki)
Discworld is a 1995 point-and-click adventure game developed by Teeny Weeny Games and Perfect 10 Productions for MS-DOS, Macintosh, and the Sony PlayStation. A Sega Saturn version was released the following year. The game stars Rincewind the Wizard (voiced by Eric Idle) and is set onTerry Pratchett‘s Discworld. The plot is based roughly around the events in the book Guards! Guards!, but also borrows elements from other Discworld novels. It involves Rincewind attempting to stop a dragon terrorising the inhabitants of Ankh-Morpork.
The game was developed because the designer Gregg Barnett wanted a large adventure for CD-based systems. A licence was difficult to obtain; Pratchett was reluctant to grant one as he wanted a Discworld game to be developed by a company with a reputation and who cared about the property. An original story was created due to Barnett having difficulty basing games on one book. Discworld was praised for its humour, voice-acting and graphics, though some criticised its gameplay and difficult puzzles. Discworld was followed by a sequel, Discworld II: Missing Presumed…!?, in 1996. (wiki)
Ankh-Morpork lies on the River Ankh (the most polluted waterway on the Discworld and reputedly solid enough to walk on), where the fertile loam of the Sto Plains (similar to Western Europe) meets the Circle Sea (the Discworld’s version of the Mediterranean). This, naturally, puts it in an excellent trading position. Lying approximately equidistant from the cold Hub and tropical Rim, Ankh-Morpork is in the Discworld’s equivalent of the temperate zone. The name “Ankh-Morpork” refers to both the city itself, a walled city about five miles (8 km) across, and the surrounding suburbs and farms of its fiefdom. The central city divides more or less into the more affluent Ankh and the poorer Morpork which includes the slum-like “Shades”, which are separated by the River Ankh. Ankh-Morpork is built on black loam, broadly, but is mostly built on itself; pragmatic citizens simply built on top of the existing buildings when the sediment grew too high as the river flooded, rather than excavate them out. There are many unknown basements, including an entire “cave network” below Ankh-Morpork made up of old streets and abandoned sewers (it has been continuously stated that anyone with a pickaxe and a good sense of direction could reach anywhere in Ankh-Morpork by knocking walls down in a straight line, though in Thud! it is added that they would also need to breathe mud). Recently, the underground regions have been extended by the city’s dwarf population to get around unimpeded. It has recently been made municipal property. Ankh-Morpork is also the city with the most dwarfs on the whole disc outside of Überwald, largely considered the dwarfen homeland, with over 50,000 dwarfs living there. (wiki)
Making Sense of “The Weird and the Eerie” By Roger Luckhurst
(…) “You have probably heard of “the weird” by now, but you may not quite know what it is, or why so many genre critics, cultural theorists, and philosophers are keen to engage with it. It might once have been quarantined as a subgenre associated with sullen Goths and all those arrested-adolescent readers of H. P. Lovecraft, but it has long slithered free of those confines, and now leaves a trail not just straight across the internet, but on the page and in mainstream TV shows and movie screens.
Fisher’s guide to this terrain is an excellent place to start your orientation. The book displays his signature knack for reading popular culture (principally music, fiction, and film) in an expressive, demotic way that is still vigorously political and philosophical. Somehow, Fisher magically renders post-Lacanian, post-ŽižekianMarxism and the radical anti-subjectivist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze entirely accessible. Only Fisher can enthuse about old QuatermassTV shows in terms of their “cosmic Spinozism” and still (mostly) make sense. With typical disdain for cultural boundaries, Fisher moves crab-wise from Lovecraft and H. G. Wells to the impenetrable mumblings of punk band The Fall; obscure Rainer Werner Fassbinder TV shows from Germany; Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, and Andrei Tarkovsky films; NigelKneale TV series from the 1970s; the music of Joy Division; The Shining; the unclassifiable fiction of Alan Garner and Christopher Priest; Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary avant-garde SF film Under the Skin; and surprising appearances of Margaret Atwood’s early fiction Surfacingand Christopher Nolan’s portentous quantum SF blockbuster Interstellar(which receives a great defense).” (read morehere)
(…) “In music, literature, art, film and photography, as well as in new and hybrid forms and media, the English eerie is on the rise. A loose but substantial body of work is emerging that explores the English landscape in terms of its anomalies rather than its continuities, that is sceptical of comfortable notions of “dwelling” and “belonging”, and of the packagings of the past as “heritage”, and that locates itself within a spectred rather than a sceptred isle.
Such concerns are not new, but there is a distinctive intensity and variety to their contemporary address. This eerie counter-culture – this occulture – is drawing in experimental film-makers, folk singers, folklorists, academics, avant-garde antiquaries, landscape historians, utopians, collectives, mainstreamers and Arch-Droods alike, in a magnificent mash-up of hauntology, geological sentience and political activism. The hedgerows, fields, ruins, hills and saltings of England have been set seething.”
“What are those pressing concerns, though, and what are the sources of this unsettlement? Clearly, the recent rise of the eerie coincides with a phase of severe environmental damage. In England, this has not taken the form of sudden catastrophe, but rather a slow grinding away of species and of subtlety. The result, as James Riley notes, is “a landscape constituted more actively by what is missing than by what is present”. This awareness of absence is expressing itself both in terms of a vengeful nature (a return of the repressed) and as delicate catalogues of losses.”
“Digging down to reveal the hidden content of the under-earth is another trope of the eerie: what is discovered is almost always a version of capital. Keiller’s Robinson tracks the buried cables and gas-pipes of Oxfordshire, following them as postmodern leylines, and tracing them outwards to hidden global structures of financial ownership. Wheatley’s deserters rapaciously extract “treasure” from the soil, by means of enslavement and male violence. In his cult novel Cyclonopedia (2008), the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani figured oil as a sentient entity, developing Marx’s implication that capital possesses emergent and self-willed properties, that it is somehow wild.” / see: 771-robinson-in-ruins-2010
Discworld is a 1995 point-and-click adventure game developed by Teeny Weeny Games and Perfect 10 Productions for 
TimeSpace Warps 