https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/oldest-swords-0018050
Category: World Building
Get Spider Star for Free!

Spider Star, the second and final book in my space opera series, is now live, and free for all Kindle readers until March 28, 2023. If you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, it will be free until June 3, 2023, when it leaves Kindle enrollment.
You may know me from my clean fantasy romance novels in the Jaiya series and the Ancestors of Jaiya series. My new space operas, called the Star Master series, have less romance, but still combine adventure, mysticism and fun characters, while avoiding harsh language, graphic violence and sexuality. Shadow Captain was written with fans of Star Wars, Firefly, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda in mind.
If Spider Star sounds like it would interest you, feel free to check it out on Amazon now.
Weird Wednesday: Thawing 48500-Year-old Viruses
https://www.livescience.com/zombie-viruses-permafrost-siberia
Professor Sexton and Dr Wells say hi.
The Hildern Brothers also say hi, but Creeping Flesh is kind of a downer, and I don’t feel like linking to it.
Weird Wednesday: Atomic Gardening
I’m out of ideas, so check this out, if it interests you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening
Weird Wednesday: Broken Windows Fallacy
If you’ve heard this expression, and wanted to know what it was all about, it comes from the first part of this essay by Claude Frederic Bastiat. Version at the link below has been translated into English; link is provided for educational purposes. I leave you to make up your own mind about the merits and demerits of Bastiat’s perspective.
1984 and Sobering Thoughts on Ash Wednesday
This isn’t explicitly religious (the source material is anything but religious in fact), but I thought it more appropriate to post the Weird Wednesday material yesterday, and put this up today.
This is a story about how people who have no values beyond their own desires and sense of mistreatment are easily destroyed by people and organizations who have no values but the will to power. The main character may be the product of his environment, but ultimately, being Winston is a choice.
Don’t be Winston or Julia. Understand what matters to you, do your best to cultivate habits of virtue and live up to whatever code of conduct you’ve managed to discern. Pray. But also, don’t feel smugly superior to Winston. Look at St. Peter the Apostle, virtue signaling about his courage and loyalty on Holy Thursday, and then denying his Lord that very night. We all have the opportunity to rise or fall. What will we do when that opportunity comes?
Weird Wednesday: Townshends Imagine Serving Pizza to George Washington
The Townshends youtube channel imagines time travelers trying to prepare a pizza for the first POTUS using methods and ingredients available in George’s time:
Weird Wednesday: Hot Rodding the Silmarillion
Many people are aware that the published Silmarillion was compiled by J. R. R. Tolkien’s son Christopher, with an eye towards consistency and concision at the expense of poetic detail, from a wide-ranging variety of incomplete (and often mutually contradictory) manuscripts left by JRRT. I have read some volumes (not all) of the History of Middle Earth, which includes many of the source texts Christopher Tolkien used, but I have only recently become aware of the third-party scholarship showing how it all came together, in books like Arda Reconstructed. Also interesting are the fan attempts to construct more comprehensive and poetic-sounding Silmarillions than the one published by Tolkien’s son. These can seem a little dry, because for copyright reasons, they are basically citations to texts compiled in the History of Middle Earth.
This one is a “finished” one-fan project: http://tasarinan.atwebpages.com/silmap.html
This one, the work of many hands, has been ongoing for twenty years: https://forum.barrowdowns.com/forumdisplay.php?f=16
That Moment When…
You can’t sleep so you work on the back story for your gaslamp fantasy idea, and realize that you need to invent an extra daughter for Queen Victoria, in the 20-month gap between Princess Helena and Princess Louise, to be the mother of one of the characters in the gaslamp fantasy.
Real Estate Website That Lists Castles For Sale
I suspect I am the last one to find out about this site, but it’s still cool. Great place to research castles for your fantasy novel, or just daydream about how to spend your hypothetical lottery winnings.
Also, here’s an interesting study from 2018 of how Lake Powell in Colorado suffers from water management rules that favor keeping Lake Mead (downstream of Lake Powell) filled, and by extension favors the lawns, swimming pools and delta smelt of California, the most populous area supplied by Lake Mead.