I went to see the Met broadcast of Verdi's Macbeth, and it's my favorite that I've seen from their repertory. The sets, the costumes, and the music were all enchanting.

I've collected some set design illustrations from the revised 1865 Paris show from Wiki Commons. Great site, that one. I'll try and add some more context here. These illustrations are by Charles-Antoine Cambon.

The post image is my favorite of them. It's the main set for act 3, when Macbeth questions the witches about their prophecy and interprets it as meaning that he is unable to be killed. I love the loose sketching of the foreground, the haunting figures perched above, and the implied details of the ruins.

Act 1 Second Tableau:

The above is the set design drawing for Macbeth's castle, and below is a print made for advertising the production. I believe the scene is when the king's body is discovered and everyone is alerted to his death.

Act 2 Scene 5:

This was my favorite scene in the whole show, in which Macbeth learns that his plot to kill Banquo succeeded but his son escaped. Macbeth has a vision of his victim during the party and then his lady tries to smooth everything over. I love how the music gives it a manic energy at the beginning and then is used for dramatic irony later in the scene. Here's the scene being performed by the Lyric theater of Chicago.

And, finally, I went digging for information on this artist and found this incredible collection that shows how sets were designed in the period. Spectacular stuff. They didn't have anything for Macbeth, but here is a miniature that Cambon did for the set design of Jeanne d'Arc:

Sorry for the admittedly low quality. I didn't want to get too close and stress it out. Primo frog though.

I've been hooked on Caves of Qud lately, and I wanted to move off of the default starter character builds. Here's one that I've been having fun with lately; It gets me into tinkering pretty quickly, and getting two extra random mutations makes it a really different run every time.

I'm wondering what people here like to use.

Arconaut
Mutated Human

Attributes
Strength: 16
Agility: 18
Toughness: 18
Intelligence: 20
Willpower: 16
Ego: 16

Mutations
Unstable Genome x2
Night Vision
Wings
Psychometry
Cold-Blooded (Disadvantage)

As of March 2022, there are at least 18 known deputy gangs within the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

I'm considering going through Ultima VII. I've got the GOG version that runs in DOS box, but I figured I'd check to see if there are any modern fan patches or anything that I should consider before jumping in.

Ideally I'd like a CRT shader, but I'm not sure how well that plays with DOS box.

John le Fucker was an Englishman mentioned in an administrative record of 1278. His distinctive byname has been proposed by some scholars as the first written record of a variant of the English swear word fuck.

According to an entry in the Close Rolls of the chancery of Edward I for 26 April 1278, John le Fucker was imprisoned for a double murder and seeking bail. As published in 1900 in summary calendar form, the entry reads:

John le Fucker of Tythinge, imprisoned at Peterborough for the death of Walter de Leyghton and William de Leyghton, wherewith he is charged, has letters to the sheriff of Northampton to bail him.

The neighbor said emergency responders worked quickly – but they did not seem panicked.

“In a situation where perhaps time is of the essence, there seems to be a little bit more urgency, but there was no urgency here,” the neighbor told CNN.

When the emergency vehicles left the street, the neighbor said their sirens were not on.

Someone showed this to me today, and I love it. It's like geoguesser for art history!

It's said that comedy movies are dying because they don't bring people to the theater.

I remember when rom-coms used to be a genre that would be practically guaranteed to do good numbers, but it seems like studios are avoiding the genre now or releasing direct to streaming.

I think that most comedies today are primarily another genre, like action/adventure or horror with a bit of millennial irony on the top. I think the biggest comedy this year was The Devil Wears Prada 2; I'm not really the target audience for that one, but it is nice to see that there is a market for it, even if it's a bit of a look back on a 20 year old movie.

The last one that I saw in the theater was Asteroid City, but frankly I went just for the cinematography; I usually prefer to watch comedy at home because it's not an experience that really matters if it's on a theater screen or not.

So what was the last comedy that you went to the theater for? I'm particularly interested in people who regularly go out to movies, but also just generally curious about people's thoughts.

I've never heard a set of all Latin American baroque music before. This concert is pretty amazing.

I've done it five times now!

I got banned for telling the guy posting Tucker Carlson on "Progressive Politics" that he's a chickenshit coward because he couldn't give a reason why he's platforming Nazi shit and instead deflecting to a hundred other topics.

I'm not mad that I got banned, I was very rude to the guy, but it is pretty gross that they're still promoting a reactionary white supremacist as "progressive politics." I reported the post to the mod and got banned instead.

Oh well, that place has a history of hosting that kind of garbage anyway. No big loss.

I like a whole lot of mediums, but my absolute favorite is the humble drawing. If pressed, I'd say pen on paper is my preferred category.

I love how one can take the simplest of materials and create a window into an abstracted reality. It's a raw medium, where it's hard to undo what is already there, so one has to either incorporate errors into the final piece or avoid them entirely.

So what is your favorite medium for visual art? Have you attempted it yourself?