Hossenfeffer

Looking for a UK pixelfed server. One choice.

Do any furries have naked molerat as their fursona?

I've been bombarded recently with adds for the Muscle Booster app. Just a minute's research revealed that this is just a subscription renewal scam, but the app looks perfect for my needs.

I'm over 50, in pretty bad shape, and looking to make some changes, so a chair workout plan seems ideal, and the (possibly fake) app they show in the ads looks perfect.

Is there a non-scam chair workout app I can use?

Another lighter dish to fight off the post-Christmas cheese coma!

Salmon en papillote with couscous, sun-dried tomatoes, and feta

Ingredients

• 4 skinless salmon fillets
• 125 ml vegetable stock
• 120g couscous
• 60g sun-dried tomatoes, in oil, sliced
• 100g feta
• ½ tsp dried oregano

Salsa

• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 1 handful of basil, finely chopped
• 1 tbsp capers
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 2 tbsp olive oil

Mix together all the salsa ingredients and season with salt and pepper.

Method

1. Bring the vegetable stock to the boil in a pan. Stir in the couscous, cover, remove from the heat and stand for about 5 minutes. Remove the lid, fluff with a fork and let it cool slightly.
2. Mix the tomatoes, feta, courgettes, remaining oil, oregano, salt and pepper into the couscous.
3. Preheat the oven, or air fryer, to 180°C/360°F.
4. Spread out four large pieces of baking paper. Put a salmon fillet in the centre of each piece of baking paper and top with some of the couscous. Press it down a little so the couscous forms a crust. Don't worry if some spills down the sides, it'll still be grand. Wrap the baking paper and try to make sure it's sealed. Place on a baking tray in the center of the oven, or in the basket of an air fryer. Cook for 20 minutes in the oven, or 15 minutes in the air fryer.
5. To serve, cut open the parcels and drizzle with salsa.

After the excesses of the last few days I fancied something lighter (and which would use up some leftover chicken).

Tuscan chicken, bean, and spinach soup

Serves 4

Soup
• 1 medium diced onion
• 1 x diced red pepper
• 1 large diced carrot
• 2 fat cloves minced garlic
• 1.5 litres chicken stock
• 2 tsp dried marjoram
• 1 can cannellini beans, rinsed
• 100g baby spinach
• 400g shredded, cooked chicken

Pesto
• Fat handful of basil leaves
• 2 tbsp good olive oil
• ½ cup of finely grated Parmegiano Regiano

Make the pesto:

1. Shove all the ingredients in a little blender.
2. Blend.

Make the soup:

1. If using raw chicken: season, cook, reserve, cool, shred.
2. Gently fry onions, pepper, carrot, and garlic until soft, 10 minutes.
3. Add stock and dried marjoram, bring to a simmer
4. Add spinach, beans, shredded chicken, return to simmer for 5 minutes.
5. Stir in the pesto.
6. Season with salt and pepper.
7. Serve with toast or crusty bread.

I love early Iron Maiden. They had a raw fresh sound, born out of metal like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, but also with influences from prog rock and - perhaps most importantly - punk. The first two albums, featuring Paul Di'Anno's vocals have a raw, angry purity which I keep coming back to.

Ludicrously under-serviced by the British music press, Maiden have given us a stupendous total of 41 albums, and have performed utterly epic tours often over 100 shows long, with the '84-'85 World Slavery Tour coming in at 187 shows and playing to massive crowds including a co-headline with Queen in Rio de Janeiro with an attendance of 300,000 people.

The next Runequest Cults book will be the Solar Pantheon, coming in early 2025.

This post is not about the mythical origins of Glorantha but about how Greg Stafford began writing about it back in 1966.

This is from a Wayback Machine snapshot taken on )ctober 14th, 2018.

How I Discovered Glorantha

I HAVE BEEN FASCINATED with mythology for most of my life.

My first mythology book that I recall reading is Manual of Mythology, by Alexander S. Murray (published 1935). I still have that old book. It is a thick tome full of the euhemerized versions of Greek myth, with many pictures of marble statues and renaissance paintings.

Like most people, I was interested in the strange and interesting stories. I began reading other versions, like Bullfinch, which was not much different, really. And then other mythologies too — well, other mythologies readily available to a pre-teen with a library card. I was lucky in that by the time I was in sixth grade I had access to the adult library, too.

Then I started reading books about mythology. I was convinced by every book that I read. If it was about how all myths are variants of Sun Myths, then I was convinced of that. Then I read one about how they were all Seasonal Myths, and they were that; or whatever subject the book was about. It didn't take too long to realize they couldn't all be right, that none were entirely right, and that mythology was something else. So I kept reading. Hero-With-a-Thousand-Faces-cover

When I got into college I was delighted to find a huge section of even deeper books that I’d never had access to before and dove into those. We even had Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces in one of my courses.

But I always had loved reading the stories, and those were in short supply. That is, there weren’t any new.

Now, at that time I’d never seen a book of fantasy fiction. I didn’t have that outlet, which was limited at the time anyway — we're talking 1966 here.

So one day I decided, “I’ll write my own mythology.”

I wrote one document, (reproduced below).

Then I wrote a little story about a guy named Snodal fighting a demon guardian, and put some notes about what he’d be doing. And thought, well, I need to know where his people came from, and so I wrote some stuff about Loskalm. But then I had to know where those people came from, so made some notes about the destruction of Seshneg. And had to know where they came from, and so on and so on.

The earliest materials weren’t as dense or sophisticated as the later ones. I didn’t have the breadth of knowledge to pack it in. It wasn’t until college that I started cramming on archeology, history sociology and religion.

But I did start writing the stories of the earliest kings of Seshnela. The first was the reign of King Froalar, which begins at the dawn of the first New Year in the world. It is about how Hrestol broke the Seshnegi caste system and instituted the new order of knights in order to combat the Pendali barbarians at the gates of his land. the-hobbit-cover

And so it began. I felt fantastic, documenting fantasy dynasties, enchanted realms, invented history, a made-up world.

Then one day I came across a copy of this weird book called The Hobbit in a book store, and then found Lord Of The Rings. I read the cover blurb and thought, “Damn, I’m not the first guy to do this.”

Ah, sweet innocence of youth, so long fled!

As, wonderful ignorance, so long driven out…

The First Glorantha Writing

I wrote this one night in 1966, in a moment of creativity, and it bore me into Glorantha. I laer discovered hat this is the only remains of a log of travellers who were fleeing the destruction of Seshnela at the end of the Second Age by the Luathela, and they later were instrumental in the foundation of the kingdom of Fronela.

Obviously, it was written in flet tip pen which has suffered slightly from some water, but it's still here!

Glorantha was first introduced to the wider world than Greg Stafford's circle of friends with the publication of the board game White Bear and Red Moon in 1975. The game featured a war between the Sartorites and the Lunar Empire in a region of Glorantha known as Dragon Pass.

Now Chasosium has taken us back to Dragon Pass (some of us never left) with the publication of the first book in the Lands of Runequest series. No doubt others will follow, and I'd guess Prax will be next.

The book has a history of the region and provides a gazeteer of Dragon Pass and some neighbouring regions including Tarsh and The Grazelands. There are regional maps and streetplans of some of the larger settlements, some sample 'typical' NPCs, details of some local cults, rules for creating additional types of PCs (newtlings anyone?), and additional bestiary entries providing details of creatures and other encounterable beings.

Different people would want different things from a book like this, but for me the level of detail feels about right. There's enough meat on the bones to give GMs plenty of ideas for adventures while leaving enough blank space for them to flesh out their own games.

The art and production values are glorious as is the norm with the current line of Runequest publications. Nice.